Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

As a leader, you are always influencing others. However, if you’re not mindful of how you exert this influence, it could lead to unforeseen consequences for yourself and your team. Your ability to negatively impact someone’s performance, or elevate it to new levels, is powerful and should be taken seriously. 

In this course, Professor Allan Filipowicz discusses how your beliefs drive your subordinates’ performance. You’ll learn how to identify negative and positive expectancy cycles and get the tools needed to reverse the former and accelerate the latter.
 

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Recognize conditions under which expectancy effects play a role in driving another person’s performance
• Modify your leadership micro-behaviors to reverse negative and accelerate positive expectancy effects 
• Make better task allocation decisions
• Combine positive and negative feedback to maximize performance

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Advancing to a more senior leadership role requires a specific set of skills. Senior leaders must shift away from tactical oversight into a more strategic and visionary role. This transition does not occur naturally and is often not a part of standard professional training, development, or onboarding. The ability to adapt to this mindset is crucial and can lead to the success or failure of an individual and/or their team.

In this course, current and potential leaders will be guided through this transition by Kate Walsh, Professor and Dean of the School of Hotel Administration, as she shares her professional expertise and research. Learners will create a personal leadership strategy and build a professional network within their organization to prepare and further their roles in the organization.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Identify distinguishing differences between managing your team and leading within your organization
• Convert these differences into a personal leadership strategy for current success
• Design a growth and development plan to chart out your future success
• Build your professional network within your organization and gain exposure to areas outside of your direct domain

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Given the ever-increasing demands of the VUCA world in which we live and work today, agile leaders need effective ways of gaining commitment to their organization's vision and strategy. Even if a leadership team has an established vision and strategy, you still need buy-in at all levels of the organization. Led by General George W. Casey, Jr., this rigorous, outcomes-driven course will help you build a high-performing team that can consistently carry out the organization's vision and strategy.

In this course, you will evaluate and describe three ways to build commitment to your vision and strategy, and use those techniques to outline a plan that cultivates complete buy-in. You will create a plan that identifies specific ways to build your team's commitment to excellence. Finally, you will assess the inclusiveness of your organization's current environment and formulate a plan to both strengthen inclusion and drive excellence.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Build your high-performing team to execute your organization's vision and strategy
• Build your team's commitment to the vision statement
• Set up channels of communications with your team to support the VUCA conditions

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Managers who are seen practicing what they preach and following through on promises enjoy dramatically enhanced credibility and loyalty. They inspire workers to perform well and even to go beyond what is asked of them. Credibility is not all it takes to be successful, but no trust or meaningful relationship with those you manage can happen without it.

This course, developed by Professor Tony Simons, Ph.D. of Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, focuses on this critical element of leadership, and helps students develop the awareness, skills and habits necessary for mastering it.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Assess your credibility and trustworthiness as perceived by subordinates and others in the organization
• Detect and address impediments to your credibility with subordinates, superiors, and others with whom you interact professionally
• Develop and practice habits of reflection and time management to confidently make and keep commitments
• Build and foster a culture of mutual accountability among your team

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

In this course you will define and differentiate between leadership and management, develop a strategy for overcoming new leadership challenges, and evaluate motivational techniques and determine when to use them. You will also identify the skills needed to develop relationships crucial to your career development as a leader, based on the research and expertise of Professor Kate Walsh, Ph.D. of Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration.

Using tools provided in this course, you will explore what motivates others, assess leadership styles, and examine communication with your leadership team. With the completion of an action plan at the end of the course, you will be ready to apply what you learn to your own organization.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Define and differentiate between leadership and management
• A strategy for overcoming new leadership challenges
• Evaluate motivational techniques and determine when to use them
• Identify the skills and relationships you need to develop that are crucial to your career development as a leader

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Being able to influence others is the most fundamental characteristic of an effective leader, but many people in positions of power don’t know specifically how they are influencing others’ behavior in positive directions. They let it happen by chance or use their formal authority—getting people to do things because “the boss said so.” But as leaders gets promoted within their organization, using formal authority becomes less effective as they not only need to influence subordinates, but also peers, external stakeholders, and superiors. 

In this course, Professor Filipowicz explores the three complementary levels of influence. First, you will explore heuristics, or rules of thumb, that people use in order to make decisions. Next, you will learn how to influence through reciprocity by uncovering what the person you want to influence wants and needs. Lastly, you will learn how to alter the social and physical environment in order to get the change in behavior you want. By the end of this course, you’ll have the skills to consistently draw out the desired behaviors from your team and from those around you. 

