Leadership Academy Courses

Build your management philosophy on time-tested practices.

If you are looking to build a leadership program that fits in with your organizational philosophies, look no further. Pick from over 15 different leadership courses to customize your experience. Whether you want to develop on your strengths or learn something new, each of our courses will help deepen your understanding of what it means to be a leader.

Foundation Courses

101: The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact

The purpose of this course is to provide an introduction to the management process by examining the many functions of management and the various roles manager’s play. Topics include: an overview of the management process; the manager’s job: folklore and fact; managerial skill sets.

102: Understanding Ourselves and Understanding Others

This course is designed to provide a basic understanding of the impact of individual differences in organizations. Self-assessment exercises and group discussions will be utilized to examine the role personality, attitudes and values in the organization.

103: Interpersonal Communication for Managers

One of the three critical skills for effective management of people is communication. In this course communication is defined as the transfer of understanding and the focus is on developing an awareness of the various ways the communication process breaks down in organizations. Topics include barriers and gateways to effective communication, effective listening, and understanding your own interpersonal style.

104: Supportive Communication

This course builds on the Interpersonal Communication course by introducing the concepts of supportive communication. Supportive communication is designed to overcome defensiveness and is the primary used in coaching, counseling and providing feedback.

105: Motivation

This course discusses the various motivational and leadership tactics that lead to high levels of employee commitment, satisfaction and performance. In this course managers are exposed to a wide variety of motivational techniques including content approaches, expectancy models, job enrichment, and goal setting.

106: The Planning and Control Process

This course introduces basic elements of planning and control that are used in strategic planning, project management and budgeting. The principles of goal-setting and effective controls are discussed in detail. This course is a prerequisite for the Managing for Improved Performance and the Strategic Management courses. 

Core Courses

201: Managing for Improved Performance

This course uses the principles of planning and control to impact performance at the individual level of the organization. Topics include performance planning, performance evaluation, and diagnosing performance problems. Role negotiation is introduced as a tool for clarifying job expectations.

202: Delegating for Results

The management process is based on achieving organizational objectives with and through people. At the heart of the process is delegating. This course discusses delegation as a powerful tool for developing and empowering employees. Topics include authority, responsibility, and power. Managers learn to delegate without abdicating responsibility and to overcome the common obstacles to effective delegation.

203: Understanding and Building Effective Teams

This course is designed to assist managers to understand the stages of team development and the issues presented at each stage. The course also examines the various types of tams and helps managers to assess the viability of a team for the task. The various maintenance and production roles involved in teamwork are examined in detail. The characteristics of highly effective and mature teams are presented.

204: Constructive Conflict Resolution

This course examines the nature and sources of conflict in the organization to assist managers to develop constructive methods for handling conflict. The course also examines the characteristics of seven types of difficult people. Self-assessment exercises are used to assist managers in developing action plans for dealing with difficult people.

205: Accounting and Financial Analysis for Managers

This workshop is designed for managers who do not have a formal background in accounting and finance. The purpose of the workshop is to equip the manager with the basic understanding and analytical tools they need to use accounting information to plan, control and make decisions. Topics include: fundamentals of financial statements, ratio analysis, trend analysis, variance analysis, understanding cost behavior patterns, and break-even analysis.

206: Creating and Sustaining a Culture of Trust

Trust is a critical element in creating sustainable, high engagement organizations. Creating a high trust culture is done one relationship at a time. When leaders are trusted an organizations accrues “dividends” in the form of lower costs and higher transaction speed. Yet, when trust is absent, Covey says relationships and organizations pay a “trust tax” due to a lack of candor, hidden agendas, and dysfunctional organizational politics. In this workshop we will look at the nature of trust and the components that are necessary for building and sustaining a culture of trust.

Advanced Topics 

The advanced topics courses have a more strategic and “macro” perspective and are designed for those managers who will be involved in decisions that impact larger segments of the organization.

