Leadership Development Curriculum

With a wide range of courses designed for leadership and professional skill development, the content portfolio is designed to enable your organization to provide comprehensive development opportunities to all of its employees, so you can deliver on the organization’s business goals and strategies. All courses also contain participant workbooks and job aids for immediate application in their role.

Build stronger communicators, strategic thinkers, and higher functioning teams across the organization with training that’s focused on the business savvy skills that every leader needs.

Change

Embracing Change
Learn how to implement change in the workplace from the individual contributor role. Participants discover their Change IQ, learn about the phases of change that many people experience, and are introduced to best practices that will enable them to tackle and overcome the new business challenges of today and tomorrow.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success or Communicating with Impact.

Driving Change
For many people, change in the workplace can cause uncertainty and even anxiety. This course gives leaders the skills and techniques they need to encourage their team members to accept and commit to a change more quickly.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success

Influencer – The New Science of Leading Change
Influencer Training teaches a powerful and portable model for executing behavior change within small teams and across entire organizations. Organizations around the world have turned to Influencer Training to improve bottom-line results such as profitability, workplace safety, customer service, compliance, and process improvement.
Prerequisites: None. Course details

Coaching

Advanced Coaching
Participants advance their coaching skills by learning to apply the Interaction Essentials and feedback skills in a different way to coaching opportunities that do not allow for a face-to-face, sit-down discussion in which the leader and direct report can address the issue in one meeting.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success and Coaching for Peak Performance

Coaching for Peak Performance
For better or worse, a team member’s work performance has an impact on other people, their productivity, and even profitability. Learn coaching techniques that not only guide people to enhance or improve their performance but also set them up for success before they even begin.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success

Coaching: Move People Forward
Coaching: Move People Forward shows leaders how to flex their approach to meet the unique needs of the people they’re coaching, right where they are, and guide them in successfully achieving a goal.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success and Coaching for Peak Performance

Collaborating

Networking for Enhanced Collaboration
Increase personal and team value by learning to cultivate a network of associates you can contact for information, advice, and coaching. Learners identify what information and expertise they need, identify who can provide it, practice asking for help, and then learn techniques for maintaining strong working relationships.
Prerequisites: None

Strengthening Your Partnerships
This course focuses on six checkpoints that help partners identify and focus on important issues and promote open communication.
Prerequisites: None

Communication and Interpersonal Skills

Building and Sustaining Trust
Trust is directly linked to employee engagement, retention, productivity, and innovation. Leaders who demonstrate trust and trustworthiness inspire higher levels of performance and commitment to team and organizational success. This course introduces Trust Builders, actions leaders can take to build and sustain trusting relationships that enable people to take risks, identify and solve problems, and collaborate to achieve business results.
Prerequisites: Connect Through Conversations or Communicating for Leadership Success

Communicating for Leadership Success
Organizations need frontline leaders who can do more and be more in order to succeed in demanding, complex work environments. This course teaches leaders the essential interaction skills they need to handle the variety of challenges and opportunities they encounter every day in the workplace and beyond.
Prerequisites: None

Communicating with Impact
This foundational course provides individuals with a powerful set of interaction skills that enables them to communicate more effectively with colleagues and customers and, in the process, build trust, strengthen partnerships, and achieve desired results
Prerequisites: None

Communication: Connect Through Conversations
Much of a leader’s work is accomplished through daily conversations with team members and others. These interactions, especially the tough ones, often involve intensely personal feelings (on both sides) that have an impact on the practical outcome of the conversation and the personal connection between the leader and the person. The leader’s level of emotional intelligence—the ability to manage oneself and one’s relationships—is a critical factor in the success of these tough conversations.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes Are High
Learn key skills for using the power of dialogue to influence behavioral change and achieve alignment with organizational values. Crucial Conversations helps you develop skills for communicating during critical moments when the stakes are high, opinions vary and emotions run strong. By teaching effective communication skills throughout the organization, you’ll see less internal conflict and more effective results.
Prerequisites: None. Course details

Enhancing Your Leadership Style With Everything DiSC®
Everything DiSC Workplace® provides participants with valuable insights that unlock engagement and inspire effective collaboration for building more productive and effective relationships at work. This module will focus on how these individual preferences impact the leader’s and team performance.
Prerequisites: None

High-Impact Feedback & Listening
Feedback promotes collaboration, inspires innovation, and enriches partnerships. Cultivating this kind of environment requires a free exchange of positive and developmental feedback, even when giving it—and receiving it—isn’t easy. Learners are equipped with the skills they need to comfortably and confidently share specific, actionable feedback as well as techniques for listening to, accepting, and acting on feedback from others.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success, or Communicating with Impact, or Connect Through Conversations

