Interactive media instruction that can be used by all Army leaders to understand, assess, create and sustain a positive command climate and increase unit effectiveness.

Achieving a shared understanding is the goal of communication. This lesson will improve your communication so that your thoughts, ideas, vision, and orders are understood. Sharing information builds trust because a leader’s thinking and decision making processes are transparent to others. Sharing information also allows others to make better, more informed decisions. Other benefits include clearer understanding of your vision and intent, relieving stress that comes from not having enough information, and controlling rumors that can spread in the absence of information.

Trust between individuals is essential for effective teamwork and group action. Trust starts from respect among people and grows from common experiences and shared understanding.” This lesson will help you to better understand trust, who’s involved in trust, and the distinction between different types or bases of trust. The lesson will describe techniques to build trust and you will be able to practice the techniques in realistic scenarios. You will learn how to assess trust in others and new ways to figure out if someone else is trustworthy. These topics will help to broaden your knowledge of trust and give you effective strategies to better earn and build trusting relationships with others.

Given the nature of current operations, it is essential that Army leaders are prepared to build and develop relationships with a host of individuals, teams, and organizations from diverse backgrounds. Building effective working relationships is complex and requires leaders to communicate across interpersonal and intercultural boundaries. Although the differences between and among individuals and groups may be real, it is just as likely that they are perceived based on prior experience, assumptions, or stereotypes. Leaders must be able to break down stereotypes and overcome differences in order to form effective working relationships.

Creating and promulgating a vision of the future helps leaders to more effectively execute their mission. Leaders who are able to instill their vision in their subordinates can avoid common leader missteps such as micromanagement by giving their subordinates the vision and guidance they need to act. When leaders are successful at communicating their vision, their subordinates can act in accordance with that vision, with mission command, and without over relying on direct orders. This allows subordinates the freedom to make decisions on their own and execute in real time using their judgment and their leader’s vision as guidance. Enhancing your ability to create and promulgate your vision will allow you to provide clearer guidance and give subordinates more autonomy and responsibility to accomplish the mission.

As today’s operational environment becomes more complex and uncertain, the need for mission-focused delegation has become increasingly important. In this lesson you will be able to assess your comfort level with delegation. You will learn the difference between mission-focused delegation and regular delegation, as well as what tasks are suitable for delegating and how you can benefit from effectively delegating.

Whether in a command meeting or communicating with host nation leaders, negotiation skills are an integral part of succeeding as a leader in today’s Army. The art of negotiation is an advanced level of communication that requires leaders to leverage their knowledge and negotiation techniques to achieve desired outcomes. This lesson will teach you about negotiation and the general conditions for negotiation. It will also help you identify why negotiations fail and how to avoid the circumstances that lead to a breakdown in negotiations. You will also learn how to apply negotiation techniques and deal with emotions.

Teamwork, team unity, and unit cohesion are some of the most important concepts to effective leadership and achieving mission success. As a leader, it is your responsibility to build effective teams that display cohesion and unity so they are ready for the challenges that they will face. This lesson will teach you the characteristics of effective teams and how you can recognize those characteristics within your team. You will also learn about dysfunctional team behaviors and how to diagnose dysfunction. In the lesson you will use multiple case studies and interactive exercises to develop your skills and achieve team unity and minimize team dysfunction.

Decision making is critical to effective leadership. Army leaders regularly deal with situations that are complex or chaotic. Leaders are often in a position of having to make tough decisions, this lesson covers specific techniques to enhance decision making in difficult circumstances, as well as, how one’s perception or interpretation of information influences decision making.

The nature of Army operations makes it essential for leaders at all levels to be able to influence outside of their chain of command. This lesson will teach you the importance of extending influence in the current operational environment. You will become more self-aware of your goals and able to achieve those goals as the lesson provides information on understanding your own interests, assessing your target of influence, and building rapport with your target. The lesson will teach you how to effectively gather information about the ultimate priorities and goals of those you are influencing to improve communication and enhance the effectiveness of your influence.

In any occupation, leaders will need to interact with people who demonstrate difficult behavior that negatively impacts unit morale and performance. This lesson will teach you how to recognize and differentiate difficult behavior, as well as, provide you with techniques that you can use to deal with and overcome difficult behavior. The lesson discusses what motivates people to be difficult and describes the benefits of taking action to resolve issues. Lastly, the lesson discusses how you can deal with subordinates and superiors who are difficult. Multiple scenarios and interactive exercises are used to allow you to practice dealing with difficult behaviors.

Seeking and incorporating diverse ideas is a means for learning, problem solving, and sharing meaning. You will benefit from seeking and incorporating diverse ideas because doing so allows you to think creatively and go outside of your perspective to learn something new. This behavior leads to open communication and a learning environment within the unit. It also shows your subordinates that you are willing to listen and that you are willing to use the best ideas.

Being able to create and support challenging job assignments for you subordinates is one of the most effective ways for supporting their development. You will learn what makes a job assignment developmental, specifically, that it is challenging and requires an increase in responsibilities or duties. By the end of the lesson you will be able to identify the importance of creating challenging job assignments, methods for doing so, and be able to identify ways to support the development of an individual with a challenging job.

Army doctrine states that any Soldier can be a coach regardless of their rank as long as they have the necessary skills or expertise. Coaching is a means for leaders to develop, build relationships, and demonstrate care and concern for their subordinates. This lesson will help you to become a better coach by using real strategies to more effectively coach others. The Army has recognized the benefits of coaching stating that it can enhance and influence maturity, self-awareness, adaptability, and conceptual and team-building skills in all leaders. The development of these skills is critical to leader, unit, and Army success. Therefore, coaching is a skill that all leaders should learn for the benefit of their subordinates and others.

