Leadership and Workplace Essentials
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
The University of Arkansas - Pulaski Technical College’s Business and Industry Center offers leadership and workplace essential training to individuals, businesses, and local governments. Customized courses or private, company-only courses are also available. Contact Matthew Coulter at (501) 907-6670 or e-mail mcoulter@uaptc.edu for pricing and details. To better meet the needs of business and industry, the courses below are offered by an instructor in a Zoom environment to provide access to continued growth and learning during this time of COVID-19.
Communicating for Leadership Success
Time: Approx. 4 hours
This foundation course introduces leaders to the essential interaction skills that are critical to leadership success. These Interaction Essentials are the core behaviors that leaders need to possess to be effective in the many situations they handle daily, such as coaching, delegating, and driving change. Leaders will learn how to meet the personal and practical needs of their team members, and how to communicate to spark action in others to achieve business results. They will also learn how to provide positive feedback that recognizes and motivates individuals and teams, as well as developmental feedback that helps others get back on track. This foundation course is a prerequisite for many of the courses in the Interaction Management® Exceptional Leaders series that are taught by a live instructor in an online environment.
Resolving Workplace Conflict
Time: Approx. 4 hours
Prerequisite: Communicating For Leadership Success
Today’s business environment presents new and growing challenges forcing organizations to continually increase productivity, improve quality, shorten cycle time, and reduce costs. Survey after survey confirms that people are working longer and harder at jobs that are more complex and have a wider range of responsibilities. At the same time, the way people work and communicate with one another is changing, creating added stress and complexity. The homogenous, single-function, the co-located group is being replaced by dispersed, cross-functional teams with diverse areas of expertise. An unfortunate but natural by-product of these challenges is conflict. While conflict can lead to discoveries such as new ideas and innovative breakthroughs, it can if allowed to escalate, result in damage to critical working relationships. This course teaches leaders how to recognize the signs of escalating conflict and take appropriate action to minimize damage. Leaders are introduced to two resolution tactics—coach and mediate—and practice using the Interaction Essentials as they coach an associate to resolve a conflict.
Maximizing Team Performance
Time: Approx. 4 hours
Prerequisite: Communicating For Leadership Success
Managers can misdiagnose the root causes of team conflict or less-than-optimal team performance when they consider only the capabilities or character of individual team members. Often more systemic conditions undermine a team’s cohesiveness, collaboration, or ability to achieve goals. This course focuses on how leaders can work with their teams to build the infrastructure that enables maximum performance. Leaders gain experience in diagnosing and applying the five Team Success Factors: Results, Commitment, Communication, Process, and Trust.
High Impact Feedback and Listening
Time: Approx. 4 hours
Prerequisite: Communicating For Leadership Success
When sharing feedback is part of an organization’s culture, it is an effective business tool that reaches across all levels. In this course, individual performers learn how to effectively deliver both positive and developmental feedback. They also learn how to be receptive to feedback and to listen to accurately understand the speaker’s intended message. In the workplace, these skills help them to optimize and sustain their own and their coworkers’ performance. In this session, individuals will learn how to support colleagues’ job performance, growth, and development; build authentic, trusting relationships with colleagues; more wisely choose opportunities to give and seek feedback; handle, reduce, or eliminate defensiveness or negative emotions that can occur in a feedback discussion; and help create a culture of teamwork and performance.
Creating an Inclusive Environment
Time: Approx. 4 hours
Prerequisite: Communicating For Leadership Success
You’re hiring for diversity, but is your culture inclusive? If not, you might
not be reaping the benefits of your diverse workforce.
This session moves past the numbers game of diverse representation to focus on
leaning into and leveraging the unique abilities, perspectives, styles, and
ideas of each person. Stereotypes and unconscious bias are explored as well as
the differences in who we are, how we think, and what it means to an inclusive
workplace. Three practices layout a personalized path for identifying, engaging
with, and advocating for individuals whose voices must and should be heard. This
course helps leaders: recognize biases and stereotypes that can affect workplace
decisions; identify those who’ve been excluded and invite them to the table;
engage everyone and encourage their voices and contributions; advocate for those
with different perspectives and ignite their success.
