Leadership Series

This leadership series, which can be taken as individual courses or as a series, will teach you the skills needed to emerge as a leader in your organization. Modules include:

  • Module 1 - Essential Skills of Leadership
  • Module 2 - Essential Skills of Communication
  • Module 3 - Coaching Job Skills
  • Module 4 - Improving Work Habits
  • Module 5 - Effective Discipline
  • Module 6 - Providing Performance Feedback
  • Module 7 - Resolving Conflict
  • Module 8 - Managing Complaints
  • Module 9 - Supporting Change
  • Module 10 - Developing Goals and Standards
  • Module 11 - Communicating Up
  • Module 12 - Delegating

Module 1 - Essential Skills of Leadership

Course Description

Essential Skills of Leadership is the first step to developing successful managers. By focusing on three critical management skills, the program establishes a methodology for productive interactions between team members and team leaders. Essential Skills of Leadership helps experienced managers, new managers, and aspiring managers refocus on the basics - the skills required to manage the individual while also leading the team.

Course Objectives:

  • Like the team leader in the video, when you have completed the Essential Skills of Leadership course, you will be able to: 
  • Deal with your team members on a day-to-day basis in such a way as to maintain and enhance their self-esteem
  • Base your discussions about performance and work habits on your team member’s behaviors rather than on their personalities or attitudes
  • Involve your team members in goal setting, solving problems, and making decisions

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Module 2 - Essential Skills of Communication

Course Description

Essential Skills of Communicating provides the tools necessary to develop clear, concise messages. Focusing on communication as a two-way process, the program can help even experienced managers improve their messages by making them clear, well organized and aimed at the needs and interests of the listener. By developing the essential skills of communicating, managers improve relations with their team members and increase productivity. 

Course Objectives:

Like the team leader in the video, when you have completed the Essential Skills of Communicating course, you will be able to:

  • See that communication is a two-way process
  • Construct clear, concise messages in the interest of the receiver
  • Manage nonverbal behaviors to reinforce the intent of your message
  • Listen actively to improve communication
  • Create a climate of open communication which increases your team members' motivation and commitment

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Module 3 - Coaching Job Skills

Course Description

Your team’s performance is crucial to the success of your department and the organization. In order to ensure the effectiveness of your team, it is critical to help them build the skills and knowledge they need to excel.

Your effort to help and train your team members strengthens communication, encourages confidence and creates a stronger and more successful unit. Coaching job skills doesn’t just entail showing your employees how to do something; it involves observing, analyzing, demonstrating and providing feedback. In this leadership development course, you’ll explore the proactive process of developing relationships with your team members.

Vital Learning’s Coaching Job Skills™™ is a management training course that teaches supervisors, team leaders and managers how to successfully coach team members in their jobs, as well as how to widen the breadth of team members’ skill sets.

Learn to:

  • Identify team member difficulties that hinder team success
  • Build improvement plans through observing and analyzing team member performance
  • Effectively coach job skills

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Module 4 - Improving Work Habits

Course Description

You have a talented team, and you focus a significant amount of time and energy on helping them address and resolve performance issues. But, there is a difference between job performance and work habits. Effective managers and leaders can identify opportunities for team members to improve work habits and help their team reach the next level.
Employees with good work habits are more productive and attentive to quality, avoiding bad tendencies like poor communication. Learning how to distinguish between job performance and work habits, as well as honing your ability to coach and develop others regarding their work habits, improves employee productivity.

The Vital Learning Improving Work Habits™? course provides supervisors, team leaders and managers with the tools necessary to recognize and address poor work habits. The course helps managers and team leaders understand the importance of focusing on negative behaviors as well as earning team members’ recognition of the problem and their commitment to changing their habits. Using the tools and skills learned in the course, managers and team leaders are able to improve employee productivity and address issues before they develop into disciplinary problems that affect everyone on the team.

Learn to:

  • Distinguish between performance and work habits
  • Recognize poor work habits
  • Effectively develop and coach others to improve work habits  

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Module 5 - Effective Discipline

Course Description

Disciplining your team members is a difficult but necessary process to help ensure that the goals and actions of your team members are aligned. Effective discipline has the potential to be a positive learning experience for both you and your team members if this aspect of employee performance management is carried out the right way.

