Leadership Courses

This course builds leaders’ skills in handling chronic performance problems. They learn how to document and present a solid case for needed improvement and use effective interaction skills. Leaders identify the steps to take after the performance problem discussion to provide ongoing feedback and support, and determine if it is necessary to impose formal consequences.

Helps leaders:

• Effectively address poor performance in a firm, fair, and consistent manner.
• Minimize the impact of chronic performance problems on people, productivity, and profitability.
• Provide problem performers with a clear understanding of what they must do to improve and the consequences of failing to do so.
• Encourage people to take ownership of, and be accountable for, improving their work performance.

Learn simple problem-solving steps to handle poor work habits on your team. Then, dive into realistic scenarios for practice. Expert coaches provide advice on how to make positive habits stick.

Helps individuals:

• Strengthen their approach to handling employees with poor work habits. 
• Avoid common pitfalls.
• Gain practical advice on how to problem-solve with employees to turn poor habits around.
• Prepare for their next challenge using the Work Habits Planner.

The trust built with direct reports pays dividends in times of stress. Follow a leader who learns to appropriately disclose feelings and share information to build trust during an organizational change. Neuroscience principles explain the impact of such authenticity and transparency. Participants also learn tips for developing good judgment.

Helps leaders: 

• Understand the neuroscience of why authenticity and transparency work.
• Use a key interpersonal skill for sharing what they know, think, and feel.
• Avoid common pitfalls when disclosing.

Adversity, change, turbulence, and uncertainty can be part of any given day. While we successfully navigate most challenges, others require greater resilience—the ability to cope with stress and adversity. Resilience keeps us from feeling stuck. Key personality traits and skills can raise our resilience, and power us through even the most challenging times. 

Helps individuals:

• Learn how individual traits and skills affect resilience. 
• Discover methods to manage tendencies and strengthen skills.
• Consider which mindset obstacles and personal biases are interfering with resilience.
• Create a 60-day plan for boosting resilience.

Attracting and landing the best candidates is a competitive advantage for an organization. When interviewers establish a human connection, candidates have a more positive impression of the job and organization. To make that connection in a virtual setting, interviewers must be especially aware of their words and actions and make an extra effort to build rapport.

Helps individuals: 

• Understand how helping candidates feel at ease can land top job seekers and benefit the organization.
• Learn ways to create a welcoming virtual environment.
• Use interaction skills to build a human connection with candidates.

Your effectiveness as a leader depends on the relationships you build with the people who report to you. Watch a leader discover her misconceptions about what makes others feel valued. The story unfolds to explain the brain's alert system for detecting a lack of acceptance and how you can apply the most important skill for demonstrating respect.

Helps leaders:

• Understand the neuroscience behind our personal need to feel valued.
• Describe common misconceptions about valuing and respecting others.
• Apply the best skill for meeting our need to feel valued.

Although you can see how others' behavior affects trust in the organization, you might not recognize how your own behavior influences trust. Building trust is a gradual process, one interaction at a time. But it takes only a single action to break trust.

Helps individuals:

• Stop behaviors that break trust.
• Model behaviors that build trust.
• Repair relationships where lack of trust is negatively affecting job performance.

Leaders are introduced to the Identify, Engage, Advocate framework for inclusive action. Through a series of activities they learn the behaviors leader allies need to create an environment of psychological safety and an equitable workplace.

Helps leaders:

• Recognize the exclusionary behaviors happening around you and within your team and take action to counter them. 
• Develop everyday inclusive leadership habits using a memorable framework of three inclusive practices—Identify, Engage, and Advocate. 
• Model inclusive behaviors in a way that encourages your team members to embrace and practice these behaviors with others.  
• Build and nurture a psychologically safe environment where each person can participate freely, be themselves, and experience success. 

This course introduces Trust Builders, actions leaders can take to build and sustain trusting relationships, as well as common Trust Breakers that can erode or quickly break trust. Applying these skills to build trusting relationships enables people to take risks, identify and solve problems, and collaborate to achieve business results.

Helps leaders:

• Recognize how trust in the workplace affects business results.
• Analyze their role in building and sustaining trust.
• Identify common workplace behaviors that can build, sustain, or break trust.
• Demonstrate behaviors that show they trust others, as well as give people the confidence to trust them.
• Use interaction skills to foster open communication, build and maintain trusting relationships, and repair damaged ones.

Not all coaching situations are easy to navigate, especially when you’re a new leader. Read a challenging scenario and think about how you might handle the situation. Then, hear advice from a DDI coach who has been there about how to handle the challenge and avoid common mistakes.

Helps leaders:

• Think through a challenging coaching scenario.
• Get tips from a coach and how they would handle that situation.
• Learn how to avoid common first-time mistakes.
• See examples of how coaches plan for the coaching conversation.

Leaders of other managers develop multi-directional coaching skills and learn the proactive inquiry method for more effective interactions with their teams. This course is designed for mid- to senior-level leaders. 

Helps leaders:

• Clearly differentiate and seek higher-level coaching opportunities that provide significant payoff to the individual, team, and organization.
• Apply advanced skills to conduct more compelling, collaborative, and rewarding coaching discussions.
• Seek and offer feedback that people can accept and act on to ensure achievement of business goals.
• Monitor and measure the continuous improvement of coaching skills in themselves and those they coach.
• Build and sustain a coaching culture within their team.

By helping learners understand the importance of three coaching techniques and how to effectively handle both proactive and reactive coaching discussions, this course helps leaders have more effective and efficient interactions.

Helps leaders:

• Encourage people to take ownership of, and be accountable for, their work performance.
• Create a work environment where people are comfortable taking on the risks associated with new responsibilities.
• Boost morale, improve productivity, and increase profitability by coaching for peak performance in each person.
• Manage work performance issues in a fair, consistent manner.

In this course, leaders recognize the benefits of a growth mindset, and the insight tool measures their general orientation to how they view other’s potential to grow. They learn and practice a practical approach to coaching in the moment, in any situation.

Helps leaders:

• Recognize and nurture the potential within others to grow and change.
• Build a coaching relationship based on trust.
• Guide, inspire, support, and empower in the moment.
• Ask questions, connect at a human level, and energize into action.

