What is the Black Belt in Thinking?
Leaders are often promoted through their experience and operational skill. In tech companies there is rarely an effective training program to ensure they can help their teams reach their goals in a way that supports the company’s strategy.
Scaling while maintaining culture and performance requires capable and empowered leaders.
The Black Belt in Thinking consists of a core 12 practical skills and frameworks to enhance every layer of your business.
Give your leaders and teams a toolkit to:
Collaborate effectively
A common language for communicating clearly has the business singing from the same song sheet, accelerating decisions while minimising fallout and firefighting.
Analize, Solve, and Implement
Robust and practical processes to understand the root cause of problems, create long-lasting solutions, and cause the change necessary to achieve strategic goals.
Get a Briefing on the Black Belt in Thinking
Request a Black Belt in Thinking Briefing
The briefing is a great way to discuss the ideas that underpin the BBIT and how they may apply to your team.
There’s no charge for this and it typically takes about 40 minutes, including questions. Here’s how it works.
We start by discussing the basics: what your leaders do, the structure of your teams and the roadblocks that are stopping them from getting the most from their teams.
We then outline the key skills of the BBIT: where it differs from other business training and the impacts it can have on your business.
We spend the remainder of the call figuring out what the most important skills are for your leaders right now, and how that might work as a training plan.
The Training Plan
The training plan is the best way to customise the training delivered by the Black Belt in Thinking for your business. The plan ensures your team are learning the most relevant skills for your business.
You build your training plan with us and your senior managers. Together, we will consider the goals and challenges of your business to create a plan to enhance leadership decision-making, company-wide collaboration, and a high-performance culture.
It is designed to answer the two most critical questions you are likely to have:
- Will this work for us? (what skills your leaders need most, how the teams will collaborate, and what is the level of training and support is best)
- How will we roll this out? (how can we make the transition without reducing team productivity, having some people left behind, or taking unacceptable risks?)
The plan contains a schedule specifying the type and timing of training and indicating the level of training each team or person will undertake.
Additionally, the process is designed to bring your senior team into alignment around this important initiative (they are far more likely to get excited about executing a plan that they have built).
Team based training
Your team training together maximises the benefits to both the individual and the business. Individuals learn more from each other’s examples and questions, while the business gains leaders with a perspective on the challenges and goals of other departments in the company.
Our tutors can handle all the mechanics, run Q&A and application sessions, review and give feedback on the tools' application, and assist the team in developing their skills.
The key part of the training is the practical application, making sure the skills are being deployed to benefit the teams and business and are not a theoretical exercise. Together, your team will solve bigger problems and make decisions that benefit the whole business.
Choose an implementation approach that suits your business
Some companies choose to get started with us, then manage their own training. The training modules themselves are available independently of our tutor involvement, meaning you can take the reigns and have internal experts maintain and develop your team’s skills. We even have advanced courses to train your own internal tutors.
Others prefer to partner with us longer term to ensure the seamless adoption of the skills and tools throughout the various stages of growth.
Neither are locked into contracts, and both get access to the expertise of the ViAGO team in creating and maintaining their training plan and the ongoing support of community forums, tutor-run support, and skill development sessions.
The three phases of a Black Belt in Thinking Implementation
Phase One: Plan
We will work with you to map out the training plan and identify the right approach for you. Should you start with a pilot team or with a team of senior managers? Should each team have a custom plan focusing on the skills most relevant to them, or should teams follow the same plan so the business as a whole can collaborate faster?
Phase Two: Train
The initial training is the main event, where your managers and top performers learn and apply the skills to their teams. This is an exciting phase where long-running issues and frustrations are resolved while ambitious goals become more achievable. Your ViAGO tutor will work on developing a critical level of skill, and provide guidance in application of the tools.
This includes support on resolving the trepidation people have with using a new approach in a live business and advice on breaking old habits and creating new ones.
At the end of this training, everything will be different for your teams!
Phase Three: Scale
You will have enough skill in your teams that the methods will be the normal way problems are solved, decisions are made, and meetings are run.
Your training coordinator will work with you to further develop advanced skills in standout performers and to spread the understanding of the techniques and methods to the rest of the business.