Course catalogue

Written communications are a necessary part of a manager’s daily work. Whether responding to emails, composing performance reviews for team members, editing an industry report, or crafting a letter to a client, you probably spend a lot of time on writing. For some people, this work comes naturally, but for others, it can be a chore. Becoming a strong writer takes time and practice. But the benefits are worth the effort. As you improve, you’ll be able to structure and “sell” your ideas more easily and your messages will be better received. Let’s look at some fundamental guidelines you can use to make your writing more powerful and effective.

• Learn the importance of thinking before writing   

• Write conversationally     

• Use active voice in your sentences

Coaching is a process that can be customized to meet the needs of the trainee. This process seeks to raise the workforce awareness toward their current style of work and behavior. It helps them strengthen their uniqueness optimally. It provides with different tools and strategies that help them achieve their individual goals faster. Coaching is the process that guides an individual to maximize the productivity seamlessly so as to achieve more in less. This helps them reach their personal and professional goals at the earliest.

• Recall the ""What, Why, Where, and How"" of an effective coaching 

• Describe the three-step approach to better coaching

All teams need coaches. That’s how they get better. Your role as the leader of a high-performing team is to provide the training, resources, coaching, and support they need—as individuals and as a team—so that they can grow in their abilities, and perform as efficiently and dynamically as possible. Because of today’s constantly evolving business environment, every individual, regardless of position or experience, needs ongoing training and coaching. Knowing which tools, training opportunities, and coaching methods work for each individual is critical. Research by Accenture found that 31% of employees left their jobs because they don’t like their boss; another 31% cited lack of empowerment as their reason for leaving. This lesson will help you build robust coaching connections and a toolkit that will help you develop your team’s skills, coach them to personal and professional success, and build a culture of growth and continuous improvement.

• Define the training needs for your team  

• Provide coaching to your team   

• Create growth opportunities for your team

As it’s important for leaders to give constructive feedback, in order to help their employees grow, develop their skills, confidence etc.. which results in organizational growth. Similarly, It’s important for an individual to ask for feedback instead of waiting to receive it. Start thinking of feedback as the fuel for your professional growth. In fact, set a goal to solicit feedback regularly instead of waiting for it to come to you. When you begin to see the value in regular feedback, your manager will find it easier to deliver, and—using these strategies—you’ll find it easier to receive, assess, and apply. Let’s take a look at how you can ensure that your future performance conversations are positive and productive.

• Examine the necessity to change your perspective towards feedback

• Identify the behaviors of receiving feedback

• Assess the ways of responding to feedback

Performance management ensures that the day-to-day activities are focused towards achieving organizational goals. In this lesson, you will learn about setting SMART goals by implementing the SMART model. Whether you are using the SMART model to define the specifics of a small business goal or to manage an enterprise-wide project, you will find that this system lends clarity, focus, and flexibility to the art of goal setting.

• Explain SMART goals

• Identify SMART goal benefits and examples

Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led.

-Warren G. Bennis 

Leaders, who spend more time managing their employees than leading them are less likely to achieve the top performance they seek because they focus on controlling employees and their tasks to accomplish a goal.

• Define leadership and management 

• Identify the hallmarks of action-based leadership 

• Differentiate between supervisory and leadership tasks 

• Describe an effective team leader

You’ve leveraged your education, professional experience, hard work, and business abilities to get to this point in your career. Now you’re responsible for leading a team in achieving your firm’s target goals and objectives. Did you know that there’s another skill that will be critical to your continued success and advancement? It’s called Emotional Intelligence (EQ), and it’s a big business topic these days.

• State the emotional intelligence model 

• List the benefits of emotional intelligence

In this lesson, we will study the first two steps of Goleman’s four components of emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and self-management. As per Goleman, self-awareness is the building block of all other competencies. Without recognizing what you are feeling, you cannot proceed to other competencies. It helps you to handle your emotions in order to avoid its interference in work and use these emotions to facilitate and recover from emotional distress. Self-management flows from self-awareness. It helps to understand situations from others’ perspective and to cultivate relationships.

• Manage yourself through self-awareness 

• Establish self-control through self-management

In this lesson, we will study social awareness and relationship management that fall under the heading of “Social Competence” in Bradberry and Greaves’ model of emotional intelligence. Social awareness is the ability to use empathy and active listening to understand others better. Leaders with strong social awareness are not only able to read their own emotions precisely but are also able to interpret others emotions accurately. Relationship management is using all of your EQ skills to establish solid relationships and manage your interactions with others.

• Define social awareness  

• Build relationships with employees to enhance business outcomes

As with many business practices, hiring techniques have been affected dramatically by the Internet. “Surprise” interview questions are now available on hiring websites, such as Glassdoor.com and Indeed.com. Candidates can practice their responses via video coaching until they are tweaked to perfection. And in the current job environment, the competition for great employees is strong. You have to move quickly and analyze swiftly to capture the best candidates for your organization.       

This video discusses some pre-interview, interview, and post-interview guidelines that will help you design and develop a winning hiring process. We begin with what to do before you’ve even met your ideal candidate and progress all the way to planning for their successful post-hire on-boarding and retention. 

