Open Enrollment Programs

Individual Open Enrollment Programs provide participants with comprehensive, detailed instruction on a specific topic and the opportunity to sharpen their business acumen. They are appropriate for individual learning in subjects such as leadership, strategy and general management.

Strategic Decision Making & Critical Reasoning (2 days) - $2,500  
May 30-31, 2012 

Are you a good decision maker? A recent 2008 study of global firms by McKinsey concluded: “Individual and group psychology can cause irrational decision making by both individuals and organizations, resulting in less than ideal outcomes. Even the best-designed strategic planning processes don’t always lead to optimal decisions.” Improved technical mastery of a discipline (e.g., finance, engineering, geology, etc.) does not improve your competence in strategic decision making. However, career success is intricately linked to competence in strategic decision making.  More Details...

Leading and Managing High-Performance Teams (2 days) - $2,500 

Teams can be a success story or a nightmare. Good teams harness the creative energy of many people into a single dynamic force. Ineffective teams are hampered by internal conflict and poor decision-making. Learn how to avoid these pitfalls by analyzing the characteristics of high-performing teams. Understand preferences of individual team members and how those preferences affect larger team dynamics. Discover techniques to successfully organize teams, create organizational enablers, guide teams through conflict, promote positive action, and derive successful outcomes.

Thinking Strategically (2 days) - $2500
June 11-12, 2012 

Perhaps the most significant impact leaders can have on organizations is through their ability to think strategically. This is a substantially different activity than building a strategy. The strategic thinker is capable of the following, and thus these will form the elements of the module:

• Easily sift through data and identify critical information
• Develop, adopt or accept a desired future end-state
• Identify key information requirements, resources and decision points along the path to reaching the end state
• Balance the big picture awareness with tactical level understanding and details
• Develop, maintain and adjust mental simulations that continually assess the elements above

Managing for Creativity and Innovation (2 days) - $2500

Creative individuals can add tremendous value to organizations. Both new and established businesses that encourage creativity in their most valuable asset -- their employees -- are likely to survive, grow, and stay competitive even in today's turbulent business environment. Although it's often easier to kill creativity instead of fostering it, this class will use methods scientifically proven to help you understand and enhance your own creative skills and encourage creativity in co-workers and employees. You will be able to assess your work environment, and implement your own ideas.

In order to lead, leaders must be understood. Miscommunication is a common barrier to effective leadership. Explore communication challenges in today's workplace and learn techniques to manage them. Participants will examine successful approaches to organizational communication, create a profile of their own communicative abilities, and formulate a strategic communication approach for their company. Participants will also develop approaches to communicating with stakeholders, the media, and industry analysts.

Strategy Foundations (2 days) - $2,500

Managers of today's organizations face a baffling barrage of communication and information technologies that threaten the very core of their businesses. They also face brutal global competition. To stay out in front, they must take big risks, make big bets, and manage them strategically. This program will present the latest methodologies for developing and implementing strategies that work, and will give business leaders the rare opportunity to share experiences with peers from other organizations and industries, forming a network of lifelong colleagues in the process. Participants will also identify new sources of profitability; develop new strategic approaches that fit their firm; establish new directions for the organization; and implement a revised strategic agenda.

Politics and Control in Organizations (2 days) - $2500

This module gives a realistic understanding of politics in the organizational context as the art and science of getting things done. Being "political" at work usually has the negative connotations of "dirty politics." Politics as we use the term in this module, however, means something much broader. The term covers many organizational activities that can build more cooperative, productive, and satisfying professional relationships. The political aspects of organizational life include a wide range of means used to resolve differences of opinion and competing interests--various ways of influencing people so that choices get made and decisions get implemented.

Essentials of Leadership (2 days) - $2500

August 8-9, 2012 

During the foundation course, participants will develop an understanding of the importance of leadership at all levels (i.e., leadership capacity) within highly successful companies.  They will begin an introspection of their own leadership styles, which will be re-examined throughout future leadership programs.  Participants will consider the differences between leadership and management and that leadership is critical in any successful change initiative.  Participants will also examine the role that individual disposition plays in the development of leadership style, team interactions, and leader effectiveness.  Ultimately this course focuses on helping participants identify the areas of their management style that are strengths and will support their transition into greater levels of responsibility and, perhaps more importantly, identify critical development areas that may hinder their future performance.

The Leader as Coach (2 days) - $2,500

August 29-30, 2012 

It is a widely accepted truth that for most organizations, it is the capability of the workforce that provides the company’s greatest competitive advantage. Following this insight, it then becomes evident that great leaders not only plan, organize and control – they develop strong capability in their people. This short course is designed to help leaders understand the frameworks and actions they can use to serve as talent magnets for and within their organizations as well as fully developing the capabilities of those leaders junior to them. We will examine differing levels of leadership, transition points between these, and the balanced use of different systems to grow leadership competency. We will pay close attention to coaching and mentorship as primary mechanisms, while understanding the roles that networks, job rotation, action learning and 360 degree feedback play in developing the total leader. We will also examine motivational concepts that support the best utilization of these activities, while matching these to the participants’ natural leadership style. As the war for talent continues to be a competitive differentiator, this short course provides the capabilities to not only win talented individuals into organizations – but to embed the development of leaders into the management culture itself.

Leading Change (2 days) - $2500
September 5-6, 2012
The focus of this module is to examine change inhibitors that create stress, waste resources, slow change efforts, or lead to outright failure, and discover how to lead, cope and win in the face of great change.

At the end of the module, students will be able to:

• Understand and apply fundamental areas that are necessary to lead effective individual, team and organizational change efforts.
• Analyze and evaluate behaviors that lead to successful change initiatives in organizational settings.
• Managing personal change and the change of others
• Prepare a change case study and develop an action plan for achieving successful change
• Serve as an organizational change agent