Advancing into Leadership Program
Do you want to sharpen your leadership skills? Do you wish you could handle difficult conversations with more confidence? When the toast hits the floor jam-side down, do you know how to clean up the mess?
Transitioning to a management position is challenging. It requires a strategic leadership mindset to effectively lead, mentor and coach your team. In your new role, you need to embrace challenges and manage change; show tenacity in the face of setbacks; and, find motivation in the success of others. To do this effectively, you must lead by example and make ethical decisions that foster trust and respect from the people you manage.
The Ted Rogers School of Management’s Advancing into Leadership Program combines academic thought leadership with industry best-practices, providing you with in-demand skills with immediate workplace applicability.
Key Topics:
- Lumina Self Assessment
- Mindful Leadership
- Developing the Strategic Leadership Mindset
- Leading for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion
- Overcoming Resistance to Change
- Having Courageous Conversations
- Ethical Challenges for Managers
- Goal Setting
(4.5 day sessions)
Day 1: Networking session 6 p.m. - 8 p.m. EST
Day 2-4: 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. EST
Registration Fee:
$3,250 plus HST*
*Registration fee includes all materials, program content, including psychometric assessments and simulations.
Virtual Program
Who should attend?
In the Advancing into Leadership Program, not only will you learn the tools and skills you need to be an effective manager, you will have the opportunity to put these very tools and skills to the test in our one-of-a-kind simulations. This program has been designed specifically for the following professionals:
- Newly-minted managers, supervisors and team leaders who need support
- Supervisors and team leaders who want to update and improve their skills
- Experienced managers who have received little formal training for leading a team
- Individuals looking to move into a managerial role
Program highlights
- Psychometric assessments further develop your leadership style and personality
- Live actor simulations provide you with unique, hands-on experience in navigating difficult conversations
- Real-life business cases support evidence-based decision-making
- Change management simulations equip you with practical tools to overcome resistance to change
- Personalized leadership action plans provide an individualized program experience
- Online sessions following the program support transfer of learning and accountability
- Practical overview of understanding labour relations from the trenches - what to expect and watch out for.
- Exclusive Ted Rogers School of Management programming led by high calibre faculty and leading industry experts hosted virtually
Networking
Meet your classmates and keynote address from the Dean.
Keynote: Dr. Daphne Taras, Former Dean, Ted Rogers School of Management
The strengths of the Advancing into Leadership Program are about self-awareness and building the fundamental skills to be an effective manager/leader. Enjoy an opportunity to network and virtually meet your fellow participants, faculty and lecturers before the program start.
Special keynote from the Former Dean of Ted Rogers School of Management, Daphne Taras. Where she will inspire us all with her Top 10 list on the secrets of being a good manager.
Day 1
Speed Reading as a Leader
Shabnam Ahmad, Certified Lumina Spark Practitioner
With a passion for constantly enhancing the client experience, Shabnam leads Fit for Business at Ted Rogers School of Management. With over 6+ years of experience in facilitation, leadership and project management, she brings forward a diverse set of experience from roles at KPMG, TDSB and TMU. 
The half-day workshop introduces the participant to th eLumina Spark model by exploring their personalized portraits in a series of individual, paired and group experiential exercises. Participants learn how to appreciate the interaction of personalities within the context of 4 personality archetypes, 8 personality aspects, and 24 personality traits and their overextensions.
Participants will walk away with strategies on how to speed read others both through verbal and written communication, identify hidden strengths for a higher performing team and adapt to different situations enabling stronger relationships with colleagues.
In this session, you will:
- Gain a greater sense of self-awareness on your leadership and communication style
- Learn how to speed read colleagues to identify opportunities of strength
- Understand how to build stronger relationships with colleagues
- Increase your confidence in communicating feedback to direct reports and become a more effective manager or leader
Leading for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion
Dr. Andrew Campbell, Adjunct Faculty at OISE
The session will foster a deeper understanding of the issues of equity, diversity and inclusion and the impact, influence of inclusive leaders to create a culture and climate that is inclusive, brave, equitable, and transformative.
Special focus is placed on individual mindset, disposition and practices, and the skills needed to courageously lead change. This will be introduced using case studies and an examination of John Kotter’s change model.
In this session, you will:
- Be able to articulate the various dimensions, dynamics, and tensions of differences in their professional community.
- Be encouraged to engage in reflective and reflexive conversations with yourself and other participants to better understand the need to foster.
- Lead and sustain change in your organisations that will lead to a more equitable workplace.
Overcoming Resistance to Change
Frank Miller, Lecturer and Faculty Advisor
Experience first-hand how you can help make change happen. By securing an understanding of change theory, you learn how to deal with resistance through practical change management techniques.