Workplace Essentials Micro-courses
Delivered in “short bursts” of learning that range from 7 to 20 minutes each, these micro-courses provide just the right amount of information—through videos, quick tips, checklists, planners, and other practical learning tools—for learners to quickly acquire and immediately apply new knowledge. Classes are self-paced and can be started at a time that is convenient with your busy schedule.
Each Micro-Course is $10 per person. Once registered for the course(s), e-mail mcoulter@uaptc.edu for instructions and access to your online course.
Embracing Change
Open Enrollment/Self-paced
Time: 20 minutes
Change is universal. However, it manifests itself in very different ways, depending on the situation, the environment, the people, and the timing. Understanding the recent past, the present, and the near future will prepare you to address important issues connected with a change. And it will surface the fears, concerns, challenges, and opportunities that you need to discuss and confront. In this session, you will learn how to understand how people typically react when change occurs, demonstrate an embracing change mindset that will enable you to remain open to workplace change, and determine how you can influence changes when, at first glance, it appears you have no control.
Overcoming Resistance to Change
Open Enrollment/Self-paced
Time: 20 minutes
Change can be disorienting. When people must give up old ways of thinking and working while adapting to something new and unfamiliar, they can feel unsure, confused, or even afraid. So, it's only natural that some people will resist change—especially when they can't control it. You can overcome that resistance by encouraging people's understanding, ownership, and trust. In this session, you will use the Interaction Guidelines to discuss the change and involve people in developing their own ideas for adapting to it.
Preparing for Difficult Conversations
Open Enrollment/Self-paced
Time: 20 minutes
Difficult conversations are usually something we want to avoid, mostly because of the negative feelings associated with them. How do you adapt your approach to be more effective and stay focused on a harmonious solution? Within this course, you’ll discover techniques and tools to navigate these conversations.
Leading Virtual Meetings
Open Enrollment/Self-paced
Time: 10 minutes
In today’s current environment, virtual meetings are more than convenient they are a necessity. Whether you need to find an alternative for a face-to-face meeting or you must regularly communicate with distributed or remote employees, leading your meetings effectively – using process and personal techniques – is critical for team collaboration and decision making. Within this course, you’ll learn more about virtual meeting pitfalls in addition to discovering methods for improving meeting productivity and audience engagement.
Strengthening Your Partnerships
Open Enrollment/Self-paced
Time: 20 Minutes
People form partnerships because they want to achieve something they can't do alone. Working together to accomplish those results is another matter altogether. Each partner might have a different plan of attack. For a partnership to operate smoothly and achieve its desired outcome, members must understand what a true partnership is and focus on building relationships based on trust and effective communication. In this session, you will learn to use collaborative strategies, assess the factors needed for success, communicate with your partners, and evaluate your partnerships.
Boost Your Resilience
Open Enrollment/Self-paced
Time: 7 minutes
Adversity, change, turbulence, and uncertainty can be part of any given day. This is truer than ever as we learn how to manage what feels like moment to moment updates during this pandemic. While we successfully navigate most challenges, others require greater resilience—the ability to cope with stress and adversity. Resilience keeps us from feeling stuck. Key personality traits and skills can raise our resilience, and power us through even the most challenging times. In this session, learn how individual traits and skills affect resilience, discover methods to manage tendencies and strengthen skills, consider which mindset obstacles and personal biases are interfering with resilience, and create a 60-day plan for boosting resilience.
Featured Programs
Does your organization need customized training?
Find out how UA - Pulaski Tech can develop a customized program exclusively for your organization. UA-PTC assists qualified organizations with grant applications to offset training costs.
COVID-19 UPDATES
Please make sure to review the COVID-19 resource page for the latest COVID-19 information.
