Leadership Development

DDI combines proven solutions and in-depth experience to help you grow and develop your leadership talent where you need it most—at the front lines, where you innovate and make your products or services, interact with your customers, and build your bottom line every day. For more than 37 years, DDI has partnered with organizations in virtually every industry around the world to assess and develop millions of leaders and to build and sustain a pipeline of leadership talent at all organizational levels. This experience has enabled us to create a substantial base of expertise and global best practices.

Our competency-based, total systems approach—which brings together all the critical components of a successful leadership development initiative—is captured in our holistic Success Architecture.

Success Architecture

Your business doesn't need another management training program—it needs a systematic approach to enhancing leadership performance. Here's how we can put together a leadership development system for you:

Alignment and Planning—Before your first leader ever participates in a DDI course, our senior management sponsorship process, Assuring Leadership Success, helps your executive-level leaders define their expectations for success and determine how they will be measured. We also provide an implementation support process, Aligning for Perfect Implementation, to develop a flawless rollout plan.

Outcomes Measurement and Evaluation—DDI provides a full range of evaluation services and tools that measure changes in leader behavior along with changes in key business metrics (employee retention, service quality, etc.). If used prior to training for benchmarking, Leadership Mirror®,  Assessing Talent: People Leader®, and E3® tools can be applied post-training to capture the impact of the implementation.

Assess and Plan Development—DDI provides an array of assessment and diagnostic tools—all geared towards providing a clear picture of leaders’ strengths and development priorities. These include our Leadership Mirror® multirater instrument; a web-enabled diagnostic process, Assessing Talent: People Leader®, and E3®, which measures how successful leaders are at fostering employee engagement—a lead indicator of long-term business impact. Post-assessment, we provide resources to help individuals—and their managers—use the results to design individual development action plans for leveraging their strengths and fine-tuning their skills

Acquire Skills and Knowledge—Our competency-based courses and course supplements incorporate a variety of engaging activities, videos, and hands-on skill practice to promote better learning. All of the courses can be delivered in high-impact half-day sessions and many are available in a blended web-based training format. This includes the award winning Interaction Management®: Exceptional Leaders . . . Extraordinary Results® (IM: EX®), our 26-course leadership development system. Organized around seven people leader imperatives, IM: EX® is designed to get your leaders back on the job faster armed with the skills, plans, and tools they need to make immediate impact..

Apply to Drive Performance—An intense focus on practice and application is built into all DDI courses. Our two application courses: Mastering Interaction Skills, which helps leaders further improve their individual skills once they have completed several classroom sessions, and Boosting Business Results, leaders apply newly learned skills to a real project and then calculate the project’s financial impact.

Management Support and Online Resources—Supporting Leadership Development, for those who manage your organization’s operational and people leaders, shows the managers how to coach, model, and reinforce the skills imparted in DDI courses. Our courses are also tied directly to OPAL®, DDI’s online performance and learning system, which provides leaders with round-the-clock access to hundreds of coaching tools and support resources to help them successfully deal with day-to-day challenges.