Course catalogue

Business acumen is gaining an understanding of how business works as well as the behaviors business professionals should possess. This important skill is critical not only to corporate leaders, but to aspiring leaders, managers, and employees as well. The organization that prioritizes business acumen as a core competency promotes the growth of its workforce and strengthens its competitive edge.   

Some use the analogy of a quarterback who can “see” the entire field to describe business acumen. It’s simply understanding how your company operates, and then using that knowledge to develop the best business strategy. Regardless of your role in the organization, it’s an important skill to develop.

• State the importance of business acumen 

• Learn ways to improve your business acumen

Leaders in a World Economic Forum study listed creativity as the third most important work skill they seek in employees. And as organizations face increasingly complex business issues, they are training their employees to be smart risk-takers and creative thinkers. They are hiring for these competencies, too. As you apply the recommendations provided in this course, your skills will increase, your employees will grow more confident and competent in their abilities, and together, you will create a powerful culture of innovation.

• Identify the need and ways to harness creative thinking    

• Identify ways to build a culture of creative thinking    

• Explore recommendations for developing your team’s creative thinking

People generally do business with people they like or look up to, and not just with a company. This means that successful leaders build their personal brand, resulting in the achievement of organizational goals. A personal brand can elevate you above the crowd and help you achieve your personal and professional goals. It is a constant and ever-changing process of identifying your goals, setting up a plan, and monitoring it consistently. Your brand is a combination of the skills you develop and the behavior you display. In this course, you will look at the traits of building a successful personal brand.

• Define personal brand

• Enlist strategy to build a personal brand

• State the steps to build a successful personal brand

First and most importantly, it is the just and moral course of action. Centuries of exploitation, oppression, and disenfranchisement of the Black community has resulted in predominantly white leadership in most organizations. Companies must intentionally disrupt the systemic barriers in place that maintain the biased (prejudiced, race-based) status quo in order to create more inclusive and sustainable organizations that better serve the community.

• Why should companies invest in Black talent?

• How do companies identify and attract Black talent?

• How do companies develop and retain Black talent?

Executive presence isn’t something you’re born with, it’s a combination of learned behaviors and characteristics that can be developed. Depending upon your personality, industry, business goals and challenges, executive presence can be manifested in different ways. 

Having great presentation skills and making a strong first impression based on your clothing and demeanor is not executive presence. You need more substantive abilities to face daily business challenges, speak your mind while maintaining your composure, or inspire your team to commit to a demanding new goal. Executive presence is a purposefully developed hybrid of internal character and external presentation. Let’s look at the qualities that distinguish great leaders from mediocre ones.

• Identify the attributes of executive presence

• Gauge your executive presence and gain insight

• Receive feedback in different forms

• Develop your own executive presence

Whether you’re publicly challenging long-held beliefs or experimenting with a new idea, it’s normal to experience fear or discomfort. You can reduce these emotions by creating a workplace that openly promotes change, welcomes honest and productive discussions, sees failure as a necessary part of business success, and rewards and supports risk taking on a daily basis. It may seem ironic, but when you instill a continuous learning culture and growth mindset in your organization, failure can actually lead to success.

• Identify methods to challenge the status quo   

• Identify reasons for bias towards encouraging smart failure and suggest solutions    

• Enlist ways of encouraging learn from failure culture

One of the key responsibilities of a leader is to assess team members on a regular basis. These might include post-project reviews, annual or quarterly performance evaluations, and in-the-moment feedback.  

Organizations use different parameters and tools to assess their employees. The assessments used are based on functional goals, developmental goals, innovation goals, stretch goals, or any other goals customized to the organizational needs. Irrespective of the tools you use, when it is time to assess your employees, do you rely on the data or by your perception of the person?  

As fair and factual as you believe your assessments are, you might actually be guilty of some “rater biases” that can skew your evaluations. 

• Assess if you are too lenient or halo in your evaluations 

• Find whether your evaluations are based on recency or similarity 

• Examine if you are driven by contrast or negative bias 

• Identify the central tendency and employ a technique to be objective during your evaluations

McKinsey’s 7-S model was created by McKinsey consultants Robert Waterman, Tom Peters, Richard Pascale, and Anthony Athos. It provides a framework to plan and execute mid-term organizational change. It is based on the premise that organizations perform properly when seven key elements are aligned. 

The seven key elements are structure, strategy, systems, skills, style, staff, and shared values. The model is most often used as an organizational analysis tool to assess and monitor changes in the internal situation of an organization.

• List the seven elements of McKinsey’s change model 

• Identify the hard and soft elements of the factors of change 

• Use the model to change organizational behavior 

• State the advantages and disadvantages of the model

Understanding customer motivation is both a science and an art. Purchasing decisions are based on a wide variety of rational and emotional factors. Besides becoming familiar with motivational models—the sales process and typical purchasing behaviors—you should also practice ongoing customer research. This research will help you identify changes in markets, competitors, products, and customer motivations. The more you understand the underlying principles that determine buying decisions, the more you will be able to satisfy existing customers, attract new ones, and develop the products and services they want.