Leading Virtually
This online course teaches leaders how to overcome the challenges of time and distance to work as a cohesive team focused on achieving results.
Prerequisites: None

Interaction Essentials for Leaders
In their fast-paced work environment, individuals often fail to see the impact their interactions with others have on their own success, their job satisfaction, or the success of the business. In Interaction Essentials^SM for Leaders, participants learn when and how to use interpersonal skills to prepare for, lead, and participate in a variety of interactions that are critical to accomplishing work goals. Using these skills also helps individuals build stronger relationships with peers and team members and even outside work with family, friends, and the community.
Prerequisites: None

Conflict

Navigating Beyond Conflict
In the workplace, differences of opinion can morph quickly into discord or even all-out dispute. If unchecked, conflict can cause serious damage to relationships, teamwork, and the organization. This course helps leaders develop the skills to recognize the signs of conflict and then coach or mediate employees through it.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success

Resolving Workplace Conflict
This course teaches leaders how to recognize the signs of escalating conflict and take appropriate action to minimize damage. Leaders are introduced to two resolution tactics–coach and mediate–and practice using the Interaction Essentials as they coach then mediate to resolve conflict.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success

Decision Making

Accelerating Business Decisions
This course helps individuals accelerate the decision-making process, yet still make quality decisions in fast-paced environments with limited information. It also teaches them to identify their own and others’ decision-making tendencies and understand how to balance them in situations requiring accelerated decisions.
Prerequisites: None

Making High Quality Decisions
Making high-quality decisions is much more than generating or choosing the best option. It involves analyzing potential problems or opportunities and making sound judgments based on that analysis. This course teaches a logical decision-making process that, if followed, leads to high-quality decisions.
Prerequisites: None

Delegation

Delegating with Purpose
Fewer resources, changing motivations, virtual employees, and global workforces are just a few of the challenges that make delegation a critical skill for leaders. In this course leaders learn skills to address these challenges and others in order to enhance the overall capability and capacity of their teams and, ultimately, the organization.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success

Delegation: Engage and Empower People
This course helps leaders shift their mindset about what they can delegate and feel more comfortable and confident doing so. Participants learn methods for matching people to tasks they’re both motivated and capable of doing and practice the delegation conversation they’ll have to ensure success.
Prerequisites: Connect Through Conversations or Communicating for Leadership Success

Developing Yourself and Others

Developing Yourself and Others
Development is critical to attracting and retaining talent, driving employee engagement, preparing future leaders, and ultimately ensuring the organization’s success. In this course, participants learn a practical process to guide their own and their direct reports’ development-planning efforts.
Prerequisites: None

Leading Self: Turn Awareness into Impact
In Leading Self, learners gain insight about their personal values, their emotions and how they manage them, and the natural talents they bring to the workplace. Through self-insight tools, engaging activities, and compelling video, learners expand their understanding of themselves so they can heighten their impact at work.
Prerequisites: None

Your Leadership Journey
This course arms a new or prospective leader with the knowledge and skills they need to confront the challenges they face early in their leader career. The course encourages the learner to think about the transitions that newer leaders face and how to handle those challenges.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success

Diversity and Inclusion

Creating an Inclusive Environment
This session moves past the numbers game of diverse representation to focus on leaning into and leveraging the unique abilities, perspectives, styles, and ideas of each person. Stereotypes and unconscious bias are explored as well as the differences in who we are, how we think, and what it means to an inclusive workplace. Three practices lay out a personalized path for identifying, engaging with, and advocating for individuals whose voices must and should be heard. Prerequisites: None

Valuing Differences
Valuing Differences gives people effective skills and tools for exploring others’ unique perspectives, understanding and leveraging people’s inherent differences, challenging devaluing behavior, and creating an environment in which people’s differences are respected and utilized. Prerequisites: Connect Through Conversations or Communicating for Leadership Success or Communicating with Impact

Engagement and Retention

All In Culture
Based on a global 300,000-person research study of high-performance organizations conducted by The Culture Works, All In Training takes leaders through a 7-step process to build a profitable, winning work-group culture where employees give that extra push of effort that leads to outstanding results.
Prerequisites: None. Course details

Engaging and Retaining Talent
Do leaders recognize when team members aren’t engaged in their work? Are the best and the brightest employees looking outside the organization for opportunities to grow? Do leaders know how to provide the recognition team members want? This course equips leaders to determine what drives each individual’s engagement and provides methods for proactive engagement and talent retention.
Prerequisites: None

