What You Will Learn
1. From Managing to Leading: Going the Distance
- analyzing and understanding your current strengths and weaknesses as an audit team leader
- manager vs. leader: differentiating the roles
- applying leadership concepts in simulated audit business cases
- the four stages of team development and what they mean to you
- techniques for making audit engagements more powerful
- attitude and morale definition: reinforcing the team ethic
- creating a climate for sustainable competitive achievement
- modeling and enforcing corporate values and personal integrity
- building a leadership style that creates trust, sets a clear vision and propels your team toward greatness
- inspiring action by building trusting relationships within your audit team and the whole organization

2. Leadership Strategies and Collaboration Methods
- modern goal setting techniques for you and your audit team
- defining and redefining audit’s corporate image in your company
- creating powerful team agreements with every member of your staff
- assessing the personality styles of your team members and how to work with them
- optimizing team productivity, evaluating team performance and measuring bottom-line results
- creating delegation techniques that will gauge the growth of your staff against the results of their efforts
- how to consistently demonstrate the connection of work (tactical) to success (strategy)
- how to be transparent and inspiring in executing planning
- how to convincingly handle peers and senior managers who are resistant to new ideas or change
- delegating generously and wisely; then staying out of the way

3. Coaching and Motivating to Deliver Results
- what real coaching is and how to build an extraordinary results-driven audit team
- establishing inter-colleague coaching to ensure advancements are validated
- designing deliberate feedback opportunities to get your feedback message delivered
- motivational skills: giving people a compelling reason to do their best
- approaches to setting direction, instructing, and training
- creating conflict management/resolution templates specific to Audit’s success
- getting more accomplished through your team
- achieving buy-in to critical initiatives through high-impact goal-setting
- developing the right set of skills to lead by example and do it well
- appreciating and assessing your teams’ learning styles

4. Hiring and Retaining the Right People
- establishing hiring practices to attract high-potential audit professionals
- choosing a team with impeccable, broad-based technical skills
- interviewing skills: getting the correct information from candidates
- ensuring continuous learning is rewarded
- incorporating measurable ROI-based training as a part of your relationships
- getting audit professionals on your team to follow your leadership, and collaborate with colleagues
- turning every audit manager on your team into a coach
- how professional development can improve Audit’s culture
- a systematic approach to effectively dealing with performance issues
- creating valuable and vibrant career plans to keep the people you want

5. Meetings that Make Dollars and Sense
- leading powerful, productive departmental and interdepartmental audit meetings
- honing skills for participative and focused team meetings
- tips for displaying poise, confidence, and presence under public scrutiny
- facilitating decision-making processes to get work completed
- creating meeting format templates and streamlining accurate note-taking
- designing pre-meeting and post-meeting accountability tracking and deliverables
- problem solving and conflict resolution strategies
- becoming a catalyst for idea generation and tracking
- Successfully exploiting the value of competing viewpoints
- Insisting on and achieving data-based conclusions to all your Audit meetings

6. Written Communication Techniques
- designing and implementing audit mission statements
- assessing effective and ineffective writing styles
- reviewing and analyzing your own writing samples
- avoiding confusion, mixed messages, wasted time and frustrated followers
- practicing writing strategies and receive immediate feedback
- the most common business plan document errors and how to avoid them
- Formatting your document for high impact audit results
- crafting e-mail, letters, memos and reports to focus on your readers’ needs
- how to write in an authentic voice, be engaging, and truly connect with your stakeholders
- writing with clear authority no matter what the topic

7. Spoken Communication Techniques
- using conversation as a leadership tool
- speaking to audit staff about change: introduction, implementation and execution
- improving your client service with a review and analysis of your communication tools
- managing challenging behaviors, assuaging conflict, and gaining buy-in
- critiquing your listening skills and identifying opportunities for growth
- communication techniques to convey vision, values, expectations, decisions, and initiatives
- developing your cognitive and non-verbal skills through on-the-spot feedback
- being able to anticipate, handle, and move on from difficult conversations
- speaking passionately about your strategy or audit recommendations to any audience
- how to listen with intention and speak with integrity – even when facing challenges

8. Successful Influencing and Persuasion Skills
- experimenting with strategies and methods of successful influence
- using power and influence appropriately to achieve Audit’s objectives
- identifying and assessing your preferred style of persuasion
- practicing techniques to persuade, market, and achieve measurable results
- developing an audit-specific protocol to market team skills and achievements to decision-makers
- working with your team’s resistance to change and how to turn it around
- integrating significant stakeholders in your company into the workflow of your audit team
- creating an action plan to chart and report on the development of your leadership skills
- finding ways to develop every person on your team