The first session titled, “Fit to Lead” focuses on the leader themselves through a series of assessments to include “Physically” Fit to Lead, “Mentally” Fit to Lead, “Emotionally” Fit to Lead, and combines all three aspects into Self Mastery concepts.

It also covers Wellness for Leaders where topics focus on stress and stress management along with addressing past trauma and reconciling the past to move forward.

The session then focuses on the students where they take the DISC and Emotional Intelligence (EI) Assessment to get a unique look at themselves through a comprehensive report in order to understand their personality type and how to communicate more effectively to the different personalities at work and at home.

Then the course covers the fours aspects (Self Management & Relationship Management) of EI to teach the “soft skills” needed to effectively lead in today’s public safety environment.

The first session concludes a recap of all the Fit to Lead topics in order to demonstrate how all the topics are interconnect and how to immediately start using what they learned in their professional and personal lives.

The theme for the first session is “Before you Lead Others, You Must Learn to Lead Yourself."

The second session titled, “Building the Dynamic Leader” course focuses on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of leadership today from a real-world perspective of the various leadership styles, theories, strategies, and techniques specific to current challenges in the public safety profession today.

All the topics from the first session like effective communication (DISC) and utilizing soft skills (EI) in all aspects of leadership are continuous integrated into the course.

This second session focuses on student participation through teach back exercises and course work to include a comprehensive Personal Leadership Philosophy (PLP) project, Presentations on Modern Leadership Theories & Styles, and the creation of expectations document for their team along with class exercises to present their expectations.

Additional topics covered in the second session are Good to Great Principles (Going from mediocre to high performing teams), Leading with Extreme Ownership, 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, Women in Public Safety Leadership, Inclusiveness and Diversity, and Leading across generations.

The session also includes a variety of challenging real world leadership scenarios where the student will have to come up with solutions utilizing all the course skills and present their solution to the instructor cadre and class.

The second session concludes with a recap of all the topics, how to prepare for session three, and an open discussion on topics, scenarios, or current challenges in the profession.

The third and final session of the course titled, “Changing the Way the Leader Thinks” focuses on Vertical Leadership Concepts (VLC) like, Systems Thinking, Group Dynamics, Forward Thinking, and Leading in VUCA (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) Environment.

This session focuses on expanding the perspective on the leader to think more “globally” in respect to their position, organization, community, and beyond.

One of the goals of the third session is to develop the student to start understanding a “Long Term View” in conjunction with the ability to start seeing patterns in problems and situations amongst VUCA situations.

After bringing awareness to VLC, the students will be given a final project which will challenge their leadership skills and require them to utilize all the topics and concepts taught in the entire course.

The final project will be taken from current situations in public safety to include, dealing with civil unrest, active shooter, officer suicide, officer involved shooting with high media attention, and county wide communication system failure. The final projects will be tailored toward the student’s assignment.

The instructor cadre has over 20 final project scenarios based on their experience combined with scenarios in today’s headlines.

The students will have to prepare a comprehensive presentation as if they were presenting to their command staff.

The instructor cadre will challenge the student by asking probing questions they may not have the answer forcing the student to think on the feet.

The course will conclude with feedback from the students along with and recap of the course. The students will then be presented their graduation certificates.