Course catalogue

Consistent business analysis is critical to a company’s short- and long-term success. Because the SWOT framework is such a simple, flexible, and powerful tool, organizations can use it to examine, plan, and implement business decisions and plans that range from incremental to comprehensive. By gathering a range of input from inside and outside the organization, your analysis will provide substantial, relevant, and objective data to guide your decision-making. Whether you’re planning new corporate-wide strategic goals or reviewing departmental processes, a well-executed SWOT analysis will enable you to focus on your strengths, diminish threats, and take advantage of identified business and market opportunities as you move forward.

• Describe SWOT Analysis   

• Conduct a SWOT Analysis   

• Create a SWOT Action Plan

"“Communication works for those who work at it.” 

-John Powell  

Upward communication flows from the lower level to the upper level of a hierarchy. For example, employees communicating with their immediate manager, the immediate manager communicating with their reporting manager, and so on up to the board of directors or owner of the company. This form of communication helps employees express their requirements, ideas, or goals. Managing upward communication is an art to be acquired if you are looking for a long-term career in your organization and wish to get ample opportunities to learn and grow. This course will help you communicate upward effectively.

Establish your interest in the organization  

Look for opportunities to contribute and think big 

Be yourself and do not encourage or be involved in manipulation 

Take ownership of your mistakes and avoid politics

"“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” 

-George Bernard Shaw 

Thanks to technology, we now have numerous ways to communicate with one another. Organizations depend on social media, texting, and tweeting in addition to emails to present themselves to all the stakeholders. These rapid-fire methods of communicating have changed how we speak, how we receive information, and how we interpret the information we’ve received. Sometimes, these speed-of-light methods of connecting can affect our communication skills. Have you ever wondered if the receiver received your communication correctly or not? Do you evaluate the messages you send? This course will help you with tricks to communicate effectively using electronic media.

• Judge whether your message is essential and timely 

• Draft short messages 

• Use tools and white spaces for flawless messages 

• Convey the gist of the message in the subject line 

• Make decisions on when to not send emails and when to reply promptly

Defining your competitive edge, target market, and competition is just the first step to gaining more market share in your industry or niche. This is an ongoing process. You must continuously research, review, and revise these three factors in order to maintain your edge. Use your research alongside a competitive strategy to drive internal and external efforts through marketing, corporate culture, training, hiring, research, operations, customer service, messaging, leadership, and more. Defining and leveraging your unique competitive edge is the key to market success.

• Define your competitive edge    

• Define your target market and identify your competition    

• Practice the strategies for building your competitive edge

The old saying, greater the risk, greater the rewards has probably rung true for many of us in different stages and areas of life. However, still most people tend to avoid risks when possible, because they think that inaction is often safer than action. The belief is that taking a risk is “exposing oneself to the possibility of loss or injury in the hopes of achieving a gain or reward.” But the legendary boxer Muhammed Ali stated “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” In this course, you will learn to mitigate risks and start taking calculated risks.

• Recognize the need for smart risk-taking and its 5 components

• Determine the strategies of smart risk-taking  

• List the types of risk-taking cultures

Employees working in an organization bring a level of enthusiasm and energy to the work they do in the organization. They are committed and creative in their approach. This energy is crucial for any organizational success, and it is termed as emotional motivation. The factors influencing this energy level can be either intrinsic or extrinsic. In this lesson, you will learn about both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation and how to leverage them. 

How do you motivate your team to do their best? You give them the tools, trust, and time to make their jobs personal. You provide enough challenge for them to work at facilitating better, but not so hard that they become discouraged. Help them connect with their work and give them a reason to work, which is beyond the paycheck. 

• Explain the challenges of using extrinsic motivation 

• Learn the three methods of intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose

The balance sheet is one of several financial reports that organizations use for monitoring and planning purposes. It is a snapshot of a company’s financials on a specific date. All balance sheets include three components: assets, liabilities, and owner’s (or shareholder’s) equity. The report shows the resources an organization owns (assets), how much money it owes (liabilities), and how much equity the owners (or shareholders) have after liabilities are subtracted from the assets. This is also called the net worth of the company. Some of the benefits of being able to read and understand a balance sheet include making better management decisions, identifying potential financial issues before they cause bigger problems, and improving your company’s organizational efficiency.

