Focus

Corporate leadership training should begin with clearly stated business objectives and desired outcomes. Many clients match The Leaders Course^® with targeted business purposes as these:

1. Produce measurable gains in the productivity of an organization's workers through higher morale, better working relationships, teamwork or more efficient meetings.
2. Solve a thorny company problem, like overtime cost, or supply chain management.
3. Implement an important company initiative, such as greater coordination between different disciplines, more innovation, or retention.
4. Introduce a new strategic direction, such as moving the organization into offering a new service, becoming more cost conscious, or customer focused.
5. Help the organization be first or faster to market with new products.
6. Strengthen communications between different departments, teams, and new groups formed through acquisition and business alliances.
7. Expanding job responsibilities, as helping middle mangers assist with company's sales and marketing efforts.
8. Improve overall customer satisfaction or take on a troubling aspect of client relationship management.
9. Increase sales or revenue while holding the line on costs and overhead.
10. Attract talent to the company or profession, through investment in continuing education and professional self- development programs.

Process

When training is clearly tied to an organization's mission and expected business outcome, its key personnel are more likely to support the program. And that support will be sustained over a longer period of time. Class participation is enhanced because class members can identify with the business purpose.

Our sessions are designed to:

• Spend time planning in detail what they need to do differently on returning to their jobs.
• Create measurements that will be used when participants return to work.
• Tailor skill-building activities targeted specifically to an individual's needs, based on a leadership style assessment.
• Provide engaging and realistic simulations that let participants experience the consequences of decisions in compressed time.
• Hold participants accountable for current examples of applying the classroom materials between sessions.
• Create action-learning projects in which participants tackle real and important issues the organization faces and in which they take some role in implementing a detailed plan of action. (It is not uncommon to see teams of managers solving problems that in times past would've been given to outside consultants.)

Many leadership development programs encourage participants to leave with a defined series of actions to undertake. The Leaders Course^® is different. While it's valuable to have a list of to-do's, we believe people gain greater competencies from participating in a weekly program of highly involved group activities, receiving personal feedback from a veteran instructor, and being held accountable for reporting on desired outcomes. This is not a slide driven class where participants sit and take notes. We deliver behavior-based training, which supports targeted business purposes.

Time

The 16 hours of classroom training are intentionally scheduled over a period of weeks to allow spaced repetition, outside applications, and measurement. Employers will often schedule sessions to meet for 4 hours on a weekly or every two weeks basis. Multiple classes on location afford participants a choice of morning, early afternoon or late afternoon classes, and an opportunity to make-up any missed sessions. By giving participants the chance to practice the material in and out of the classroom -- self-awareness and life-long skills are more likely to happen.

30-90 day follow-up reviews are recommended to remind participants that leadership development is more than an event. It's a process that lasts an entire career.