In this session, you will:
- Discover the driving and resisting forces for change
- Learn how to build a change management plan
Day 2
Change Management Simulation
Frank Miller, Lecturer and Faculty Advisor
In this team-based session, you will engage in ExperiencePoint’s Global Tech online change management simulation where you will experience, first-hand, how to make change happen. You will have the opportunity to act as a change consultant by helping a fictional company through some transformative changes. This simulation will provide you with real-time feedback on your consulting advice.
In this session, you will:
- Gain hands-on experience interviewing stakeholder to hear their concerns
- Receive specific feedback on your change management plan from stakeholders
- React to real-life challenges as a manager
Developing the Strategic Leadership Mindset
André Serero, Executive-in-Residence
Learn how to think and act like a strategic leader. This session focuses on establishing an in-depth understanding of strategic leadership, emphasizing key behaviours and attitudes.
In this session, you will:
- Gain practical tools and techniques you can apply to become a strategic leader
- Understand the silo-mentality and how to breakdown this destructive organizational barrier
- Learn how to detect threats and opportunities
- Develop stakeholder management skills
- Identify what is holding you back from optimizing your full management potential
- Determine how your own leadership style has immediate relevance and impact on your job
Day 3
Mindful Leadership
Dr. Ellen Choi, Assistant Professor
Mindfulness practices have been attracting attention by a variety of audiences from executives, educators, athletes, and even the US military as optimal performance requires individuals to be attuned to their needs and the needs of others. Mindfulness offers leaders a tool kit that enables them to develop the internal resources that enable them to be more effective and extend more compassion while guiding others. This session provides comprehensive overview on what mindfulness is, why it is relevant to a variety of industries/roles, and how it can be applied to enhance performance, manage stress, and deepen relationships.
In this session, you will:
- Understand what mindfulness is and how (and why) mindfulness can be applied at work
- Understand how to practice mindfulness and guide oneself through a practice
- Understand how self-compassion can be used as a tool for sustaining excellence
- Apply practical rituals that cultivate psychological safety in teams
- Understand how empathy and compassion support leadership effectiveness
Personal Leadership Action Plan
André Serero, Executive-in-Residence
Set yourself up for success through the creation of a personal leadership action plan.
In this session you will:
- Improve your decision-making by identifying how to tailor decision-making criteria to long-term versus short-term projects
- Reflect on past leadership experiences (including mistakes) and how you would reimagine the outcomes with your newfound self-awareness and identified leadership style
- Identify career goals that align with how you want your leadership style to develop
Day 4
Courageous Conversations
Live Actor Simulation (LAS)
Learn how to prepare for and conduct difficult conversations. Actors are used to simulate conversations with employees, bringing realism to the exercise and allowing for practical application of the tools and strategies learned. Participation in the simulations is voluntary, but all participants will have the opportunity to be engaged through debriefing and reflection.
In this session, you will:
- Learn how to apply the SBI model of Courageous Conversations with your employees
- Identify strategies for providing clear feedback
- Identify the impact of intentions and assumptions on a Courageous Conversation
- Use this as an opportunity to prepare for an upcoming Courageous Conversation
Ethical Challenges for Managers
Dr. Chris MacDonald, Chair, Law and Business Department and Associate Professor
Managers face unique ethical challenges. We all arrive at our workplaces with our values in place and with principles we believe in, but the challenges of management can make it difficult to live up to those values and to put those principles to work. Managers face additional challenges because they are responsible for shaping the organizational context that will in turn shape other people’s behaviours and choices.
In this session, you will:
- Explore the positive role that ethics plays in enabling team performance and organizational excellence
- Discuss the gap between knowing the right thing to do and getting it done, and gain insight into how to bridge that gap
- Reflect on what managers can do to make it easier for other people to do the right thing at work
- Understand the special challenges faced by your most junior employees, and explore the role of managers in helping employees meet those challenges
Closing Ceremony
Individual benefits
- Learn how to apply self-awareness and key strengths to your leadership style
- Find win-win resolutions to challenging situations and relationships
- Improve your ability to influence individuals, teams and your organization as a whole
- Master coaching techniques to take your teams performance to the next level
- Recognize common manager pitfalls and ethical mistakes and how to avoid them
- Gain access to an external peer network
- Receive a Certificate of Completion and digital badge. You can share your accomplishment and commitment to professional development by displaying the digital badge on social media, employer and professional networks and websites.
Organizational benefits
- Cultivate your organization’s leadership capacity and talent pipeline
- Supply your managers with the tools to embrace responsibility and accountability
- Empower managers to anticipate and resolve team challenges without escalation
- Provide the tools to ensure open and honest communication between senior management and employees
- Decrease the dreaded “groupthink” as employees engage in knowledge sharing with external experts
- Gain access to program content and best practices brought back to your organization
