Communicating for Leadership Success

The essence of being an effective people leader lies in establishing good interpersonal work relationships and having the ability to spark action in others. This is a foundation course and prerequisite for all the web-based learning courses. In this course, leaders will learn a set of essential skills to meet both practical organizational needs and people’s personal needs. Learners acquire a set of proven interaction skills, discover seven Leadership Imperatives for meeting today’s challenges, and realize their role as a leader who inspires others to act.

"Using the delegation skills I learned, I'm able to give my employees more responsibilities that show I trust them. I am gaining buy-in and commitment. They have been more productive and happier as a result. The interaction guidelines and key principles have been extremely helpful. I feel like I'm able to coach my employees and discuss any work issues with them while maintaining their self-esteem."

Your Leadership Journey

It’s an exciting day in the workplace when an individual is recognized for their outstanding performance and rewarded with a promotion to the leadership ranks. Unfortunately that stellar individual contributor isn’t magically transformed into a successful leader overnight. This course provides leaders with the knowledge and skills they need to confront the challenges associated with getting their footing—and getting results more quickly—in their leadership role. They learn how to focus their time and efforts on tasks that are most important to the organization’s success. Leaders learn an approach that will accelerate their ability to achieve results through others.

Coaching for Peak Performance

Effective coaching is one of the most important drivers of team member performance. Whether leaders are guiding people toward success in new or challenging situations or helping people improve or enhance their work performance, their ability to coach and provide feedback makes the difference between mediocrity and high performance. This course helps leaders handle both proactive and reactive coaching discussions. By understanding the importance of four coaching techniques learners can have more effective and efficient interactions. The session incorporates a fast-paced game to understand the techniques. Since both proactive and reactive coaching discussions can be challenging, participants will use their own situations to make the course especially relevant to them.

"The Supervisor Foundation Skills program has helped me to better focus my efforts in addressing performance problems. The discussion planner has been a tool that I use quite often to keep my conversations moving in the right direction. I'm definitely better at empowering my staff to succeed. I use the Delegating for Results and Setting Goals methods much more now. It's an amazing feeling to be able to "let go" and in turn have my staff thrive by getting results accomplished."

Managing Performance Problems

Just one staff member with ongoing performance or work-habit problems can drag down the performance and morale of an entire work group. It can dominate a leader’s time and lead to frustration and stress. This course builds leaders’ skills in handling ongoing performance or work-habit problems or misconduct. They learn how to document the problem and explain what the staff member must do to address it. Leaders are skilled in discussing and imposing formal consequences while adhering to their organizations’ disciplinary policies and procedures.

Delegating for Results

While most leaders understand the need to delegate, they are often hesitant to invest the time and effort up front. They need to be able to transfer responsibility and authority to achieve key results and enhance the capabilities of their staff. In this course, leaders overcome their hesitation to delegate by learning skills for successfully matching people, responsibility, and authority. This allows them to maximize involvement, productivity, motivation, and growth for individuals, groups, and the organization.

Setting Goals and Reviewing Results

People are more engaged and strive for better results when they feel ownership of their work process and outcomes. Unfortunately, leaders fail to engage and reinforce this sense of ownership during performance management discussions. This course will show the positive effect of shifting the traditional role managing performance to a shared responsibility between leader and employee. This shift builds employee ownership, and allows the leader to focus on coaching and developing throughout the performance cycle. Leaders will experience how to use effective (SMART) goals to help them and their employees track progress and fairly evaluate outcomes. A well-written performance plan is also a powerful tool for leaders to use when determining where to focus their development and coaching discussions with their employees.