Leadership Programs
Great Organizations Start With Great Leaders
ACHIEVEBLUE recognizes that "whole person" professional development requires isolating each of these roles for investigation, discovery and growth, followed by integration back into the composite value you provide to your organization and your people.
ACHIEVEBLUE programs provide learners with practical and actionable leadership knowledge, techniques and skillsets. Our programs are deeply rooted in understanding how leaders impact culture and on delivering measurable change in your leaders. And with deep experience in delivering learning through multiple modalities including virtual classroom we can engage your leaders no matter where they work and how they want to learn.
For details on our Leadership Development Curriculum download our program brochure
Talk to us today at 647-292-6782 or email info@achieveblue.com
Course List
Establishing and living your organizational identity and brand.
Duration: ½ day (3.5 hours)
Positioning
Establishing and living your organizational identity and brand is not a luxury. Clear articulation of these things are the underpinnings of your organizational culture. Having a constructive culture that incorporates high achievement, innovation, people development, collaboration and exemplary client / customer service is a key driver of success – for your organization and for everyone who works there.
Prework
This course has no formal training course prerequisites. It is often used as a predecessor course for Leading Organizations: Strategy Planning and Execution.
As pre-work for this course, we ask that you investigate and bring (as available):
- Your Corporate Vision Statement
- Your Corporate Mission Statement
- Your Corporate Values Statement
- Information regarding at least one current corporate strategy and the programs, projects or initiatives that represent its execution.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to identify and apply:
- an efficient method for articulating a compelling direction and aligning effort
- a powerful, clear focus for, and approach to, business planning
- a clear, practical, and actionable approach to making business decisions
- common points of reference for initiatives, projects, results, and rewards.
Apply best practice tools and techniques for leadership potential, development, and assessment.
Duration: ½ day (3.5 hours)
Positioning
In order to thrive and grow, organizations depend on the presence and active engagement of leaders at all levels. While leaders can be recruited from other organizations, this is only a short-term strategy. Ultimately, organizations need to be able to identify and develop leadership expertise in-house.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
- Establish an actionable framework for leadership development, incorporating and defining the relationships among the focus areas of strategy, business, self, and people
- Link each of the leadership focus areas to key leadership competencies
- Identify and apply best practice tools and techniques for leadership potential, development, and assessment.
Turn strategy into action and results.
Duration: ½ day (3.5 hours)
Positioning
Strategic planning and execution are areas where many organizations need improvement. Without a clear structure for operationalizing the brand and vision, daily realities may trump and derail even the simplest of plans. This course provides an easy to follow and effective roadmap that links all of the moving parts together.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Create a framework for developing and aligning strategic objectives, and strategies, programs, projects and other initiatives with your organization’s mission, vision, and values
- Establish measurable goals for all initiatives that are domain appropriate with the correct degree of precision
- Establish lead and lag indicators, targets and thresholds, and the appropriate level of acceptable variance for deliverable-based project goals that support organizational strategy
Set and track performance against goals.
Duration: ½ day (3.5 hours)
Positioning
Performance management is an area that is often considered, at best, a yearly chore, and at worst, chaotic and a waste of everyone’s time. Yet, the setting and tracking of achievement against goals is key to professional development of your people, succession planning, and the creation of high-quality products, services and business outcomes. What is needed is an easy to follow structure, tools, and techniques that allow both managers and the teams to take ownership over individual and team performance.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
- Apply the Human Capital Dynamics™ model and the GAME™ Approach (Goaled Accountability / Metrics / Expectations) to talent and performance management at individual and team levels
- Track and manage workload, progress metrics and levels of performance within a team
- Manage expectations regarding performance by linking the goals to the strategy.
- Establish clear, deliverable-based, actionable, and measurable goals for your people
- Establish a framework for performance management for the entire employee lifecycle
Understand and activate your role as a change leader.
Duration: ½ day (3.5 hours)
Positioning
As the rate of change accelerates in all aspects of our professional and personal lives, most people feel some degree of stress or disruption on an ongoing basis. This can lead to resistance to even beneficial change. This course provides you with insight into the drivers of change as they occur in your organization, insight into how to manage the emotional and intellectual process as we and our people go through change, and a set of adaptive behaviours that help everyone not only accept needed change, but develop ownership of the change as Change Agents.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
- understand and activate your role as a change leader from 3 perspectives: business leader, team leader, and individual contributor
- manage the emotional and functional impact of change by enabling change ownership in people through adaptive behaviours
- create an effective, proactive communication strategy for change that incorporates universal and specialized messaging.
Effective delegation strategies that will empower your staff and drive accountability.
Duration: ½ day (3.5 hours)
Positioning
Your organization is in a highly competitive global market which requires highly competent and effective management. This requires the ability to delegate much of the work to collaborative teams and individuals who are subject matter experts in the technical disciplines required for successful completion of work.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Balance accountability and authority based on competency
- Reverse engineer work packages from specific, visible, and measurable deliverables
- Establish appropriate status tracking and feedback schedules and milestones
Coaching and Feedback principles and practices to positively impact performance
Duration: 1 day
Positioning
Effective coaching requires deep personal insight into your own attitudes and behaviours and the ability to inspire and motivate others through understanding of their attitudes and behaviours. Effective coaches help bring out the personal leadership qualities of those they coach. This course provides you with effective day-to-day coaching and feedback techniques that can be applied both formally and informally with your teams.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
- Apply Coaching and Feedback principles and practices to positively impact individual and team performance
- Determine the appropriate approach for coaching and providing feedback, whether you are coaching to task, overall job performance or career development
- Apply the correct coaching technique for coaching for corrective action or coaching for a goal
Plan, structure and deliver effective, interactive, and actionable presentations
Duration: ½ day (3.5 hours)
Positioning
The best content is of no use unless it is communicated effectively. Today, almost everyone is called upon to deliver formal and informal presentations to a wide range of audiences. This course provides you with all the tools you need to get yourself organized, plan your presentation and deliver it for impact and influence, and apply the learning to all types of communication.
