Preparing for Leadership: What It Takes to Lead

Do you need leadership training to prepare you for your next big step? Learn how to get noticed, get selected for leadership roles, and develop the skills that genuinely confident leaders rely on.

This leadership training course is uniquely designed to help aspiring leaders prepare for the real challenges and responsibilities that come with leading others. You will discover what is at the heart, soul, and mind of authentic leadership. Through role-playing, self-assessment exercises, and realistic leadership scenarios, you will explore the full range of leadership functions: strategist, change agent, coach, manager, communicator, mentor, and collaborative team member. And you will learn how to develop and refine your own distinctive leadership style for maximum credibility and impact.

Who Should Attend:

Any manager who needs to develop leadership skills in preparation for stepping into a formal leadership role, or who is about to take on a significant new leadership assignment, and wants to arrive ready.

How You Will Benefit:

• Gain a clear and honest understanding of what effective leadership actually looks like, and what it does not
• Project a more dynamic, credible, and commanding professional presence
• Identify and begin developing your own distinctive leadership style
• Honestly assess which leadership attributes you already possess and which need deliberate development
• Step into your first leadership role with substantially greater confidence and self-awareness
• Learn how to communicate, carry yourself, and position yourself in ways that leaders in your organization will notice and remember
• Understand what the people you will lead genuinely expect and respect from those in authority
• Develop a more sophisticated approach to building and exercising power and influence in positive, productive ways
• Build skills for motivating a diverse team, including people who are resistant, difficult, or disengaged
• Recognize and protect yourself from the most common pitfalls of organizational politics

What You Will Cover:

• Is there a leader in you? Identifying and assessing your existing leadership qualities and potential
• What do leaders talk about? Developing a leadership communication style and building your authentic voice
• What is your leadership image? Projecting executive presence and establishing credibility
• How can you build influence and power? Understanding your sources of authority and how to use them well
• How can you develop the key relationships that will define your leadership effectiveness?
• How should you handle organizational politics? Understanding and participating without being corrupted by them
• How can you motivate people, including those who seem impossible to reach?
• What to do in the first day, week, month, and year of a leadership role

Course Outline

Learning Objectives

• Identify the qualities and characteristics of respected, effective leaders and begin building your own authentic leadership voice
• Gain practical insights into how to discover, develop, and pursue your own leadership style with intention
• Project a positive, trusted, and credible professional image in every leadership context
• Identify and use your available sources of power and influence productively and ethically
• Expand your professional network by developing key strategic relationships across your organization
• Engage effectively in organizational politics without compromising your integrity or your relationships
• Motivate team members of all types and avoid the most common demoralizing behaviors that undermine team trust

Who Is the Leader in You?

• Identify the qualities, skills, and behaviors that define effective leaders in high-performing organizations
• Conduct an honest self-assessment of your current proficiency with the qualities and skills of effective leadership

Leadership Styles and Communication

• Identify and understand the full range of leadership styles and when each is most appropriate
• Assess your own dominant leadership style and its impact on those around you
• Identify and consistently apply the communication patterns that the most effective leaders use
• Understand the types of subjects and conversations that leaders need to engage in to drive organizational direction
• Explain the value of clear, authentic vision, mission, and value statements in creating organizational alignment and energy
• Practice drafting vision, mission, and value statements that reflect your genuine leadership priorities

What Is Your Image as a Leader?

• Project executive presence: a positive, credible, and trusted professional image that inspires confidence in those you lead
• Understand the specific factors that build or damage trust in leadership relationships
• Establish and consistently demonstrate credibility and authenticity with your team, peers, and senior leaders
• Apply your self-knowledge to lead your own teams with greater clarity, empathy, and effectiveness

Relationships, Networking, Power, Influence, and Organizational Politics

• Identify the full range of sources of power and influence available to a leader in your organizational context
• Honestly assess your current level of power and influence and identify where the gaps are
• Develop a strategy for expanding your influence network through the cultivation of key professional relationships
• Understand the specific ways that effective leaders build power and influence over time, both up and across the organization
• Distinguish clearly between good political behavior, which advances the organization's interests, and bad politics, which undermines them
• Explain why leaders at every level must understand, engage with, and navigate organizational politics deliberately and skillfully
• Identify the different political structures and power dynamics that exist in your organization
• Develop specific strategies for gaining buy-in and support from others for your initiatives and agenda
• Engage constructively and professionally with adversaries and skeptics

How You Can Motivate and Mentor Others

• Identify practical, proven ways to motivate and engage your team members, including those who are disengaged or resistant
• Develop and practice the skills of a productive, effective coaching conversation
• Distinguish clearly between mentoring and coaching, and understand when each is the right approach
• Identify the characteristics of an excellent mentor and the conditions of a healthy, productive mentor-mentee relationship

