Leadership Courses

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.

Competencies developed:

• Coaching
• Influencing

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.

Competencies developed:

• Emotional Intelligence Essentials

Business savvy leaders use economic, financial, market, and industry insights to improve their own, their team’s, and their organization’s results. But few people are born with this ability. It’s the result of experience and knowledge—and you can build both.

Helps leaders:

• Recognize the importance of being business savvy.
• Understand basic business functions.
• Practice using a tool to identify, organize, and leverage business-related data.
• Get tips for building business savvy.

Competencies developed:

• Business Acumen

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building Customer Relationships
• Customer Focus

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building Partnerships
• Decision Making
• Driving Innovation

Strong business partnerships – both inside and outside the organization – help leaders to forge alliances. They help leaders accomplish goals that they couldn’t accomplish alone. This course guides leaders on how to identify, build, maintain, and evaluate partnerships.

Helps leaders:

• Discover what information is needed from a partner and who can provide it.
• Learn methods to initiate and build partnerships.
• Receive tips on how to ask for help.
• Learn how to provide partners with ongoing, mutual support.
• Get advice on how to monitor and evaluate partnerships over time.

Competencies developed:

• Building Networks
• Building Partnerships

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building Partnerships
• Earning Trust
• Selecting Talent

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building Networks
• Building Partnerships

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building Relationships

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building Strategic Work Relationships

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. 

Competencies developed:

• Creating a Culture of Trust
• Creating an Inclusive Environment

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.

Competencies developed:

• Coaching
• Coaching & Developing Others

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building Partnerships
• Communication
• Emotional Intelligence Essentials
• Managing Relationships

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.).

Competencies developed:

• Building Partnerships
• Communication
• Emotional Intelligence Essentials
• Managing Relationships

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.

Competencies developed:

• Coaching
• Coaching & Developing Others

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.

Competencies developed:

• Decision Making

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building Talent
• Continuous Learning
• Leveraging Feedback
• Personal Growth Orientation

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.

Competencies developed:

• Coaching

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.

Competencies developed:

• Positive Approach
• Stress Tolerance

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.  

Competencies developed:

• Building Partnerships
• Earning Trust

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.

Competencies developed:

• Delegation & Empowerment

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.

Competencies developed:

• Facilitating Change
• Positive Approach

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.

Competencies developed:

• Coaching

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 and most authentic way to provide positive feedback.

Competencies developed:

• Coaching

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.

Competencies developed:

• Coaching
• Courage
• Emotional Intelligence Essentials

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.

Competencies developed:

• Influencing

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building Partnerships
• Communication
• Emotional Intelligence Essentials
• Managing Relationships

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building Self-Insight
• Executive Presence

Imagine leading team members whom you’ve never or rarely met in person and who might never have met one another. Do they feel isolated, confused, or insecure? Do you? Even with the challenges of working remotely, you can enable your team to achieve optimal performance.

Helps leaders:

• Recognize challenges of leading virtual teams.
• Learn about six factors that indicate a team’s performance level.
• Observe signs that a factor needs to be strengthened.
• Plan to strengthen a factor on their virtual team.

Competencies developed:

• Guiding Team Success 
• Creating a Culture of Trust 

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.

Competencies developed:

• Communication
• Driving for Results
• Planning and Organizing

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building a Successful Team

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.

Competencies developed:

• Delegation & Empowerment
• Sharing Responsibility

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.

Competencies developed:

• Creating a Culture of Trust
• Creating an Inclusive Environment

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.

Competencies developed:

• Decision Making

There are currently five generations in the workplace—the most ever. Longevity trends indicate this will remain the case, with half of children under age 13 predicted to live to 104. Experts agree that people will both need and want to work longer than the traditional retirement age. How do you ensure everyone’s needs are met, regardless of age?

Helps leaders:

• Challenge common assumptions about how people are based on their generation.
• Highlight real, data-based obstacles that affect multigenerational teams.
• Provide actionable tips/best practices for managing an age diverse team.

Competencies developed:

• Creating an Inclusive Environment

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.

Competencies developed:

• Compelling Communication
• Communication

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.

Competencies developed:

• Continuous Learning

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.

Competencies developed:

• Coaching
• Coaching & Developing Others
• Courage
• Initiating Action

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. ​

Competencies developed:

• Planning and Organizing

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.

Competencies developed:

• Emotional Intelligence Essentials
• Resolving Conflict

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.

Competencies developed:

• Aligning Performance for Success
• Influencing

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.

Competencies developed:

• Communication
• Driving for Results
• Planning and Organizing

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.

Competencies developed:

• Coaching
• Coaching & Developing Others
• Initiating Action 

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.

Competencies developed:

• Building Customer Relationships
• Customer Focus

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.

Competencies developed:

• Coaching

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.

Competencies developed:

• Creating a Culture of Trust
• Creating an Inclusive Environment