You inspire, motivate, and influence team members every day to reach business goals. Learn three tips on making the most of your communications to maintain your consistent and authentic brand.

Helps leaders:

• Recognize how they communicate is as important as what they communicate.
• Adapt their communication style to connect more effectively.
• Craft communications to positively impact individuals, teams, organizations, and their own leadership brand.

Many conversations occur through email, conference call, team collaboration apps, instant messaging, or other digitally-enabled formats. We communicate with greater speed and efficiency than ever before, but it’s easy to be misunderstood, or for messages to have unintended, negative consequences. This course provides tips and tools to make sure virtual communications are clear and effective.

Helps leaders:

• Be reminded of the fundamental elements of communication.
• Evaluate their understanding of effective communications practices.  
• Discover methods for improving the clarity and receptivity of messages delivered virtually.
• Receive a wealth of actionable tips for improving communications across a variety of modalities (email, conference calls, etc.).

This foundation course for most Interaction Management^® courses helps leaders communicate effectively so they can spark action in others. The course teaches leaders the Interaction Essentials they need to handle the variety of challenges and opportunities they encounter every day in the workplace and beyond.

Helps leaders:

• Achieve results through others by building strong interpersonal relationships.
• Plan for successful interactions with team members─in person and virtually.
• Provide meaningful, supportive feedback that motivates team members and helps individuals improve their performance.
• Impact business outcomes by consistently meeting the personal and practical needs of others.

This foundational course provides individuals with a powerful set of interaction skills that enables them to communicate more effectively with colleagues and customers and, in the process, build trust, strengthen partnerships, and achieve desired results.

Helps individuals:

• Recognize the impact they can have on their success and the success of others by enhancing interpersonal relationships in the workplace.
• Relate to colleagues and customers in a way that meets their personal needs while also meeting the practical need of accomplishing objectives.
• Use a set of interaction process skills that enable them to conduct more successful discussions that achieve results.
• Use a technique for providing specific, meaningful feedback that helps people improve their performance and increase productivity.

This course highlights to leaders that engaging the “head”—the business outcome of the conversation—is just as critical as recognizing and addressing the “heart”—people’s feelings such as being respected or appreciated. Leaders will recognize the role of emotional intelligence in success as a leader as they develop foundational leadership skills that apply to the wide range of workplace situations they must handle.

Helps leaders:

• Conduct conversations that achieve the intended business goals.
• Communicate and respond in ways that meet the unique personal needs of team members and others.
• Recognize and react to emotions (their own and others’) present in work situations.
• Use a technique to provide meaningful, supportive feedback.

This course provides a new, uncomplicated approach to performance management. Instead of semiannual reviews driven by managers, this new process is about having regular, meaningful dialog. In these everyday conversations, leaders coach and develop, making the time they invest reap better performance and stronger relationships with their direct reports.

Helps leaders:

• Conduct everyday conversations that inspire their direct reports to achieve their personal best.
• Nurture workplace relationships and grow trust.
• Give feedback for improvement that’s more comfortable for themselves and their direct reports.
• Convey clear expectations for what their direct reports should be achieving and how.
• Champion a conversation-based approach to managing performance within their organization.

Imagine a workplace culture where team members play to their strengths, help one another to be their best selves, and push forward awesome solutions. A coaching culture creates a safe space for these moments to blossom. In such a culture, learning can come from a variety of sources: peers, managers, direct reports, and external coaches. When everyone in a company can be a coach, everyone benefits.

Helps leaders:

• Evaluate the current coaching mindset of themselves in comparison with their work group.
• Discover actions they can take to foster a safe working environment.
• Receive actionable tips for modeling and promoting effective coaching behaviors.

This session moves past the numbers game of diverse representation to focus on leaning into and leveraging the unique abilities, perspectives, styles, and ideas of each person. Stereotypes and unconscious bias are explored as well as the differences in who we are, how we think, and what it means to an inclusive workplace. Three practices lay out a personalized path for identifying, engaging with, and advocating for individuals whose voices must and should be heard.

Helps leaders:

• Recognize biases and stereotypes that can affect workplace decisions. 
• Identify those who’ve been excluded and invite them to the table. 
• Engage everyone and encourage their voices and contributions. 
• Advocate for those with different perspectives and ignite their personal success.

In this course, mid- to senior level leaders learn to evaluate their current network and take steps to close gaps. They identify personal and organizational barriers that hamper efforts to negotiate, collaborate, and communicate as they build partnerships.

Helps leaders:

• Navigate complexity in your role and accomplish critical business objectives by using strategic networking and partnership tools and skills.
• Advance your organization’s objectives; build effective networks and strong partnerships.
• Evaluate your active network to close gaps and enhance the network’s strategic value.
• Identify critical checkpoints to plan, execute, monitor, and maintain partnerships.

Digital technology and data are helping organizations transform into more responsive, nimble, and inclusive cultures. Information is abundant, yet leaders are making more and more decisions in the midst of uncertainty. To lead through transformation effectively, leaders must get the right information and form accurate insights.  Then, they can accelerate actions.  

Helps individuals:

• Learn about decision making in transformation-orientated organizational cultures. 
• Discover methods to effectively collect and analyze information.
• Learn how to propose, vet, and select alternative courses of action. 
• Prepare to confidently decide and accelerate action.

During this two-hour session, participants take an in-depth look at what they value most, connect with their purpose as a leader, and craft a personal brand statement that embodies the impact they want to achieve in the workplace.​

In this course, leaders learn the skills they need to address these challenges, gain the commitment of team members, develop individual skills and abilities, and enhance the overall capability and capacity of their teams and, ultimately, the organization. Leaders learn to identify the tasks they need to delegate, select the most appropriate individuals, assess capabilities and commitment, and plan the delegation discussion. That discussion includes the level of decision-making authority, amount of support, and methods for monitoring progress and measuring results.

Helps leaders:

• Achieve key business results by leveraging the entire team’s abilities.
• Build the team’s capabilities and capacity through developmental delegations.
• Free up time to focus on mission-critical responsibilities.
• Delegate with increased confidence.