The Gratitude Leader Lab
Based on Leading with Gratitude by New York Times bestselling authors Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton,The Gratitude Leader Lab will teach you eight easy ways to recognize value being produced in your team and how to show your employees they’re respected and appreciated.
Prerequisites: None. Course details

What Motivates Me
Crafted for supervisors, managers, and executives of all levels who want to unlock the full potential of their team, What Motivates Me Engagement Training is especially suited for groups struggling with subpar employee engagement levels or those facing talent retention and development challenges. Participants will learn how to pinpoint and unlock someone’s intrinsic motivators, allowing them to not only experience a steady boost in productivity but actually enjoy their job.
Prerequisites: None. Course details

Influencing

Strategies for Influencing Others
This course shows leaders and individual contributors how to package their ideas in a way that will win over even the most skeptical individuals. Participants learn strategies for effectively capturing people’s attention, transforming their perspectives, and gaining their commitment to taking action.
Prerequisites: None

Interviewing

The Art of Behavioral Interviewing
This course teaches hiring managers and interview team members how to conduct interviews that are objective, fair, and provide the candidate the opportunity to shine. Learners leave the class knowing how to build rapport, manage an interview, and ask pertinent questions to gather data that are predictive of future on-the-job success.
Prerequisites: None

Innovation

Fostering Innovation
Learn a practical approach, tools and techniques, to help leaders and teams think differently about how they work and to help them generate new ideas that add value to your organization and from your customers. Leaders also learn what they can say and do to foster innovation with their teams.
Prerequisites: None

Managing Performance

Addressing Poor Performance
When a team member’s poor performance becomes chronic, the negative impact can ripple throughout the team and the organization, leaving the person’s leader with a challenging coaching situation. By using this performance data along with essential interaction skills, leaders can address performance problems firmly but fairly while gaining the team member’s commitment to improve.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success and Coaching for Peak Performance

Conversations to Inspire Performance
Instead of semiannual reviews driven by managers, participants learn a new process is about having regular, meaningful dialog. In these everyday conversations, leaders coach and develop, making the time they invest reap better performance and stronger relationships with their direct reports.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success

Meetings

Leading Meetings: Use Time Effectively
With this course, you can eliminate bad meetings (voted the #1 “time-killer” in organizations!) and make meetings more productive and inclusive. Leaders embark on an activity-filled exploration of techniques to drive intentionality, create impactful agendas, encourage participation.
Prerequisites: None

Productivity

Planning and Managing Resources
This self-study course helps associates develop the skills they need to use time and manage resources more effectively so they are able to make stronger contributions to the organizations. Using the tips, techniques, and tools in this course will also help learners complete projects successfully by anticipating obstacles and devising a plan to address them.
Prerequisites: None

Service

Taking the Heat
This course equips learners with an important skill set that is essential to providing high-quality customer service. These essential skills will help providers turn dissatisfied, upset customers into satisfied, loyal ones.
Prerequisites: Connect Through Conversations or Communicating for Leadership Success or Communicating with Impact

Setting and Reviewing Goals

Setting Goals and Reviewing Results
Unclear performance goals can lead to unpleasant surprises when reviewing results, causing direct reports to become frustrated and disengaged. Leaders learn how to help their direct reports take a more active role by sharing responsibility with them for all aspects of their performance by working together to set SMART goals, gather reliable data to accurately track progress, and exchange specific feedback.
Prerequisites: Communicating for Leadership Success

Strategy and Business Execution

Executing Strategy at the Front Line
In this course, leaders will learn the three key elements of executing strategy at the front line–Focus, Measurement, and Accountability. They learn how to focus on the few most critical priorities, to measure progress toward the accomplishment of these priorities, and to hold themselves and their team members accountable against the metrics.
Prerequisites: None

Teams

Maximizing Team Performance
This course focuses on how leaders can work with their teams to build the infrastructure that enables maximum performance. Leaders gain experience in diagnosing and applying the five Team Success Factors–Results, Commitment, Communications, Process, and Trust.
Prerequisites: None

Working as a High-Performance Team
This course focuses on enhancing team effectiveness and maximizing not only performance, but also impact on the organization as a whole. Participants learn the personal, interpersonal, business advantages of working together as a unit and are introduced to a set of best practives for optimal results.
Prerequisites: None

Tailored Solutions

To meet your unique needs, IES offers on-site, tailored training programs. By hosting a training specific to your organization, we can tailor the timing and content of the workshop to support key business drivers and initiatives. On-site training increases accessibility to allow more of your staff to participate. In addition, the training is delivered just-in-time; when you and your team are ready!