Leadership Development Seminars

Bad leaders ruin good people and organizations. Good leaders help people and organizations thrive. Any leader can transition into good leadership with the right tools and learning. This seminar reviews leadership literature and research on exemplary leadership and provides essential perspectives and practices that optimizes the performance of the collective.

Participants will:

• Review how and why good leadership matters.
• Evaluate different leadership styles and behaviors.
• Develop a language and holistic model for exemplary leadership.

While IQ and technical skills are important to getting hired, it is emotional intelligence (EQ) that determines whether people advance in their careers. It is not just a skill you have or you don’t, it can be learned and improved. This seminar explores the features of emotional intelligence and other big factors such as grit, growth mindset, and conscientiousness that better equip people to thrive and build productive work environments.

Participants will:

• Identify and evaluate the non-cognitive factors that lead to success.
• Cultivate necessary mindsets, dispositions, and habits for personal and professional success.
• Build emotionally safe and socially productive work cultures.
• Discover how emotional development can contribute to career advances.

Research has consistently demonstrated that approximately one-third of the workforce is fully engaged in their respective jobs and that only 20% of the personnel go above and beyond their role and duties consistently. This seminar explores how 50% to 70% of the variability in employee engagement is attributed to leadership at the executive and unit levels and provides principles and practices that empower colleagues to be more innovative, productive, and fulfilled in their work.

Participants will:

• Review when and why colleagues are either engaged or disengaged at work.
• Evaluate five key drivers of employee engagement.
• Develop practices for creating favorable work conditions that encourage personnel to excel.

Common sense is not that common because groups perceive, think, and value similar things differently. Social psychologists have discovered that most people practice naïve realism and often make misleading comparisons between others and themselves, often to the detriment of their individual and collective success. This seminar equips participants with principles from social psychology to be organizational mentalists whose common sense on common sense makes them the wisest people in the room.

Participants will:

• Consider the nature of common sense and why it is not so common.
• Evaluate the nature of people and groups to better “read the room.”
• Identify and evaluate principles to nudge the collective to think and act wisely.
• Discover how applications of social psychology lead to wisdom.

Leaders, managers, and administrators have similar goals and responsibilities, yet their roles vary in the way they work with and serve the collective. This seminar explores basic orientations and practices of each approach and synthesizes them into a holistic model that deals with change and creates cultures of high expectations (leadership), maintains order and routines (management) and judiciously governs among the competing values and interest groups of any collective, but especially those in the public sector (administration). This seminar equips participants with perspectives and skills to be effective leaders, managers, and administrators, honoring the tradition and roles of each function.

Participants will:

• Evaluate the origins and differences among leading, managing, and administrating and why they matter.
• Identify key principles for balancing the competing expectations and roles associated with leading dynamic collectives.
• Identify strategies and tactics to create and sustain optimal organizational performance.

Leadership is difficult and seemingly overwhelming as leaders are called to operate in complex and, at times, chaotic environments. According to a Global Chief Executive Officer Study conducted by IBM (2010), “Today’s complexity is only expected to rise, and more than half of the CEOs doubt their ability to manage it” (p. 8). This seminar equips leaders with simple principles from complexity science to develop a lens for understanding systems thinking, leading and managing complex environments, and bringing about systemic change.

Participants will:

• Develop a language and framework to optimize organizational performance consistent with core values.
• Evaluate the hidden architecture that governs all organizational systems.
• Identify principles to leverage “chaos” to manage systemic change.

The playwright Philip Massinger stated that, “He that would govern others must first master himself.” Self-awareness is a pivotal starting point for the ongoing development of effective and sustainable management practices. Nonetheless, the drivers of core behavior may lie beneath the surface of conscious thought, thereby restricting opportunities for reflection and improvement. In part I of this seminar, participants review and discuss aspects of self-awareness that can contribute to personal growth.

Participants will:

• Evaluate the value of self-awareness for oneself and for one’s team.
• Relate self-awareness to one’s core behaviors.
• Identify strategies for personal and professional growth inself-awareness.

Managers, like all people, have blind spots regarding their behaviors and impact on others and the organization. Successful leaders seek feedback from colleagues in order to gain a comprehensive view of their managerial style. Additional benefits include the identification of strengths, weaknesses, and insight related to opportunities in personal growth. In part II of this seminar, participants will analyze and discuss elements of a research-based assessment to highlight opportunities for future development.

Participants will:

• Discuss the core elements of a research-based assessment.
• Explore opportunities to apply self-awareness to leadership growth.
• Develop sustainable managerial practices.

People are dependent on others within and across organizations to accomplish goals. This seminar provides research-informed principle for leaders to cultivate genuine broad bases of support, goodwill, legitimacy, mutual respect, trust, and cooperation. It will also help leaders to position themselves, others, and their organizations to excel above and beyond, contrasting settings where political and social capital are otherwise limited or lacking. This seminar equips leaders to develop authentic communities of trust and cooperation.

Participants will:

• Review the nature and value of political and social capital.
• Evaluate methods for cultivating political and social capital.
• Develop practices for creating high trust and cooperation communities that enhance organizational success and service.

Public discourse has historically been cantankerous and divisive at times, but it seems that the public square has become consistently more vitriolic and alienating, to the point where essential conversations are often thwarted and thoughtful people are maligned. This seminar explores reasons for public incivility, its prevalence, and principles for restoring civility to our private and public spheres of influence.

Participants will:

• Review the history of and reasons for public incivility.
• Explore mindsets and models to engage others in thoughtful and respectful high-stakes conversations.
• Develop a winsome posture for listening, deescalating tensions, and advancing important agendas.

Humor teaches us not to take ourselves, others, or life too seriously. Within or without pandemic times, humor is a vital leadership skill that aids in putting employees at ease, promoting a positive work culture, and enhancing the leader’s trust and likeability. This seminar explores the motivational, cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral impacts of humor in the workplace and its power to put everything into perspective.

Participants will:

• Evaluate the different types and corresponding values of humor in the workplace.
• Judiciously leverage humor in the workplace.
• Have fun.