I'm Human Resources Coordinator with Porter-Starke Services, a mental health organization located in Northwest Indiana. 

Our goal is to develop a Leadership Academy to provide new supervisors, middle managers and executive level directors with training in a variety of areas perhaps at different levels or tiers.  We have initially identified areas in general areas, such as management basics, leadership skills, financial management, human resources, IT, marketing, clinical services and back office support. 

Essential Learning offers many courses which we currently use and assign to various positions, but wondered if any of your organizations have developed a Leadership Academy using Essential Learning and other outside resources in the development of a training curriculum.

I don't believe in re-inventing the wheel, so welcome your comments, suggestions or the opportunity to network with you via e-mail or telephone.   My e-mail address: mzimmerman@porterstarke.org.

Thank you!

We have been in the process of setting up a leadership academy for a while now. We initially looked at some of the programs in surrounding areas.  A couple of the CSBs are part of the county governments and have a lot more resources than we do. They have stand alone training departments which cover the entire county and have affiliations with the community colleges in their jurisdictions. They have been able to set up live classes utilizing staff from not only the CSB, but the county and the community colleges. What we are looking at is a combination of courses in Essential Learning (we are still working on that) coupled with in-house trainers and mentors. Our agency is looking to put more responsibilities on middle managers so we are using management meetings for team building and negotiation skills and the like.  The leadership academy would be for all employees.  In the meantime, human resources is setting up a mandatory curriculum built from EL courses for managers. It would also include some live training from HR. This includes things like FMLA, etc. We also looked at hiring a trainer from Old Dominion University's school of business a couple of years ago to do some initial training which would have included some follow along but there was a management change here and that fell through and we would need to find grant money to do that now. During the process of setting that up, we did get a fair amount of helpful information for workgroup leadership.  There is also a fair amount of helpful information on the web for specific manager skills like workgroup leadership.

I'm posting this response on behalf of mark.

Thank you so much for your nice information.  I really sounds like we are much at the same level and face the same challenges of finding resources.  I want to try to utilize Essential Learning curriculum in a workshop setting in addition to the stand alone online training.  For example…just saw a new Legal Interviewing course for this month, which would make a great workshop for our managers and supervisors who never had formal training on the dos and donts of interviewing. 

- Mark

One more possible resource is the employee assistance program. Sometimes EAPs offer various courses some of which could be incorporated - like time management.