Utilizing strong coaching skills is critical when disciplining your team members. Learning how to use effective discipline as a teaching opportunity and deliver constructive, negative feedback in a way that encourages team members to change without demeaning them is paramount to the success of your team.

The Vital Learning Effective Discipline?™ course provides supervisors, team leaders and managers with the interpersonal performance training necessary to dramatically reduce employees’ problem behaviors. Involving team members in performance discussions and winning their commitment to behavioral change enables managers and team leaders to turn a potentially negative interaction into a positive developmental step.

Learn to:

  • Encourage self-discipline
  • Deliver disciplinary actions to team members
  • Use discipline as a positive growth experience 

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Module 6 - Providing Performance Feedback

Course Description

Most employees want feedback about their work and strive to improve workplace performance. You know what it takes to achieve results. After all, your success got you a leadership position. Providing high-quality performance feedback to your team members gives them the information they need to succeed.

As a manager and team leader, you are aware of your team members’ performance, and uniquely positioned to provide effective feedback after developing performance goals. You must be able to establish a process that helps improve workplace performance while maintaining strong relationships within the team. Whether given formally during a performance review or informally during a one-on-one meeting, clear and actionable feedback helps to ensure that employee performance improvement goals are reached.

The Vital Learning Providing Performance Feedback™? course equips supervisors, team leaders and managers with a fair and fact-based, collaborative model for feedback sessions. This model helps reduce discomfort and improves the payoff from challenging feedback discussions between a manager and team member. Effective performance feedback is highly collaborative; when team members agree to the process, they are committed to employee performance improvement and work to produce great results.

Learn to:

  • Develop a collaborative feedback process
  • Get team members’ buy-in
  • Implement a systematic approach to performance improvement  

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Module 7 - Resolving Conflict

Course Description

You have worked hard to build a highly productive and diverse team that fosters an environment of creativity and innovation. But, diversity can also create conflict when individuals bring different personalities and work styles together.

Effective managers understand that effective conflict resolution in the workplace is the key to efficient business operations. By keeping your team members focused on performance, minimizing the impact of potential conflicts and improving company communications, you greatly improve your team’s output. Managing conflicts quickly through conflict resolution and negotiation skills training prevents disruptions and loss of productivity.

The Vital Learning Resolving Conflicts?™ training course equips supervisors, managers and team leaders with the tools to recognize conflict and handle it quickly and effectively. When managers and team leaders understand the signs of conflict and find the root cause, they’re able to eliminate the issues quickly and minimize the negative effects. With the skills learned in conflict resolution training, leaders are able to face conflicts directly, thereby preserving the integrity of their teams and demonstrating a commitment to individual performance and growth.

Learn to:

  • Recognize conflicts before they become problems
  • Develop the skills needed to identify the source of team member conflicts
  • Use effective communication and management techniques to resolve conflict  

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Module 8 - Managing Complaints

Course Description

Your ability to keep an open mind when it comes to managing employee complaints is critical to the morale and success of your team and organization. Complaints highlight your team members’ frustrations and/or distractions, and addressing them negatively or avoiding them altogether affects productivity across the company.

Most employees don’t enjoy complaining, so when you are approached with a grievance, it is typically cause for concern. Knowing how to listen, effectively communicate and resolve complaints is fundamental to ensuring that your team members feel valued, understood and supported, which ultimately leads to greater job satisfaction and increased output.

The Vital Learning Managing Complaints™? course provides supervisors, team leaders and managers with a proven process and individual skills to effectively manage employee complaints in a way that supports employee and team goals. This course illustrates the importance of managers and team leaders listening to team member complaints and remaining non-judgmental. This is a pivotal skill –? because what might appear to be a minor issue to the manager may, in fact, be a major problem to the team member.

Learn to:

  • Empathetically listen to team members’ complaints
  • Find the root cause of an issue
  • Effectively resolve workplace problems 

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Module 9 - Supporting Change

Course Description

Change is inevitable in business. Reliable leadership change management ensures the success of your team during difficult transitions and helps team members adjust and remain committed. But, how do you keep your team members focused on performance amidst the distractions of complex change initiatives?

