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LiDRS in the spotlight

Who we are

LiDRS BV is a full-service training and consultancy agency based in the Netherlands. With a new inspiring location, next to Schiphol airport and just a few minutes walk from Hoofddorp Central Station, LiDRS delivers high-end leadership trainings, coaching and consultancy services.

LiDRS is an abbreviation of Leadership Development Research and Support. The ‘I’ stands for ‘innovation’ and inspiration. LiDRS started in 2014 after Jochen Hekker’s book ‘Leading up, down and across’ was published. Together with business partner ‘Bastiaan Ruizeveld de Winter’, they started to develop trainings and consultancy services based on their knowledge, experience and believes. Both founders have a strong military background as a submarine commanding officer and EOD diver. Their multiple missions to high risk environments created their thoughts and believes what leadership is all about. And that is not per se the top down, hierarchical leadership one might think of when looking at their military background. On the contrary! Leaders should be focusing on team improvement and ensuring all members get better every day!

Psychological ownership

Later this year, Jochen’s new book will be published, focusing on increasing psychological ownership by your leadership. Several aspects of leadership are needed to ensure people take ownership in a company. Ownership on their job, tasks, results, etc. In almost every consultancy or training assignment that LiDRS sees, leaders and managers struggle to increase ownership with their people. With this latest book, a new approach to ownership has finally been written down. Simple steps to really increase the level of ownership in any organization, backed by a useful reference guide. The book’s subtitle is going to be ‘how to increase your company’s performance in only 4 phases’. And that basically says it all.

LiDRS Consultancy

LiDRS Consultancy created a unique program to deliver performance improvement in any organization. Their current focus is on High Reliabiltity Organizations (HRO), while working for the process industry, Oil and Gas Industry and Healthcare. But Real Estate and banking are also their cup of tea, just to name a few.

LiDRS Performance Program mainly focusses on 2 elements; 1. Structure and frameworks and 2. Human factors. Depending on the need of the customer, LiDRS puts the emphasizes where needed.

Structure and frameworks

Structure and frameworks helps your employees to understand the organization. How they should work, what is needed. It gives them a guideline in order to excel on other issues. As soon as people struggle with their needs and guidance, they fall into a mode of ‘I don’t care’. We’ve seen this in many companies that have grown too fast, like in scale-ups, merges and take overs. As soon as we have structures and frameworks in place, employees feel relieved. There’s guidance, they know what is expected and they understand their work better. Needless to say this emphasizes motivation and is a strong basis for improving human factors.

Human Factors

In the end, it all comes down to the people that work with and for you. They make the difference. If you treat them well, if they understand their work and if they are motivated, then you have the potential to build great leaders and effective teams. We teach, we mentor, we coach and we train. Not from a distance, but close to the team. We observe, we monitor, we guide and we give feedback. We even take over if that is needed to save your business. Based on our experience with Crew Resource Management, Emotional Intelligence, Psychological Ownership and Operational Excellence, we have a strong ground and the best team to support your challenges. But more importantly, we have been and still are leaders ourselves. In order to really improve leadership and operational performance, you have to know the ropes. It’s not good enough to have it all from the books. You need to feel and understand the concerns of a leader. You have to be the entrepreneur yourself. That’s what we bring to the table.

LiDRS Academy

LIDRS academy focusses on training young and experienced managers and leaders to increase their potential as a leader. We have unique trainings, Master classes and workshops to ensure leadership and team development. We welcome teams and individuals at our inspiring location but we are happy to travel to your location and conduct ‘on premises’ training. From a 1-day Masterclass to a 6-day Practitioner and 3-day Master course. An initial CRM training to understand what teamwork is all about, to a full week of CRM training in order to create more effective teams. We have innovative workshops for public speaking, we train teams on a boat through the canals of Amsterdam and we have a workshop ‘explosive leadership’ where you and your team will be challenged to be a bomb disposal unit and clear a ‘reallife’ bomb. All necessary aspects of leadership and communication will be tested.

