Interactive multimedia instruction (IMI) lessons are designed to target an area of development based on leadership competencies outlined in ADP/ADRP 6-22. Displayed below is the Leadership Requirements Model (LRM). IMI lessons are associated with leader competencies. Click on a leader competency to see associated IMI lessons.
Leads
Creating and Promulgating a Vision of the Future
Overview: Creating and promulgating a vision of the future helps leaders to more effectively execute their mission. Leaders who are able to instill their vision in their subordinates can avoid common leader missteps such as micromanagement by giving their subordinates the vision and guidance they need to act. When leaders are successful at communicating their vision, their subordinates can act in accordance with that vision, with mission command, and without over relying on direct orders. This allows subordinates the freedom to make decisions on their own and execute in real time using their judgment and their leader’s vision as guidance. Enhancing your ability to create and promulgate your vision will allow you to provide clearer guidance and give subordinates more autonomy and responsibility to accomplish the mission.
Associated Leader Competency: Leads Others
Overview: The nature of Army operations makes it essential for leaders at all levels to be able to influence outside of their chain of command. This lesson will teach you the importance of extending influence in the current operational environment. You will become more self-aware of your goals and able to achieve those goals as the lesson provides information on understanding your own interests, assessing your target of influence, and building rapport with your target. The lesson will teach you how to effectively gather information about the ultimate priorities and goals of those you are influencing to improve communication and enhance the effectiveness of your influence.
Associated Leader Competencies: Extends Influence Beyond the Chain of Command
Overview: Decision making is critical to effective leadership. Army leaders regularly deal with situations that are complex or chaotic. Leaders are often in a position of having to make tough decisions, this lesson covers specific techniques to enhance decision making in difficult circumstances, as well as, how one’s perception or interpretation of information influences decision making.
Associated Leader Competencies: Leads by Example; Prepares Self
Seeking and Incorporating Diverse Ideas
Overview: Seeking and incorporating diverse ideas is a means for learning, problem solving, and sharing meaning. You will benefit from seeking and incorporating diverse ideas because doing so allows you to think creatively and go outside of your perspective to learn something new. This behavior leads to open communication and a learning environment within the unit. It also shows your subordinates that you are willing to listen and that you are willing to use the best ideas.
Associated Leader Competency: Leads Others
Being an Adaptable Leader in Times of Change
Overview: ADRP 6-22 states “Like self-awareness, adaptability takes effort. To become adaptable, leaders must challenge previously held ideas and assumptions by seeking out novel and unfamiliar situations. Leaders who remain safely inside their comfort zone provided by their current level of education, training, and experience will never learn to recognize change or understand inevitable changes in their environment..” As such, it is crucial that leaders understand these changes and are able to adapt and manage them effectively. Additionally, leaders need to be able to assist members of their unit with recognizing these changes and build consensus as they occur.
Associated Leader Competency: Leads Others
Building Working Relationships Across Boundaries
Overview: Given the nature of current operations, it is essential that Army leaders are prepared to build and develop relationships with a host of individuals, teams, and organizations from diverse backgrounds. Building effective working relationships is complex and requires leaders to communicate across interpersonal and intercultural boundaries. Although the differences between and among individuals and groups may be real, it is just as likely that they are perceived based on prior experience, assumptions, or stereotypes. Leaders must be able to break down stereotypes and overcome differences in order to form effective working relationships.
Associated Leader Competencies: Communicates; Extending Influence Beyond the Chain of Command; Prepares Self
Extending Influence During Negotiation
Overview: Whether in a command meeting or communicating with host nation leaders, negotiation skills are an integral part of succeeding as a leader in today’s Army. The art of negotiation is an advanced level of communication that requires leaders to leverage their knowledge and negotiation techniques to achieve desired outcomes. This lesson will teach you about negotiation and the general conditions for negotiation. It will also help you identify why negotiations fail and how to avoid the circumstances that lead to a breakdown in negotiations. You will also learn how to apply negotiation techniques, deal with emotions,
Associated Leader Competency: Extends Influence Beyond the Chain of Command
Achieving Shared Understanding
Overview: Achieving a shared understanding is the goal of communication. This lesson will improve your communication so that your thoughts, ideas, vision, and orders are understood. ADRP 6-22 identifies several benefits of achieving a shared understanding. Sharing information builds trust because a leader’s thinking and decision making processes are transparent to others. Sharing information also allows others to make better, more informed decisions. Other benefits include clearer understanding of your vision and intent, relieving stress that comes from not having enough information, and controlling rumors that can spread in the absence of information.