Preparing for Your First Day, Week, Month, and Year as a Leader

• Develop a clear, strategic plan for how you will spend your first days in a new leadership role
• Identify the early wins, conversations, and relationships that will define your success in the first month
• Create a roadmap for your first year that balances learning and listening with decisive leadership action
• Design a personal strategy for getting noticed, getting selected, and making the most of your leadership opportunity when it arrives

Additional Seminar Features and Continuing Development

One of the most distinctive aspects of this leadership training course is its combination of intellectual rigor and practical application. Throughout the seminar, participants engage in role-playing exercises that simulate the real conversations and challenges leaders face, self-assessment tools that reveal both strengths and blind spots, peer learning discussions that bring multiple organizational perspectives into the room, and scenario-based leadership challenges that require you to apply what you have just learned under realistic pressure.

This is not a passive learning experience. It is an immersive one, designed to move you meaningfully forward in your leadership development, not just give you something to read on the plane home.

Certificate Programs include additional post-course resources to continue your development between formal learning events:

• On-demand lessons to reinforce the key leadership skills covered in the seminar
• Best practice skill refreshers to revisit and deepen specific areas of leadership capability
• Articles with practical, situation-specific tips and tactics for emerging leaders

What Separates the Leaders Who Rise from Those Who Stay Stuck

Research on leadership development consistently shows that the professionals who advance most successfully into leadership roles are not simply those with the most technical expertise. They are the ones who understood early on that leadership is a distinct set of skills, developed those skills deliberately, built the relationships and visibility required to be recognized as leadership material, and arrived at their first formal leadership role prepared to lead rather than still figuring out what leadership required of them.

This course accelerates that developmental process dramatically. By the time you leave, you will have a much clearer picture of the kind of leader you want to be, a realistic assessment of where you currently stand relative to that vision, and a specific, actionable plan for getting there.

Expanded Outline: Leadership Styles, Communication, and Executive Presence

Effective leaders do not communicate the way everyone else does. They speak with greater intention, listen with greater attention, and consistently choose words and approaches that serve their audience and their purpose rather than simply saying what comes to mind first. This section of the course goes deep into the communication habits that distinguish recognized leaders from capable but under-leveraged contributors.

• Understand the relationship between self-awareness and effective leadership communication
• Identify the communication patterns and topics that signal to others that you are already thinking and operating like a leader
• Practice adjusting your communication style in real time based on your audience, the stakes of the conversation, and the desired outcome
• Develop a personal brand as a communicator: a consistent, distinctive way of expressing your perspective that builds credibility and recognition over time
• Learn to use vision, mission, and values as active leadership tools rather than decorative organizational wallpaper

Expanded Outline: Power, Influence, and Navigating Organizational Politics

Power is not a dirty word in leadership development. It is a resource, and like all resources, it needs to be developed, invested wisely, and used with judgment and restraint. This section explores the full map of power that is available to you in an organizational context and helps you build and deploy it in ways that advance both your goals and the goals of the organization.

• Understand the six classical sources of power in organizational contexts and which ones are most available to you right now
• Develop a strategic relationship map: identifying who the key stakeholders are in your organization and what your current relationship with each of them looks like
• Learn how to build alliances across organizational levels and functions before you need them, not after
• Distinguish between the short-term gains of political maneuvering and the long-term advantages of genuine relationship investment
• Develop strategies for earning the trust and support of adversaries and skeptics without compromising your own values or position
• Understand how to read organizational dynamics accurately so you can act with awareness and strategic intentionality rather than simply reacting to whatever happens next

Expanded Outline: Motivation, Coaching, and Building a High-Performing Team

One of the truths that most new leaders are surprised to discover is that what motivated them personally often has very little to do with what motivates the people they now lead. Effective leaders understand that motivation is individual, situational, and dynamic. They develop the skill of reading each team member accurately and responding in ways that activate rather than suppress engagement and performance.

• Understand the research on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and its implications for how you structure work, recognition, and accountability
• Develop practical approaches for identifying what genuinely motivates each of your team members as individuals
• Learn to have performance conversations that are direct, honest, and constructive without being demoralizing
• Build a team culture in which feedback flows in multiple directions and continuous improvement is the norm rather than the exception
• Understand how to manage the most challenging personalities on your team, including those who resist direction, undermine team cohesion, or consistently underperform, using tools that address root causes rather than surface behaviors
• Learn the mentor role: how to make yourself available as a trusted guide and thinking partner for high-potential individuals, and how to structure those relationships productively