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Understand heuristics (people’s mental shortcuts/rules of thumb) and how to use it to influence others while guarding yourself 
• Use the principles of reciprocity to influence others for mutually beneficial outcomes
• Change the social and physical environment to influence others 

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Leaders are responsible for encouraging the highest possible performance from their employees.  Most leaders recognize that motivation is a key driver of high performance. Few leaders are skilled at choosing the right combination of approaches and tools to motivate all of their people. Cornell University Professor Risa Mish provides a learning experience that builds on the important premise that not all individuals are motivated by the same things, and some might be demotivated by the same conditions or incentives that motivate others. This course prepares leaders to analyze performance problems and assess whether they actually can be attributed to a lack of motivation or to one of several other root causes.

When students determine that poor workplace performance is indeed caused by a lack of motivation, they will use the motivation techniques that will be most effective for all the people involved. Leveraging the work of two American social psychologists to address the factors that may be demotivating people, students will learn how to increase the factors that do motivate people and improve workplace performance. Students will also use the three primary drivers of human motivation to foster better performance on the job.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Identify your personal primary driver for motivation
• Conduct a root-cause analysis for an individual with performance gaps  
• Evaluate factors that undermine employee motivation and engagement in your organization
• Use the three critical primary motivation drivers to tailor your approach to motivation
• Enhance the conditions for an individual that make optimal use of that person's key motivation driver

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

In this course, you will begin by focusing on service intangibles and consider the power of both customer perceptions and experience management in delivering exceptional service. The impact of sharing service stories and the benefits of fostering creative approaches to addressing service challenges are emphasized as participants consider how to facilitate a strong culture of service excellence. Providing phenomenal service requires empowered employees, and along with your fellow students, you will discuss methods of preparing employees to solve problems, make decisions, and address issues of service recovery. Then, you will consider how to best facilitate performance management practices including coaching and mentoring. A compassionate workplace fosters increased satisfaction and productivity, and the course concludes with suggestions for focusing on service employees' health and care.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Select service-centered employees
• Orient and socialize employees to practice high service standards
• Create a team-centered, collaborative culture
• Provide training that facilitates service excellence

Interacting with Others

CCOURSE OVERVIEW

In this course, you will learn when training is the right course of action and how you can design and deliver instruction  to meet your training needs. Professor Bradford Bell of Cornell's ILR School will take you from the analysis stage to the evaluation stage, as you explore training within your organization. In the process, you will conduct your own analysis, create a training plan, incorporate instructional events that facilitate learning transfer, and determine evaluation methods and measurements for your program.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• How to conduct a training needs analysis to identify current and future training needs within the organization
• Ways to choose training methods and technologies that are appropriate for learner population as well as the training content 
• How to facilitate the transfer of learning within the workplace, which includes marketing the program, securing manager and peer support  
• How to evaluate the success of training initiatives
• Ways to identify methodologies for calculating return on investment in training

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

A crisis can have a tremendous impact on the people involved and on an organization's performance and reputation, so it's important to communicate effectively in order to minimize negative consequences. Preparing for a crisis through the creation and ongoing analysis of a crisis communication plan can help minimize negative reactions and fallout. In this course, you will define crisis, paracrisis, and the goals of crisis communication. You will share your own experiences and practice identifying potential crises, creating a crisis communication plan, choosing a crisis communication team, and evaluating the plan.

A key component of preparing for a crisis is crafting messages for internal and external stakeholders. Messages must be quick, consistent, and open, and preparing initial statements ahead of time will help leaders and spokespersons communicate effectively during a crisis. You will examine the content of effective initial statements with the opportunity to review real-life examples, evaluating them for quality and success. You will practice addressing difficult questions and criticisms, exploring acceptable and graceful responses.