Associated Leader Competencies: Communicates; Leads Others; Leads by Example
Enabling Subordinates Using Mission-Focused Delegation
Overview: As today’s operational environment becomes more complex and uncertain, the need for mission-focused delegation has become increasingly important. ADRP 6-22 states that it is imperative that Army leaders learn to use delegation successfully by empowering their subordinates to become agile and adaptive leaders. In this lesson you will be able to assess your comfort level with delegation. You will learn the difference between mission-focused delegation and regular delegation, as well as what tasks are suitable for delegating and how you can benefit from effectively delegating.
Associated Leader Competencies: Leads Others; Develops Others
Building Trust
Overview: Trust between individuals is essential for effective teamwork and group action. ADRP 6-22 describes how leaders must establish trust to be effective leaders, “Leaders build trust to mediate relationships and encourage commitment among followers. Trust starts from respect among people and grows from common experiences and shared understanding.” This lesson will help you to better understand trust, who’s involved in trust, and the distinction between different types or bases of trust. The lesson will describe techniques to build trust and you will be able to practice the techniques in realistic scenarios. You will learn how to assess trust in others and new ways to figure out if someone else is trustworthy. These topics will help to broaden your knowledge of trust and give you effective strategies to better earn and build trusting relationships with others.
Associated Leader Competencies: Builds Trust; Extends Influence Beyond the Chain of Command; Creates a Positive Environment; Prepares Self
Fostering Team Unity
Overview: Teamwork, team unity, and unit cohesion are some of the most important concepts to effective leadership and achieving mission success. As a leader, it is your responsibility to build effective teams that display cohesion and unity so they are ready for the challenges that they will face. This lesson will teach you the characteristics of effective teams and how you can recognize those characteristics within your team. You will also learn about dysfunctional team behaviors and how to diagnose dysfunction. In the lesson you will use multiple case studies and interactive exercises to develop your skills and achieve team unity and minimize team dysfunction.
Associated Leader Competencies: Creates a Positive Environment; Develops Others; Gets Results
Managing Difficult Behavior
Overview: In any occupation, leaders will need to interact with people who demonstrate difficult behavior that negatively impacts unit morale and performance. This lesson will teach you how to recognize and differentiate difficult behavior, as well as, provide you with techniques that you can use to deal with and overcome difficult behavior. The lesson discusses what motivates people to be difficult and describes the benefits of taking action to resolve issues. Lastly, the lesson discusses how you can deal with subordinates and superiors who are difficult. Multiple scenarios and interactive exercises are used to allow you to practice dealing with difficult behaviors.
Associated Leader Competencies: Extends Influence Beyond the Chain of Command; Leads by Example; Communicates
Develops
Managing Conflict
Overview: Managing conflict is a necessary skill employed by leaders on an everyday basis. This lesson will help you to identify conflict and apply different strategies to appropriately deal with conflict. Whether managing conflict among others or with yourself and someone else, the ability to communicate to resolve conflict collaboratively will help you to move past conflicts and succeed in your mission. While effective communication is the first step to minimizing conflict, conflict will assuredly arise. For this reason, demonstrating the ability to manage and resolve conflict is essential to effective leadership.
Associated Leader Competencies: Creates a Positive Environment; Prepares Self; Leads by Example
The Leader's Role in Providing On-the-Job Learning and Support
Overview: This lesson will help you get the most from what you
do every day. Every experience is an opportunity for learning.This lesson will help you learn all that you can on-the-job and develop faster so you're better prepared for the unexpected. Because on-the-job learning is a frequently used, cost effective, and universally applicable means for developing your leaders, this lesson will immediately impact the effectiveness of your unit.