This course sets out to help leaders shift their mindset about what they can delegate and feel more comfortable and confident doing so. Learners dig into their workload to identify tasks they’d never consider delegating. They use methods for matching people to tasks they’re both motivated and capable of doing. And, they practice the delegation conversation they’ll have to ensure success.

Helps leaders:

• Delegate work that they wouldn’t have before.​
• Identify tasks to delegate that engage, empower, and develop the team. ​
• Match a person’s capabilities and motivations to an appropriate task.​
• Share work that extends the right amount of ownership and decision-making authority. ​
• Establish clear boundaries, support,​ and follow-up with each delegation.

Some people on your team need development to meet minimum job requirements. Others need to prepare for future opportunities such as new job responsibilities, upcoming assignments, or a promotion. Address both types of development needs with some help from a Development Action Planner, a handy tool that both you and team members can use to plan a development effort.

Helps leaders:

• Understand the role of the leader and team member in development.
• Recognize the importance of development to the success of individuals, teams, and the organization.
• Identify who is responsible for determining the most effective way to develop skills, knowledge, and competencies.
• Measure the effectiveness of development efforts.

In this course, mid- to senior level leaders learn to define the current state of team development as well as the ideal future state, pinpointing team and individual strengths and growth needs. Also, identify and develop high potentials for future leadership roles, assess the impact and effectiveness of development efforts, and provide feedback.

Helps leaders:

• Identify their team’s development needs as they relate to achieving current and future business priorities.
• Describe the experienced leader’s role in developing direct reports.
• Recognize how to achieve the highest pay-off for their efforts in developing others.
• Use a three-phase process—Assess, Acquire, Apply—to help individuals identify strengths and growth areas, plan development strategies, and acquire and apply new or enhanced knowledge, skills, and experience.
• Measure and provide feedback on the effectiveness and impact of development efforts on the individual, team, and organization.

In this course, learners are introduced to a practical process to guide their own and their direct reports’ development-planning efforts. The outcome is a meaningful development plan that supports the organization’s current and future business needs.

Helps leaders:

• Recognize the role of the leader and the team member in development planning and execution.
• Recognize the importance of development to the success of individuals, teams, and the organization.
• Use a three-step process—Assess–Acquire–Apply—to identify strengths and growth areas, plan development actions, and successfully implement development plans.
• Employ a set of best practices to overcome common development barriers and challenges.
• Measure the effectiveness of their development efforts so they know they are successful.

Understand how your coach qualities (motivations, style, and personal attributes) affect your ability to coach effectively. Everyone is different and it’s important to understand how to leverage your unique qualities.

Helps leaders:

• Discover how their coach qualities influence their coaching impact.
• Learn tips to make the most of their unique strengths and avoid risks.
• Prepare for their next coaching opportunity using new self-insights learned.

This course provides the skills and resources leaders need to accelerate the process of implementing change with their team members and to create an agile work environment where people are more open to change.

Helps leaders:

• Accelerate the process of making change happen.
• Minimize the potential negative effects change can have on productivity, morale, and collaboration.
• Turn resistance into commitment and inspire team members to take ownership of change.
• Clearly communicate the business rationale and benefits of change for the team and the organization.

This course for individual contributors focuses on their role in implementing change in the workplace. Participants discover their Change IQ, learn about the phases of change that many people experience, and are introduced to best practices that will enable them to tackle and overcome the new business challenges of today and tomorrow.

Helps individuals:

• Commit to and take ownership of change.
• Effectively recognize change, explore change, and overcome personal resistance to change.
• Minimize the negative impact on individuals, work groups, and the organization of not adapting to change.
• Demonstrate an embracing change mind-set that influences others to embrace workplace change.

Change is universal. However, it manifests itself in very different ways, depending on the situation, the environment, the people, and the timing. Understanding the recent past, the present, and the near future will prepare you to address important issues connected with a change. And it will surface the fears, concerns, challenges, and opportunities that you need to discuss and confront.

Helps individuals:

• Understand how people typically react when change occurs.
• Demonstrate an embracing change mind-set that will enable you to remain open to workplace change.
• Determine how you can influence changes when, at first glance, it appears you have no control.

This course provides leaders with a model to determine what drives each individual’s engagement, as well as methods for proactive engagement and talent retention. Participants learn how to conduct “engagement conversations” and “retention conversations.” They explore ways to offer recognition and create an engaging environment using no-cost “everyday engagers.”

Helps leaders:

• Engage individuals on a daily basis.
• Uncover and address what individuals need to be more satisfied and engaged at work.
• Inspire higher levels of engagement by acknowledging the value people bring to the organization and showing them that they matter.
• Increase the quality of conversations with people about their engagement and intent to stay.

The speed of work and ever-increasing demands on employees' talents and time can leave them burned out and, possibly, on their way out. Leaders can pivot to prevent team burnout, but they often won't know what to look for or how to address it before it escalates. 

Helps leaders:

• Learn the signs of burnout and where it's coming from.
• How to take action to protect their team.  

People need to feel satisfied with their jobs, but even a leader’s best intentions can’t guarantee that their team is truly engaged. If people feel disconnected, they might not perform at their best. Evaluating engagement efforts and demonstrating simple but powerful everyday actions will help to motivate and engage team members as well as leaders themselves.

Helps leaders:

• Understand why engagement is important.
• Recognize the leaders’ role in engagement, and the importance of self-engagement.
• Learn 3 aspects of engagement and how to enhance team satisfaction in these 3 areas, daily.

In this course, leaders will learn the three key elements of executing strategy at the front line─Focus, Measurement, and Accountability. They learn how to focus on the few most critical priorities, to measure progress toward the accomplishment of these priorities, and to hold themselves and their team members accountable against the metrics. Participants will also explore best practices for accountability, such as determining and communicating accountability—including consequences. The Strategy Execution Tool helps leaders capture in one place their top priorities, progress and outcome measures, and those accountable for achieving the priorities. Using the three elements of execution ensures that leaders and their teams get the right things done, in spite of daily distractions.

Helps leaders:

• Maintain focus on important work in the midst of the daily pressure of business.
• Explain the importance of critical work to their team and others.
• Track progress and outcomes against relevant measures to ensure successful execution.
• Communicate accountabilities so that team members understand the importance, impact, and expectations regarding priority work.

