Leadership: Learn to Successfully Lead & Influence Others

Define leadership as guiding followers and adding value through influence or command, embrace messy, ever-changing situations, and grow by empowering others to become leaders.

Cultivate leadership as a lifelong learning journey with a strong foundation to become a true, influential leader who supports people, develops staff, and leads from every level.

Explore nine core leadership competencies, from motivates others and takes charge to strategic thinking, trust, goals, team building, positivity, authenticity, and communication, and examine getting results and its costs.

Unite leaders and managers as essentially the same by blending visionary thinking with practical execution to drive change, manage risk, and influence others toward shared goals.

Develop essential leadership skills to successfully lead and influence others, reinforced by a short quiz that reinforces practical leadership strategies.

Explore three leadership challenges, including the organization‑individual divide and the three priorities of leadership, plus ethics, morality, and practicality in decisions. Learn strategies to balance health, employees, and the organization.

Explore the organization–individual divide and its impact on employee welfare. Learn to narrow the gap through shared welfare and higher purpose, with equal responsibilities for workers and the company.

Lead by owning organizational success, support workers' welfare, and foster effective teamwork to drive lasting impact.

Leadership in troubled times requires prioritizing community welfare, balancing public good with personal freedoms, and making moral decisions guided by science, ethics, and empathy.

Assess your leadership skills with a shorter quiz that reinforces how to lead and influence others.

Contrast nominal and true leadership, showing why promotions don’t ensure effectiveness and how true leaders balance priorities and values to embody the characteristics of effective leadership.

Contrast nominal leaders who lead by authority with true leaders who are truthful, optimistic, empathic, and goal-focused, and learn to develop skills through practice and feedback.

Explore the four pillars of leadership, including moment of truth, eliminating waste, mistake proofing, and leadership bundles, and learn how they support you in becoming a true leader.

Develop situational awareness to recognize moments of truth, prioritize the greater good, and apply waste elimination, mistake proofing, and leadership bundles to lead effectively.

Explore essential leadership skills and practice, study, and teach tools like Covey's delegation model to grow as a productive, collaborative leader.

Empower others to lead by fostering mutual accountability, clear messaging, and usable tools, aligning teams for informed, impactful decisions and ongoing change.

Use a SWOT analysis to assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, building trust, credibility, and empathy between leaders and employees for loyalty and the psychological health of the organization.

Use a transparent decision making model that separates issue, goal, and solutions; identify the issue, define the goal, list hurdles, brainstorm solutions, and select the best option with pre-set criteria.

Apply Covey's time management matrix to prioritize important and urgent tasks, delegate to empower others, and follow A, B, C priorities to lead and influence.

Find the right problem or opportunity, listen to workers, and define an emotionally engaging vision to guide change with an inclusive team and clear communication.

Practice skillful communicating by listening more than you talk and engaging others in a dialogue. Seek feedback to measure impact and tailor messages to your audience.

Lead with Covey's five-step delegation: set clear targets and boundaries, align resources and accountability, define reporting, and address consequences of success or failure.

Lead with the four Cs: connect, collaborate, contribute, and confirm, to boost both employee and customer loyalty through human-to-human service.

Lead effective meetings by designing purposeful formats for daily stand-ups, weekly tactical, monthly strategic, and quarterly off-sites; ensure prep, right people, concise agendas, and clear decisions.

Learn to give and receive feedback with a structured approach: obtain permission, describe observations and consequences, invite dialogue, and respond with gentle, constructive honesty.

Take a really short quiz to quickly assess and reinforce essential leadership skills for successfully leading and influencing others.

Explore softer leadership skills that center on emotional self-awareness and storytelling, emphasizing sensing and expressing feelings, building trust with your audience, and leading with your heart.

Learn how respectful leadership empowers followers to feel belonging, contribute ideas, and grow through mistakes, while avoiding dehumanizing management and embracing universal values.

Drive engagement and align teams through storytelling, using the Stone Mason tale to show how conflict, a clear hero, and personal narratives make work inspiring.

