Invested Leader Program

Invested Leaders. Inspired Teams.

Leaders have always needed to motivate, inspire, and engage teams to achieve high performance. Now, their efforts are complicated by diminished workforce well-being, the mixture of remote and in-office working styles, and a competitive global talent pool where top talent can choose to work anywhere in the world.

At the same time, organizations are asking more from team leaders. As the workforce becomes more distributed and remote, people managers are the most critical connectors to the workforce. Companies rely on a leader’s strong relationships with their team to help the company adapt to customer needs, drive innovation, deliver efficiencies, enter new markets, and more.

Whether your organization is working entirely from company offices or is fully remote, leaders will need to adapt their leadership mindset, skills, and routines to manage teams that aren’t sitting together. The visual cues and spontaneous moments that presented opportunities to leaders aren’t as plentiful today as they manage teams working in multiple offices, co-working spaces, and at home.

To fully unlock the potential of their employees, organizations need their leaders to make the following shifts in their approach.

Move from this:	To this:
Gathering insights about team members through observation	Gathering insights about team members through inquiry
Seizing informal moments to connect and coach	Creating moments to connect and coach
Creating communications to align, direct, and inform	Creating thoughtful communications to connect, coach, and create culture
Driving engagement through promotion and compensation	Driving engagement through personalization of the work experience
Connecting the team to work	Connecting work to the team’s values

Organizations need to invest in developing leaders so they have the tools they need to connect, coach, and create an inclusive culture.

This program helps leaders better understand, build, and master the skills needed to thrive alongside their team in this new way of working. The goal is to enhance learner effectiveness in the three C’s of connecting, coaching, and creating an inclusive culture regardless of the physical setting.

Contact sales to enroll leaders at your organization

Informed by research, built by practitioners

The Invested Leader program guides formal learning and practice of today’s essential leadership capabilities identified and validated by the Conference Board, Professor Dave Ulrich at the University of Michigan Ross School, and the ROI Institute. The program features a proven approach for guiding successful behavior change, and an award-winning ROI, measured by the ROI Institute.

Program features

The Invested Leader program consists of three weeks of formal, virtual learning, and three weeks of applied learning where learners use toolkits to practice new behaviors, and then debrief and share success practices in group coaching sessions.

The program was developed in partnership with the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and the consulting firms The RBL Group and Virtual Work Insider.

WEEK 1: Connect

• Understand the new requirements for leaders to connect and build trust with their teams
• Discover why leaders must personalize work and care for people
• Enable employees to find meaning by helping them believe, become, and belong
• Learn techniques for connecting across distances

WEEK 2: Connect – Application Projects

• Use a four-step framework to demonstrate empathy
• Create micro moments for check-in conversations to develop relationships and build trust
• Use stay interviews to tailor employee experiences and retain talent

WEEK 3: Coach

• Define and develop skills team members need now and in the future
• Develop the mindset of a leader coach
• Use new approaches to establish and manage team accountability
• Learn to check priorities and monitor work overload

WEEK 4: Coach – Application Projects

• Conduct a communication audit to check information flow
• Create an assignment brief to set accountability
• Use a stoplight exercise to detect employee burnout

WEEK 5: Create an Inclusive Culture

• Improve workplace communication
• Retain the right people
• Improve employee engagement
• Deliver a positive employee experience

WEEK 6: Create an Inclusive Culture – Application Projects

• Connect company values to inclusive team behaviors
• Facilitate team member belonging using the life experiences exercise
• Conduct a calendar cleanse and meeting audit to create inclusive meetings