During this two-hour session, participants explore the consequences of fear and failure and the impact a fixed versus growth mindset can have on their ability to take risks. They learn how to mitigate those risks by forming a safety net that enables them to jump into the unknown...and achieve extraordinary things!

Change can be many things—energizing, confusing, exciting, daunting. One thing is for sure—the element of the unknown that can leave you feeling disoriented, even lost. When the situation seems out of your hands, you can make traction—and successfully move yourself and others through change—by identifying areas you can control as well as areas you can influence.

Helps leaders:

• Examine their own change situation, the reason it’s happening, and what it means for them.
• Identify areas of the change they can control, or at least influence.
• Explore ways they can take initiative to exert their influence over the change.
• Review tips for taking care of themselves and others during change.

This course provides a practical approach, and tools and techniques, to help leaders and their teams think differently about how they work and to help them generate new ideas that add value to your organization and your customers. Leaders also learn what they can say and do to foster innovation with their teams.

Helps leaders:

• Help their teams contribute to business objectives when they:
  • Focus on innovation opportunities that will help their customers meet their objectives.
  • Build robust innovative ideas that consider many perspectives.
  • Learn and benefit from both success and failure.
  • Work together to advocate for the innovation and ensure that valuable new ideas are not lost.
• Enhance their contributions as a leader by fostering innovation with their team.

Providing a direct report with feedback for improvement can be one of your most challenging, least favorite interactions. This structured approach can make such discussions much more comfortable and collegial. Neuroscience explains how using this approach can help you avoid common pitfalls and achieve your intended results.

Helps leaders:

• Understand the neuroscience behind the reaction to feedback for improvement.
• Identify common mistakes to avoid.
• Apply a feedback model that sparks better performance and maintains a positive relationship.

Research makes a compelling case for praise as a driver of employee performance. Yet, giving praise can be harder than you might think thanks to some common hidden biases. In an example, a leader who intends to deliver praise finds that his approach is falling flat. You'll learn why. Also, you'll discover how to make your positive feedback sincere and meaningful.

Helps leaders:

• Understand the research and neuroscience that explains why praise is important.
• Recognize hidden biases that trip up leaders.
• Use the best, most authentic way to provide positive feedback.

Some of the most difficult interactions are with employees who suddenly become emotional. Participants learn about the neuroscience behind emotions and three common approaches that make negative feelings worse. They’ll also learn about how to use empathy to help an upset employee return to a calm, productive state.

Helps leaders:

• Understand the neuroscience of handling the emotional response.
• Identify three approaches that make responding to emotion and upset worse.
• Use the number one skill to effectively handle and defuse emotion.

When team members have skill and experience, they're likely to produce acceptable results. In today's business environment, however, teams often are under pressure to produce more than just acceptable results. As the leader, you can proactively create conditions that allow your team to reach peak performance quickly and without undue strain on any individuals.

Helps leaders:

• Fulfill the three roles—diagnose, coach, and reinforce the team in its efforts to reach high performance.
• Focus their team's efforts on high-priority actions that directly support the organization's goals and strategies.
• Enhance the effectiveness of their team by identifying and eliminating conditions that are preventing the team from achieving higher levels of performance.
• Create an environment in which team members are moved to strive harder to realize the potential of the team.

In this course, individual performers learn how to effectively deliver both positive and developmental feedback. They also learn how to be receptive to feedback and to listen to accurately understand the speaker’s intended message. In the workplace, these skills help them to optimize and sustain their own and their coworkers’ performance.

Helps individuals:

• Support colleagues’ job performance, growth, and development.
• Build authentic, trusting relationships with colleagues.
• More wisely choose opportunities to give and seek feedback.
• Handle, reduce, or eliminate defensiveness or negative emotions that can occur in a feedback discussion.
• Help create a culture of teamwork and performance.

In order to commit to becoming a more inclusive leader, they must first personally understand the problem of exclusion. Leaders experience an immersive simulation, either in VR or a computer-based format, to experience firsthand what it's like to be excluded. Following the simulation, leaders engage in a candid and open discussion where they share personal experiences with inclusion and exclusion. With a shared understanding of the problem and why it's important, leaders learn more about what a culture of inclusion looks like, why it's important, and what they can do to help create one.

Helps leaders:

• Experience firsthand what it feels like to be excluded at work through an immersive simulation.
• Recognize the impact an inclusive workplace can have on an organization’s ability to achieve goals.
• Embrace the role of a leader in creating an inclusive work environment.
• Increase commitment to model and support behaviors that create a more inclusive workplace.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion enable organizations to innovate better, make smarter decisions, retain talent, and achieve greater performance. Three inclusive practices give leaders a framework for taking action when exclusion happens and build and nurture an inclusive culture for their team. Five interaction skills give leaders a voice they can use to conduct everyday inclusive conversations.

Helps leaders:

• Recognize the exclusionary behaviors happening around you and within your team and take action to counter them. 
• Develop everyday inclusive leadership habits using a memorable framework of three inclusive practices—Identify, Engage, and Advocate.
• Model inclusive behaviors in a way that encourages your team members to embrace and practice these behaviors with others.
• Build and nurture a psychologically safe environment where each person can participate freely, be themselves, and experience success.

During this two-hour session, participants learn how to be bold and ask for the next step in their career. They identify their stakeholders, learn how to craft a strategy, package their idea, and gain commitment from others. 

In today's ever-evolving organizations, leaders need to get things done through people who don't report to them and, in some cases, even outrank them. Welcome to the new age of influence, where, to be effective, you must know the techniques that will help you earn people's commitment to make things happen.

Helps individuals:

• Capture people's attention, change their perspective, and make things happen.
• Clearly link ideas, suggestions, and recommendations to changes that will have a positive impact on individual, team, and organizational performance.
• Express themselves with enthusiasm and conviction.
• Understand people's motivations, needs, and concerns, and gain their commitment.

In this course, mid- to senior level leaders learn how to create an influence strategy that clearly links their ideas and recommendations to changes that will have a positive impact on individual, team, and organizational performance.

