Leadership Curriculums

Vital Learning’s Leadership Essentials and Leadership Plus offer the most comprehensive approach available to the leadership challenges of today. Our online courses and classroom materials address the recurring management challenges every leader confronts on a daily basis, providing leaders with the skills they need to be an effective leader in today’s complex work environment.

Our modules are practical not intellectual, supplying new and experienced leaders with down to earth “how to” techniques and strategies to improve the performance of the teams they lead.


"Vital Learning is by far the best partner for providing
Supervision training for our employees. The course
materials are solid. The classes are easy to facilitate.
The exercises guarantee participation."   Read more.

Tiffany Landrum
VP, Training & Development, Financial Institute

Leadership Essentials - available Online, Classroom, BlendedLeadership Essentials

All 12 leadership modules include pre-tests, post-tests and skill practices. Each can be customized to reflect your specific business or industry. Videos in all modules represent today’s workplace environments and scenarios.

Essential Skills of Leadership

Maintain and Enhance Team Member Self-Esteem
This is probably the single most important skill a manager or team leader can have. It is the ability to provide direction, evaluate performance, correct work habits, deal with complaints, and resolve conflicts while supporting a team member’s sense of self-respect and dignity.
Focus on Behavior
Problems on the job are solved more effectively and less stressfully when managers and team leaders deal with what people do rather than with their attitudes or personal characteristics.
Encourage Team Member Participation
Involving team members in decision-making, problem solving, and other non-routine, on-the-job activities are one of the manager’s or team leader’s key motivational tools.

Essential Skills of Communicating

Create a Climate of Open Communication
The bedrock of good communication is openness—the extent to which the organization and its people support the free exchange of open, honest communication. Openness contributes more to a positive communication climate than any other factor.
Design Clear, Concise Messages
Messages that are well designed are clear and concise. Managers and team leaders need to organize their thoughts and speak to each team member’s level of understanding.
Manage Nonverbal Behaviors Effectively
Voice tone, intonation, facial expressions, gestures, and posture are some of the nonverbal factors that managers and team leaders must understand and learn to use for effective communication.
Listen to Communicate
Effective communication cannot take place without effective listening, which includes the ability to reflect, probe, support, and advise.

Improving Work Habits
Absenteeism . . . Repeated tardiness . . . Conduct . . .Dress code. If your team leaders are faced with these or other work habit issues, this module will show them how to address these issues. Merely quoting company regulations to the noncompliant worker will not solve the problem. The truly effective team leader immediately addresses poor work habits in a supportive, non-threatening way.

Providing Performance Feedback
This module shows the way evaluation is done by the experts. First, relevant performance standards are established. Then, the team member’s own performance evaluation is solicited. This accomplished, the stage is set for a summary evaluation that will be clear and credible to the team member.

Resolving Conflicts
Whenever people work together, conflicts arise. They may be simple misunderstandings that your managers and team leaders can clear up. Or they may reveal subtle, but pervasive, morale problems that threaten to tear the delicate fabric of your organization. This module shows managers and team leaders how to explore a conflict and get to the heart of the problem to correct it before it’s too late.

Communicating Up
Most managers and team leaders realize the importance of upward communication, but few accept the responsibility for the quality and effectiveness of communicating with their own managers. Managers and team leaders will learn how to frame communication so that a desired result is achieved.

Supporting Change
As the link between management goals and the frontline labor force, the manager or team leader is the key to supporting change. Dealing with the “comfort level” of team members and involving them in detailed discussions will facilitate their acceptance of new ways of doing things. This module shows managers and team leaders how to introduce change without inducing defensive reactions.

Managing Complaints
As the leaders on the front line, managers and team leaders are often the first to hear team member complaints. And though sometimes they may seem to they may seem to be unimportant, each complaint should be addressed and resolved. This module shows how to resolve simple complaints and identify the “hidden agendas” that so often underlie the chronic grievances.

Delegating
This module gives valuable insights into and practice of the “Three W’s” of effective delegation: When should team leaders delegate?; Whom should they delegate to?; and What explanation should they give to team members? Delegating also shows how to use delegation as a motivational tool, and improve team members’ skills.

Developing Performance Goals and Standards
Unless your managers and team leaders are successful in spelling out the organization’s specific goals, their team members are not going to know how to meet those objectives. This module shows trainees how to establish specific, measurable, attainable, result-oriented, and time-framed performance standards. It then illustrates the steps that gain team member agreement and commitment to those performance standards.

Coaching Job Skills
Upon completion of this module, the team leader will have the skills to conduct a successful meeting with a team member on how to perform a job, task or skill. The team leader will also learn how to distinguish between performance problems that require coaching and those that can best be handled by some other means.

Effective Discipline
Most of us dislike having to discipline team members. Discipline team members because feelings can be easily hurt and resentment can linger for a long time. The skills your managers and team leaders will learn in Effective Discipline will preserve team members’ self respect and egos while changing the unacceptable behavior. This process encourages the best kind of discipline-self-discipline. It also motivates team members to accomplish their goals and work well within the organization.

Leadership Plus - available Online, Classroom, Blended
Leadership Essentials

A growing curriculum of 5 new modules offering strategic capabilities every leader needs to raise their performance to the highest level.

Retaining Winning Talent  (8 Hour Classroom)
To remain competitive today, you have to hire truly talented people and then you have to keep them. Turnover is not only costly in terms of replacement expense; it impacts productivity and it is demoralizing to other time members when they see team members leaving the organization. This program teaches the skills that help team leaders rate the attrition risk of each team member, surface individual team members’ retention needs and develop a Retention Action Plan designed to increase retention for the entire team.

Hiring Winning Talent   (8 Hour Classroom, Online/Blended)
Hiring top quality employee’s, employees’ who rapidly get up to speed and who remain with the organization for substantial time, doesn’t happen based on guesswork. It happens by applying the powerful, structured, analytical process approach taught in this two-module program. Performance will increase, hiring will take less time, and there will be fewer new hires to hire when your leaders complete this program.

Developing and Coaching Others (4 Hour Classroom with Video)
Focuses on how a team leader can effectively and successfully develop and coach others to become better and more consistent performers. Team leaders will be provided with skills and strategies to guide their team members through a learning process, with specific tactics to help them "before," "during," and "after" training to ensure that behavior change is achieved. Team leaders will also be provided with a "coaching moments" model to help their teams gain understanding and insight about their actions in a way that supports self-awareness with opportunities to learn and improve.

Motivating Team Members  (4 Hour Classroom, Online/Blended)
Can leaders directly motivate their team members? Does each of us motivate ourselves? Can a leader influence the work environment to motivate improved performance? This program provides an introduction to basic motivation theory that establishes the positive relationship between motivating and achieving results. It helps leaders understand what they can do to create an improved work environment that will motivate members of their team.

Solving Workplace Problems  (4 Hour Classroom)
Solving Workplace Problems doesn’t focus only on addressing problems that occur, it also addresses how to look at current practices to design them to be more efficient and effective. SWP presents a five-step methodology to identify and solve critical workplace problems. No leader will be fully capable without understanding this methodology.

Leading Successful Projects  (16 Hour Classroom)
Leading Successful Projects provides the structure, process, and tools necessary to master the art and science of project management. This four-module program enables managers to identify and work with the key variables that impact how projects are defined, planned and implemented.