Senior leaders think about different things that more entry level employees.
Entry level employees ten to think about:
- Their wage
- Their benefits
- Their work environment
- Their boss
- Their perks
Owners and senior executives tend to think about:
- Competitive threats
- Profitability
- Finding great people
- Offboarding problem people
- Building a sustainable business
The difference is that entry level employees tend to think about themselves, and owners and senior executives tend to think about the good of the business.
As a result, they have different needs and need to learn different skills.
Here is a list of the top 6 eLearning courses for business owners and senior executives. They are all relatively short, and all come with downloadable tools and templates.
Course #1: Enhancing your career through delegation
You’ve proven that you’re a strong personal performer. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be at the level you’re at.
Being a leader is simply setting goals and bringing strong people along with you. That means that in order to get anywhere or accomplish anything, you’re going to have to achieve results through other people. That skill is called delegation.
The leader learns a role and then trains another person to do it. Then the leader moves up. Rinse and repeat. This is the formula for the successful owner or executive.
Enhancing your career through delegation teaches you how to increase your impact, build a stronger team, and do what you love to do rather than what you have to do.
Read more about it here:
https://learning.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/courses/how-to-delegate
Course #2: How to read financial statements
Do you need to sharpen your understanding of the three financial statements and how they work? Do you want to better understand how to use them to make effective decisions for the business?
Or maybe you are embarrassed at your lack of financial literacy. If so, this free course that will take away the mystery of the most basic financial statement.
You can’t be an effective senior leader without a basic understanding of how financial statements work.
This course on financial statements will help you understand the financial strength of a company so that you can make informed decisions. Find out more about it here:
https://courses.corporatefinanceinstitute.com/courses/learn-to-read-financial-statements-free-course
Course #3: Building your one page strategic plan
This skill is really important for any business owner or senior leader. It deals with significant destiny decisions and goals for the organization as a whole. A strategic plan is something that should be at the top of every senior executive’s checklist for the organization.
In this course, you will learn to define the culture of the organization, determine the scope of its business operations, establish a numerical dashboard that defines success, and set long and near term goals.
Most organizations that have strategic plans hold them in a binder. In this case, the plan will be on a single page. This forces simplicity and clarity. As it says in the course, ‘simplicity brings focus, complexity brings chaos.’
As the saying goes, those without a plan are planning to fail.
Read more about it here:
https://learning.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/courses/one-page-plan
Course #4: Discovering and implementing core values
The most important principle of human motivation is: followers copy the behavior modeled by their leaders.
Leadership comes from the top, and culture trickles down. Every company gets the culture it deserves.
This course helps you define how your culture should look; it helps you choose the handful of behaviors that leadership is willing to defend. You will hire, onboard, train, promote, and correct all based on your core values.
They’re really important. Find out how to discover and implement them in this simple course:
https://learning.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/courses/core-values
Course #5: How to hire A-players
The most important skill any executive can develop is the ability to attract and retain A-players. If you can do this, you can win in any industry, at any time.
But while hiring is one of the most important activities any organization engages in, it’s also one of the least understood.
Even if you’ve attended business school and earned your MBA, it’s unlikely that you learned any practical skills on this most important topic.
This course covers the entire hiring process, from sourcing, screening, interviewing and reference checking.
You can see more about the course here:
https://learning.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/courses/hiring
Course #6: Coaching based performance reviews
Leadership isn’t easy but it isn’t complicated either. It’s all about hiring the best people you can find, telling them what you need them to accomplish, and then giving them feedback on how they’re doing.
But how many organizations give that kind of simple feedback?
The traditional performance review is dead and dying. Managers hate doing them, and employees hate receiving them.
Coaching is quickly taking its place as a much more effective and useful way of seeing your underperformers pick up their game and your best performers get even better at what they’re already good at.
In this course, you’ll learn how to use a very simple one-page coaching form called “coach and connect.” You will learn how to have frequent, informal, coaching conversations with team members, and address the important issues that get lost in the process of conducting traditional performance reviews.
Find out more about coaching based performance reviews here:
https://learning.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/courses/108-performance-reviews
In summary:
The top 6 courses for owners and senior executives are:
- Enhancing your career through delegation
- How to read financial statements
- Building your one page strategic plan
- Discovering and implementing core values
- How to hire A-players
- Coaching based performance reviews
Additional resources
Thanks for reading this article on The Top 6 owner and senior executive courses. Below are additional resources from Professional Leadership Institute, the global provider of online human resources and leadership tools:
- How to build a one page strategic plan for your organization https://www.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/resources/how-to-build-a-one-page-strategic-plan-for-your-organization/
- Categories for your one page strategic plan https://www.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/tips/categories-for-your-one-page-plan/
- 7 ways to make company core values come alive in your organization https://www.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/resources/7-way-to-make-company-core-values-come-alive-in-your-organization/
- Objectively assessing your team https://www.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/course/objectively-assessing-your-team/