Associated Leader Competencies: Creates a Positive Environment
The Art of Asking Questions
Overview: This lesson will help you get the most from what you
do every day. Every experience is an opportunity for learning.This lesson will help you learn all that you can on-the-job and develop faster so you're better prepared for the unexpected. Because on-the-job learning is a frequently used, cost effective, and universally applicable means for developing your leaders, this lesson will immediately impact the effectiveness of your unit.
Associated Leader Competencies: Creates a Positive Environment;
Prepares Self; Leads by Example
The Value of Self-Awareness
Overview: This lesson explores the importance of self-awareness
along with strategies and techniques for becoming more self-aware
and adjusting your behavior in response to feedback. The Army
Self-Development Handbook states that self-awareness facilitates
many social interactions, but is especially critical for leadership, in
terms of the leader’s own development, the leader’s interactions
with others, and the leader’s ability to adapt to changing situations.
As a leader you need to know what you excel at and what you need
to improve on. Self-awareness allows leaders to identify their strengths and developmental needs
and optimize these strengths while addressing their developmental needs. Self-aware leaders are
able to more accurately gauge their impact on others because they understand how others see them.
Leaders who do not possess self-awareness are not capable of getting the most out of their subordinates
because they lack an understanding of what they can do to better lead them. Finally, as a self-aware leader
you will be better able to adapt to changing situations. A leader must know where he or she is at to know
how to change in response to a situation.
Associated Leader Competencies: Prepares Self
Supporting the Developing Leader
Overview: A leader’s ability to develop their subordinates affects
their subordinate’s morale, the ability of the Army to achieve its
mission, and the overall quality of the Army’s leadership culture.
Consistently, leaders have identified the ability to develop others
as the leader competency most in need of development. This
lesson covers both basic fundamentals of developing others and
more advanced methods for doing so.
Associated Leader Competencies: Develops Others
Every Leader as a Coach
Overview: Army doctrine states that any Soldier can be a coach
regardless of their rank as long as they have the necessary skills
or expertise. Coaching is a means for leaders to develop, build
relationships, and demonstrate care and concern for their
subordinates. This lesson will help you to become a better coach
by using real strategies to more effectively coach others. The
Army has recognized the benefits of coaching stating that it can
enhance and influence maturity, self-awareness, adaptability, and
conceptual and team-building skills in all leaders. The
development of these skills is critical to leader, unit, and Army
success. Therefore, coaching is a skill that all leaders should learn
for the benefit of their subordinates and others.
Associated Leader Competencies: Develops Others; Communicates
Creating and Supporting Challenging Job Assignments
Overview: Overview: Being able to create and support challenging job
assignments for you subordinates is one of the most effective ways for
supporting their development. You will learn what makes a job
assignment developmental, specifically, that it is challenging and
requires an increase in responsibilities or duties. By the end of the
lesson you will be able to identify the importance of creating
challenging job assignments, methods for doing so, and be able to
identify ways to support the development of an individual with a challenging job.
Associated Leader Competencies: Develops Others
Rapid Team Stand-up: How to Build Your Team ASAP
Overview: Overview: Not all teams have the luxury of time to work through problems
and issues before they have to perform. Leaders of these teams must,
therefore, understand the critical team skills that are necessary in order to
quickly and effectively stand up such teams. The most significant
relationship between rapid team stand up and leadership is the ability of
leaders to build team or group skills and processes. Rapid team stand-up is
one of the greater challenges confronting leaders because of the limited time
available for developing trust and cohesion, establishing roles and
expectations, and creating a shared understanding of goals and purpose. This
lesson will teach you how to do all of these things under difficult constraints.
However, this information is also applicable to the development of teams that
are not under such constraints.
Associated Leader Competencies: Develops Others
Seeking and Delivering Face-to-Face Feedback
Overview: Overview: Feedback provides informative and evaluative messages
that enable recipients to understand how their performance
compares to expected standards, which facilitates improvement of
their actions and behaviors. Feedback directs, motivates, and
rewards behavior. Army leaders must understand both how to
proactively seek constructive feedback and deliver corrective
feedback to improve the performance of others. You will be able to
use the information learned in this lesson to get the feedback that
you want so you can more effectively achieve your mission.
