Women’s Business Leadership Certificate 2024-2025

Certificate Topics Include:

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
American business was designed centuries ago. Women are now fully participating in the workplace, yet only 5% of CEOs 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 work really gets done in the office.

Strategic Thinking and Planning
Strategic thinking and planning are the roadmaps to success. Implementation is the vehicle that gets you there. It is deciding the most important things that need to get done. Implementation is executing the key to-dos and knowing the things to say no 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 experiences from hundreds of real-world implementation success stories. Participants leave energized and ready to be more strategic thinkers and implement their strategic plans.

Creative Problem Solving
This session is a highly-interactive, fun, and fast-paced learning session that provides a framework for understanding and applying dramatic improvisational tools to meet real business needs.  You will tap your innate creativity to find practical applications in both work and relationships. This session provides increased confidence with uncertainty/ambiguity to generate new ideas, techniques to recognize/replace unproductive thinking patterns, and a methodology to foster creative potential and innovation.

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 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.

Influencing and Negotiating
Influence is centered on the connection you make with others and how you create trust. Effective influencing will help you reach personal, team, organizational goals while working seamlessly together. In this session, you will learn strategic tools that will help you to be heard and acknowledged. There is a direct correlation between negotiating confidence and success. The more confident you feel in your negotiating skills, the more prepared and successful your outcome will be. This program will cover negotiation skills, effective methods, and hands-on practice on how to effectively negotiate.

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 workplaces.  You will explore how to create leadership behaviors that model inclusivity, create safety in the workplace, and truly understand and promote individuals’ strengths.

Managing Change
There are few guarantees in the workplace today. However, change is one of them. More than ever, organizations and their environments are in a state of flux; streamlining processes, upgrading technologies, introducing new products, and competing in a global market. In some cases these changes are planned, in others they are unplanned. Sometimes the forces for change are internal to the organization, sometimes they are caused by external conditions. The need for an organization and its people to meet and cope with change requires employees to be competent in dealing with and managing change.

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 on the company. Finance for Leaders helps build confidence in understanding 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.

Customer Centricity
It’s more important than ever to know, understand, and delight your customers. However, this is often easier said than done.  Growth comes from providing solutions and experiences to differentiate your company from your competition. Delivering exceptional customer service is all about the details and this session will provide strategies to deliver customer experiences with purpose. In order to exceed expectations, you need to create systems and processes to make sure that nothing is left to luck. Learn ways to be intentional to create memorable experiences and you will make sure your customers are telling others about their excellent experience with your organization.

Moving Forward with Effective Leadership
This interactive, engaging, and thought-provoking session will help you understand yourself and others in order to build strong, productive relationships as a leader. You will literally be out of your seat as you experience moving forward with effective leadership. Your DiSC Workplace report uses your individual assessment data to provide a wealth of information about your workplace priorities and preferences.  You’ll learn how to connect better with colleagues and employees whose priorities and preferences differ from yours – saving you time, energy, and money.