Helps leaders:

• Identify and assess influence opportunities and choose strategies to achieve business results.
• Evaluate their business network and build supportive and reciprocal long-term working relationships at all levels of the organization.
• Leverage their personal power to move people to take action on those ideas, opportunities, and recommendations that will have the greatest impact on organizational priorities.
• Use techniques that allow them to engage people both emotionally and rationally.
• Assess the people they need to influence—understanding their motivations, needs, and concerns—so they can change or reinforce their perceptions and gain their commitment.
• Capture people’s attention and make things happen.

In this course, we train mid- to senior level leaders to use techniques that support innovation. By gaining experience with these techniques in an engaging classroom setting, leaders will be equipped to model ideal conditions for innovation—and be a keeper of the culture that inspires and rewards their teams.

Helps leaders:

• Apply leadership actions that minimize the challenges to creating an innovative environment.
• Recognize their role as a leader in building and sustaining the conditions for innovation.
• Make and measure 30-day commitments to hold themselves accountable for instilling a culture of innovation.

The Interaction Essentials are powerful skills for having meaningful and productive conversations with others. But there are times when we miss opportunities to use these skills or even misapply them. Participants challenge themselves to determine how these skills are used in four scenarios.

Helps individuals:

• Identify Key Principles used in a short conversation segment.
• Identify Interaction Guidelines used in a short conversation segment.

Build excitement for your women in leadership initiative with this high-energy keynote for your lunch-and-learn conference or virtual session. Female and male attendees will find real-world wisdom from themes including confidence, inner strength, and accessing the leader within.

With DDI's Leaders as Allies session, you can create a more equitable and gender-diverse workplace extended to both men and women. This onsite or virtual session empowers bosses and colleagues to be allies to women. It uniquely focuses on what allies can do to champion women versus what they cannot do.

Executives are also in a unique and powerful position to make substantial advancements with gender equality within their organization. The Executives as Allies Session includes all foundational content covered in the standard Leaders as Allies course, with activities and content leveled-up to accommodate an audience of top-level leaders. After surfacing top organizational barriers to women in leadership, participants define actions to address and overcome the identified challenges. Participants then establish lead and lag measures to monitor progress toward a more gender diverse leadership pool. Opportunities for ongoing post-session dialogue and consulting are also available.

With this course, you can eliminate bad meetings (voted the #1 "time-killer" in organizations!) and make meetings more productive and inclusive. Leaders embark on an activity-filled exploration of techniques to drive intentionality, create impactful agendas, and encourage participation. Leaders will practice stewardship with a meeting makeover to make the best use of everyone’s time.

Helps leaders make meetings matter by:

• Mixing up their meeting approach with techniques that add variety and engagement.
• Designing quality meetings with intentionality and purpose.
• Preparing meaningful, impactful agendas.
• Turning “attendees” into motivated “participators.”
• Becoming a steward of others’ time. 

Times of significant stress and crisis are times when our leadership behaviors and actions may not always align with our intentions or our priorities. Leaders often know what to do, but act in ways that are very different. Learn how to manage the impact of personal tendencies and derailers on leadership brand and behaviors in times of stress and crisis.

Helps leaders: 

• Understand the importance of their leadership brand and behaviors in times of crisis.
• Identify the personal tendencies and derailing tendencies that might influence their behavior under pressure.
• Develop a plan to manage the impact of personal tendencies and fulfill their leadership brand.

In Leading Self, learners gain insight about their personal values, their emotions and how they manage them, and the natural talents they bring to the workplace. Through self-insight tools, engaging activities, and compelling video, learners expand their understanding of themselves so they can heighten their impact at work.

Helps individuals:

• Increase internal self-awareness by identifying values, emotions, and talents.
• Define personal code of values.
• Identify emotional triggers and learn tactics to manage response.
• Identify leadership talents to leverage for greater positive impact.

All teams face challenges. Whether an agile leader, project leader, formal or informal leader - the team leader’s role is to identify them and guide the team in addressing them. In this course, learners become aware of teams’ practical and personal needs and are introduced to six factors by which they can evaluate a team’s level of performance. Learners experience an immersive, interactive exercise in which they diagnose problems of several teams in a fictitious organization and recommend steps the teams’ leaders can take to move toward optimal team performance. Learners apply this new understanding to their workplace teams and leave the session with a plan for moving forward toward optimal team performance.

Helps individuals:

• Identify team issues that have an adverse impact on productivity.
• Diagnose team dynamics and the effect on team and business results.
• Recognize their role in building and sustaining a high-performing team culture.
• Apply best practices to help teams overcome challenges.
• Leverage what they learn for use with their own team.

In today’s global economy, virtual meetings are more frequent than ever. Whether you need to find an alternative for a face-to-face meeting or you must regularly communicate with distributed or remote employees, leading your meetings effectively – using process and personal techniques – is critical for team collaboration and decision making. 

Helps individuals:

• Learn more about virtual meeting pitfalls. 
• Evaluate individual process and personal orientations.  
• Discover methods for improving meeting productivity and audience engagement.

This online course teaches leaders how to overcome the challenges of time and distance to work as a cohesive team focused on achieving results.

Helps leaders:

• Build community among virtual team members.
• Communicate more effectively in a virtual environment.
• Enhance trust among members separated by time and/or distance.
• Focus their team by keeping team members and their goals visible and in sight.

In this course, mid- to senior level leaders develop a long-term strategy for leading in a global environment.

Helps leaders:

• Recognize the impact of globalization on their business.
• Understand the mind-set, knowledge, and skills required to execute their global leadership responsibilities.
• Enhance their effectiveness to lead in a global environment.
• Commit to actions they will take to positively impact the business.

You're reluctant to delegate; in fact, you sometimes avoid it altogether. Why? Perhaps you don't want to let go of tasks and activities you enjoy. Maybe it's the idea of investing time and effort in getting people up to speed. Or maybe you think it'll be less stress and rework if you do it yourself. Whatever your reason for not delegating, you'll miss opportunities to take on new, more challenging responsibilities that can grow your skills and boost job satisfaction. However, if you know how to allocate the right work to the right people, you, your team, and the organization will experience the benefits.

