Learning to Lead - Virtual

Personal benefits

This program will help new leaders learn the ropes of leading and managing employees:

• Develop a deep understanding of the challenges that emerging leaders encounter
• Broaden your repertoire of communication skills and learn to motivate and inspire employees
• Help employees find meaning in their daily work
• Find meaning in your role as an emerging leader
• Learn how to use motivation tools for the recruitment, selection, development, and retention of employees
• Become an effective manager of employee performance by leveraging human capital management
• Create long-term commitment between your followers and yourself
• Learn how to continue to develop yourself as a leader over time

Organizational benefits

Organizations will benefit from new leaders who inspire followers and who are more effective in their day-to-day roles as managers. They will:

• Experience less friction during transition periods in which team leadership changes
• Develop leaders of tomorrow in their first steps towards becoming a leader in your organization
• Create strategic alignment between the goals of employees, leaders, and the entire organization
• Enhance creativity and innovation in the organization
• Reduce turnover amongst emerging leaders and in their respective teams
• Become an employer of choice by ensuring a successful transition of employees into emerging leaders

Program content

The program covers two modules:

Module 1: Leading With Meaning

This module will focus on the leadership of teams. Participants will learn how to create meaning for themselves and their followers:

• Understand the psychological needs of your followers
• Motivate followers by promoting psychological experiences of autonomy, relatedness, and competence
• Promote creativity and innovation through intrinsically motivated followers
• Cultivate positive emotions in yourself and your followers
• Inspire followers with a growth mindset
• Change the conversation from ‘what’ to ‘why’
• Develop a broader understanding of how your team contributes to the organization and society at large
• Develop yourself as an emotionally intelligent leader

Module 2: Managing Your Talent

This module builds upon the leadership fundamentals from the previous module by showing participants how to put these elements into action through the management of their human capital. They will:

• Understand how to choose new talent to prioritize alignment with your organizational goals and needs
• Develop the skills for effectively recruiting and hiring new employees
• Learn to identify and manage conflict as well as employees who are behaving in dysfunctional ways
• Develop the knowledge and skills necessary to manage employees’ performance with ongoing coaching, performance assessments, and performance improvement discussions
• Identify and manage your team’s performance through goal-setting and alignment with the larger organization

Dynamic Virtual Classroom

Participate in the program from anywhere. Our online learning platform combines live, interactive video instruction with breakout sessions, panel discussions, and expert Q&A.

Our learning platform is fully encrypted, allowing you to connect securely from home, office or anywhere in between.

Virtual programs are designed to fit within your schedule, allowing you to learn new skills and immediately put them to work.

Session Leaders

Session leaders include senior professors from Smith School of Business and knowledgeable experts from industry. These outstanding teachers are constantly in touch with today's business world through real-world business experience, Board memberships and their own consulting practices.

Jana Raver

Organizational Behaviour
Smith School of Business

Dr. Raver is an Associate Professor and E. Marie Shantz Faculty Fellow in Organizational Behaviour at Smith School of Business, and is also cross-appointed to the Department of Psychology. She is an authority on interpersonal relations and group processes at work, with a specific emphasis upon the ways in which employees support each other and build high-performance environments (e.g., helping, promoting learning) versus engage in counterproductive actions that undermine each other (e.g., harassment, bullying, relationship conflicts).

Professor Raver's scholarship in this area has been internationally recognized through best paper awards from the Academy of Management and from the International Association of Conflict Management (IACM), and her work on these topics has been published in prestigious outlets including the Academy of Management Journal and the Academy of Management Review. A second area of Professor Raver's expertise pertains to workplace diversity and cultural differences, where her current focus is on the integration of diverse or dissimilar employees into work groups and organizations. Her work has also included cross-cultural investigations of conflict processes and societal control systems. Her scholarship in this domain has also earned awards, including the Outstanding Article Award from IACM, and has been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Human Resource Management Review, and in several book chapters. Professor Raver has worked with a number of organizations from both the private and public sectors in the U.S. and Canada. She is also regularly invited to speak about building positive organizational cultures, teams, workplace harassment, conflict, and diversity to associations of academics, policy makers, and employees. Her work has been profiled in media outlets including The Globe & Mail, the National Post, and the Chicago Tribune.  Professor Raver teaches courses in human resource management, organizational behaviour, and group processes that span academic programs (Commerce, MBA, MSc, PhD). She is also actively involved in professional service, including serving on the Editorial Board of Negotiation and Conflict Management Journal and acting as an ad-hoc reviewer for numerous top-tier journals.

Matthias Spitzmuller

Organizational Behaviour
Smith School of Business

Matthias Spitzmuller is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Smith School of Business.

His research focuses on team motivation/team leadership, and on helping behaviors/cooperative work behaviors and has been published in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, American Psychologist, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Matthias has taught classes on Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management to undergraduate students, MBA students, and doctoral students. He has also served as a lecturer on leadership in executive education programs at the National University of Singapore and Harvard Business School Publishing. Prior to joining Smith School of Business, Matthias worked as an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. Matthias completed his Ph.D. in Organizational Behaviour under the guidance of Prof. John R. Hollenbeck at Michigan State University.

He also holds an MBA from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Before embarking on his academic career, Matthias worked for Kienbaum Management Consultants as assistant to the CEO and consultant. In his work for Kienbaum, Matthias consulted organizations on Strategic HRM issues and on realigning / reorganizing their HRM.