301: The Leadership Imperative

This workshop is uniquely designed to help participants understand the key distinction between individual contributors, managers, and leaders. The session involves a wide variety of individual assessments and skill development exercises. These exercises are designed to help you develop an understanding of the leadership role you play and to assist you in developing your own leadership style. 

Topical Outline: 

  • Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?
  • Important Traits of a Leader 
  • Leadership Styles: A Continuum
  • Contingency Approaches to Leadership: The Situational Factor
  • Three Paradigms of Organizational Life
  • Making the Transition from Individual Contributor to Manager
  • The Next Transition: From Manager to Leader
  • Transactional –Vs- Transformational Leadership
  • Power Bases and Influence Tactics
  • Ethical Dimensions of Leadership
  • The Five Temptations of Leadership
  • The Final Transition: Becoming a Servant Leader
  • Legacy Leadership: What Difference Will You Make?

 

302: Leading Change: Transformation and Renewal

Today’s organizations are faced with increasing complex and dynamic environments. In the past, they could view change as a once-in-a while, episodic event. But now they must face the reality that they are navigating through “permanent white water.” Leaders must be equipped for this new environment and the constant pressure to transform their organizations to respond to the heightened demands of the new economic realities. This workshop equips leaders at every level of the organization to be successful change agents.

Topical Outline:

  • Identifying The Forces for Change in Your Organization
  • Force Field Analysis: Specifying the Need for Change and Identifying Resistance
  • Understanding The Change Process
  • Overcoming Resistance: Resistance as Feedback 
  • Over-Managed and Under-Led?
  • Why Do Transformation Efforts Fail?
  • Deep Change: The Ingredients of Successful Change
  • Making It Stick: Anchoring Changes in the Organizations Culture
  • Alignment and Congruence: The Art of Balance

303: The Strategic Management Process

The focus of this course is the issues and problems of strategic management. Although strategic management is often associated with the roles of the CEO and a small group of senior managers, it is becoming increasingly evident that the ability to “think strategically” is important at every level of the organization. This course is designed to challenge you in a number of ways. It will not only require the application of functional knowledge, skills and techniques learned in other courses, but will also introduce the critical business skills of planning and managing strategic activities.

Topical Outline:  

  • Defining the business
  • Developing a mission statement
  • SWOT Analysis: Developing an understanding of the relationships between the organization and its environment
  • Formulation of strategic goals and objectives
  • Development of organizational strategies
  • Implementing Strategy: The role of leadership, structure, and culture 
  • Internal systems in guiding and controlling the implementation of strategy.

304: The Engagement Factor: Building a High Commitment Organization

Attracting, retaining, and engaging a talented work force is a strategic imperative. Creating a committed workforce requires a comprehensive set of organizational practices that emanate from both macro and micro levels of the organization. This workshop is designed to provide an understanding of the HR Value Chain as the context within which engagement. Then, we drill down on the micro practices of full-range leadership, job design, goal setting and performance management, and creating trust. The session involves a wide variety of individual assessments and skill development exercises that will help participants develop their own engagement enhancing skills. 

Topical Outline:

  • Understanding Engagement and Why It Matters
  • The Engagement Factor Model Overview
  • Setting the Context: The HR Value Chain
  • Full-range Leadership: Transactional and Transformational
  • Enriching Jobs 
  • The High Performance Cycle: Goal-setting and Performance Management
  • Assessing the Level of Engagement 
  • The Consequences of Engagement: In-role Performance 
  • Beyond In-role Performance: Organizational Citizenship Behavior
  • The Crucial Role of Trust

News

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On Friday, Sept. 13, the university community welcomed George Weigel, distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the father of two UD alumnae. Celebrated for his two-volume biography of St. John Paul II and many other intellectual contributions, Weigel presented an exploration of the current Catholic situation in light of a new interpretation of the past 250 years of the church's interaction with social, cultural, economic and political modernity.

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