• Explain the factors that influence purchasing decisions

• Determine how customers make buying decisions

• Use research methods/tools to understand customers

When writing business emails, letters, memos, and other communications, it’s important to check for any grammar or spelling errors that can distract from your message. Misspelled words and grammatical errors are easy to fix if you make a habit of using the spellcheck and grammar features on your computer. In this course, we will review basic punctuation rules. We will examine some common sentence structure mistakes. And we’ll study some common word choice errors. Finally, we’ll provide a list of online resources and books. Don’t let grammar and word choice errors blur your message or damage your credibility.

• Use appropriate punctuations    

• Improve your sentence structure    

• Identify the common mistakes in word usage

Coaching is a process, which the leaders use to help employees become more independent. There are many coaching programs available to managers these days. But the good leaders implement The COACH Model in coordination with a coaching philosophy that includes mentoring, constant two-way communication, and continuous feedback. The COACH Model is a five-step program that walks a leader through the process of coaching an associate from setting a goal to measuring their success at the end of the process. 

• Describe the effectiveness of the COACH Model 

• Explain the need to clarify goals 

• Identify obstacles and explore alternatives through brainstorming 

• Choose an action and hold the accountability

There are three business languages managers need to understand in order to make the best decisions. These languages are accounting, finance, and economics. Leaders use these languages to see how their company has performed in the past (accounting), plan how the company should move forward (finance), and predict how outside influences will affect their plan (economics). The benefits of having a working knowledge of these three languages include being able to understand and communicate with others in he organization about financial issues, making decisions that align with overall corporate goals and strengthening your value to the company.

• Make better business decisions based on accounting 

• Use historical financial performance data to plan for the future 

• Educate yourself to make better financial, accounting, and economic decisions

As a person at a leading position, have you ever assessed your effectiveness as a coach? Although, coaching your team is the most underrated roles you play, it is the most important role too. This course addresses the five strategies used by effective coaches. Assess your skills against these five strategies and enhance your abilities to sharpen your coaching skills.

• Listen more to your team and talk less 

• Provide timely feedback to your team 

• Set up your team to win 

• Cheer your team 

• Provide your team with the right resources

Courage is the ability and willingness to act in spite of fear. Many of us avoid talking about bias, racism, and white privilege because we are afraid. We are afraid of not knowing what to say; afraid of being judged, or afraid of the change these conversations may produce. To have a courageous conversation about race is to engage in necessary dialogue despite fear.

Authentic conversations are the first step toward personal awakening and creating an environment where meaningful change can occur. Fear and anger are common examples of emotional feedback that can arise when faced with unfamiliar or uncomfortable topics. Finding the courage to acknowledge those emotions is the first step. Engaging in open, constructive dialogue with people who may not share your views nor your life experiences is the way forward.

• How to prepare for a courageous conversation?

• What are the practical tips for conducting a courageous conversation?

• How to address conflict if it arises during the courageous conversation?

"“A goal properly set is halfway reached.” 

-Zig Ziglar was an American author, salesman, and motivational speaker 

In this course, we will explore cascading goals. Organizations have used cascading goals in its performance management process for decades. The purpose of cascading goals is to ensure that individual goals align with organizational objectives. We will examine some approaches used by organizations to cascade goals. We will also explore why some organizations are now turning this process upside down.

• Describe the two approaches of cascading goals from top to bottom 

• List the disadvantages of the top to bottom approach 

• Describe the bottom to top approach and identify its disadvantages

How to great in the new world.

The focus of your call center may be to generate sales or to handle customer service, either way, your department has an important role in the organization. The call center team is the face of the company for the customer, hence plays a crucial role in customer handling. Call centers generate a high turnover, which makes it even more important to exhibit consistent management and strong leadership to avoid attrition and to increase productivity and response time. 

In this lesson, let’s look at some ways that you can develop and maintain a happy, productive, and motivated call center team.

• Hire and train the right professional 

• Measure, monitor, and motivate your employees 

• Reward and affirm your team

Being a successful virtual leader takes a lot more energy than a face-to-face leader. It is also important to keep each employee engaged in a “high-touch” environment. Leadership qualities such as communication, coaching, feedback, and professional development are important, yet it is how you deliver these qualities can be challenging. Virtual life has its pros and cons, hence it is important to have strong communication skills through effective virtual meetings that allow all employees to contribute. 

• Identify ways to create a high-touch environment

• Enlist the elements of a successful virtual environment

• Demonstrate leading change in a virtual environment

• Determine factors in creating successful virtual teams

Microaggressions are one aspect on the spectrum of racism. They are interpersonal, everyday occurrences that have a significant impact. When faced with the need to eradicate racism in our society, it can feel like an overwhelming task. Understanding the macro effects of microaggressions, and how to address them, is a great place to start.

• What is a microaggression and examples?

• What are the macro effects of microaggressions?

• How do we address microaggressions in the workplace?

The success of a product or services organization is dependent on how effectively their sales team sells. The ability of a company's sales reps to “win” at each stage of the selling process, and ultimately earn the business on the right terms and in the right timeframe, determines the sales team’s effectiveness. In this course, you will get familiarized with the importance of cold calling, it’s key principles and the tips and trick of mastering the subject.

• Define cold calling

• Identify key principles of effective cold-calling

• Enlist the tips to master cold calling