Education & Training

Leader / Management Development Courses

Available Courses

Leadership Education for Senior Management

Keeping Up with Your Managers
Senior Management must have an understanding and appreciation of tools, techniques, and templates that their Leaders/Supervisors have learned in corporate coursework. To that end, we have prepared a quick immersion into the massive content that Leaders / Supervisors have gathered through their C4PD Leadership and / or Supervisor Professional Certificate courses. Continuity between these newly trained Leaders / Supervisors and their Senior Management relative to the understanding of, and support for, the knowledge gained in these programs, provides an end result where the information gained in these courses will most likely be applied on behalf of the organization (which is the whole purpose of attending the programs). Leadership Education for Senior Management is specifically designed to facilitate maximizing organizational value from previous C4PD Leadership / Supervisor Certificate courses within their organization with a focus on:

Plans and decisions—root needs for overall supervisory effectiveness.
Personality—harnessing personality differences for successful outcomes.
Coaching—keeping your work group moving toward its objectives.
Motivation—creating an environment where people want to be productive.
Teaming—creating a synergistic work environment.
Communication—sharing the right information—the right way, the right time, the right audience.
Shared language—assuring that the concepts and terms learned by your Leaders / Supervisors in C4PD courses is reinforced with Senior Management to accomplish continuity of messages and overall effectiveness.
Employee Relations and Development—attracting and retaining the right employees.
Contemporary Issues in Supervision—issues confronting today’s supervisors.
Other relevant topics as required.

Executive Coaching

Coaching for the Coach
Especially experienced Leaders who have achieved a senior level position within their organizations, it can be “lonely at the top”. You are expected to have, if not all of the answers, the bulk of them—immediately and correctly. You have few, if anyone, to share your frustrations with, safely voice concerns about your own skills and stamina, bounce ideas off regarding huge up-coming opportunities. You are “out of balance” spending too much time actually or, at least, mentally and emotionally, in your professional life. Executive Coaching provides both support and challenge to assist you in better understanding your personal strengths as well as areas for improvement. Through dialogue and appropriate assessment of personal values and purpose, C4PD guides you in creating and implementing your personal development plan which, then, allows you to balance your personal and professional lives fulfilling both—leading to enhancement in overall organizational performance and personal satisfaction. C4PD has designed the program to be conducted in periodic work sessions based on the focus at that time, associated activities and individual needs. You are too important to your family and to your organization to miss the opportunity for assuring work-life balance through C4PD’s Executive Coaching.

Delegation – Empowerment

Empower—Take the Risk
Empowerment is risky. Today’s workplace requires employees who can make decisions; invent solutions to problems; take initiative and be accountable for results; nuture and support employees who feel responsible not just for doing their jobs, but also for making the whole organization better. This course will create practical application around:

Identifying and implementing the key qualities of empowered workplaces.
Making employees active problem-solvers through stewardship delegation and other resources.
Understanding the difference between “delegation” and “dumping” and the benefits of and barriers to successful delegation.
Assuring employees know how to make a difference.
Being willingly responsible and accountable for their results.
Being a part of the team and have control over how they do their jobs.
Using their full talents and abilities by taking initiative.

Decision Making

Practical Application of the Decision-Making Process
Technology will never replace the Leader’s / Supervisor’s need to make decisions. Decision making involves uncertainty, risk-taking and intuition. Not every situation requires an equal depth of study and analysis, however, every problem has the same baseline considerations. In this course, participants will proceed through a linear step-by-step decision making process. They will discover an efficient and effective approach that will take them from true problem identification to decision effectiveness evaluation. This approach provides consistency in dealing with problems / decisions of all areas and magnitude.

Change Management

Personalizing the Change Management Model
Change at its basic level is simply an event that alters patterns that once were deemed acceptable. Change Management is the discipline of planning, organizing and controlling organizational change to better solve present and future problems. This course will help participants:

Understand the nature of change.
Discuss the forces that drive change.
Learn why we resist change and how to address the resistance.
Discuss the change process and how to manage through it.
Share the role of stress in change.
Discuss effective change communication.

Personalizing the change management model so that everyone can progress through it successfully is a key leadership function.

Coaching

Successful Coaching in a Dynamic Work Environment
One of the most critical roles of every Leader is that of effectively coaching employees to greater performance and satisfaction—personally and professionally. Too often, opportunities are missed by leaders to share performance-improvement opportunities with employees. This often happens because we do not have a simple, structured approach to coaching our employees. The net results are lower levels of productivity coupled with a reduction in overall employee satisfaction. This program provides Leaders / Managers / Supervisors the tools to strengthen overall coaching abilities. In this course participants will:

Understand the consequences of timely, focused and respectful coaching (or not coaching) on the organization and the employee.
Understand the functional implications between being “boss” and being “coach”.
Learn why and how to successfully use “momentary” coaching.
Discover when coaching is and is not the appropriate course of action.
Recognize why coaching is not just a “negative” thing.
Learn the traits of successful coaches.
Discuss obstacles to effective coaching and strategies to manage them.
Learn techniques for building trust between coach and the coached.
Implement a simple and effective coaching process for having those “hard / crucial conversations” with added confidence and more positive results.
Identify steps to take beyond the course to enhance ongoing coaching skills successfully using program-provided coaching skills and templates.

