LEADERSHIP & CULTURE
TRAINING
The Leadership Imperative
Leadership is a people skill. Think about your own lived experience, and those you consider to be great leaders. What made them so effective as leaders? It wasn't their ability to design innovative products, sell the most things, make the most money or accrue the most power. More likely, it was their deep respect for you and the rest of the team, and their ability to align and focus your excitement, energy and effort towards the achievement of great things, to the benefit of all. Great leaders are, at once, aspirational, inspirational and empathic. They excel at coaching, mentoring, and championing their people, not just getting things done. They actually care about the people, not just the goals or their own glory. And, let's face it, you can't fake this. People know when they are dealing with someone who is only out for themselves, or who, conversely, is actually a leader. True leaders make new leaders. And, by the way, get great things done.
Year after year, in study after study, the need for effective people leadership remains at or near the top of the priority list across industries, in organizations large and small. Leaders enable strategy planning and execution, create high performance and positive cultures that increase employee focus and engagement, product and service quality, the power of your brand, and bottom line success.
Whether you work in manufacturing, finance, academics, government, research, software development, not for profit, agriculture, athletics, or any other field, leadership skills are universal and fundamental.
What to Look for in Leadership Training
Important Note: Currently all instructor led, in class courses are suspended due to COVID-19. All offerings are available through instructor-led online delivery.
When you are looking for leadership training, whether it is for highly targeted topics or part of a comprehensive program, our guess is that you don't want to be sitting in a classroom listening to endless theory and wasting time on exercises that don't reflect your professional reality or address your needs. You do want:
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instructors who have decades of "walk the talk" real-world leadership success, at strategic, tactical and operational levels, along with true passion for leadership excellence.
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a highly immersive, experiential, challenging session, where you not only learn from highly respected people leaders and educators, but from your peers who are also attending, with the opportunity for you to share your wisdom and experience;
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an unrelenting focus on real life application to the leadership challenges you face every single day, in real projects, with real stakeholders, customers, clients and your people;
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Models, frameworks, tool kits, and processes that you actually get to practice for value during the session, and ample opportunity for in-session coaching, so that you can return to work ready to apply them the very next day;
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Follow up and follow through with your instructor and new network of professionals, with ongoing access to webinars, ask the expert online sessions with industry leading guest speakers, online team spaces for sharing, and the ability to bring your instructor back as coach/mentor to work with you and your team in real situations.
That's where we come in.
Think Competency, Not Courses
Our multiple award winning learning and development experts have been building impactful technical and people-focused adult education and training programs for over 35 years, including standardized, customizable and bespoke tailored-to-one programs, for individuals, and for local, national and global clients. And this we know: training needs to be about you and built around your needs, not the other way around, requiring you to fit into someone else's vision and version of what you need to learn. To be fair, if you are starting from square one, guidance is essential. But let's be real here. In order to deliver maximum value, your training provider must know you, know your challenges, know what is it you already know, and work with you in partnership to take your people to the next, natural stage in their professional development. In short, know your gemba, the place where your leaders create value, and what it will take to enhance that.
That is why, yes, we have packages of topics that, for many, will make sense, as highly immersive 1 day courses. They provide solid foundations. If your needs are more selective, we want you to be able to configure your learning experience right down the topic level. So we have taken all the blocks apart, so that they can be recombined with maximum flexibility to deliver exactly everything you need, and nothing that you don't.
We offer a full range of 1 and 2 hour topical modules on all aspects of leadership, and build from there to create immersion learning sessions that speak directly to your leadership development requirements. We start by working with you to understand your needs. What is important for your people to know? What is urgent? What do they already know and can put into practice? What is the current state of your leadership competency bench strength, as compared to the leadership challenges you face regarding strategy execution?
Together, we put together a strategic plan for leadership development that is as unique as you are. We identify those critical, high priority modules and schedule them in ways that make it easy, and very cost effective for you. And we go further. Once those essential building block competency modules have been selected, we add the connective tissue that brings it all together for actionable leadership. Choose Delegation and Performance Management? We include how they relate to each other. Choose Coaching and Project Leadership? We do that too. The result is an unsurpassed, deeply effective learning program that translates to immediate and long term positive impact.
This is how we work with you: as fully dedicated partners in your success, with a degree of high touch engagement you won't find elsewhere. We will help you build a strategy and program of study for your very complex and intersecting leadership development needs, to make it simple, feasible and cost effective to bring every one of your leaders, from executives to front line supervisors, to that critical, next level of competency and measurable performance.
Courses, Modules and Scheduling
Here's a list of currently available leadership topics. If there's something you don't see here, but need, our team of experts can quickly develop it for you. You can configure your program of studies any way that suits your requirements and preferences:
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Purchase individual 1 and 2 hour modules from any course in the program. These are normally delivered as self-paced, online training.
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Bundle modules from different courses together to create fully customized sessions. With overall durations of a least 3 hours and 5 participants, they can also be delivered online with live instruction.
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Purchase our immersion learning, 1 day courses. Each of these courses are scheduled once a month. With COVID-19 restrictions in place, we currently offer online, live instruction only.
Building Your Team Bench Strength for Leaders - 1 day
Building a Culture of Engagement and Performance
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Strategic, tactical and situational goal setting, the right way
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Delegation for performance and professional development
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Leading, coaching, mentoring, managing and championing your teams
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Essentials of Performance Management
Building Value as a Leader - 1 day
Building a Culture of Value Creation
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Walking the Talk: linking the organization's vision, mission, values, brand and brand promise to your people's effort
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From strategy to realized value: building an actionable, aligned, self regulating and actionable strategic planning framework
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Essentials of Program and Project Management for leaders
Working Together for Leaders- 1 day
Building a Culture of Collaboration and Teamwork
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Communication essentials for leaders
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Preventing and managing conflict
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Inclusion and diversity
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Preventing harassment in the workplace
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Leading challenging people
Leading the Way for Leaders - 1 day
Building a Culture of Adaptability, Vision and Transformational Innovation
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How organizations evolve: the Adaptive Cycle
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Change Management and Change Leadership
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Continuous Improvement essentials for leaders
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Process Mapping and Optimization with BPMN
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Reducing waste and creating efficiencies: Lean essentials
Leadership Application and Activation Workshop
Living Your Leadership With You
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It is very common to come back to work after intensive learning, sit down with your coffee or tea, and ask yourself "now what?" Knowing where to start, and how to apply what you have just learned to your actual, everyday realities and challenges is critical, and sometimes difficult. We get it.
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With our Leadership Application and Activation Workshops, you bring your instructor back to work with you. These workshops can be scheduled from 1 day to up to 5 days duration. We work side by side with you and your team, coaching you as navigate the many daily challenges leaders face.