The Program

The Program

Interactive Sessions
This transformative seminar consists of 12 interactive sessions that expand your ability to confidently guide your organization. Begin by exploring how to effectively communicate and end the series by examining how to solidify your role as a leader and build positive momentum. Along the way, you will learn to adapt and thrive in the face of change and lead more effectively. Gain practical techniques and strategies you can apply immediately.

360° Assessment
Self-awareness and meaningful feedback from others are essential to developing your capacity to lead. Participants in this program use a 360° assessment to evaluate their own leadership practices and receive important feedback on how others perceive them as leaders.

Coaching
Coaches help us to focus development efforts for the greatest impact. During the program, participants receive two coaching sessions. The first session focuses on the 360° assessment, and the second will take place once the program has completed, to support achieving goals established during the program.

 

The Leader as Communicator

Again and again, research concludes that leadership communication is the most important factor in staff motivation and organizational productivity. Every day as leaders, we set an organizational tone or culture through our communications. We begin the Executive Leadership Program by exploring your own assumptions about leadership, examining how to positively influence the culture of your organization through your communications, and setting your own goals for this program.


Leadership Practices to Increase Effectiveness

Examine key leadership concepts and behaviors – what leaders actually do to get results in their organizations. Often, an organization fails to reach its goals because its leaders limit themselves, sometimes severely so, in their ability to adapt their leadership to changing situations. Unlike personality, which is linked to genetics and nearly impossible to change, leadership is a set of learned behaviors that can be acquired and developed.

Increase your understanding of your leadership strengths and areas of growth through a 360-degree assessment and gain valuable feedback about how others experience your leadership. Using this information, you will formulate a clear picture of the actions you can take to adapt to meet the needs of your organization and become more effective.


Leading Innovation

When leaders want to unleash innovation and encourage new ideas, they make one of two mistakes. They either give unprecedented freedom to unleash creativity or they try to force employee creativity through a prescribed set of activities. Neither addresses what Linda Hill at Harvard Business School noted as the paradox of innovation—unleashing individual talents while simultaneously harnessing those diverse talents to get to a cohesive result. In this class, you will explore when and why innovation is necessary. You will analyze various traits of leaders of innovative teams, as well as examine how your own leadership skills may support or hinder innovation. Finally, you will learn strategies and tools that will support your role in leading innovation.


Leading Change

To stay relevant, every organization must change over time. Significant changes—new strategies and systems—should be thoughtfully planned and executed. But even when they are, change efforts are often hindered, or even defeated by the existing culture. Leaders must include cultural change as part of their strategic change initiatives.

You will assess your organization's culture, explore essential change management concepts and techniques, and develop a change management approach that supports the planned direction of your organization.


Leading as a Coach

The best leaders not only manage, they develop their employees. They understand their greatest contribution to talent development can come from effectively coaching their direct reports. Coaching as a leader means engaging direct reports in a way that challenges their thinking and enables them to reflect and become more self-aware. Leaders who coach encourage their people to stop and learn from successes and failures and to question assumptions and reevaluate perceived limits.  Learn the techniques of Master Certified Coaches and become a more effective coach to your own team.


Leading with Emotional Intelligence

While it takes cognitive intelligence to be a good leader, the true edge to superior leadership depends on our emotional intelligence, which is our ability to make informed, healthy choices based on the emotions of those involved. Based on research and best practices, this interactive, informative and engaging workshop will teach you how to enhance the social and emotional competencies that build better leaders. Whether it’s developing deeper self-awareness of our values and beliefs through personal mission statements or exploring the role of emotional regulation when stressed through scenarios and role plays, you will take home concrete knowledge and tangible tools that support outstanding leadership. 


Leading with Values and Commitments to Gain Organizational Momentum

Living your leadership values with courage is not only essential to integrity and confidence, it is also the fastest way to build positive momentum in your organization. When your organization is engaged and mobilized around positive values, success becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of commitment, collaboration and impact. In fact, your single greatest challenge as a leader is to mobilize that positive momentum – in yourself, your team and across the organization. This hands-on session helps you solidify the role values and courage play in your leadership style, diagnose the level of positive momentum in your organization and identify the leadership "moves" to reverse negative cycles and activate your team’s highest potential.


Case Study

You will conclude the program by learning from leaders who are doing the hard word of people leadership every day. You will learn about real-world, practical challenges of gaining support for an organizational vision, translating that vision into a winning strategy, and developing leadership at all levels to support the organization in moving forward. Leaders will share what they got right, what they got wrong, and the lessons learned about how to effectively lead at the executive level.