As a team leader, you must effectively manage organizational change by handling the emotions, fear and anxiety that accompany it and encourage your team members to support new initiatives. Understanding the three phases of change –? resistance, exploration and acceptance –? allows you to more clearly communicate transformations and help your team members embrace change.

Vital Learning’s Supporting Change™? is a management training course that equips supervisors, team leaders and managers with the tools to understand and interpret change so they can more successfully guide their teams through it. By working to support change while addressing the team’s comfort level with it, team leaders will more effectively manage organizational change and facilitate acceptance of new processes and procedures.

Learn to:

  • Understand and facilitate the three phases of change
  • Develop strategies for effectively communicating and supporting change
  • Build team member buy-in to change  

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Module 10 - Developing Goals and Standards

Course Description

In an ideal world, every member of your team understands his or her role and responsibilities and performs those duties flawlessly. Your role as a team leader is to motivate your team members. It is essential to the success of your team that you not only develop performance goals with team members, but also acquire the employee performance management skills to hold them accountable.

Although building consensus around performance standards and responsibilities from your team members is difficult, developing performance goals and standards collaboratively ensures commitment. As a result, team members agree to the process and are dedicated to its success.

The Vital Learning Developing Performance Goals & Standards?™ course helps supervisors, team leaders and managers develop the tools they need to successfully implement effective performance goals and standard processes within their teams. By focusing on logical processes and reasonable commitments, Developing Performance Goals & Standards enables managers and team leaders to outline clear work standards and encourage better job performance. Using the SMART ?– Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented and Time-framed –? approach with team members, managers and team leaders are able to demonstrate their commitment to an open and consistent performance improvement process and effectively motive team members.

Learn to:

  • Define goals, objectives and performance standards
  • Identify and set performance standards
  • Involve team members in creating individual performance standards
  • Monitor team members’ progress toward their goals during individual review meetings

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Module 11 - Communicating Up

Course Description

You have worked hard to develop relationships and build rapport with your team members and colleagues. That’?s a good start. However, the ability to communicate effectively with your supervisor and other members of senior management, in addition to your team members and peers, improves your success as a manager and team leader.

Where poor communication has the ability to cripple your leadership capacity, a solid business communication strategy increases productivity and builds stronger professional relationships. Effective communication strengthens the connections with your organization?’s senior leadership. Your ability to understand a superior?’s communication style, deliver bad news with grace, communicate group or employee achievements and maintain their attention during a meeting is critical to ensuring mutual understanding and agreement.

The Vital Learning Communicating Up™? course is the communication skills training that any supervisor, team leader or manager needs to understand how to hold more successful meetings with their managers and other members of senior leadership. An effective business communication strategy turns these meetings into positive, productive experiences. Communicating up is not difficult, but it does require employees to empathize with their managers and to understand their managers?’ specific styles and work challenges.

Learn to:

  • Plan for effective communication with supervisors
  • Build consensus around goals, objectives and action plans
  • Recap communications for clarity and consistency  

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Module 12 - Delegating

Course Description

Does the phrase, "?If you want something done right, do it yourself,?" resonate with you? It is often difficult to delegate responsibility to your team members. However, proper leadership delegation ensures that you are not spread too thin, and with the right delegation training, you are able to focus on critical priorities. The ability to delegate effectively is an essential employee time management skill. It helps balance the workload and prevents you from being an ineffective leader.

Effectively utilizing your team gives you more time to interact with management, colleagues and team members, enabling you to develop deeper and stronger connections across the organization as well as within your team. Leadership delegation also demonstrates that you trust your team members while encouraging the development of their skills. In addition, it helps your team members believe that their jobs are important, meaningful and critical to the success of the team and organization.

The Vital Learning Delegating?™ course provides supervisors, team leaders and managers with the delegation training they require to strengthen the team’s commitment to the organization?’s success. Delegation is an important time management skill that every employee should master. With apt leadership delegation, team members learn accountability and responsibility; thus, employees feel like an important part of the team and the entire organization.

Learn to:

  • Delegate for optimal time management, job satisfaction and productivity
  • Develop processes that ensure the involvement and success of your team members in performing delegated tasks
  • Design a framework to develop responsibility, accountability and the personal growth of your team members  

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