Leadership Institute

Advanced Leadership Skills

Recommended Solution for: Advanced Leadership Skills

Once fundamental leadership skills have been attained, leaders can work on some of the more challenging day-to-day tactical skills and strategic skills that help create a high-performance environment.  At this stage, leaders need to focus on being able to:

  • Build an environment of trust with and among others.
  • Develop and retain organizational talent.
  • Adapt leadership approaches to meet a variety of personalities, environments, and situations.
  • Use personal power (rather than position power) to gain acceptance to ideas and move people to action.
  • Motivate employees to achieve higher levels of performance.
  • Build partnerships across the organization to achieve goals.
  • Select talent to insure long-term organizational success.

Because they are new to the leadership role, it is important for new leaders to:

  • Understand and focus their efforts on the organization’s business strategies.
  • Identify strengths and development needs for themselves and their team.

Course Recommendations

These courses build leaders’ skills in more challenging situations. 

* Essentials of Leadership is the prerequisite course for most leadership courses.

  • Adaptive Leadership -- Teaches leaders how to tailor their approaches based on team members’ motivations, personality styles, the organizational environment, and the situation. This is an advanced interpersonal skills course. It is highly recommended that several other interpersonal skills courses from DDI be taken prior to this one.
  • Building an Environment of Trust -- Teaches leaders to recognize behaviors that lead to distrust and to understand the human impact of a non-trusting environment.
  • Developing Others -- Helps leaders understand the critical role they play in developing organizational talent, and provides a process for them to follow in doing so. (No prerequisite course required)
  • Retaining Talent -- Helps leaders understand their critical role in retaining organizational talent, and creating an environment in which people feel valued and satisfied in their job.
  • Building Winning Partnerships -- Leaders learn how to establish true partnerships to meet customer needs by developing strategies for gaining people’s commitment to working together.
  • Influential Leadership -- Helps leaders get their good ideas heard, accepted, and enacted. (No prerequisite course required)Essential Interviewing Skills (SM) -- This behavior-based interviewing course teaches hiring managers how to interview for behaviors, knowledge, and motivations needed for success on the job.


Supplemental Courses and Development Tools

Motivating Others

  • Rapid Decision Making (No prerequisite course required)
  • Reviewing Performance Progress
  • Setting Performance Expectations
  • Thunderbolt Thinking®: Building an Innovative Workplace (No prerequisite course required)
  • OPAL® (Online Performance and Learning) -- Provides Internet reinforcement and just-in-time coaching.

Rationale

After building initial skills, leaders need to continue developing the skills that will help propel their team and organization to success, such as creating and maintaining an environment of high trust and innovation.  Without this environment, productivity decreases and low morale can lead to higher turnover.  They need to help team members assess their strengths and development needs.  Leaders must also work beyond their own teams, building solid relationships with other groups and individuals to help the organization achieve its objectives. When a leader can successfully match people and responsibilities, the individual, the group, and the organization all prosper.