Helps leaders:

• Overcome hesitation to delegate by exploring the benefits of letting go.
• Determine the best way to allocate work to promote growth and achieve key business results.
• Give people more responsibility for and more authority over tasks they've delegated.

Do you value the unique qualities you and your coworkers bring to the workplace? Did you know that people expressing their differences actually enhances an organization's growth? Valuing differences is the right thing to do from both an interpersonal and a business perspective. By leveraging diverse styles, abilities, and motivations (SAMs), you encourage creative solutions and unique approaches that enable your organization to achieve improved results.

Helps individuals:

• Determine their own styles, abilities, and motivations.
• Work more collaboratively and productively with people who have a variety of styles, abilities, and motivations.
• Use Key Principles to support differences and encourage others to share their unique contributions.

Making decisions in today's fast-flowing business environment is a lot like navigating white water in a kayak. Not only is the path choppy and fraught with unseen hazards and poor sight lines, but there is little time to ponder an opportunity when it presents itself. Decisions must be made quickly, or those opportunities are gone—swept away in the relentless undertow that is today's business world. You don't have the luxury of waiting for all the information to come in or of trying to make the perfect decision.

Helps leaders:

• Make quality decisions even when pressed for time.
• Cut through ambiguity, complexity, and unnecessary information to identify the best decision in the time available.
• Rely on experience, good judgment, and leadership intuition.
• Take what's given and narrow their options to a manageable few.
• Make a speedy decision and adjust-or even reverse-it later, if necessary.

In this course designed for mid- to senior leaders, leaders learn the ability to drive change by understanding the importance of stakeholders, multiple viewpoints, communication, and buy-in.

Helps leaders:

• Develop their ability to drive change by understanding the importance of involving stakeholders, dealing with resistance, communicating, and building buy-in.
• Improve their understanding and ability to leverage insights from the Change Style Indicator^® (CSI).
• Enhance their skills in leading and motivating others through organizational change initiatives.

Using an engaging simulation, this course teaches a logical decision-making process that addresses the critical elements that result in high-quality business decisions. Participants will develop the skills and confidence to generate options and compare them to important decision criteria, and to select the best course of action. Utilizing this process will also help individuals avoid the pitfalls that often undermine high-quality decision making.

Helps individuals:

• Make business decisions more effectively and confidently.
• Avoid obstacles to objective analysis and judgments.
• Involve the right people at the right time in the decision-making process.
• Gain the help and support needed to make high-quality decisions and to implement them.

In this course, mid to senior level leaders learn a decision-making discipline that will help them manage various dynamics and overcome the forces both within themselves and across their organization that can compromise their decision-making ability.

Helps leaders:

• Recognize the presence of complex dynamics that can negatively impact the ability to make objective, informed business decisions.
• Identify specific decision-making biases to which the organization and leaders are most susceptible.
• Apply a decision-making discipline to manage these biases and other decision dynamics.
• Apply this same discipline to diagnose past decisions and coach others in making decisions.

In this course, mid- to senior level leaders assess their own emotional intelligence (EQ) and learn to prevent the emotional hijacking that can interfere with personal intentions and organizational outcomes.

Helps leaders:

• Realize how EQ affects business results.
• Understand how emotional hijacking interferes with values and outcomes.
• Recognize the five elements of EQ and learn skills to strengthen each one.
• Analyze their own EQ and the impact of their skill level on those around them.
• Identify their emotional triggers and apply techniques so they can respond effectively rather than react inappropriately.

Interactions have a significant impact on the performance and productivity of people and organizations. To make this impact a positive one, executives can consistently apply essential interaction skills, leverage the strengths of their leadership interaction style, and employ an emotional intelligence approach to improve the quality of each interaction, meeting, and discussion they conduct.

Helps senior leaders:

• Recognize the relationship between the quality of interactions and the job satisfaction, productivity, and well-being of leaders and teams. 
• Review seven interaction mistakes to avoid that commonly occur at the executive level. 
• Examine how to balance personal and practical needs despite a tendency to focus on the practical. 
• Review essential interaction skills that provide a framework for effective discussions. 
• Explore the role emotional intelligence plays in understanding their approach to an interaction. 
• Identify their dominant leadership interaction style and how to leverage the strengths and manage the potential risks of that style.

This course focuses on how leaders can work with their teams to build the infrastructure that enables maximum performance. Leaders gain experience in diagnosing and applying the five Team Success Factors—Results, Commitment, Communication, Process, and Trust.

Helps leaders:

• Avoid misdiagnosing problems that negatively impact team performance.
• Focus their team’s efforts on high-priority actions that directly support the organization’s goals and strategies.
• Enhance the effectiveness of their team by addressing conditions that prevent it from achieving higher levels of performance.
• Foster an environment of collaboration and shared responsibility (with virtual team members, as well), to achieve team goals.

In this course, individual performers learn how to recognize the warning signs of conflict and take action to prevent situations from escalating or to work out the conflict if it does escalate. This allows them to mitigate any negative impact, thus reducing the cost of conflict and improving business results.

Helps individuals:

• Reduce the cost of conflict to them and their organization.
• Minimize or prevent conflict by promoting a culture of trust, mutual respect, and collaboration.
• Make appropriate choices, both in words and actions, to direct situations away from possible damage and toward the discovery of new ideas and solutions.
• Remove roadblocks to proactively taking action when the warning signs of conflict occur.
• Successfully plan and conduct conflict resolution discussions.

This course will help learners increase personal and team value by teaching them to cultivate a network of associates they can contact for information, advice, and coaching. Learners identify what information and expertise they need, identify who can provide it, practice asking for help, and then learn techniques for maintaining strong working relationships.

Helps individuals:

• Apply a process for developing, expanding, and maintaining a business network.
• Recognize the benefits of networking for themselves, their work group, and organization.
• Use a set of flexible interaction skills to secure the help and involvement of network contacts and maintain strong working relationships.
• Identify opportunities to reshape and expand their network to meet new needs.
• Plan their approach to following through on networking opportunities.