Because the course includes actually delivering a presentation, participants are asked to come prepared with a 3 to 5-minute presentation on any topic of interest.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
- Identify and apply best practice behaviours of great communicators to build your personal brand and ability to communicate well
- Apply audience analysis techniques to align your messaging style, format, and content
- Plan, structure and deliver effective, interactive, and actionable presentations that have well-crafted opening, body, and close components
- Identify and remove barriers to listening.
Optimize team effectiveness by maximizing constructive attitudes and behaviours
Duration: ½ day (3.5 hours)
Positioning
Every day we work in formal and informal groups and teams to deliver on our goals and targets. In order to do this effectively, everyone involved must know how to translate critical concepts like collaboration, conflict management, shared goal setting, risk analysis, group dynamics, inclusion and effective listening into ongoing behavioural habits. At the same time, individuals and teams need to be able to identify and remove barriers to team success.
Performance Objectives
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Optimize team effectiveness by maximizing constructive attitudes and behaviours
- Proactively identify and avoid behaviours that represent barriers to success and reduce team effectiveness.
- Score the effectiveness of teams with regards to twelve behavioural styles.
Make effective decisions and gain confidence in your ability to make the right move
Duration: ½ day (3.5 hours)
Positioning
Making decisions means being accountable for the outcomes. This accountability cascades down from the actual decision maker (individual or group) into those who provide critical decision support information. With the accelerating pace of business and fluid nature of the environment within which organizations operate, having an easy to follow standardized process and robust set of techniques for effective decision making is a critical element in everyone’s leadership, management and contributor toolkit.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
- Select and deploy Root Cause Analysis techniques based on situation-specific variables
- Select and deploy time tested techniques for decision analysis and support
- Establish both formal and informal processes for effective decision-making.
Apply best practice techniques for dealing with bias in the moment and over time
Duration: ½ day (3.5 hours)
Positioning
Leading companies are recognizing that a diverse, skilled workforce is critical for growth and innovation in a global economy. The complexities that come with a multicultural, multi-generational workforce can create challenges. Therefore, managing diversity and building inclusiveness have become critical tools for any organization to attract and retain top talent. The question is, how do you get everyone working together and capitalize on diversity of thought while at the same time managing the fact that each of us has conscious and unconscious biases that could impede that progress?
This course combines experiential, facilitated immersion learning, with open, candid, targeted discussion throughout the session. It is all about engaging all employees and driving extraordinary performance by making sure that every employee is comfortable being their whole self at work.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
- Define and describe the causes and impact of both conscious and unconscious bias on the culture and performance of the organization
- Create a forum within their professional teams for discussion of bias and its impact on diversity and inclusion in an open and supportive environment
Effectively manage conflict and gain confidence in managing tough situations
Duration: ½ day (3.5 hours)
Positioning
Conflict is neither good nor bad must be managed effectively and proactively in order for people to be able to work towards a common goal and maintain productive professional and personal relationships. These are things that everyone knows. Yet, so often, people are overcome by the emotional response to conflict, with the resulting inability to achieve goals, and damaged or destroyed relationships.
This course explores the nature of conflict, 9 classic response patterns to conflict and how to manage them, and ease to use tools that enable you to minimize conflict through specific adaptive behaviours.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this module you will be able to proactively manage professional relationships to pre-empt, minimize or manage conflict caused by incompatible expectations by:
- Configuring professional relationships to pre-empt, minimize and manage conflict
- Recognizing the goals versus relationship priorities in yourself and others by understanding 9 conflict responses
- Knowing how to gain the support and action commitments of others by adapting your behaviour and approach to their high priority needs.
A seven–step problem-solving model to structure your continuous improvement efforts
Duration: 2 days (delivered in one session or two sessions each one day)
Positioning
Adapting a culture of continuous improvement enables organizations to adapt to changing business and marketplace requirements with relative ease, assess and embrace positive change, enable ongoing innovation and take more control over their marketplace. Without continuous improvement, status quo inertia can cause massive disruption when abrupt, severe change is suddenly required.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
- Utilize an efficient, seven–step problem-solving model to structure your continuous improvement efforts
- Define and analyze work processes using four different process- flowcharting techniques
- Establish improvement targets along with key assessment criteria and measurements to gauge progress
- Select the best breakthrough actions based on identified priority requirements
- Communicate effectively with others regarding the goals and intended outcomes
Foundation in project management— complete projects on time, within budget and scope.
Duration: 1 day
Positioning
Rapid changes in technology, business needs and market characteristics are leading organizations to turn to formalized project management and business analysis to increase the speed, efficiency and effectiveness with which new or enhanced products and services are developed, business problems are solved and internal changes are managed.
Yet many of those who are responsible for the management of projects, who must support or sponsor projects or who must serve as project stakeholders lack the knowledge and experience necessary to complete projects on time, within budget and according to product scope.
Performance Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
- Explain the relationships among portfolios, programs, and projects
- Describe the role of the Project Manager and the principal process groups used in a project
- Identify and list variables that can assist in the selection of the most appropriate project management approach for a given situation (waterfall, iterative or agile)
- Create a short Project Charter scoping paragraph that includes project purpose, deliverables (in scope) / major work packages, out of scope items and timeline
- Identify and describe the component plans that comprise a project plan from a value perspective