LiDRS Coaching

We are able to put ourselves in your organization and help with performance improvement. We can train elements of CRM, leadership development and team effectiveness. But in the end, leaders can struggle with multiple topics that they just want someone to help them with. Someone who listens, challenges and is a sparring partner for you. That’s what LiDRS Coaching does. Our highly experienced and certified coaches, understand your concerns and look for ways to straighten your thoughts. Sometimes we only ask questions, in other cases we think along and bring in new solutions. It all depends on your needs. We built trust and are there for you. Just for you!

That’s who we are. Experienced, passionate and down-to-earth people that are doing their very best to help you to perform better. But above all, we are eager to get to know you, learn your business and look for ways to improve. We would like to invite you for a cup of coffee without any strings attached. What do we have to lose? It’s going to be a win-win, that’s a certainty!

Feel free to get in touch by email (info@lidrs.nl) or just give us a call at +31 (0) 85 401 83 68

Read the full article here: HR Tech Outlook.

LiDRS award

LiDRS – Most influential Leadership Development Company of the year!

We are proud to announce that LiDRS have been awarded the ‘Company of the year award’ by HR Tech Magazine. We were already proud to be shortlisted as top 10 ‘most influential leadership development companies’, but to actually win this, makes it even better.

Our nomination and actually being awarded as ‘company of the year’, has to do with our high impact leadership development trainings, Crew Resource Management trainings, workshops and our successful consultancy assignments. Organizational improvement by focusing on human capital and results, have long lasting impact.

We are proud to have won this award but predominantly thankful to our clients and customers, our trainers and consultants.

 

What can we do for you?

Are you interested in learning more about LiDRS, our performance improvement programs, or our high impact trainings, do not hesitate to contact us today. We would love to get in touch and see how we can improve your business results.

Feel free to download our Whitepaper on effective leadership. Surely this will be enough food for discussion.

How to identify your own critical leadership skills

By LiDRS founder Jochen Hekker

9 May 2017, by NPM Capital

We all have some of the inherent qualities that make a good leader. The trick is to learn to identify these critical leadership skills so you can develop and use them strategically. In a nutshell, that’s the philosophy espoused by leadership consultant, trainer and corporate coach Jochen Hekker. His leadership model LiDRS – which doubles as the name of his company – enables leaders at all levels to discover their personal management abilities. As he likes to put it, ‘you need to know which knobs to twist on your personal turntable.’

In your book Leiders! (‘Leaders!’), you describe how you learned to develop your leadership skills the hard way. You went to naval college, which is notoriously gruelling – complete with enduring one of the infamous hazing rituals as part of the transition to naval life – came to blows with your superior during an operation at sea, and on top of that you qualified as a scuba diver and were deployed to Afghanistan several times. In your book, you also address the almost Kafkaesque cultural differences that exist between the various links in the NATO chain of command. I’d say that’s a far cry from the career path of your run-of-the-mill Dutch corporate executive!

‘Yes, and I’m very aware of that. Then again: we’re talking about universal qualities – building blocks, if you will – that are intrinsic to all human beings. Since I spent more than 20 years working under rather challenging circumstances, I inevitably had a steep development curve. But what it’s essentially about is learning exactly what critical qualities are required for good leadership, and when you might need to ramp up or tone down some of those qualities in order to achieve your goal. It’s about knowing what the knobs on your personal turntable are for and which of these knobs you need to twist when.’

As part of the LiDRS model, you define a number of ‘baskets’, as you call them, each of which contains certain personality traits and skills. You distinguish between management qualities, perceived qualities, diplomatic qualities, social qualities and action-oriented qualities. Are those the various knobs that leaders can twist on their ‘turntable’?

‘Essentially, yes. The only thing is that each basket contains both traits and skills. We believe that personality traits are pretty much fixed and unchangeable: the best you can do is to try and understand those traits and truly get to know yourself and your behaviours. Skills, on the other hand, can be trained. You should imagine each skill as a knob that you can twist as needed in order to compensate for any critical leadership qualities you find you might be lacking.

‘For example, having a lot of natural charisma is a huge asset for any leader. If you don’t have that kind of innate charisma, however, you can make up for it by, say, having a healthy dose of flair combined with a strong demeanour and personal presentation. Flair is something that can be trained to some extent, and the same is true for being personable and thoughtful in your actions. These are all perceived qualities that help you to come across to others as a strong leader.’

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Your model is based on three aspects of leadership that you refer to as ‘up, down and across’. What does that mean?