Motivation

Creating an Environment Where People Want and Can Be Productive
Creating an environment where people want to be productive requires understanding the key elements of motivation, identifying what can be done to create a motivating environment and creating the circumstances that allow motivation to consistently occur. Role-modeling motivation is critical for leadership in order to expect staff to “feel” and act on it. While it is important to have some sense of the theory behind successful motivation, this course will boil down years of research to practical application—how to:

“Get to know” your employees—understand their personalities and their needs.
Create a reward system—make sure your employees feel that the outcome they have to achieve is doable and that the reward has real value to them.
Create a sense of fairness and honesty in the workplace.
Communicate clearly about how you expect employees to behave and what you want them to achieve.

Critical / Innovative Thinking

Developing the Characteristics of Excellent Critical Thinking
Some people are natural-born critical thinkers; others can be nurtured to develop the skill. We know that the most successful people are accomplished—aware critical thinkers—which means they have spent some time understanding and enhancing that skill. Unfortunately, most people rarely give the concept of critical thinking, in and of itself, much thought. We don’t appropriately understand its characteristics and application as well as our own personal level of skill and how to improve it. We are, therefore, missing the opportunity to progress—personally and professionally. In this course, you will (re)learn the characteristics of critical thinkers and how to identify the personal factors that affect our ability to think critically. Understanding the organizational impact of decision making, why it is important to use an objective process to make crucial decisions, which tools to use to analyze problems and identify criteria for decisions are all part of an accomplished critical thinker. A standardized problem solving process drives a successful critical thinking outcome. In this program, participants will:

Discover how individual / personal factors affect our critical thinking.
Identify organizational influences and situational circumstances that enhance critical thinking activities overall.
Learn how critical thinking leads to effective problem solving and subsequent organizational gains.
Learn useful techniques and opportunities for effective critical thinking and problem solving day-to-day, on the job.
Discover habits that impede critical thinking and problem solving.
Learn how to apply and improve critical thinking—problem solving going forward.

Stress Management

Clear-headed and Refreshed: Simple Tools to Manage Stress
We all need simple tools to manage our stress. The better we understand the stressors that affect us, the more effective we will be in coping with workplace and general life events in an appropriate and healthy manner. Everyone should periodically examine how they handle stress and where improvement can be made. In this course participants will:

Enhance their understanding of the stressors in our lives and the cumulative impact of stress.
Learn techniques for managing our stress for both long-term and immediate resolution; to improve our overall psychological and physical well-being.
Recognize our physical and mental responses to stress.
Understand practical tools for managing current stressors and averting potential stress.
Discover the relationship of diet, exercise and sleep to stress.
Support one another as we encounter difficulties in the workplace and in our personal lives.
Be able to support others as workplace difficulties are encountered.

Diversity

Valuing our Differences
Promoting and accomplishing a diverse workplace goes beyond simply communicating between groups. Enhancing diversity awareness enables us to work successfully in a cross-categorical-based culture to improve our business as well as personal success. For legal, ethical and moral reasons, we must become more “diverse” in our attitudes and practices. But this course takes us beyond those requirements to embracing a gratifying understanding of diversity and why we must capitalize on it. In this program, participants will:

Recognize the true nature of diversity in today’s workforce.
Discover how we are alike and different and yet are a necessary “fit” for each other.
Understand how diversity brings real value to the organization—individually and collectively.
Learn “who we are. . .” is “where we were when. . .” to understand our current paradigms on diversity.
Discuss the real consequences/impact of when we feel avoided or tolerated vs. when we feel truly appreciated and accepted.
Understand positive steps we can take to “update” or change our paradigms relative to how we view those that are different than us.
Discover how to be a positive “change agent” for ourselves and others around us.

Generational Differences

Working with a Multi-Generational Workforce
For the first time in history, the U.S. workforce is made up solidly of four generations and in some venues, up to five. People are staying in the workforce longer out of financial need as well as personal desire. The nature of work itself continues to evolve and members of the different generations have subtle and not-so-subtle differences in how they go about accomplishing their work-related tasks. By exploring workforce generational diversity, learning how to appreciate one another, capitalizing on what each naturally and comfortably brings to the table, we greatly enhance the likelihood we will enjoy our work life personally and be more productive. In this program participants will:

Recognize the true nature of diversity in today’s workforce.
Identify and understand the four (and in some venues, five) generations or “work cohorts” in the modern workplace.
Appreciate that “who you are, is where you were when”—understand the impact of major events on a given generation’s development.
Review the characteristics of generational members to better appreciate differences.
Understand the workplace contributions and challenges for each work cohort.
Identify techniques and strategies for working successfully with a multi-generational workgroup.

Personalities

Harnessing Personality Differences for Successful Outcomes
Understanding how personalities impact behaviors and knowing how to interact with those different personalities is critical to our daily satisfaction at work and elsewhere in life. Personalities are everywhere and we don’t necessarily “enjoy” all of them. Building effective personality understanding and awareness are the focus of the course. In this course participants will:

Learn why understanding personalities are a precursor to effective performance.
Understand significant insights into your own personality.
Discover how personality traits can be confused for stubbornness, inability to perform, etc.
Discover how various personality types irritate, influence and contribute to overall team performance.
Find out what your personality says about you relative to social interaction, gathering data, and decision making.
Learn how your personality relates to your contributions to the organization, leadership style, preferred work environment, potential pitfalls as well as developmental opportunities.
Grow individually and collectively to improve your business’s working environment.