• Record the assets of a company    

• Define liabilities    

• Explain owner’s equity

In today’s dynamic business environment, it has become of utmost importance for any organization to have a strategic plan in place. A strategic plan is a powerful instrument that helps a company commit to a future goal, motivate its organization through vision, clearly see its strengths and weaknesses, and move forward with a well-thought-out and measurable action plan. Thus, we can say that strategic planning sets direction, outlines measurable goals, and aids in changing approaches when moving forward. To develop an effective strategic plan, you must understand both where your business stands today and where it wants to be in the future.

• Define strategic planning and enlist elements of strategic planning      

• Explain the importance of an organizations mission and vision statements      

• Describe the core values and its unique value proposition     

• Outline goals, objectives, and plan to measure progress and performance

To better understand today’s digital age, it’s important to look back at the Industrial Revolution. As Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward.” Just as the steam engine and other machines transformed the 18th-century economy, digital technologies are changing our world economy, business practices, customer expectations, and societal norms—and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. And while it’s impossible to predict the exact changes that lie ahead, it’s possible to predict who will succeed: agile organizations who are able to quickly take advantage of new opportunities by applying digital technologies.

• Understand the parallels between the industrial revolution and the digital revolution

• Define Digital Transformation

• Understand how digital is changing the operation of businesses, affecting all business sectors, and is making organizations flatter

These days, organizations are making the most of available tools to locate, screen, and attract the most qualified candidates available. The recruiting process has been enhanced, streamlined, and accelerated by technology, behavioral science, pre-employment assessments, and social media. The key is to know how to position your business to attract the best talent pool using social recruiting. Using social media to present your organization dynamically, positively, and effectively to your audiences of active or potential applicants is also vital. It is important to recognize the candidates who have the right competencies and cultural fit to your organization is another skill worth developing. We’ll look at ways that you can establish your company as an employer of choice, use social media to locate and draw the right applicants for recruitment, and assess cultural fit to guarantee the best possible talent choices.

• Become an employer of choice   

• Maximizing your company’s social media reach   

• Evaluate if a candidate is a cultural fit for your organization

Do you want to mentor an environment of innovative thinking in your organization? A leader needs to have some qualities to promote innovative thinking among their team members. The leader also needs to know the techniques of exercising innovation. This lesson outlines the qualities and techniques as well as the four-step process of leading innovation sessions. You can also learn various strategies to maintain the environment of innovation in your organization. It encourages you to challenge your processes and think out of the box. This is a must-learn lesson for persons who want to lead innovation teams effectively.

• Describe an ideal change leader and team members

• Explain the techniques of exercising innovation

• Describe the four-step process of leading innovation sessions

"Faced with the increasing pace and pressures of today’s business environment, organizations are constantly seeking ways to be more efficient and effective. Because companies are often asked to do more with less—including time—they must use their resources wisely to stay ahead of the competition. A talented and skilled workforce is the key to achieving the required results. When you align your workforce with your company’s goals, your organization’s energies will be appropriately focused. And if you set reasonable, measurable, and attainable goals, you will be able to link performance to rewards and motivate your employees to do even more. 

Most organizations don’t understand the power of incorporating the correct timing and frequency of goals into their plan. For example: goals that are set at the beginning of the year and audited 12 months later are not going to motivate your people. It’s difficult to stay committed a business goal over such a long time. When you learn how to set strong, timely, and measurable goals, your team will clearly understand their purpose, see their importance, and know how they will be measured. In this course, you will learn the usage of stretch goals to motivate your team.

• Align stretch goals to performance goals 

• Decide whether to stretch the goals

"“Change is the only constant in life.” 

-Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher 

As a leader, you’re responsible for leading your team to achieve organizational goals. Sometimes that involves changing processes, adopting new technologies, or learning new skills. What do you do when one or more of your employees refuse to change and grow with the rest of the team? People tend to approach change in one of the two ways. They either embrace change and are excited about the possibilities and opportunities inherent in a new adventure. Or they resist change because they fear the unknown. As a leader, you probably have employees in both camps. In this course, we will discuss how to influence the change resisters.

• Identify the fear for change 

• Implement T-chart

Leaders face conflict situations regularly as they manage team members, departmental issues, and organizational challenges. While there are core principles for solving these problems, they can’t all be solved using one strategy. Personality conflict between co-workers requires one approach, while an interdepartmental conflict requires another. In this lesson, we’ll look at several incidents and discuss how to resolve them. We’ll also suggest other strategies you can employ to address and minimize conflict in your workplace.

• Manage small group conflict   

• Manage large group conflict   

• Identify more strategies, tools, and thoughts on managing conflict

Leaders of successful sales organizations focus on strategic planning, intentional hiring, and effective coaching. They build a solid and well-defined sales framework that undergirds their sales team’s efforts. They prioritize hiring people who have the right skills, energy, and outlook. And they develop work environments that are highly structured, purposefully challenging, and appropriately supportive. When sales leaders achieve a good balance of these three factors, the sales process is streamlined, organized, and successful. 

• Build a strategic framework   

• Hire qualified salespeople  

• Coach your team members

Follow Social Distancing: Avoid close contact with one another. Keep at least a six feet (2 meters) or the governmental recommended distance.

Social scientists have studied and designed leadership theories for decades to understand and explain how great leaders are made. They have compiled lists of leadership traits and constructed frameworks and models to illustrate the leadership phenomenon. And while these theories are detailed, thoroughly researched, and insightful, none provide “the” singular leadership model that works for every high-level manager aspiring to lead their team effectively and successfully.

What they do provide is an abundant source of leadership data that can be used to create your own flexible brand of leadership. Leaders face a wide range of tasks, responsibilities, and challenges—both anticipated and unexpected—every day.

Assembling a toolkit of leadership options that can address them is something smart leaders do. Let’s study the specifics of some core leadership theories and how you might use them in different business scenarios.

• Identify the Traits and Contingency theories

• Describe the Behavioral theory

• Explain the Transformational Leadership theory

How much time do you spend developing your leadership succession plan? As older leaders begin to retire at greater rates, the 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey discovered that 65% of potential millennial leaders feel unprepared to take their places. Forbes reports that by 2025, 75% of the workforce will be made up of millennials. These statistics suggest that there’s a leadership crisis on the horizon. Designing a strategy and framework to direct leadership development is mission critical for every organization. Training—and retaining —emerging leaders in your company should be a top priority. Understanding what team members want and expect from an employer will help you develop the right programs and systems to keep your talent engaged in learning, growing, and contributing to your organization.

• Retain your talented resource   

• Design a leadership development framework   

• Create a culture of learning

In today’s corporate world, it is important for a leader to develop writing skill and create a personal brand. When you are able to write crisply and relevantly about topics you understand well, you will influence not only those in your organization but customers, industry peers, and potential clients too. Whether writing emails, business letters, online articles, or posting on social media, you have the ability to set yourself apart from other leaders if you can convey ideas in a way that clearly and powerfully persuades, motivates, or informs. In this lesson, you will learn how to plan, organize, and write business communications as well as create and manage your personal brand.

• Write clear and direct business communications 

• Build your personal brand

The majority of meetings should be discussions that lead to decisions.

 -Patrick Lencioni 

An important part of planning a successful meeting is deciding who should attend the meeting. In the previous course, we have learned that less is more. Invite only those persons who are necessary to achieve the vision and are committed to getting the work completed. Similarly, it is equally important to define and assign specific roles and responsibilities to the team members attending the meeting. This is a critical part of pre-planning. Careful planning ahead of time will result in less resentment, less time wasted, better decisions, and greater ownership of the process by each member of the team.

• State the different roles played in a meeting 

• Determine the roles and responsibilities of a meeting leader