Are you ready for a change in your role, but not sure how to know if a particular position will be right for you? Or maybe you know exactly what you want but don’t know how to land the job. This course will help participants think through goals and motivations, and then gather robust examples of strengths based on experience. They’ll also get tips for navigating the interview, from starting the conversation in a positive manner, to providing complete examples of skills and abilities, to closing in a way that conveys interest in the position.

Helps individuals:

• Identify strengths and gaps in knowledge, skills, experience, and motivations.
• Decide whether they’re a good match for a job and an organization and whether the job and organization are right for them.
• Prepare behavioral examples for use in an interview that demonstrate how they’ve effectively used their skills in the past.
• Anticipate and be prepared to face a variety of interview challenges.

Difficult conversations are usually something we want to avoid, mostly because of the negative feelings associated with them. How do you adapt your approach to be more effective and stay focused on a harmonious solution? Within this course, participants will discover techniques and tools to navigate these conversations.

Helps leaders: 

• Identify pitfalls when having difficult conversations.
• Understand your personal approach and how to adapt it to be more effective.

There's one motto almost everyone can relate to: "Make it fast and make it good." In today's competitive marketplace, people are pressed to achieve higher quality, faster results, and lower costs. But balancing these requirements can be difficult. Pay too much attention to quality, and time and costs can swell. Focus too much on speed, and quality might drop. Misdirect your focus, and these demands can start to hamper your productivity in a big way.

Helps individuals:

• Recognize challenges to productivity. 
• Gain tips for prioritizing work, leveraging resources, and staying focused on results. 
• Test their ability to stay productive. ​

During this two-hour session, participants explore women and confidence, quieting the inner critic, and conquering self-doubt to advance their career path. They also immerse themselves in a challenging, real-life scenario in which they identify specific tactics for leaning in to confidence.

This course, designed for managers of leaders participating in an Interaction Management^® program, presents research managers can’t ignore...they can make or break the training initiative. Managers walk away with the skills and resources they need to support their leaders before, during, and after training, so that your organization realizes a return on their investment in leadership development.

Helps managers:

• Support individuals before, during, and after they participate in training events or activities.
• Share accountability with frontline leaders for identifying opportunities to apply newly learned skills in the workplace.
• Champion the value and benefits of using interaction skills in everyday conversations.
• Provide as well as promote the use of specific, balanced, and timely feedback.

This course teaches leaders how to recognize the signs of escalating conflict and take appropriate action to minimize damage. Leaders are introduced to two resolution tactics—coach and mediate—and practice using the Interaction Essentials as they coach then mediate to resolve a conflict.

Helps leaders:

• Reduce the damaging effects of workplace conflict on individuals, groups, and the organization.
• Effectively address workplace conflict and enhance productivity, efficiency, and morale.
• Help others take responsibility for resolving their own conflicts.
• Promote a culture of trust and mutual respect within their work group.

The differences people bring to the workplace can promote remarkable creativity, innovation, and solutions. However, those same differences can lead to a lack of agreement (discord) and, if left unresolved, to a full-blown argument (dispute). You can feel the effects of conflict on yourself as well as those around you—tension, stress, lower morale. If the situation continues, it can damage relationships, productivity, quality, and service.

Helps individuals:

• Use the Interaction Guidelines to uncover the causes of a conflict and develop a solution that everyone can support.
• Use the Key Principles to show that they value the other person's ideas, build trust, and encourage the person toward resolution.

Missed expectations. Unpleasant surprises. Bad performance reviews. Anything can happen when performance goals aren't clear from the start. Avoid disastrous outcomes by applying five criteria when composing goals. These SMART criteria ensure that performance goals are specific, well-written, and effective.

Helps individuals:

• Use a three-part formula to write performance goals that meet the SMART criteria.
• Compose performance goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound.

This course will show the positive effect of shifting the traditional role of planner and evaluator from the leader, to a shared responsibility between leader and employee. This shift builds employee ownership, and allows the leader to focus on coaching and developing throughout the performance cycle. Leaders will experience how to use effective (SMART) goals to help them and their employees track progress and fairly evaluate outcomes. A well-written performance plan is also a powerful tool for leaders to use when determining where to focus their development and coaching discussions with their employees.

Helps leaders:

• Ensure direct reports take a more active role in managing their performance.
• Manage performance on an ongoing basis while working within the organization’s time parameters for goal setting and performance reviews.
• Provide the ongoing coaching and feedback your direct reports need to achieve their goals.
• Increase your direct reports’ confidence and commitment to their own success.

Meetings expert Steven Rogelberg challenges leaders to get creative and try new meeting approaches that are efficient and energizing. Find out how standing meetings and short daily huddles can address team needs.

Helps individuals:

• Be prompted to try new ways of meeting.
• Gain insight into the research about quick meetings.
• Understand how different industries have applied huddles to solve problems.
• Plan a huddle for their team.

Organizations need their new hires to become productive quickly, be fully engaged, and committed to stay with the organization. It all begins by providing new hires with a strong start. This course guides leaders on how to execute an effective onboarding process.

Helps leaders:

• Discover the importance of an effective onboarding process.  
• Learn methods to build trust with new employees.
• Receive tips for setting clear performance expectations.
• Learn how to help new employees build a purposeful and courageous business network.
• Prepare to implement a new hire’s 90-day development plan.

Customer experience is critically important to your organization. Your customers’ perception of how you and your company make them feel affect their behaviors, build memories, and drive their loyalty. In this course, you will discover key steps to ensuring a successful customer experience.

• Identify the personal and practical needs of customers.
• Review three Key Principles to help effectively meet and exceed customers' personal needs.
• Learn a simple process for satisfying customers’ practical needs.

This course shows leaders and individual contributors how to package their ideas in a way that will win over even the most skeptical individuals. Participants learn strategies for effectively capturing people’s attention, transforming their perspectives, and gaining their commitment to taking action.

Helps individuals:

• Capture stakeholders’ attention, gain their commitment, and make things happen.
• Leverage their personal power to gain other’s commitment to take action on promising ideas and alternatives that achieve business results.
• Implement new ideas, improvements, and alternatives that will have the greatest impact on organizational objectives.

