The Leadership Conference

This track is focused on identifying your unique leadership strengths, discovering ways to lift your team members when morale starts to sag, creating a solid team framework, boosting your leadership confidence, and inspiring creativity. As a result, you'll be prepared to influence, motivate, communicate, and coach for maximum productivity.

• Session 1: Define and Fine-Tune Your Leadership Role

  It's getting harder than ever to tell who has responsibility for what as structures and process are redefined and reconfigured … only to be revamped all over again. Today's progressive companies have discovered the benefits of having employees move in and out of various leadership roles. This session provides the tools to smooth out the transition.

  • Use proven leadership roles to make the most of today's changing organizations
  • Learn to distinguish leadership roles by their contribution to business
  • How "action," "influence," and "motivation" define a leader
  • Why different kinds of leaders are needed in today's ever changing workplace
• Session 2: Become a Confident Leader

  Eager to find out what it takes to motivate and inspire your staff and team members to greater success? Don't miss this session focusing on developing team members, cultivating and using influence, and using communication techniques designed to lead others.

  • What motivates — and de-motivates — people
  • Creative ways to use performance challenges to build team loyalty and genuine morale
  • How to read your teammates' attitudes and behaviors — and use what you learn for the good of the team
  • Ways to foster a positive and spirited team attitude that encourages everyone to give 110%
  • How to rally people behind your leadership — and get them to follow you willingly and enthusiastically
• Session 3: Implement Communication Strategies for Leaders

  In this session, you'll explore the ins and outs of communication. You'll take away valuable techniques and examples successful teams have used to overcome communication obstacles by building open dialogue and using disagreement as a positive force.

  • Assess your current communication techniques using our fail-proof checklist
  • Deal with the anxieties, doubts, and self-questioning every new team experiences
  • Recognize the signs of "groupthink" and prevent your team from falling into this trap
  • Create an environment where team members feel free to ask for help, exchange ideas, admit to mistakes, and share opinions
  • Overcome barriers to productive communication
• Session 4: Embrace Challenges with Level-Headed Confidence

  Gain the skills you need to handle the challenges and conflicts every leader faces, so you can approach problems effectively, take charge, and keep emotions and situations under control. You'll uncover new competencies that are sure to boost your confidence in everything you do.

  • How to build strength in your 3 most critical areas
  • Why it's so valuable to encourage open and honest debate — and how to do it without causing harm or creating enemies
  • The key formula to ensure you'll make consistently good decisions
  • Keeping a cool head and controling your judgment even when you're under fire
  • Which decisions should — and should not — require your team's consensus

This track helps give you a working knowledge of how to "play the game" to get the resources you want for your team, gain recognition for their efforts, and establish yourself as a leader who has the good of the organization at heart. You'll also find out how to offer praise to those who deserve it and constructive criticism to those who need it.

• Session 1: Utilize Feedback and Direction: How it Works and Why It's Important

  In this session, you'll learn how to provide team feedback and direction in a way that motivates and leads teams to success. You'll discover how to provide constructive team criticism, create learning experiences from team failures, and decide when to step in — and when to keep quiet.

  • The feedback cycle: effective ways to give and receive feedback
  • Key measures and benchmarks you can use to assess the development and progress of your team
  • The value of stepping back gradually allowing your team to reach its own conclusions and map its own actions
  • Clever remedies for "snipers" — team members that use "put downs" to make other team members look bad
  • How to turn successes and failures into training opportunities
• Session 2: Overcome Team Conflict

  Learn how to identify the most common types of team conflict, along with techniques and strategies for a team approach to discipline. You'll also find out how to resolve conflict between team members and how to teach team members to resolve team differences on their own.

  • Valuable tips for resolving conflict, handling change, and motivating others
  • Sound guidelines that pinpoint conflict within a team, and lead you to firm and quick solutions
  • The main sources of team conflict; five styles of handling conflict and when, why, and how to use them
  • Seven steps to confronting — and resolving — team conflicts
  • New approaches to conflict resolution that will clear the air and give your team members the fresh start they need
• Session 3: Develop Individual Team Members

  A leader's role is to nurture the individual strengths of team members. Learn to coach team members who are not pulling their weight or who are exhibiting inappropriate behavior. Find out how to develop team members for greater team contribution.

  • Effective approaches that help you handle the most difficult people on your team
  • A fail-safe process that prevents back-stabbers and trouble-makers from disrupting team unity
  • Why focusing on the process — not the person — is the most constructive criticism
  • Strategies team leaders use to get the best of each team member
• Session 4: Think Outside the Box and Develop Creativity in Yourself and Others

  Have no doubt — you DO have a creative bone in your body, and so does your team. In this entertaining, mind-stretching session you'll learn how easy and fun it is to nurture an environment of creativity where inspiration grows. Discover how to tap into your imagination and unlock your creativity to find new solutions to old problems.

  • Ways to unleash and nurture the creative genius in those around you
  • Rewarding "creative weirdness", encouraging risk taking, and applauding failure
  • How you can make innovation a performance requirement
  • Proven advice for team "brainstorming" sessions that produce more good ideas than you ever thought possible
  • Why "visual thinking" is essential for the most innovative team meetings — and how to get everyone to see better ideas and solutions