Explore how influence and leadership emerge when you decide whom to lead or follow, reflect on the Johnny the Bagger story and storytelling elements, and apply these insights at work.

Create a compelling vision that earns trust and drives engagement by crafting clear, short, emotionally engaging vision statements tied to your organization's purpose and impact.

Lead teams using Rudy Williams's four-part timing model—compelling task, membership, influence, and reward—to form high-performing, purpose-driven groups. Teams outpace work groups with clearer goals, peer accountability, trust, and strong collaboration.

Treat employees as investments and craft a written development plan to grow their skills. Emphasize informal, handwritten collaboration and human-to-human connection, guided by the medium is the message.

Develop leadership skills to successfully lead and influence others, reinforced by a you're-in-charge quiz today.

Explore the granularity of leadership development by detailing leadership competencies and their importance. Focus on attitudes, character, and soft skills that drive connectedness, motivation, and influence.

Explore leadership development inspired by Dee Hock, emphasizing self-leadership, ethics, motivation, and reflection, and contrast formal assessments with organic feedback from peers and supervisors to identify simple, broad competencies.

Develop leadership skills by creating four-month and twelve-month development plans from feedback, plus mentorship and coaching. Engage in projects and collaborative training to learn, apply, and track milestones.

Develop staff and teams by tailoring development to each individual, recognizing diversity and language needs, and applying personalized feedback within a team context.

Explore how motivation drives leadership by distinguishing intrinsic and extrinsic motives, understanding intensity, direction, and persistence, and applying rewards, recognition, and a supportive workplace to boost employee commitment.

Plan flexible staff development with four- and twelve-month horizons, set goals and dates. Foster collaborative and in-house training, track progress with a visible skills map, and ensure hands-on practice and feedback.

Create vision and mission statements for the company, department, and individual to boost motivation, membership, and teamwork, aligning personal goals with organizational aims to enhance satisfaction and contribution.

Draw on decades of organizational and leadership wisdom, rooted in sources dating back 50 years and updated over time to help you lead and influence others.

Learn how storytelling drives leadership by celebrating Nordstrom’s grand cathedral of customer service, using true stories to reveal company values and boost engagement in meetings.

Design systems through just culture to ensure employees produce a safety outcome, follow procedures, and avoid risk. It uses gauge monitoring, calling for help, and coaching or discipline.

Apply the FISH environment's four principles—be there, play, make their day, and choose your attitude—to develop leadership skills, teamwork, and a more engaging workplace.

Discover how to transform into a learning organization by aligning with a shared vision, applying systems thinking, challenging mental models, and fostering team learning and personal mastery.

Discover how to foster a heroic environment by applying Rob Lebow's eight principles, including telling the truth, building trust, mentoring unselfishly, and embracing new ideas.

Lead innovation to strengthen the organization through continuous improvement and lean thinking, challenge assumptions, spark creativity, explore novel connections, prepare teams, and test ideas for implementation.

Develop empathic leadership by recognizing, understanding, and sharing others' thoughts and feelings, valuing their view, and collaborating to ask how this affects them and how we can improve.

Develop trust as a leader by recognizing excellence, empowering teams, and communicating often, while upholding consistency, honest feedback, and vulnerability to foster high-trust environments and growth.

Explore how to give meaningful, appropriate recognition that strengthens high-performing teams, balancing team praise with individual contributions, and delivering specific, in-person thanks and storytelling.

Lead with informal performance reviews that focus on progress, address gaps, offer coaching, and close with appreciation to build trust.

Explore leadership skills by taking another you're-in-charge quiz to practice leading more successfully and influencing others.

Learn to influence others without formal power or being the leader by being engaging, listening well, and presenting ideas that invite agreement.

Influence others without authority by adding value, recognizing leadership vacuums, and sharing ideas with charisma to inspire followers and improve work.

Speak up with tact when you see something, say something, or make it happen. Use observation and useful questions to align mental models and guide collaborative decision making.