Veterinary Leadership Academy^SM Leading Your Team
(formerly Experiential Leadership)

VLA Overview | Being a Leader | Leading With Style | Leading Your Team | Location & Hotel | Registration

IMPORTANT: To get the maximum experience at this program, you should register no later than April 14, 2008. This program includes several pre-course assessments that you and members of your team will need to complete online. If you register after April 14, 2008, you can still attend the program, but you will not have time to complete the pre-work; therefore, you will not receive personalized feedback from the online assessments until after the program concludes.

The Veterinary Leadership Academy encompasses three courses, three days each, over a period of approximately 12 to 18 months. The courses are designed to reinforce each other, and you will leave each course with practical skills that can be immediately implemented in your practice. You will return to the next course to build on your skills and share your success and challenges with fellow colleagues.

We recommend that attendees take the courses in the following order: Being a Leader (formerly Intrinsic Leadership), Leading With Style (formerly Extrinsic Leadership), and Leading Your Team (formerly Experiential Leadership). Taking the courses in this order will allow you to connect with familiar faces and share your leadership journey. The courses are offered every year — Being a Leader in the Spring, Leading With Style in the Fall, and Leading Your Team the following Spring. Leading With Style is a prerequisite to Leading your Team.

Leading Your Team
May 15-17, 2008

This course builds on the content from Leading With Style to achieve an advanced level of understanding regarding effective leadership in a complex work environment. This program is designed to help practices establish successful, collaborative and high performing teams within a supportive structure. It helps to jump-start team productivity and communication by building trust among team members and promoting collaboration.

This course will also focus on how to develop and lead your entire team, showing you what type of leadership is needed for each level of team development and how to manage conflict within these stages for many different personality types. The integration of these skills will have a significant impact on creating a culture of 100 percent accountability for a practice that runs smoothly, even in your absence.

Course Description, Learning Objectives and Faculty

Thursday - Saturday, May 15-17, 2008
The Ken Blanchard Companies

Description:

This three-day program provides you with the skills and competencies needed to be a more effective team leader. You will learn how to:

• Identify the characteristics of high performing teams, and assess gaps in those key characteristics for your team
• Identify and address missing elements of your Team Charter
• Diagnose your team’s overall stage of development
• Influence more effectively by matching your leadership style to your team’s development stage
• Utilize the DiSC® instrument to give you insights into how team member DiSC®-position can contribute to team conflict, and create strategies to address these conflicts
• Develop strategies for higher team performance by leveraging the models and tools presented in the program

This program is based on the Situational Leadership® II model. Attendees will receive feedback from their direct reports and peers via the Leader Action Profile assessment. The assessment will provide feedback on the frequency with which the leader uses specific Directive and Supportive behaviors from the Situational Leadership® II model. Situational Team Leadership® offers a set of tools for managing small group dynamics, clarifying a team's charter, identifying team development stages, and providing the appropriate leader behaviors to move the team towards high performance and full team member engagement. The DiSC® Personal Profile System, introduced in The Veterinary Leadership Academy Extrinsic Leadership Course, forms the basis for managing team conflict. The workshop will include:

• Proven and effective team performance models
• An assessment of your team to identify its development stage and suggest action steps for helping the team improve productivity and morale
• A process for examining team conflict and creating strategies to address the causes of team conflict more effectively
• Highly interactive learning activities to engage participants in applying the models, tools, and techniques

Learning Objectives:

If you lead teams in your practice, this program will help you to:

• Create a plan for the strategic development of specific leadership skills
• Inspire consistent team performance
• Develop and strengthen team member engagement
• Enable interpersonal cooperation among team members

Course Faculty:

Chris Edmonds – The Ken Blanchard Companies

“Enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and humorous” are the best words to describe Chris Edmonds and his speaking style. With more than 20 years of platform experience, Chris consistently makes an impact on his audience through his expertise in leadership, performance enhancement, team effectiveness, and customer service excellence. Mr. Edmonds is qualified to speak on a variety of concepts based on The Ken Blanchard Companies® training programs—Situational Leadership® II, Raving Fans®, C.O.A.C.H., Situational Self Leadership, and Gung Ho!®

Chris believes people are the ultimate competitive edge in our high-tech world. He not only makes his audiences laugh but also challenges them to think. People from dozens of organizations have benefited from his wisdom and insight. He speaks to organizations in industries ranging from restaurants to hospitals to insurance. A graduate of Whittier College with a degree in education, Chris holds a secondary teaching credential from California Lutheran College. He received his master’s degree in human resource and organizational development from the University of San Francisco and is a faculty member of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ sponsored Master of Science in Executive Leadership program at the University of San Diego.

Lael Good – The Ken Blanchard Companies

Lael Good is a skilled speaker and facilitator who understands both the people and business aspects of today’s organizations. Her capabilities in and knowledge of organizational development and instructional design complement her natural ability to influence and involve people in solving their own problems. Lael has served as the lead consultant on some of Blanchard’s largest global accounts and has extensive expertise in working in the pharmaceutical industry. She is consistently one of the most requested and respected Consulting Partners because of her diverse skill set and ability to work with global organizations. Lael grew up on a ranch in rural Wyoming and today is still an active member of her family’s fifth-generation agricultural operation. This unique life experience provides the backdrop for her lifelong dedication to helping people work together more effectively.

As a coauthor of two Blanchard programs, Situational Team Leadership with Don Carew and Eunice Parisi-Carew and The Leadership Bridge: SLII® and the MBTI® with Tom Hill and Ken Blanchard, she is an expert on the dynamics of people working together and high performance teamwork. Lael received her bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Arizona and her master’s degree in counseling from the University of Wyoming.

Please note: Faculty members are subject to change without notice; however, the course content and quality will remain consistent.

Transportation:

For your travel plans, we encourage you to book your flight into the Colorado Springs, Colorado airport. The airport is approximately 15-20 minutes from the Cheyenne Mountain Resort. Round trip transportation is available to and from the airport to the resort when you book your sleeping room reservations. After your plane lands at the Colorado Springs airport, you will proceed to the resort’s information desk located across from Baggage Claim #3. A shuttle will be ready to take you to the resort.

If, however, you are flying into Denver International Airport and renting a car, you can expect to be on the road for at least 1 – 1 ½ hours to Colorado Springs. Construction on the highway could be a detriment in Colorado Springs, and travel could very well be heavy during rush hours.

Please refer to the agenda for program start and end times. Please do not make return travel arrangements until at least 5:00pm on Saturday, May 17, 2008, from the Colorado Springs airport or until at least 7:00pm on Saturday, May 17, 2008, from the Denver International Airport.

Agenda:

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Friday, May 16, 2008

Saturday, May 17, 2008

*Please be mindful not to book departure flights before 5:00pm on Saturday, May 17, 2008, from the Colorado Springs airport OR before 7:00pm on Saturday, May 17, 2008, from the Denver International Airport.