Women’s Business Leadership Certificate 2021-2022

Certificate Topics Include:

Immersion Experience
Team building is important in deepening relationships within the leadership cohort. The Immersion Experience allows the group to get to know each other, sets the stage for the program, and through a fun event allows participants to begin to recognize strengths and leadership skills.

Personal Authentic Leadership
This program begins with a personal assessment of your innate combination of thinking and behavioral preferences that make you unique. This knowledge will allow you to understand the leadership styles that fit with who you are and how you are most valuable to your team and the organization. You will also develop an understanding of the key considerations that determine which leadership approaches will be most effective to accomplish your goals. Upon completion, you will create your own plan for applying insights from this transformative journey to becoming a more effective leader in your organization.

Mastering the Unwritten Rules at Work and Negotiating Skills
American business was designed centuries ago. Women are now fully participating in the workplace, yet only 5% of CEO’s are women. By mastering the unwritten rules and learning to negotiate, you will have new tools to help you be your successful best. You will leave with a number of concrete actions you can use immediately.

This program discusses topics not covered during orientation including how decisions get made and how the work really gets done in the office. You will explore how to get the boss to say yes to your projects, how to make sure you are included early in the project, how much risk to take with commitments, and what your body language is really saying.

Finance for Leaders
As a leader, no matter what area of the organization in which you work, decisions need to be made with an understanding of the financial impact to the company. Finance for Leaders helps builds confidence in understand finance, the language of business, so you can speak with your peers using the correct terms, concepts and appropriate foundational knowledge.

In this program you’ll also develop an understanding of all of the key financial documents, how to interpret them, and why they are important. Financial terms and calculations will be explained in a way that makes sense for both financial and non-financial business professionals. Finally, you will also be challenged to apply what you learn in class by analyzing how your work and your decisions are related to the overall performance of the company.

The Leader’s Voice
The first part of this energizing, interactive program focuses on why leadership communication is essential, who you’ll need to reach with your messages, and how to ensure your communication gets through and gets results.

The second part focuses on what you need to communicate in critical leadership situations including stepping into a new leadership role, leading through significant change, pitching a product or service, or sharing a vision that inspires confidence and action. You’ll close the day by developing a personal communication action plan that you can begin to apply immediately — and walk away with the clarity, capability and confidence you need to communicate effectively and achieve your leadership goals.

Creating an Inclusive Environment
It takes many different strengths, experiences, and types of diversity to make an organization successful.  It is important for leaders to understand the elements of creating an environment that welcomes and includes each employee.  These environments both feel good and make good business sense. According to Deloitte, inclusive workplaces are 6X as likely to be innovative, and have 2.3X the cash flow per employee over non-inclusive workplace.  You will explore how to create leadership behaviors that model inclusivity, create safety in the workplace, and truly understand and promote individual’s’ strengths.

Operational Metrics that Matter
Practically all organizations have metrics, but in most cases, they don’t provide the information we believe they provide, they are constructed improperly, and they are difficult to comprehend and manage. This program will help you understand how to create metrics that truly matter and avoid the pitfalls of poorly conceived metrics.

This interactive program will begin by laying out key aspects of operational and financial performance and how they relate to one another. We will then focus on key areas such as the impact of bad metrics, the difference between metrics and measures, leading and lagging metrics, aligning metrics with business performance, and designing metrics that can be understood and managed.

Critical Conversations
When we are stuck because we are avoiding a needed conversation, or having the same conversation more often than we want, it is a sign that we are talking but not really conversing. Learning the proven skills that help frame how, when, and what we say can yield amazing results. These tools improve relationships, reduce stress, minimize conflict, improve productivity, and best of all, increase our ability to be effective.

This fast-paced discussion based program will feature interactive exercises that allow you to gain critical conversation tools, such as: identifying roadblocks to managing relationships and conflict, learning to practice and apply specific skills geared toward effectiveness, recognizing and addressing individuals displaying disruptive behavior, focusing on interactions common to the corporate environment.

Executive Presence and Building and Marketing Your Personal Brand
A key to creating, capturing, delivering and communicating the value of a “product ” that differentiates it from others, positively influences buyers’ purchase behaviors, and creates brand loyalty is a strong value-driven strategic marketing plan. Developing the plan helps you focus on necessary resources, plan for growth, and understand the different factors that may affect your success. In this engaging program, you will not only learn the process of creating a value-driven strategic marketing plan to identify your target market, how you will meet their needs, and how you’ll differentiate from the competition, but you will learn to use strategic marketing techniques to design, enhance, and promote “your professional image”.

Knowing your personal brand requires thought, internal reflection and preparation, and it is key to projecting a strong executive presence that builds trust and value in the minds of others. Designing a “personal marketing plan” will help you create a valuable roadmap to navigate your career and plan for your next level of success.

Strategic Thinking and Planning
Strategic thinking and planning is the roadmap to success. Implementation is the vehicle that gets you there. Strategic thinking and planning is deciding the most important things that need to get done. Implementation is executing the key to dos to achieve your strategic goals. To win in business, you need to master both. Fast  paced and filled with relevant examples, this program teaches the powerful tools from Krissi Barr’s strategy/execution book, Plugged. It incorporates ideas from AG Lafley’s book Playing to Win and experience from hundreds of real-world implementation success stories. Participants leave energized and ready to be more strategic thinkers and implement their strategic plans.

Innovation
Building your own innovation capability: This program features a primer on Design Thinking, LEAN innovation, and scrappy approaches to user research. You will leave with awareness, capability, and tools to get better innovation outcomes. Crafting your leadership philosophy: As a leader in your organization, it’s important to know what you want to stand for in the hearts and minds of the innovators you are leading. We will spend time discovering the pillars of your leadership philosophy in order to build on them over time.

Creating conditions where innovators can thrive: The environment and cultural tone of an organization is often set by the leaders. It’s important for leaders to know the role they play in creating conditions for innovators to thrive. The mindset and behaviors of the leader play a key role in getting the best out of the innovators, and consequently, more innovation.

Women in mid-level manager positions looking to develop the necessary business acumen and leadership skills to advance to organizational leadership positions.

Participants will walk away with these skills:

• Utilizing a leadership style that is valuable to your team and organization
• Mastering the unwritten rules of work and effectively negotiating
• Understanding key financial documents, how to interpret them, and knowing why they are important
• Using the language of finance
• Communicating with clarity and confidence to achieve leadership goals
• Creating metrics that truly matter, and avoiding the pitfalls of poorly conceived metrics
• Leading with Inclusivity and creating a culture for people to thrive
• Projecting a strong executive presence that builds trust and value in the minds of others
• Creating conditions for innovators to thrive