Launching your Career

Leadership Accelerator

Overview

Congratulations on earning your degree from Penn State Graduate Programs!

Penn State Professional Graduate and Executive Programs wants to help you make the most of your new degree by providing a next step on your lifelong learning path. To help set you on the fast track to a leadership role, we're offering a seat in one of three classes in our Leadership Accelerator Certificate series as a benefit to our 2022 graduating class.

The Leadership Accelerator Certificate is designed to provide you the essential strategic leadership, communication, and teaming skills required to meet today's complex, and often unpredictable, business challenges. Your technical knowledge and personal presence have helped you secure your current position. Let us help you complement your graduate education and refine your leadership skills with our Leadership Accelerator.

Who Should Attend

Penn State Executive Programs' Leadership Accelerator is designed for those who are new to leadership roles or who aspire to leadership roles in their organizations and communities.

Program Benefits

  • Improve your ability to:
    • Think strategically within your department and organization.
    • Adapt and shift in dynamic and unpredictable environments.
    • Work effectively as part of a team, whether as its leader or as an individual contributor.
    • Leverage communication skills as you influence and execute new strategies.

The Executive Programs Short Course Experience

All of our transformational learning experiences provide the right environment for you to quickly develop and apply new capabilities.

Emerging Leadership: Becoming a 'Ready Able' Leader

The world and the workplace are all changing in exciting but unpredictable ways. The leadership capabilities required for success are being redefined and reimagined. To keep pace, organizations are emphasizing the need for 'ready able' leaders. These ‘ready able' leaders combine an understanding of formal and informal leadership with flexibility, capacity to learn, an ability to connect dots and see emerging trends, and comfort with quickly shifting strategies and actions to accommodate rapidly changing business conditions.

Session Outline

  • The essence of leadership
    • Explore the differences between management and leadership and what it means to be leader in today's business environment
  • A look out and around
    • Discuss trends in the external environment that are impacting leadership, teamwork and performance and their implications for leadership development
  • A look in the mirror
    • Use a personal assessment instrument to help you assess your own leadership style and discuss techniques to enhance personal leadership effectiveness.
  • Charting a course
    • Work with program faculty to develop action plans for enhancing personal and organizational effectiveness.
  • The 'Ready Able' Leader
    • Explore an integrative framework leadership that can help you organize your learnings from the class.
Email me when available *As a 2022 PGP alumnus, your enrollment in "Emerging Leadership: Becoming a 'Ready Able' Leader" is provided as a benefit from Smeal Professional Graduate Programs. Simply click the "Claim Your Seat" button and enter code "BusinessPartners2022" to receive your benefit. Should you wish to complete the remaining two classes to earn your Leadership Accelerator Certificate, you may register for each at the Penn State Alumni rate of $899. Please contact us for additional information.

Refining Interpersonal and Professional Communication

A winning strategy is only as good as your team's ability to execute on a shared vision. Effective execution requires that we rally stakeholders to our cause, securing their buy-in and using our influence and networks to gain resources and mindshare. Refining Interpersonal and Professional Communication will provide you the tools you need to communicate your vision and move people and the resources they control into alignment with your strategy.

Session Outline

  • Employing the psychology of persuasion
    • Learn how to leverage Cialdini's six principles of influence - reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. These strategies have been scientifically proven to help increase your likelihood to get others to say "yes" to your requests even when you don't have the power of a title nor traditional means to reward or punish.
  • Levering the power of an effective network
    • Success in business often depends more on who you know than what you know. In this module we will discuss the strengths and shortcomings of your current network, uncover strategies of how to effectively create a more optimal network, and discuss most effect ways grow your career through the best ways to utilize that network.
  • Strategies for remote working
    • It seems inevitable that our careers will include some blend of working remotely and returning to a traditional office environment. In this unit, we will discuss strategies to succeed in both environments. When I am working remotely, what are best practices to be efficient and be recognized? When I am in the traditional office environment, what are the ways I need to interact with superiors, peers, and subordinates to get the most out of that rare face-to-face time.
Email me when available *After taking "Emerging Leadership: Becoming a 'Ready Able' Leader," should you wish to complete the remaining two classes to earn your Leadership Accelerator Certificate, you may register for each at the Penn State Alumni rate of $899. Please contact us for additional information.

Teaming Your Way to Success

Are you someone that other people want to work with? Would you like to be? Teaming Your Way to Success targets the essential teamwork capabilities that are essential for career success in today's complex, dynamic, and interconnected world.

Session Outline

  • Becoming someone others want to work with
    • Discuss how effective communication and feedback support healthy, productive work relationships.
  • Enhanced conflict management
    • Conflict in any collaboration is inevitable and even productive, when appropriately managed. We'll discuss enhanced strategies learners can leverage to best handle conflicts in their organizations.
  • Failing better, succeeding faster
    • Among some of the world's most successful firms, failure is no longer perceived in a negative light, but as a necessary, and even desirable, step toward success. We'll discuss how to create an environment in which collaborators can feel psychologically safe and strategies to ‘fail better' in order to succeed faster.
  • Extreme teaming: Different configurations and how to manage them
    • For both teams and individuals, competing demands and conflicting goals are pervasive challenges in the workplace. In this module, we discuss how different types of team configurations exacerbate different challenges and how to navigate them.
  • Teaming across boundaries
    • As teams within organizations become increasingly geographically, departmentally, and functionally disparate, teaming across boundaries can introduce new challenges. We'll discuss strategies to cross these divides.
Email me when available *After taking "Emerging Leadership: Becoming a 'Ready Able' Leader," should you wish to complete the remaining two classes to earn your Leadership Accelerator Certificate, you may register for each at the Penn State Alumni rate of $899. Please contact us for additional information.

Faculty

Expert executive faculty who have led significant change within the private and public sectors will provide models and frameworks to help you transform vision into an action plan for results.

Advance to a Professional Certificate

Expedite your leadership skills by earning an in-depth Professional Certificate in ‘Strategy and Organizational Performance. Professional Certificate Program Schedule