Once the crisis is over, it's important to review what worked well, what didn't, and to update the crisis communication plan for next time. Reflecting on a real life example, you will evaluate the response to the crisis and the crisis communication plan itself.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Analyze a crisis communication plan to ensure that the organization is prepared for potential crises 
• Respond to a paracrisis to prevent full crisis development
• Prepare internal and external messages to respond to stakeholders during a crisis
• Address questions and criticisms from internal and external stakeholders
• Evaluate crisis responses to identify plan improvement opportunities

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

The ability to effectively communicate about change in an organization is essential for success. Change is inevitable and people will be affected by it to varying degrees — even by positive change — so it's important to be able to communicate clearly. In this course, you will explore the different ways change can impact people, how communication can alleviate negative reactions, and how to work with resistance to change.
You will be introduced to formal communication plans, identifying the kinds of change that require documented plans and establishing the appropriate internal and external audiences that must be considered. You will then define the communication objectives for each audience, identifying their needs and discovering that each audience is distinct and may need different information at different times. Lastly, you will examine message strategy and timing, determining the content of the message, the forms of media that should be used for delivery, when to communicate with each audience, who the messenger will be, and the types of reactions to expect so that negative reactions can be effectively addressed and positive reactions can be encouraged.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Determine when change requires a formal communication plan
• Analyze internal and external audiences affected by anticipated changes 
• Define communication objectives for each of the audiences affected by change
• Determine message strategy and timing for an organizational change
• Create a communication plan for an organizational change

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Conflict on a team is unavoidable and necessary. In this course, you will explore strategies to encourage constructive conflict and to discourage destructive conflict. You will explore recommended negotiation techniques for managing conflict. You will then identify threats to communication, explore strategies to overcome those threats, and use those strategies productively on your virtual teams. One of the biggest challenges of a virtual team is figuring out who has what information and how to get it. You will identify strategies to manage information to help make decisions. By the end of this course you will have a toolbox of tips and strategies for maximizing the team's communication.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Assess and rate the type of conflict on your virtual team and reflect on ways to encourage positive and prevent negative conflict
• Use a questioning technique to explore the root causes of a conflict facing your team and come up with a plan to fix it
• Use negotiation to try to resolve an issue facing your team

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

In this course, you will identify the responsibilities of a service champion and the personal characteristics that contribute to effectiveness. The key skills required to assess, guide, and motivate service employees’ performance are presented. You will practice the competencies required for engaging your colleagues in creating a strong service culture. Self-assessments and tools provide you with direction in developing several of these skills to evaluate your leadership traits, such as your credibility and expression of empathy. A review of communication channels and characteristics enables you to select the most appropriate method of communicating service standards. A final project provides an opportunity for you to apply course concepts to your own organization to facilitate a strong service culture.

What’s a “service champion”? What do we mean by a “strong service culture”? In this course, you will identify what great customer service teams do so that you can practice and model the same skills, helping your team move from good to great.

Throughout this course you will practice modeling empathy, communication, curious discovery, and empowering others. This practice will give you the ability to empower others and empower your team to deliver excellent service that can be sustained over time.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Assess your personal competencies required for facilitating your employees’ service
• Develop service-focused leadership competencies to engage colleagues in creating a strong service culture
• Select appropriate communication channels by considering the audience, the message, and your overall communication strategy
• Develop clear action steps for improving key personal competencies

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

In this course, you will distinguish between the various components of a service culture and assess your current service environment. Using a case-based approach, this course will illustrate the importance of developing a strong service culture. You will reaffirm the importance of communicating a clear vision to both internal and external customers and share vision statements for your ideal service culture that reflect your organization's key values. Finally, you will identify workplace challenges and formulate an action plan to close gaps between specific components of your current and ideal service cultures.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Define service culture and identify the strategies used by culture leaders
• Define the characteristics and expectations of your target market that enable you to focus on activities that will delight customers
• Describe an ideal service culture for this market
• Assess the effectiveness of each component of your service culture so that you can plan for continuous improvement
• Develop an action plan for enhancing your service culture based on your assessments

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

In an increasingly competitive global environment, quality is no longer considered a nice-to-have luxury. It's a requirement for successfully competing and surviving in the marketplace. While the concepts, tools, and procedures for quality and process improvement are now universally recognized and firmly placed in a large number of high-performing organizations around the world, it was not always so. The importance of quality in organizations has gone through a complete evolutionary cycle. 

In this course, you will develop measures and standards of service quality, devise practices that improve employee learning and outcomes, and evaluate different approaches to process improvement, all based on the research and expertise of Cornell University Professor Rohit Verma, PhD. Using the tools provided in this course, you will be able to relate strategic decisions to their impact on organizational performance. And with the completion of an action plan at the end of the course, you will be ready to apply what you learn to your own organization.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Develop measures and standards of service quality that are consistent with the expectations of internal and external customers
• Devise employee-related practices that improve organizational learning and enhance service outcomes for customers
• Evaluate the trade-offs for leveraging different approaches to process improvement
• Recognize constraints of commonly used approaches for measuring financial performance and develop alternatives that promote sustained quality and service excellence