Managing conflict is a necessary skill employed by leaders on an everyday basis. This lesson will help you to identify conflict and apply different strategies to appropriately deal with conflict. Whether managing conflict among others or with yourself and someone else, the ability to communicate to resolve conflict collaboratively will help you to move past conflicts and succeed in your mission. While effective communication is the first step to minimizing conflict, conflict will assuredly arise. For this reason, demonstrating the ability to manage and resolve conflict is essential to effective leadership.

Not all teams have the luxury of time to work through problems and issues before they have to perform. Leaders of these teams must, therefore, understand the critical team skills that are necessary in order to quickly and effectively stand up such teams. The most significant relationship between rapid team stand up and leadership is the ability of leaders to build team or group skills and processes. Rapid team stand-up is one of the greater challenges confronting leaders because of the limited time available for developing trust and cohesion, establishing roles and expectations, and creating a shared understanding of goals and purpose. This lesson will teach you how to do all of these things under difficult constraints. However, this information is also applicable to the development of teams that are not under such constraints.

Feedback provides informative and evaluative messages that enable recipients to understand how their performance compares to expected standards, which facilitates improvement of their actions and behaviors. Feedback directs, motivates, and rewards behavior. Army leaders must understand both how to proactively seek constructive feedback and deliver corrective feedback to improve the performance of others. You will be able to use the information learned in this lesson to get the feedback that you want so you can more effectively achieve your mission. Further, the lesson will describe how you can deliver constructive feedback to others so you can more effectively deliver the messages that you need to send to subordinates so they can more effectively carry out their tasks.

A leader’s ability to develop their subordinates affects their subordinate’s morale, the ability of the Army to achieve its mission, and the overall quality of the Army’s leadership culture. Consistently, leaders have identified the ability to develop others as the leader competency most in need of development. This lesson covers both basic fundamentals of developing others and more advanced methods for doing so.

This lesson will help you get the most from what you do every day. Every experience is an opportunity for learning. This lesson will help you learn all that you can on-the-job and develop faster so you're better prepared for the unexpected. Because on-the-job learning is a frequently used, cost effective, and universally applicable means for developing your leaders, this lesson will immediately impact the effectiveness of your unit.

This lesson will help you get the most from what you do every day. Every experience is an opportunity for learning. This lesson will help you learn all that you can on-the-job and develop faster so you're better prepared for the unexpected. Because on-the-job learning is a frequently used, cost effective, and universally applicable means for developing your leaders, this lesson will immediately impact the effectiveness of your unit.

This lesson explores the importance of self-awareness along with strategies and techniques for becoming more self-aware and adjusting your behavior in response to feedback. The Army Self-Development Handbook states that self-awareness facilitates many social interactions, but is especially critical for leadership, in terms of the leader’s own development, the leader’s interactions with others, and the leader’s ability to adapt to changing situations. As a leader you need to know what you excel at and what you need to improve on. Self-awareness allows leaders to identify their strengths and developmental needs and optimize these strengths while addressing their developmental needs. Self-aware leaders are able to more accurately gauge their impact on others because they understand how others see them. Leaders who do not possess self-awareness are not capable of getting the most out of their subordinates because they lack an understanding of what they can do to better lead them. Finally, as a self-aware leader you will be better able to adapt to changing situations. A leader must know where he or she is at to know how to change in response to a situation.

Performance within the military context involves distinct roles and formal processes for accomplishing tasks. As a leader you need to effectively establish roles and processes that enact order and discipline and allow for efficient decision making and action in critical situations. Your decisions will affect the approach that your subordinates adopt which affects the quality of their relations with others and the general unit climate.

Being able to select the right Soldier for the job is a fundamental of leadership and a leader’s ability to do so effects the mission and reflects on that leader’s overall quality. Good leaders recognize that their Soldiers are different from one another and account for the differences in capabilities and commitment of individuals and groups. The task at hand can be difficult given all of the responsibilities of leadership. Leaders have to know how to gather information that isn’t always easy to get, such as a Soldiers ability to perform a specific task or their level of commitment. This lesson will provide you with and understanding of how individuals and groups differ regarding capabilities and commitment and how you can go about identifying the capabilities of individuals and groups.

Understanding one’s role helps individuals to be able to know what they need to do to accomplish the mission and how they need to act in order for that to happen. As a leader, you’ve likely encountered situations where your subordinates’ or peers’ lack of clarity concerning their role has caused conflict among individuals or hampered the unit’s ability to accomplish the mission. Clarifying roles is a way of communicating your intent or vision so you can improve mission execution.

In order to effectively lead others it helps to know about human motivation and how to apply that knowledge to more effectively motivate others. This lesson will help you get the most out of those you work with by helping you identify what motivates them which will allow you to respond with rewards that will work to maximize their potential. What you learn in this lesson can be used to help you motivate people and also you can use what you learn to teach others how to motivate more effectively.

Contentious conversations arise normally when working with others. Handled correctly you can remove unnecessary points of contention and use your communication skills to challenge others and yourself to come to well thought out decisions. In order to get the most out of conversations, Army leaders need to know how to communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively and deal with contention.

This lesson will teach you how to remove work barriers in order to get the mission accomplished. Work barriers can interrupt plans and delay or derail execution. The strategies presented in this lesson will teach you how to effectively remove work barriers. As a leader, the ability to remove work barriers is critical to your success because work barriers can block or harm your unit’s success and morale.