Leadership Academy Popular Courses

Leaders and managers across all disciplines need to solve business problems and make effective decisions. Using data to analyze the risks and rewards of their decisions is an essential skill for leaders across all professional settings. In this course, you will apply tools and methods to solve practical business problems. You will learn about sequential and simultaneous decision-making and how to allocate scarce resources among competing activities. You will also learn how to compare different scenarios and be able to make more confident and profitable decisions.

This course provides an overview of the project management topic. The course will define terms and describe the context within which projects are used to solve organizational problems and take advantage of opportunities. The course will discuss project workflow and provide some techniques and tips in areas of project scope definition, planning, execution, monitoring, controlling, and closeout. Additionally, the course will review the project manager job and approaches, the process of schedule development, and audience dependent communication.

This course provides practical strategies for engaging in difficult conversations at work (e.g., performance reviews).  Strategies will be provided to have conversations over multiple platforms, both face-to-face and virtual.  Participants will leave with a toolbox of possible communication strategies to use when communicating challenging messages to individuals and groups.

The goal of managers is to achieve the unit goals by maximizing the use of the organizational resources (e.g., staff). After reviewing the meaning of employee performance, the course assesses the participants’ ability to maximize the employee contributions (performance management). In doing so, participants will be able to discern the variety of ways employees contribute to the unit’s goals and the actions that managers can put in place to incentivize such contributions.

This course focuses on using Kim Scott’s Radical Candor approach to identify whether employees are rockstars or superstars, to co-create, through the power of effective questions, the professional development opportunities to best serve employee goals based on their career trajectory, and to enact radical candor as a mentorship foundation.

This course addresses the methods involved in influencing others, especially in hierarchical relationships. Participants will be able to evaluate themselves with respect to said mechanisms and understand the steps necessary to improve their own influencing (leadership) skills.

This course reviews the notion of engagement and the causes that provoke such state. Participants will have the opportunity to develop an action plan for elevating the dedication of employees to the unit’s goals.

This course focuses on developing and practicing Michael T. Motley’s Communication Orientation strategies to help manage public speaking anxiety, to intentionally organize information, and to co-create memorable messages by building meaningful, engaging audience connections.

This course encourages participants to reframe their thinking on daily communication practices (email, texting) by attending to what is being created in communication rather than simply the content of the information shared. Topics include effective writing, professionalism in interpersonal interactions, and leadership communication.

Managers who can forge consensus in complex situations generate significant value for their organizations, their communities, and for themselves. In this course, participants will learn the fundamental aspects of negotiation analysis and social behavior, develop a deeper understanding of negotiation as a dynamic process in which the interests, and even values of the parties often evolve significantly, and sharpen their analytic and interpersonal skills in unstructured situations.

This course focuses on conflict strategies used to manage common types of issues in the workplace, related to interpersonal and group dynamics created over time. Practical ideas will be provided to help work through sticky issues on a variety of topics. Participants will also gain an understanding of their own conflict styles and other possible communication behaviors they can use when managing conflict.

This course covers strategies for running effective in-person and/or virtual meetings, from setting up an agenda, to strategies to use to get multiple voices heard, to brainstorming solutions about problems, to making decisions collaboratively after discussion using decision-making tools.

This course helps to understand the ways in which social media influences important social domains like immersed reality.  Essentially, we understand the effect of our social media use and how it shapes the way we connect to each other and build relationships with others.

This course equips participants with a thorough understanding of how diversity influences human relationships. Participants will be exposed to best practices in dealing with diversity in organizations while also understanding their own limitations (e.g., biases) to manage diversity.

Emotions have the capacity to bring people together, but they also possess the ability to draw us apart. This course will discuss the role of emotions in the workplace and how we can become better leaders through understanding them. The goal of this workshop is to help leaders in business, government, communities, and small groups alike better understand, develop, and leverage emotional intelligence in their workplace. Facilitator-led discussions and activities will help you improve your emotional intelligence and put this new knowledge to work in your everyday personal and professional relationships.