Course catalogue

Organizations are changing, and so are our offices. The new age millennials are shifting toward the virtual world. More and more organizations use virtual teams to meet corporate goals. This has created the need to determine how best to manage and lead these virtual groups. 

Traditional methods of managing on-site groups don’t work with remote workers, because virtual teams are most often composed of workers who are spread over a varied geographic and cultural expanse and communicate, for the most part, electronically. Future Workforce Report states that 63 percent of companies utilize virtual workers, but only 57 percent have standards in place to manage the process. 

In this lesson, you will learn to effectively guide teams that they rarely see face-to-face.

• Establish requirements 

• Build mutual trust with your virtual team 

• Communicate frequently with them

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

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

Managers are often called to present to the groups of customers, cross-departmental teams, or in-house decision-makers. The process of crafting and delivering a presentation requires organizational skills, insight, technical abilities, and courage. Public speaking can be intimidating. But, by taking the time to methodically plan and execute the necessary details, you can be prepared and confident to deliver an effective presentation. This course will walk you through the steps you’ll need to plan and organize your topic, choose visual aids, consider technology tools, and practice delivering your speech. 

• Research, decide, and plan your presentation  

• Create a presentation with additional aid   

• Practice and make the presentation

Executive presence isn’t something you’re born with, it’s a combination of learned behaviors and characteristics that can be developed. Depending upon your personality, industry, business goals and challenges, executive presence can be manifested in different ways. 

Having great presentation skills and making a strong first impression based on your clothing and demeanor is not executive presence. You need more substantive abilities to face daily business challenges, speak your mind while maintaining your composure, or inspire your team to commit to a demanding new goal. Executive presence is a purposefully developed hybrid of internal character and external presentation. Let’s look at the qualities that distinguish great leaders from mediocre ones.

• Identify the attributes of executive presence

• Gauge your executive presence and gain insight

• Receive feedback in different forms

• Develop your own executive presence

People generally do business with people they like or look up to, and not just with a company. This means that successful leaders build their personal brand, resulting in the achievement of organizational goals. A personal brand can elevate you above the crowd and help you achieve your personal and professional goals. It is a constant and ever-changing process of identifying your goals, setting up a plan, and monitoring it consistently. Your brand is a combination of the skills you develop and the behavior you display. In this course, you will look at the traits of building a successful personal brand.

• Define personal brand

• Enlist strategy to build a personal brand

• State the steps to build a successful personal brand

When writing business emails, letters, memos, and other communications, it’s important to check for any grammar or spelling errors that can distract from your message. Misspelled words and grammatical errors are easy to fix if you make a habit of using the spellcheck and grammar features on your computer. In this course, we will review basic punctuation rules. We will examine some common sentence structure mistakes. And we’ll study some common word choice errors. Finally, we’ll provide a list of online resources and books. Don’t let grammar and word choice errors blur your message or damage your credibility.

• Use appropriate punctuations    

• Improve your sentence structure    

• Identify the common mistakes in word usage

In this lesson, you will learn how a culture of learning leads to success. Establishing a culture of continuous learning in your organization takes time and effort, but the results are worth the investment.    

Begin with gaining the support of executives, and then start to incorporate learning into your overall mission, your strategic goals, and value statements.   

Work to get “buy-in” from everyone in your company, and include them in finding ways to learn, teach, and share knowledge.   

Establish easy-to-use systems and processes that make learning an expected part of your corporate behavior.    

Your organization and employees will benefit not only through increased productivity and higher profits, but in personal development and job satisfaction as well. 

• Describe a continuous learning organization     

• List the benefits of a continuous learning organization    

• Build a culture of continuous learning

Whether you’re publicly challenging long-held beliefs or experimenting with a new idea, it’s normal to experience fear or discomfort. You can reduce these emotions by creating a workplace that openly promotes change, welcomes honest and productive discussions, sees failure as a necessary part of business success, and rewards and supports risk taking on a daily basis. It may seem ironic, but when you instill a continuous learning culture and growth mindset in your organization, failure can actually lead to success.

• Identify methods to challenge the status quo   

• Identify reasons for bias towards encouraging smart failure and suggest solutions    

• Enlist ways of encouraging learn from failure culture

First and most importantly, it is the just and moral course of action. Centuries of exploitation, oppression, and disenfranchisement of the Black community has resulted in predominantly white leadership in most organizations. Companies must intentionally disrupt the systemic barriers in place that maintain the biased (prejudiced, race-based) status quo in order to create more inclusive and sustainable organizations that better serve the community.

• Why should companies invest in Black talent?

• How do companies identify and attract Black talent?

• How do companies develop and retain Black talent?