• List the pre-interview tasks   

• Prepare for the interview  

• Identify the post-interview tasks

The impact of social media has dramatically changed the recruiting strategies. Evaluating and screening candidates for job openings also significantly changed. Today’s organizational hiring processes consist of software programs, technology, and behavioral science. Once applicants have responded to your company’s recruiting efforts via LinkedIn, corporate website, or other social platforms, what are the most efficient and cost-effective ways that hiring managers can decide to pursue suitable candidates? The answer lies in a variety of methods from old-fashioned reference checking, software programs that manage hiring efforts, pre-employment assessments, and so on. Let’s look at some of the ways you can use these tools to streamline your efforts and quickly identify the most qualified candidates for your organization.

• Review and shortlist candidates resume and use software applications to screen them   

• Identify the need to check for reference and social media presence of candidates    

• Conduct remote interviews for the first round of scanning   

• Use assessments to gauge the candidates

Your talent is your most important resource. Deploying it to implement different methods of coaching will not only help you to strengthen your team’s abilities, but also your own leadership skills. No matter where you are, no matter how many people you put together on a team, you will always experience the same phenomenon. Some team members will perform above expectations while others will perform at an average or standard level, and some will perform at substandard levels. Coaching is a performance process with lots of actions and steps. Let’s take a look at some of the ways to coach your team and how you can make the most of these opportunities.

• Identify how to coach the low performing employees 

• Implement the techniques to coach the average performing employees 

• Coach the high performing employees 

• Meet the challenges of coaching remote employees

Very few leaders are born with the qualities required to inspire and lead others. Most leaders are built—through personal effort, lots of introspection, and assistance from mentors and other leaders. In this course, you’ll learn the six characteristics that set effective leaders apart. You’ll discover the differences between managing and leading, and when to do each. And you’ll find out how to create a plan that will help you move from simply managing results to setting vision and leading others.

• Differentiate between managing and leading  

• Create leadership development action plan

In today’s competitive world, businesses move faster and faster to stay ahead of the competition, develop new offerings, and keep up with client demands, employees need constant feedback, support, and direction in order to achieve those objectives. The era of the annual performance review is long gone, with managers now meeting with team members frequently to set goals, coach, provide training, and review performance. Performance dashboards that automate company-wide goals, metrics, customer feedback, and other performance-related data keep leaders and team members aware of their progress. Instead of looking backward, the new model for managing and motivating employee performance is fast-paced and feedback focused.

• State the best practices to improve the performance management process 

• Explain the review model

Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.

-JimRohn, an American entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker 

Meetings are necessary, but they become intolerable when they drag on and on, start late, or the discussion goes off the track. It’s annoying when you feel that your time has been hijacked—especially when other projects and responsibilities are in the pipeline. Poor time management is often the cause of this distress. Meetings would be more productive—and less irritating—if all activities started on time, ended on time, and stayed on the topic. As a leader, it is your responsibility to ensure that meetings are of benefit to the participants and satisfy the meeting objectives. Running a successful meeting can be boiled down to three things: be purposeful, be engaged, and be respectful of the attendees’ time.

• Explain the importance of adhering to meeting time 

• Interpret the impact of delaying a meeting 

• Respect others’ time

Accountability is an individual’s acceptance of responsibility for the outcome of a job, project, or program. There are five steps that you can use to engineer accountability into both, your work processes and your employees to achieve performance goals.

• Define accountability 

• Describe the five steps to accountability 

• Apply the five steps of accountability

It is a law of nature, if you work with people, you’re going to have conflict. When people with different viewpoints, backgrounds, personalities, work ethics, and industry experience come together, discord and differences of opinion are inevitable. Wise leaders accept that conflict is a part of work, they anticipate it, and they have a plan to address it. Effective conflict resolution takes practice. You may want to ask an experienced colleague, your HR department, or your manager for suggestions on dealing with this issue. Just realize that while you can’t avoid conflict entirely, you can establish an environment and a process that minimize the damage conflict can cause. 

If managed well, conflict can lead to innovation, stronger teams, and greater personal development—for you and your employees. 

• Become aware of workplace conflicts 

• Set a protocol to handle conflicts

Learning how to manage conflict successfully is a critical business skill that’s worth the time and effort to practice. Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Mark Gouston’s Just Listen are two resources among many that can help you strengthen your conflict management aptitude. Relationships can be messy, but with the right skills, attitude, and mindset, you will be able to address issues calmly, ensure that your customer feels heard and valued, and arrive at a solution that satisfies you both.

• Use the right tools to find a resolution of conflict

• Demonstrate the right attitude and behavior required for conflict resolution

• Determine the right solution to solve the problem

Many managers are promoted to leadership positions by virtue of their technical skills or subject-matter knowledge. Their proficiency and expertise set them apart from other candidates. These abilities are important, but they are just one aspect of being an effective leader. Leadership expert, Stephen Covey, says that due to the speed and constant change that define our world today, leaders need to be able to face new and different problems as they arise, make strategic decisions quickly, and guide their organizations with competence and character. He has identified four roles a leader must master in order to succeed in this ever-changing environment.

• Inspire trust among your team members

• Create a vision for your team

• Execute strategy to reach your goals

• Recognize your coaching potential

"As a leader of a small or big team, you all are responsible for the budget allocated to your projects, which in turn is nothing but finance. Thus, knowingly or unknowingly you are involved in financial management too. You must evaluate the investment decisions, such as return on investment analysis after you deliver the product or service that you are responsible for. As a nonfinancial manager, you cannot avoid financial information, profitability statements, rates of return, budgets, variances, asset management, and project analysis.        

In this lesson, you will get an overview of financial management, roles within the financial department, and the four financial objectives of any organization.

• Overview financial management     

• Identify roles within the finance department      

• List the four financial objectives