Leadership Presence Skill Building Series

To reserve a skill-building mini-workshop or the series, email workshops@icma.org.

2.5 hour workshops: $2,500 plus travel and lodging.

Session 1: Core Values and Action Planning

Identify values that are core to who you are and how you lead that become the basis of your signature leadership style and provide a context for decision making. Using a 20-minute exercise to identify long and short term personal goals, this 2.5 hour workshop will jumpstart your ability to identify what is important to you and begin to articulate your values, goals, and action steps that will help you identify what to give your time and resources to and, perhaps more importantly, what to stop doing. (Practice Area 5- Personal Resiliency and Development)

Session 2: Improving Your Ability to Speak with and to Others

Communication is a critical skill in leadership presence. How we present ourselves determines our effectiveness with our elected officials, staff, community, and press. Albert Mehrabian, author of Silent Messages, tells us that only 7% of any message is conveyed through words. Of the other 93%, vocal elements make up 38%, and 55% are made up of non-verbal elements such as facial expression, gesture, and posture. Becoming aware of how the tone, pace, facial expression, and choice of wording impacts the way we tell our stories and how we are perceived by others is a first step to increasing leadership presence. This 2.5 hour session is highly interactive and requires the courage to practice the tools presented during the session—out loud and in front of others. (Practice Area 14: Communication and Information Sharing)

Session 3: Coaching High-Performing Individuals and Teams

Are you using your coaching skills to improve performance and enhance organizational effectiveness? During this highly interactive workshop, you will learn to speak the language of possibility. While coaching is widely recognized as one of the key skills for developing leaders, it is also a critical tool when working with teams and helping staff at every level achieve their personal and professional best. A highly motivated staff produces high performance results. Coaching skills may be used to help a senior manager or someone young to the profession find balance in work and life. Coaching may reinforce or correct behavior, increase a high performer’s ability to stretch beyond good into great, and transform organizational culture so that each individual is recognized as naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. This 2.5 hour workshop provides practice in the skills of coaching, trusting intuition, learning to ask the right questions, and mining strengths of individuals and organizations. (Practice Areas 4: Staff Effectiveness & 5- Personal Resiliency and Development)

Session 4: Engagement, Motivation, and Leadership

As data from the Gallup research shows us, the percentage of disengaged and actively disengaged employees in the U.S. is truly alarming. This research includes local government employees. How can we increase engagement in our organizations? First by understanding what is key to employee engagement, understanding drive or motivation and providing the leadership needed to inspire your organization. This 2.5 hour workshop will challenge you to look at the Gallup research, examine what we now know about what motivates people, and develop a leadership plan to create the platform for engagement. Daniel Pink's book Drive is highly recommended reading prior to the workshop. (Practice Areas 4: Staff Effectiveness & 5- Personal Resiliency and Development))