Classes & certificates

Self-awareness is the cornerstone of outstanding management. Using a series of self-assessments, learn how your styles and needs compare with those of other managers and with agency goals. Discover strategies to enhance your strengths and address limitations.

Identify behaviors, create strategies that help you manage multiple priorities and handle interruptions so you are more effective at work. Cover the myth of multitasking, how daily goals and objectives lead to success, strategies and best practices in putting out fires and doing more than one job.

One of the most important tasks facing an organization is building a cohesive team. Learn proven techniques for effective team development and management that can help you strengthen participative management in your organization and promote long-term enthusiasm for team projects.

Only through true listening and understanding can we hope to create communities of integrity that sustain us and elicit our best actions. Whether you're facilitating a discussion among members of your family, workplace, or community, learn to listen with curiosity and welcome multiple perspectives.

Examine the core aspects of servant leadership. Topics for the five-day program are: Servant Leadership Foundations, Personal and Organizational Challenges of Servant Leadership, Serving Customers/Clients/Citizens, Servant Leadership at the Team and Organizational Level and Connecting Servant Leadership to Community and the World.

This class will help build foundational knowledge of Scrum and equip you with skills to effectively manage, lead or be a member of a Scrum team. You will learn what kind of projects call for an Agile Scrum approach.

Learn of the recent neuroscience discoveries that reveal how our brain triggers stress and poor interpersonal reactions. Exploration and practice of multiple methods for managing your brain will greatly improve your ability to lead others in today's organizations.

Inclusivity is the practice of radical hospitality, where people of diverse social and cultural groups experience uncompromising respect and dignity. Inclusive leaders value and encourage multiple perspectives. Gain insights into unconscious bias and inclusivity on individual/organizational levels.

Emotional Intelligence is recognized as an important contributor to work performance and personal well-being. However, today, work is increasingly team-based, so group leaders need advanced skills to build an emotionally intelligent team. This class will focus on the proactive approaches and tools for creating an E.I. culture that enables respectful, effective and creative collaboration even when the going gets tough. Emotionally intelligent teams are better equipped to solve problems, adapt to change, work together more effectively and achieve greater productivity. For this class, it will be assumed that participants are familiar with E.I. and want to lead or influence a team to become an extraordinary one. Participants will have the advantage of completing the EQi 2.0 self-assessment in advance of the class — the cost is included in the class fee.

Advance your project management skills by diving deep into some of the critical components of managing a project. Going beyond the basics of project management creates a culture of learning, accountability, transparency, high performance and successful delivery.

Master the skills necessary to communicate effectively with internal and external audiences in today's professional environment. Learn techniques of document structure, grammar and style proven to enhance credibility and influence. Learn credibility-damaging errors and tips for avoiding them.

A key challenge for today's leaders is helping employees to understand the need for change. They must help employees discover new ways of working and embracing these new ideas. We explore strategies for communicating the need for change and building employee commitment to that change.

There are many myths about what managers can and should do to support employee work performance, satisfaction and engagement. Learn what decades of real-world management experience reveal about best practices and tools, plus gain insights into today's diverse and fast-moving environments.

We're seeing more organizations with employees who work from home, live in other states and often live in other countries. "Lead from a distance" by understanding the challenges and best practices. Build trust, navigate conflict, make decisions and conduct engaging meetings with virtual staff.

Conflict can open us to new possibilities and deepen our relationships. This workshop will help you embrace both-and thinking, transforming conflict into win-win solutions. Discover how to increase your comfort in dealing with conflict and to build more trust and communication in relationships.

Gain foundational knowledge and explore best practices in project management to build the personal knowledge, skill and confidence you need to effectively lead projects. Whether you're leading your first project or looking for strategies to ensure project success, you will benefit from this class.

This class will be a mix of self-directed learning through Canvas (UW Learning Management System), and a live online session with the instructor using the Zoom platform. The self-directed learning information will be open and downloadable through Canvas starting approximately two weeks before the live virtual session. You may know the moment: Your team is discussing what to do about a difficult issue. A solution has just been voiced with a tone of certainty and triumph but you somehow know it's unworkable; a "bad idea." But you can't say exactly what's so bad about it. Your brain is tied in knots. Although you're able to stifle the impulse to say "that's no good," you're not able to unpack the poor logic or impracticality of the solution. This class will give you both the analysis and the communication tools to know what to do next. You'll gain the applied skills of critical analysis, solution generation, risk assessment, behavior interpretation, communication, social influence, and decision-making when issues are complex and there is disagreement about how to proceed. Both solutions and relationships are often at stake. Therefore in addition to learning methods for problem analysis and decision making, you will also gain an understanding of how to navigate difficult discussions when emotions and power differentials are impacting the dynamics.

Explore leadership characteristics and ways to strengthen your organization and support others' work. Learn about different leadership styles, public perceptions of leadership by sector and servant-leadership basics. Develop a personal leadership philosophy that contributes to your mission.

Handle difficult conversations at work and to listen and be assertive without weakening relationships. Better understand the complex nature of interpersonal communication and explore why misunderstanding is so normal. Apply the skills learned to conflict resolution and giving performance feedback.

This class is designed for human resources managers, staff supervisors/managers and others who work with employees experiencing various losses. It shares information, strategies, tools and resources to best support employees to heal and grow in the midst of these losses.