This course focuses on six Checkpoints that help partners identify and focus on important issues and promote open communication. In addition, learners are also introduced to the Partnership Scorecard, a tool used to provide feedback and measure progress on key elements of the partnership.

Helps individuals:

• Identify six important areas of agreement—called Partnership Checkpoints—that are critical to a successful partnership.
• Use these Checkpoints as the basis for defining and agreeing on key aspects of what is to be accomplished and how the partners will work together.
• Recognize common areas of misunderstanding in partnerships.
• Create and apply measurement tools and methods to monitor progress and facilitate the exchange of feedback.

People form partnerships because they want to achieve something they can't do alone. Working together to accomplish those results is another matter altogether. Each partner might have a different plan of attack. For a partnership to operate smoothly and achieve its desired outcome, members must understand what a true partnership is and focus on building relationships based on trust and effective communication.

Helps individuals:

• Use collaborative strategies.
• Assess the factors needed for success.
• Communicate with partners.
• Evaluate partnerships.

During this two-hour session, participants explore five kinds of networks they need to nurture to develop their career. More importantly, they learn how to sell their value to potential champions to receive that invitation to connect, and stay connected.

This course equips learners with an important skill set that is essential to providing high-quality customer service. These essential skills will help service providers turn dissatisfied, upset customers into satisfied, loyal ones.

Helps individuals:

• Recognize the business impact of customer retention on their organization.
• Identify the differences between two types of customers—“walkers” and “talkers”—and explain the importance of encouraging walkers to talk about their dissatisfaction.
• Apply a set of skills (HEAT) that will enable them to identify and respond to dissatisfied customers.
• Use a set of best practices for taking the “heat” to turn difficult customer situations into positive interactions.

Learn how to manage customer interactions, raise customer satisfaction, and take the HEAT. 

• Be introduced to a model to help them respond to dissatisfied customers in a way that addresses needs and builds loyalty.
• Learn to diffuse situations so they can address the problem and stop the frustration from gaining momentum.

This course teaches hiring managers and interview team members how to conduct interviews that are objective, fair, and provide the candidate the opportunity to shine. Learners leave the class knowing how to build rapport, manage an interview, and ask pertinent questions to gather data that are predictive of future on-the-job success.

Together, with The Science of Behavioral Interviewing, these courses can help your organization:

• Lower employee turnover by ensuring the candidate’s fit.   
• Reduce bias in the hiring process. 
• Gather relevant data that tells the whole story about candidates. 
• Prevent your interviewers from asking potentially illegal questions.   
• Enhance your company’s brand with an exceptional candidate experience. 

This course teaches interviewers how to make the best hiring decisions by collecting high-quality behavioral data around job-related criteria for success. Interviewers build their skills in using an objective, consistent, and unbiased process for evaluating candidate data, and learn how sharing their data and considering the data that other interviewers have collected leads to hiring the best candidate every time.

Together, with The Art of Behavioral Interviewing, these courses can help your organization:

• Lower employee turnover by ensuring the candidate’s fit.   
• Reduce bias in the hiring process.
• Gather relevant data that tells the whole story about candidates. 
• Prevent your interviewers from asking potentially illegal questions.   
• Enhance your company’s brand with an exceptional candidate experience. 

Guiding team members toward successful performance requires more than just telling people what to do. Effective coaches help people think through possibilities and build buy-in and commitment by asking powerful, provocative questions as well as sharing experiences and insights. Asking questions that support the person’s diagnosis, discovery, and exploration helps bring out the best in people while also building their confidence to handle the situation themselves.

Helps leaders:

• Learn to encourage people to take ownership of and be accountable for their work performance.
• Conduct more compelling, collaborative, and rewarding coaching discussions.
• Build and sustain a coaching culture within their team.

In this course, mid- to senior level leaders learn actions they can take to engage themselves and their team in executing priorities and how to overcome the challenges that interfere with effective strategy realization.

Helps leaders:

• Understand the essential elements required to successfully implement strategy.
• Overcome the challenges that interfere with implementing strategy.
• Keep themselves and their teams engaged in executing strategy.
• Realize how to sustain execution in the long term.

Everyone has unconscious biases—they’re the result of the way the brain handles the millions of bits of information bombarding us daily. But our biases can get in the way of our good intentions, limit our own success, and cause us to deny development opportunities to others. This microcourse helps learners become aware of their own biases in order to make better decisions.

Helps individuals:

• Learn how the brain influences reactions to the world around them.
• Review common biases and gain insights into their own behavior.
• Interrupt their biases to make better decisions.

Valuing Differences gives people effective skills and tools for exploring others’ unique perspectives, understanding and leveraging people’s inherent differences, challenging devaluing behavior, and creating an environment in which people’s differences are respected and utilized.

Helps individuals:

• Contribute their unique styles, abilities, and motivations to ensure the success of their work group and organization.
• Encourage others to contribute their unique styles, abilities, and motivations.
• Work more collaboratively and productively with people who have a variety of styles, abilities, and motivations.
• Leverage the talents of their coworkers to achieve better results.
• Contribute to a climate in which people’s differences are respected and utilized.

This course will enhance team effectiveness and maximize not only performance, but also impact on the organization as a whole. Participants learn the personal, interpersonal, and business advantages of working together as a unit and are introduced to a set of best practices for optimal results.

Helps individuals:

• Realize the personal and organizational benefits of working in teams versus working individually.
• Recognize the stages of development that teams typically experience as they grow and mature.
• Use the Team Success Factors and best practices to help their team move from acceptable to high performance.
• Diagnose what is limiting their team from moving to high performance and identify appropriate techniques to overcome such challenges.
• Develop a strategy to help their team progress from one stage to the next.
• Use a set of tips and techniques for working more effectively with virtual team members.

This course arms a new or prospective leader with the knowledge and skills they need to confront the challenges they face early in their leader career. The course encourages the learner to think about the transitions that newer leaders face and how to handle those challenges. They are introduced to three leadership differentiators that are most important to building a positive reputation as well as contributing to the organization’s success.

Helps leaders:

• Reduce the stress associated with the shift to leading others.
• Act with authenticity to build trust.
• Bring out the best in others to enhance engagement and capacity.
• Look for and accept feedback with grace.