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

In today's workforce, adaptation and responsiveness are key elements in the success for an organization. As turnaround times shorten and demands increase, organizations must leverage teams to reach strategic goals and fulfill initiatives. Based on the expertise and research of Kate Walsh, PhD, students in this course will diagnose team needs, set expectations for development, utilize conflict to augment change, and build team autonomy to support leaders in embracing a more strategic focus.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Diagnose team skill sets and develop a plan to build synergy and collaboration
• Determine team expectations and goals
• Implement healthy team behaviors and functioning
• Facilitate team development

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Leaders at every level need to be able to execute on their ideas. In virtually every case, this means that leaders need to be able to persuade others to join in this execution. In order to do so, understanding how to create and utilize power in an organization is critical.In this course, developed by Professor Glen Dowell, Ph.D., of Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, students will focus on their personal relationship with power as well as how power works in their organization and social network.

Project Management Institute (PMI®) Continuing Certification: Participants who successfully complete this course will receive 6 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from PMI®. Please contact PMI ® for details about professional project management certification or recertification.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Assess how powerful you are within your professional circumstances
• Analyze what creates power and take stock of where power resides
• Analyze, enhance, and activate your network to achieve goals and improve your ability to exercise power
• Consider what constitutes responsible use of power and the limits of power

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Leaders are responsible for encouraging the highest possible performance from their employees.  Most leaders recognize that motivation is a key driver of high performance. Few leaders are skilled at choosing the right combination of approaches and tools to motivate all of their people. Cornell University Professor Risa Mish provides a learning experience that builds on the important premise that not all individuals are motivated by the same things, and some might be demotivated by the same conditions or incentives that motivate others. This course prepares leaders to analyze performance problems and assess whether they actually can be attributed to a lack of motivation or to one of several other root causes.

When students determine that poor workplace performance is indeed caused by a lack of motivation, they will use the motivation techniques that will be most effective for all the people involved. Leveraging the work of two American social psychologists to address the factors that may be demotivating people, students will learn how to increase the factors that do motivate people and improve workplace performance. Students will also use the three primary drivers of human motivation to foster better performance on the job.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Identify your personal primary driver for motivation
• Conduct a root-cause analysis for an individual with performance gaps  
• Evaluate factors that undermine employee motivation and engagement in your organization
• Use the three critical primary motivation drivers to tailor your approach to motivation
• Enhance the conditions for an individual that make optimal use of that person's key motivation driver

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

All leadership is change leadership. Good leadership isn't about stagnation; it's about moving ahead. In this course, Cornell University's Professor Samuel Bacharach, Ph.D., explores the fundamental, practical skills that effective leaders have mastered.

Effective change leaders do three things; they anticipate where things are moving, they facilitate the implementation of change, and they sustain momentum by taking charge and moving things ahead. Great change leaders know how to be both proactive and reactive, as Professor Bacharach explains. Students in this course will examine their own leadership styles and practice skills that will help them translate ideas into organizational results, find ways to overcome organizational inertia, and examine strategies for overcoming individual resistance to change.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Facilitate change by translating ideas into desired organizational results
• Identify the change process as it relates to organizations
• Identify ways to overcome organizational inertia
• Examine strategies for overcoming individual resistance to change
• Explore ways of anticipating and mitigating uncertainty

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

In this course, you will learn how to make disability inclusion an explicit part of your overarching business strategy. Starting with a a broad overview of the role HR professionals play in addressing this issue, you will maximize workplace disability inclusion and minimize disability discrimination across the employment process. You will discuss the importance of inclusion for people with disabilities, employers, and the business case for aligning disability inclusion with a company's strategic human-capital, diversity, and customer-service imperatives. You will also dive into the implications of effective HR policies and practices in the recruitment and hiring process, career development and retention initiatives, and compensation and benefits programs. Finally you will utilize metrics and analytics to measure the employee benefit of inclusion in your organization.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Emphasize the importance of a diverse workforce that includes individuals with disabilities
• Examine HR policies and practices that facilitate effective recruitment and hiring of individuals with disabilities
• Design and implement effective professional development, career advancement, performance management, and retention strategies for employees with disabilities
• Develop strategies to counteract the biases faced by employees with disabilities and create a climate of inclusion
• Use metrics to verify disability inclusion and equitable access to employment benefits
• Execute progressive workplace policies and practices to minimize disability discrimination and maximize disability inclusion throughout the employment process