Recommended Learning Tracks in Transform

In this Kickoff course, participants will learn the foundations of the Best-Self Management philosophy, the “why,” and the science behind several of the keys to thriving and human potential. Understanding these concepts will underpin the skill sets managers will be developing throughout the Manager Accelerator. In particular, managers will learn how and why understanding and consistently incorporating these keys to thriving and human potential creates the foundation for highly engaged, high-performing teams and organizations.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the relationship between individual thriving & organizational performance and engagement.
• Identify strategies for creating wellness for themselves, in their relationships, and in their work culture.
• Create a learning goal (or self-development objective) to define how they aim to grow as a leader.

Cultivating Relational Mastery is a core practice of our Best-Self Management philosophy, where every employee demonstrates genuine care about their team members. Managers will learn to ensure their team feels seen and heard in order to support their growth and performance. In this course, participants will learn foundational skills for effective relating and for creating and sustaining psychological safety to build strong professional relationships and creative, innovative teams and organizations. They’ll also learn the practice of the Best-Self Kickoff to build sturdy relational foundations.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the relationship between psychological safety and high performance.
• Gain strategies to increase psychological safety in their workplace relationships.
• Apply the Best-Self Kickoff to strengthen relationships with employees.
• Gain awareness of relational energy and its implications for strong relationships and performance.

Clear expectations are the most basic and fundamental employee needs. Role Clarity is a key mechanism for creating the psychological safety required for innovative, nimble teams. In this course, participants will understand their responsibility to ensure clarity around roles and responsibilities. They will gain strategies to help their teams create clarity in project-based roles as well as in their role on a greater team or within the greater organization.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand how role clarity and psychological safety affect performance.
• Gain strategies to create effective role and performance agreements.
• Learn frameworks that clarify and align teams on project-based role clarity.

As a manager, goals are a powerful mechanism for motivating your people and aligning your team to accomplish extraordinary results for your organization. This course equips managers with the skills to create impactful goals to motivate their team and drive towards measurable outcomes. Participants will learn to design inspiring goals, support their team in executing and progressing towards them, and foster a culture of autonomy matched with accountability.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand how a personal growth mindset impacts learning and performance.
• Identify their own intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.
• Gain strategies to set effective SMART goals, OKRs, Breakthrough Goals, and Learning Goals.
• Identify common challenges in goal setting.
• Gain strategies on how to set context, motivate, and make agreements for goal progress.
• Understand the importance of aligning individual goals with department goals.
• Gain strategies for weekly prioritization (eg. deep work, navigating whirlwinds).
• Gain strategies to support team members in re-goaling when priorities shift.

This course focuses on learning evidence-inspired practices to facilitate better conversations by sharing what you saw, heard, or noticed without layering judgments, assumptions, and inferences. Managers will learn the skill sets needed to deliver constructive feedback and redirection required for mindset or behavior change. They will practice the 15Five Best-Self Feedback model aimed at creating a safe and productive feedback conversation.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand how requesting feedback creates psychological safety.
• Gain strategies to receive feedback well.
• Gain strategies on how to give Feedback for Redirection (eg. observations, Non-violent Communication).
• Gain strategies for making agreements towards new action.

As a leader, 1-on-1s are one of the most important tools in your leadership tool kit to keep your people engaged, productive, and high-performing. In this course, we’ll start by talking about the importance of having a one-time kickoff meeting at the start of your working relationship, before you even begin your continuous 1-on-1s. And then we'll go into what a successful 1-on-1 framework looks like. We’ll discuss how to prepare for your 1-on-1 meetings and how essential it is to relate and connect personally.

Learning Outcomes:

• Learn effective frameworks to guide 1-on-1s.
• Gain strategies for building strong relationships during 1on1s (relating, psych. safety, role clarity).
• Gain strategies for leading continuous and effective dialogue during 1-on-1s (goals, feedback, growth, actions).
• Understand how to utilize asynchronous check-ins to supplement 1-on-1s.

A focus on career growth is one of the most effective ways to help individuals and teams to thrive. In this course, participants will learn how to identify, cultivate, and leverage their strengths, values, and passions to ultimately build an aligned vision for their career growth. Applying these skills to their own growth will inform their ability to support growth conversations with their employees.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the importance of supporting the use of strengths at work.
• Identify top strengths, values, and passions and apply them to your role/work.
• Gain strategies to lead strengths-alignment discovery and career growth planning conversations with their direct reports.

In this course, managers learn about delivering positive feedback effectively. They begin by understanding the power of positivity and why it’s so crucial to intentionally create positivity in our team cultures at work. Then, there will be opportunities to practice specific skills such as effectively recognizing and encouraging people.  Managers will dive into a practice called strength spotting, the process by which we call out and reinforce people for their individual strengths and the impact of those strengths.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the negativity bias and the value of implementing a higher positivity ratio in feedback.
• Gain strategies to provide feedback to build strong relationships (eg. Strengths-Spotting, Active Constructive Responding).
• Understand the value of continual and strategic encouragement.

