Leadership Program
Introduction

Welcome to momentum, a Greenville Tech program that shares ideas on how you can gain momentum within your organization as well as your career. I'm Wendy Walden. Our topic today is organizational excellence and my guest is Carol Beckham, program manager of organizational excellence at the Buck Mickel Center.
Welcome, Carol.

Hi, Wendy.

Nice to have you with us.

Thank you, it's nice to be here.

Tell us a little bit about the organizational excellence program - otherwise known as the leadership program.

Right. Well, Wendy, what we do at the Buck Mickel Center is help companies develop and cultivate leadership within their organization. It's interesting because leadership has a lot of different meanings to different people and a lot of different companies. Basically, what you're trying to do within the leadership realm is to locate people with the capacity to lead, to guide, and to coach others while they're doing that.
How would you define leadership as it is today in corporate America?

Leadership is simply the ability or someone holding the capacity to get other folkd to follow them. The ability to influence people - a person of influence. If you think about leaders in the public today - the public eye - those are folks who can get other people to listen to them for guidance and listen to them. Organizations, in particular, need that capacity in their employees - not jsut one leader, but a whole plethora of leaders in a different role.

Sure. As the environment and the economy changes, what are you finding that these companies are asking for in training needs more and more?
Well, typically, what we're seeing today in companies is a focus on coaching and a focus on bringing the ability to lead and pushing it down further in the organization to the absolute lowest level. So a leader is not just the president or the vice president of the company. A leader is anyone in the company. As long as they have that capacity. So what is happening in today's businesses is that they are looking for help in developing those leaders. It's tough. It's a daunting task. It's something that you need some expertise in order to be able to do it. Companies are creating internal universities. They like a corporate focus, but they also want these foundational topics built into their programs.
It is a wonderful that we are offering at Buck Mickel Center. Tell us about some of these courses or classes that are within that or under that umbrella of the leadership classes.

Well, you have, it's really a lot of things, Wendy. There are communication topics, there are topics where we have a number of courses where you can learn how to do a presentation, to do a little public speaking without being afraid, we also have classes on motivation, we have - just you name it, we have the ability to teach or to coach those kinds of competencies in an organization. So, if a company has a need for a certain type of training or coaching, they can come to us and say, "do you have this?" If we don't already have something, we can find it.

Now I'm glad you touched on that because at Greenville Tech, the Buck Mickel Center, we specialize in two areas - we offer courses that are public offering, meaning anyone can come in basically and register and take those courses, and secondly we provide a service where we go out and meet with companies and asses their training needs and develop a program based on that. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Well, again, since the need for leadership training is so great in the business community, and since every company its own culture, its own texture, its own field, it makes sense to find out what the company really needs in terms of training and coaching. So, what we will do is go out and look at the organization - how they function, get some information about them, meet with the folks there, do an assessment as to the kinds of issues they might have. Often the company really doesn't have one overwhelming issue, they have a bunch of little things that need a little bit of help - a little bit of tweaking. Or, they have some new people, and those new people need some training - they need some help. Every company is a little different, so you have to go to the company and you have to say "Show me your work world - introduce me to your world. That way we come away with something in mind that we can come back and offer them that will really work.

Now for the classes that are public offerring, is there a pre-requisite for people to take these classes?

No, not really. We have a - one of our primary courseofferrings in the public offering realm is the supervisory program and we really like to see people who are brand new to supervision or to management and leadership - we like to see those folks in class. We have an advanced level class or series and we like those folks go through the first level if they don't have experience in supervising or managing. Other than that, there are no pre-requisites for our programs.

Wonderful