Veterinary Leadership Academy^SM Leading With Style
(formerly Extrinsic Leadership)

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

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 With Style
October 2-4, 2008

After recognizing your inner leadership potential, this course will help you master your skills as a coach and mentor. You'll gain valuable tools in the areas of employee development, personality, and behavioral styles, and learn how to invest in your staff to help them reach their full potential.

Pre-course activities include a 6-hour interactive CD-ROM, a leadership assessment and a personality profile.  The CD-ROM provides a fun and challenging way to learn about your own leadership style.  In one activity on the CD, you have to be a leader and help direct your employees to be successful.  In each interaction, the game provides you with a multiple choice response to your employee’s questions, and then shows you the results of the answers you select.  If you choose incorrectly (i.e., you didn’t flex your leadership style to the employee needs), you will destroy the company, your employees will quit, you’ll get fired or something even worse!  This fun activity allows you to learn the Situational Leadership II model before class, so that your time together is spent on application to the veterinary industry and skill practice. 

The leadership assessment helps you also to identify your default (or strongest) leadership style as well as your weakest leadership style.  Then, during the course, you will understand when to use which leadership style with each individual employee and you will develop strategies to practice the behaviors and skills that are more challenging for you as a leader.

Finally, the personality assessment adds another layer of complexity and insight.  The DISC Profile is a powerful tool that can help you significantly improve your work effectiveness. The DISC language provides you with an explanation and understanding of yourself and others. This element of the course provides detailed insights into your communication preferences, decision-making style, risk tolerance, and behavioral tendencies.

During the course, you’ll share your own experiences with the CD-ROM activities and practice improving your leadership weaknesses.  You’ll also learn the personality profile model and share your personality results.  Not only will it help you understand that you have to flex to different employee development needs, but practice how to accommodate various personality styles when providing feedback.  This course is taught by faculty from the Ken Blanchard Companies.

Course Description, Learning Objectives and Faculty

Thursday – Friday, October 2-3, 2008
The Ken Blanchard Companies
Situational Leadership® II

Situational Leadership® II (SLII® ) is the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and practical method of effectively managing and developing people, time, and resources available today. SLII®  is a model and a set of tools for opening up communication and helping others develop self-reliance. It is designed to increase the frequency and quality of conversations about performance and development between managers and the people they work with so that competence is developed, commitment is gained, and talented individuals are retained.

Because it opens up communication, SLII® invites individuals to teach their managers about themselves and the kind of help or coaching they need in order to become more self-directed and self-motivated. The role of the Situational Leader is to provide employees with whatever it takes – goals, direction, training, support, feedback, or recognition – to develop their skills, motivation, and confidence. The result is an organization in which people feel more empowered and willing to contribute their ideas and energy.

Learning Objectives:

As a result of SLII® training, managers become

• Effective leaders by increasing the frequency and quality of conversations about performance and development with the people they lead.
• Flexible and adaptable, which is necessary when managing a diverse workforce and managing change.
• Comfortable in using a variety of leadership styles to increase morale, create a positive work environment, and achieve desired results.
• Thoughtful about when to use which leadership style to develop others’ competence and commitment.
• Skillful in setting goals, giving work direction, encouraging self-reliant problem solving, listening, observing and monitoring performance, and giving feedback.
• Better at developing and retaining talent.

Saturday, October 4, 2008
The Ken Blanchard Companies
DISCovering Self & Others

Everyone repeats behavior they feel serves them in some way.  Repeated behavior, while not always functional, can be observed and predicted.  This powerful one-day workshop is structured to help you identify and understand your patterns and patterns in other people so you can communicate more effectively.  The workshop is based on the time tested self-assessment tool using the well-known D (Dominance), I (Influence), S (Steadiness), and C (Conscientiousness) model.

You will determine your preferred pattern and learn the inherent strengths and undeveloped aspects of that preference.  You will also learn how your preference differs from others, which may or may not be compatible with your own.

Learning Objectives:

• To increase awareness of yourself and others.
• To identify patterns in your behavior and what you need from others to do your best work.
• To understand others’ motivations.
• To become more “people smart”.
• To understand what creates/drains energy and commitment.
• Develop more trust, cooperation, and teamwork.

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, October 4, 2008, from the Colorado Springs airport or until at least 7:00pm on Saturday, October 4, 2008, from the Denver International Airport.

Agenda:

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Friday, October 3, 2008

Saturday, October 4, 2008

*Please be mindful not to book departure flights before 5:00pm on Saturday, October 4, 2008, from the Colorado Springs airport OR before 7:00pm on Saturday, October 4, 2008, from the Denver International Airport.