Managing performance is a manager’s primary responsibility, but how does one effectively manage the performance of various individuals to create the most engaged and high-performing team? In this course, managers will become familiar with the blueprint of continuous performance management. They will gain strategies to fairly and objectively measure and assess performance and to have growth-based conversations with their people.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the value of clear agreements for fair reviews (company compensation policy, performance agreements).
• Identify common biases that impact performance reviews.
• Gain strategies to fairly assess performance (results, competencies).
• Gain strategies to have strengths-based growth and development conversations (eg. bi-annual, separate compensation conversations).
• Gain strategies to lead action planning conversation (eg. coaching up, coaching out)

Coaching really matters when it comes to producing higher levels of performance and engagement on your teams. It also has the power in deepening your connection with your people both personally and professionally. This course is designed to give you some powerful and actionable insights into how to become a better coach. These lessons will be dissecting what it means to go from a Manager to a Coach, and the shift in thinking and approach that is required for you to become a truly effective coach to your people.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the directive, situational and non-directive approaches to leading people.
• Gain strategies to apply non-directive coaching (eg. open-ended questions, active listening).
• Gain and demonstrate coaching competencies through mock peer coaching exercises.

In today’s global workforce, diversity is a competitive advantage. In this course, managers will learn a shared language to more effectively talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. They will get a chance to explore aspects of their own identity a necessary element in Being and Becoming their Best. Finally, they will learn how to bring inclusion into meetings in order to tap into the power of collective intelligence.

Learning Outcomes:

• Develop definitions for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
• Understand how DEIB impacts employee engagement, performance, and innovation.
• Identify important aspects of their own identity.
• Gain strategies to demonstrate inclusion and build psychological safety in team meetings.

In current times, “burnout” has become a blanket term to describe many experiences at work. But what is burnout? And how do we prevent it? In this course, managers will explore the stress landscape and learn how certain types of stress may lead to burnout. They will be able to define and identify symptoms of burnout as well as the causes that may be present in the workplace. Finally, they will learn about their responsibility in preventing burnout on their teams and gain strategies to keep their team members healthy and engaged.

Learning Outcomes:

• Gain awareness of inequities involved in workplace stress.
• Understand the distinction between eustress and distress & their implications for burnout.
• Identify the leading symptoms of burnout.
• Gain strategies to prevent burnout for themselves and for their team members.

A feedback culture is foundational for any team to grow, adapt, and perform. Managers will gain a comprehensive understanding of feedback and its importance in team performance and engagement. Learn about the power of preparation and different dimensions of feedback. Explore ways to identify and address biases that may distort perceptions and hinder objectivity. Address the emotional challenges of feedback and learn how cultivating a growth mindset leads to more effective feedback.

Learning Outcomes:

• Learn practices that normalize and integrate continuous feedback as an aspect of team culture.
• Identify biases that distort our perceptions, and learn how to minimize them for fairer feedback.
• Practice making specific and observational statements instead of judgments.
• Help yourself and your team be more receptive to feedback

In this course, we explore some of the most challenging and powerful aspects of feedback and what techniques result in healthy & high-performing teams. Participants will learn about the importance of recognition for boosting motivation and encouraging positive behaviors. They'll also learn how to create psychological safety when giving feedback, including a framework to help you handle difficult conversations with confidence and constructive action. Finally, discover the power of coaching as a leadership skill to help team members in their growth and development.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand and combat ‘negativity bias’ with the practice of strengths-spotting to build a positive feedback culture.
• Create the conditions for a psychologically safe conversation by identifying triggers and learning practices to restore safety.
• Gain techniques for having difficult conversations with empathy and constructive action.
• Develop coaching skills, including the use of open-ended questions and deep listening

Feedback is most effective when it considers and adapts to its audience. In this course, we’ll explore additional ways to hone the practice of feedback specific to different working relationships and scenarios. Learn how to have critical conversations whenever conflict arises, while creating regular space for peer and upward feedback. Participants will also discover methods for bringing a deeper cultural awareness to their conversations which involve feedback.

Learning Outcomes:

• Use a conversational framework specifically for addressing and resolving conflict with coworkers.
• Share wins, challenges, and learnings as part of a group peer feedback practice.
• Discover how culture can influence preferences for feedback.
• Learn and apply practices that help to identify and honor differences in feedback needs.

In this course, gain insight into understanding motivation, cultivating a belief in achievability, creating SMART Goals & OKRs, and implementing focused strategies with measurable progress.

Learning Outcomes:

• Develop the ability to articulate and clarify personal and organizational goals, understanding the intrinsic motivations that drive commitment.
• Learn the importance of strategic planning, time management, and breaking down big goals into manageable steps for efficient and focused achievement.
• Understand SMART Goals and OKR goal-setting methodologies to foster alignment and collaboration within teams

As a leader, creating goals for your team is just the beginning of achieving them. In this course, you will learn how to take what they’ve identified as essential success measures within goals and move towards execution with their team.

From fleshing out strategic initiatives using team input, to identifying dependencies and constraints to reduce roadblocks early on. Participants will learn how to get stakeholder alignment for goals, while considering values alignment to minimize unintended consequences.

Learning Outcomes:

• Develop skills to translate goals into actionable plans through engaging team brainstorming.
• Master the identification and management of dependencies and constraints in project goals.
• Acquire techniques for creating consensus and buy-in among key stakeholders
• Understand the crucial link between goals, values, and ethical behavior, ensuring responsible leadership.

Goals exist in a changing world. Effective managers are not only skilled at setting goals, but in consistently managing goal progress over time. In this course, participants will learn to establish effective team meetings for goal tracking, tackle roadblocks collaboratively, and conduct insightful retrospective meetings that highlight wins and learnings to ensure goals improve over time.

Learning Outcomes:

• Develop a structured team progress meeting plan to track goal progress effectively.
• Learn how to personalize your communication for different stakeholders and leaders.
• Apply the Fierce Confrontation model to collaboratively address roadblocks and expedite progress.
• Conduct “retrospectives” to celebrate wins, learn from challenges, and rally team members around new goals.