Women in Leadership: Influence and Impact

Develop a holistic view of your skills, strengths and personality traits and establish yourself as an effective and influential member of your organization.

Take the next step in your professional development by completing the SMU Women in Leadership Certificate program designed by five industry leaders who understand what it takes to boldly lead with influence and impact.

Who Should Register

The Women in Leadership program offers a unique learning experience for both aspiring and established leaders seeking to advance their leadership skills.

The program is ideal for new leaders, emerging leaders, and individual contributors who desire to apply proven communication, mentorship, and growth-mindset strategies, as well as tenured leaders who currently manage teams or coach those seeking leadership opportunities.

Why SMU?

• SMU Continuing and Professional Education has offered noncredit learning programs since 1953.
• SMU is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.
• Students who successfully complete a certificate program will be issued a digital credential through Credly and will earn a lifetime credential through SMU Continuing and Professional Education.

Program Overview

Module 1: Leadership Starts from Within

• Maximizing your personality style
• Developing emotional agility
• Leveraging growth mindset strategies
  
  

Module 2: Developing Strategic Insights – From Staff to the C-Suite

• Understanding the big picture
• Developing solution-driven strategies
• Effectively using key performance indicators (KPIs)
  
  

Module 3: Communicating for Influence

• Strategic thinking: know what you are communicating
• Know your audience: communicating with leaders and peers
• Know your audience: communicating with your team
  
  

Module 4: Cultivating Psychological Safety, Trust, and Team Engagement

• The business case for psychological safety and trust
• Making the connection between psychological safety, trust, and engagement
• Strategies to practice psychological safety and trust
  
  

Module 5: Influence through Coaching, Mentorship and Sponsorship

• Trust is where it all begins
• Coaching, mentoring and sponsorship: relationships for career advancement
• It’s time to activate: creating a mentoring plan
  
  

Module 6: Industry Expert Panel

Senior leaders from some of the country’s top Fortune 500 companies will share leadership tips and strategies in a live panel discussion with participants during the final week of the program.

What You'll Learn

Through this six-week program, you’ll learn essential leadership practices to help you influence, inspire and lead your team to achieve a common goal, and create a vision for how to develop yourself and others in service of career objectives.

At the beginning of class, you’ll also be paired with another student (an Impact Partner) and meet with them once a week to discuss the curriculum, and what each of you are learning and applying from each week’s module.

Upon your successful completion of the program, you should be able to:

• Understand and maximize your leadership style
• Reframe unhelpful thoughts through emotional agility and growth-mindset strategies to enhance leadership performance
• Improve your communication through action-inspiring messages for just-in-time delivery
• Identify the level of psychological safety and trust within your organization
• Use mentoring meeting tools to plan and engage in impactful mentor relationships

Participants will be taught how to grow their influence and impact in the following ways:

• Confidently showing up, sharing your point of view and recognizing triggers that steer you off course
• Decoding your organization’s strategic goals and aligning your actions and those you manage to support these objectives
• Preparing the right message for the right person at the right time to inspire action
• Building a healthy and happy team that delivers results
• Cultivating relationships that help you and your team feel connected, empowered and encouraged to develop professionally