Manager Essentials Certificate Program

As a first-time manager, you likely feel a mixture of excitement and apprehension about your new role. What changes should you expect? How can you build rapport and make a good first impression with your new team? And above all, how can you become an effective boss?

As a manager, you’re not just the “person in charge.” It’s your responsibility to help your team realize their potential. Solid team management brings people together to maximize their strengths, overcome differences, and achieve shared goals. By doing so, you improve performance, productivity, and employee satisfaction. A well-managed team makes everyone—including you—look better.

Do you ever wish you had more hours in the day? While we can’t manufacture time, we can take control over how we spend it. In this course, you’ll first learn what effective time management is—and how it helps you juggle competing responsibilities and interests. Then, you’ll learn how to track, analyze, prioritize, and schedule your time so that you can maximize each day.

Unnecessary and unproductive meetings waste significant time in the workplace. Yet we all rely on meetings to communicate and collaborate with our teams, coworkers, and clients regularly.

Your team is your greatest asset, and as a manager, you’re responsible for their success—yet the roadmap to achievement is often murky. In this course, you’ll learn how to talk to employees about their values and goals, identify gaps in your team’s skills, and training techniques for different types of employees.

What is motivation? It’s what makes you spring out of bed in the morning or smile when you see who’s calling. It makes you willing to put in a long day to close that sale. In short, motivation is the reason you do what you do. In this course, you’ll review types of motivation.

Anyone can set an ambitious goal, but how many of us actually end up achieving it? All too often, when we embark on a seemingly smooth course, it turns out to be treacherous and unclimbable.

In this course, you’ll learn why the process of setting your goals is just as important as choosing targets that truly matter.

When you think of a leader, who do you imagine? Chances are, it’s someone who knows the difference between doing and leading. Great leaders strategically guide the team’s work—they don’t do the team’s work. That’s where delegation comes in. Delegation is assigning responsibility for specific activities to others.

Performance management is people management. An ongoing process to align individual and company goals, performance management helps make both the individual employee and the overall business more successful.

Feedback is essential for growth. It helps us understand the impact we’re making in the workplace, how others see us, and how we can improve. But giving feedback isn’t always easy. And if the thought of it makes you uneasy, you’re not alone.

No one loves having a difficult conversation at work—but most of us have had to do it. Because it’s so common, knowing how to navigate a sensitive discussion effectively is essential.

At best, workplace conflict stifles communication and productivity. At its worst, tensions escalate to aggression and bullying. That’s why it’s important to address conflict quickly. In this course, you’ll learn common sources of discord and some typical responses to it.