The modularity of the Villard Group's curriculum allows our clients to use our courses in various ways. We can be employed to plug a leadership gap with one course or to solve broad organizational needs with a multi-course, multi-level package delivered over several months or even years.

Course Descriptions

Emerging Leaders: Assessing Leadership Potential

Emerging Leaders is a course for junior staff that have demonstrated competency in their core discipline, a willingness to develop leadership skills and an expressed desire to assume more responsibility in the near future.

Transitioning to Leadership

In most organizations, the transition from individual contributor to leadership is short or non-existent. New managers and technical leads are expected to adjust quickly, however, they often find their current skill sets mismatched with the demands of their new roles. In Transitioning to Leadership, these challenges are met head on and resolved.

Consulting Strategies & Skills: Adding Customer Value

Today, clients are more cost sensitive, technically sophisticated, critical in their expectations and more demanding for higher levels of service, support and value. This course provides the perspective, strategies and skills to not only survive, but flourish in this more competitive environment.

Collaborative & Group Selling: Building Business Alliances

Collaborative and Group Selling teaches how to strategically position your enthusiasm for your products and services, while staying focused on your customers' needs, priorities and goals. It is for internal staff pitching a new idea, technology or business, as well as seasoned outside sales professionals looking to launch or grow business.

Sales Gurus: Best Sales Practices

Most sales managers have said quietly, " If I just had more salespeople like…" Although it is not possible to clone your most effective ones, it is now possible with Sales Gurus, to duplicate their best practices and transfer their secrets and skills to the rest of your sales force in an effective and cost-efficient way.

Facilitation Tools & Techniques

Facilitation is about what to do with meetings: how to shorten them; run fewer of them; involve only the "right people"; get higher quality input; and make more effective decisions with greater ownership and follow through. Ultimately, it is about using all of your time, talents and abilities more fully when you get together.

Top Team Tools

Top Team Tools is an advanced course building upon the basics of the Facilitation Tools & Techniques workshop by showcasing cutting-edge group process tools that are easy to apply. Top Team Tools is a fast way to build and jell teams and solve business problems.

True Teams Lab: Building High Performance

The True Teams Lab was designed for one purpose: to improve business competitiveness by achieving tangible outcomes that impact the success of the team's mission. This course is not a traditional, feel good-do nothing team building "exercise". It is an intensive two-day work session that produces the business outcomes of a rigorous offsite, while overhauling the team's dynamics. True Teams will enhance your team's ability to make decisions and hold one another accountable when shortfalls occur.

Leading Virtual Meetings

The challenges of facilitating increase exponentially when you attempt to lead virtual meetings. Similarly, your weaknesses as a facilitator get magnified. Leading Virtual Meetings is a nuts and bolts course designed to address the most common roadblocks to achieving effective virtual meetings.

Launching & Leading Virtual Teams

Launching & Leading Virtual Teams takes the guesswork out of jump-starting and effectively managing remote groups. This course tackles the most common and difficult hurdles head on, by scripting each step of your first 3 team meetings and propelling you along the path to high performance.

48 Hour Team Resuscitation

48 Hour Team Resuscitation is a customized work session to help you jump-start new teams and address the unique challenges that roadblock existing teams. The session is designed as a results-oriented, collaborative effort. Delivered by one of the Villard Group's nationally recognized master facilitators, 48 Hour Team Resuscitation will catapult your team to high performance… guaranteed!

Coaching: Enhancing Employee Performance

Today, managers must get maximum effort from their people and teams. Coaching addresses this more demanding role by demonstrating how leaders can seamlessly integrate the art and science of getting discretionary effort from their people.

Positive Approaches To Negative Feedback

Managers often cite giving negative feedback as the worst part of their job. Contributing to this perception are employees who seem impervious to feedback regardless of how it is approached. Others are crushed, even if it is shared gently. If not delivered effectively, it can lead to defensiveness, damaged relationships, legal repercussions and even workplace violence. Most managers have one approach to feedback they use with everyone. Regrettably, one approach doesn't work with everyone. There is a science to it. Positive Approaches teaches you that science.

Retaining Top Talent

At any moment, over 25% of your talent pool is intending to leave the organization, while an equal number are contemplating it. Retaining Top Talent will help you head off unnecessary and costly attrition, by focusing on the underlying causes of employee disengagement, its symptoms and factors that push top performers over the edge. The program also helps you identify who, in your organization, might be at risk. Retaining your top talent is not an HR issue; it is a management leadership challenge.

Collaborating with Peers

One of the most underestimated leadership skills is the ability to work effectively across organizational boundaries with peers. The skills needed to sell ideas, marshal resources and win over peers are different than those associated with working with bosses and employees. There is no power or authority dynamic in play when dealing with peers… So why are some leaders successful and others not? What's the secret?

Mentoring

Mentoring provides both an avenue for passing down "legacy learnings" from senior leaders and a clear path for integrating new employees into the organization's culture. It can compensate for unsettling downturns, help fill and retain the talent pipeline, as well as create an open environment that blends corporate and individual career goals.

Practical Empowerment

Practical Empowerment presents a programmatic, step-by-step approach for confronting the intense pressure and relentless demands of competing in today's volatile business environment. The course teaches how to obtain greater engagement and secure a stakeholder work ethic, from your most valuable resource… your people. Practical Empowerment will show you how to cultivate their abilities and maximize their effectiveness, now, when you need them the most.