Making People a Competitive Advantage—Online

New Program

Hone your leadership and talent management skills to build a results-driven culture, leveraging insights into human behavior and data-driven principles. Turn your people into a powerful competitive advantage.

This program is in partnership with Global Alumni.

"Good managers know what the business needs; great leaders know what the business needs and what their people need — and avoid compromising on one in order to achieve the other."
—John Philbin, program faculty director

In this program, you learn the critical role of effective talent leadership in addressing and overcoming your business challenges. You'll gain a holistic view of talent management essentials: people literacy, team structure and dynamics, growth planning, and your individual role as a leader. Within each area, you’ll systematically uncover your organization’s unique strengths and weaknesses and create targeted action plans.

You’ll emerge with a mastery of key leadership and talent management principles that enable you to align your business needs with what your people need — giving your organization a competitive edge and fostering a thriving workforce.

By attending, you will...

  • Develop leadership skills to align business strategy with people strategy, ensuring sustainable organizational success.
  • Master the fundamentals of talent management and leverage behavioral insights to attract, retain, and cultivate a high-performance culture.
  • Apply frameworks to enhance team dynamics, improve performance, and foster psychological safety.
  • Strengthen team alignment and navigate cross-cultural dynamics
  • Gain personal leadership strategies, including personalized action planning, for continuous growth.
A High-Impact Learning Format

This program incorporates two live online sessions with program faculty as well as self-paced learning. You’ll experience a blend of classroom sessions, group discussions, a case study, and assessments. Each module builds on the last, ensuring an impactful learning experience that makes you confident in your new skills and ready to drive change.

Participants will gain access to Spectacular Team Assessment, a proprietary survey designed by John Philbin, as an integral part of this program. This assessment provides leaders with anonymized and aggregated insights into team dynamics across the cohort.

You'll also gain customized insights and action plans through:

  • A proprietary People Literacy® framework that offers crucial insight into common business challenges.
  • Talent Assessment that will yield clear snapshots of where your company is currently, and provide a detailed roadmap for future actions.
  • Talent Risk Assessment that will assess the state of your succession planning and identify potential risks to your company’s performance due to talent gaps.
  • Personality assessment to understand your core behavioral tendencies and build better teams.
  • Tools to help you learn rapidly from your own experiences.
Live-Online Sessions

This program incorporates two live-online sessions with program faculty.

Language

This program is offered in English and soon Spanish. All live-online sessions and simulation experiences are delivered in English.

Program duration
Six weeks, 5–6 hours per week

This program is ideal for mid- to senior-level leaders from any functional area who are key in managing talent and aligning their teams with the organization’s broader vision.

We recommend participants have seven or more years of experience, with a focus on identifying and nurturing top performers, driving employee engagement, and fostering people and culture initiatives.

This program is suitable for professionals across various industries and geographies, offering a globally relevant leadership experience.

John Philbin

Adjunct Associate Professor, Executive Education Programs

As the founder and Managing Partner of Spectacular at Work, John Philbin helps companies compete and win and helps them create cultures where their people thrive.

John advises CEOs and develops future business leaders around the world. John and his team coach leaders and up-and-comers, help companies determine who to hire to make their company stronger, and architect leading people processes to make sure companies have a steady flow of future leaders that fit their culture.

John works with some of the most respected companies in the world (Blue Cross Blue Shield, PWC, Aon, Reebok, McDonalds) and with companies who aspire to be great. Really any company that wants to be better at the people stuff, no matter the size or industry. John is regularly invited to speak on People Literacy®, building better leaders and corporate culture (What’s Really Going On at Work?™), creating a competitive advantage through people and culture (“The Four Stages of Talent Management”), and strategic talent management + succession planning.

John completed his Ph.D. in Psychology at Loyola University and is an adjunct faculty member at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.



Strategic Leadership and People Literacy

  • Aligning business strategy and people strategy
  • People Literacy®: Solving business challenges by understanding human behavior
  • Making a strong talent management practice the responsibility of all leaders

Fundamentals of Talent Management

  • Defining talent management: key deliverables for leaders
  • '9 Box' and the alternative talent review 
  • Assess the state of your succession planning
  • Identify risks to your company’s performance due to talent gaps

Advanced Talent Management and Integration

  • Building people development plans using principles of People Literacy
  • Team/department talent action planning
  • Integrating your talent strategy with business and people strategy
  • Ensuring top performers are developing on the right track
  • Evaluating workforce tradeoffs when organizations change and innovate

Team Dynamics and Psychological Safety

  • How style and temperament affect team dynamics, cohesiveness, and performance
  • The importance of psychological safety
  • Building trust and avoiding derailers

Team Alignment and Cross-Cultural Dynamics

  • Getting your team aligned, performing, and agile
  • Cross-cultural considerations
  • Courage, Conflict, and Challenge

Leadership and Personal Talent Management

  • Balancing self-empathy and high standards
  • Strategies for continuous growth as a leader
  • Personal action planning
Upcoming Course Dates

December 3, 2024 - January 27, 2025
February 18 - March 31, 2025
April 29 - June 9, 2025
October 7 - November 17, 2025

Fee: $2,800