‘The best way for me to explain that is to share an experience from my own life. Years ago, when I was still in the navy, I ended up in a work conflict with my commander. There was another rank between us, a Lieutenant Commander. Anyway, to give you the short version: it started out with some tension between us, which escalated into a few serious confrontations, only for the whole situation to explode at some point. When something like that happens, you can’t help but wonder afterwards: what could I have done differently; how should I have handled this instead? That’s when it dawned on me that I needed to roll with the punches and adapt to each specific situation as needed. I had failed to show adequate “up” leadership in this case: I had neglected to empower my immediate superior by not presenting him with convincing arguments that he could have brought before the commander.

‘I was so convinced that I was right that I ended up in an isolated position, when in fact I should have tried to connect with others during that conflict. I also should have realised that my commander had made that rank for a reason; I should have explored how I might have been able to learn from him instead of simply dismissing him as a poor leader. In other words: I was still lacking the skills I needed at that point to be able to hold my own in a variety of situations and to achieve my personal goals regardless of the circumstances. And that is what I consider the hallmark of a true leader, irrespective of the level at which you’re operating.’

Doesn’t someone’s personal leadership experience play a key role in knowing which knobs to twist on their personal turntable?

‘Yes, of course, especially in everyday situations. Having that experience helps you to assess not only what’s required in a specific situation – is it better to focus on maintaining the status quo, or should you start working on a new long-term strategy instead? – but also what’s needed in the organisation more broadly. Leadership in a “feminine” organisation such as, say, KLM is vastly different from leadership in a “masculine” organisation, like companies operating in the offshore industry.

‘And finally, experience helps you to understand what it is the people in the organisation need from you. This is related to people’s experience – including work-specific experience – and level of professional knowledge. I like to compare it to the work of a DJ: DJs play around with sound, volume, light and so on to make the magic happen. Can that same DJ pull the same thing off again at a different venue in a different city the next night? The answer is a resounding no. While the factors light, sound and volume are still there, the vibe at that new club is going to be different, and the DJ is going to have to pull out a different bag of tricks. But even in this new venue with a different crowd and a different atmosphere, he can still twist the knobs and see what happens.’

The basket labelled ‘action-oriented qualities’ contains qualities such as ‘tough’, ‘demanding’, ‘gutsy’, ‘ambitious’ and ‘decisive’. It seems that what many would consider the number-one leadership quality – dominance – is missing.

‘I don’t agree that dominance is essential to being a powerful leader. Evolutionary psychology has taught us that it is not effective as a successful leadership strategy. Take a band of gorillas, for example, where you’ve got one dominant male, the silverback. All the other males in the troop have only one goal: killing him and his offspring and then impregnating the females. They’re ready to stab their leader in the back the first chance they get. In a human context, it’s all about social acceptance, which means the leader should be part of the group, rather than trying to control it from the top down. We want a leader who holds the group together, someone who communicates and coordinates, and who makes sure everyone gets an equal piece of the pie. That’s integrity in its most basic, tribal form. People will only accept dominance if the survival of the group is compromised in some way, but in any other setting they’ll reject it.’

You describe in your book how, on several occasions, you were hired as a ‘new’ manager to lead a team of highly experienced professionals. How did you manage to win the trust of these people time and again?

‘To get back to evolutionary psychology: we use our reptile brains to size up people we meet for the first time in a split second. We pigeonhole them into narrow categories such as “friend”, “enemy”, “potential mate” and “indifferent”. When you’re first hired as a manager in a company, people’s attitude towards you tends to be the latter. But you want them to start thinking of you as their friend, as that makes them much more likely to back your decisions.

‘And this is something you absolutely can control. Moral of the story: you need to hit all the right switches to communicate to people that you can be trusted, that you’ve got their back, that you understand where they’re coming from and that you have the energy and passion needed to bring positive change to the organisation. You need to do this through both verbal and non-verbal communication – the latter is arguably even more important. At the same time, you have to be firm and stand your ground rather than trying to please everyone – particularly if there are problems in the organisation, which you’ll find is nearly always the case. You have to spend the first few months running the gauntlet, but if you’ve mastered all the skills in your personal “leadership repertoire”, you can come out on top in any situation.’