Further, the lesson will describe how you can deliver constructive
feedback to others so you can more effectively deliver the messages
that you need to send to subordinates so they can more effectively carry out their tasks.
Associated Leader Competencies: Communicates; Creates a Positive Environment; Prepares Self; Gets
Results
Achieves
Removing Work Barriers
Overview: Overview: This lesson will teach you how to remove work barriers in
order to get the mission accomplished. ADRP 6-22 states that in order
to remove work barriers you need to 1) Protect the organization from
unnecessary taskings and distractions, 2) Recognize and resolve
scheduling conflicts, and 3) Overcome other obstacles preventing
full attention to accomplishing the mission. Work barriers can
interrupt plans and delay or derail execution. The strategies
presented in this lesson will teach you how to effectively remove
work barriers. As a leader, the ability to remove work barriers is critical to your success because
work barriers can block or harm your unit’s success and morale.
Associated Leader Competencies: Gets Results
Accounting for Differences in Capabilities and
Commitment
Overview: Overview: Being able to select the right Soldier for the job is a
fundamental of leadership and a leader’s ability to do so effects the
mission and reflects on that leader’s overall quality. Good leaders
recognize that their Soldiers are different from one another and
account for the differences in capabilities and commitment of
individuals and groups. The task at hand can be difficult given all of
the responsibilities of leadership. Leaders have to know how to
gather information that isn’t always easy to get, such as a Soldiers ability to perform a specific task or
their level of commitment. This lesson will provide you with and understanding of how individuals and
groups differ regarding capabilities and commitment and how you can go about identifying the
capabilities of individuals and groups.
Associated Leader Competencies: Gets Results
Clarifying Roles
Overview: Overview: Understanding one’s role helps individuals to be able to
know what they need to do to accomplish the mission and how
they need to act in order for that to happen. As a leader, you’ve
likely encountered situations where your subordinates’ or peers’
lack of clarity concerning their role has caused conflict among
individuals or hampered the unit’s ability to accomplish the
mission. Clarifying roles is a way of communicating your intent or
vision so you can improve mission execution.
Associated Leader Competencies: Gets Results
Motivating Through Rewards
Overview: In order to effectively lead others it helps to know about
human motivation and how to apply that knowledge to more
effectively motivate others. This lesson will help you get the most out
of those you work with by helping you identify what motivates them
which will allow you to respond with rewards that will work to
maximize their potential. What you learn in this lesson can be used to
help you motivate people and also you can use what you learn to
teach others how to motivate more effectively.
Associated Leader Competencies: Gets Results
Beyond People Skills: Leveraging Your Understanding of Others
Overview: Performance within the military context involves distinct
roles and formal processes for accomplishing tasks. As a leader you
need to effectively establish roles and processes that enact order and
discipline and allow for efficient decision making and action in
critical situations. Your decisions will affect the approach that your
subordinates adopt which affects the quality of their relations with
others and the general unit climate.
Associated Leader Competencies: Leads Others; Leads by Example;
Communicates; Prepares Self
Navigating Contentious Conversations
Overview: Contentious conversations arise normally when working
with others. Handled correctly you can remove unnecessary points
of contention and use your communication skills to challenge others
and yourself to come to well thought out decisions. In order to get
the most out of conversations, Army leaders need to know how to
communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively and deal with
contention.
Associated Leader Competencies: Extend Influence Beyond the Chain
of Command; Communicates;Prepares Self; Creates a Positive Environment
Leader as Follower
Overview: In the Army, everyone is part of a chain of command.
Just as you need to be the best leader you can be, you also have to
work to be an effective follower. Part of leadership is being able to
effectively follow those that lead you so that the guidance, vision,
and orders you give to your subordinates are in line with your
leaders’ guidance, vision and orders. This lesson will help you to
become a better follower or if you suggest the lesson to your
subordinates it could help them to become better followers of you.
Associated Leader Competencies: Extends Influence Beyond the Chain
of Command; Communicates;Creates a Positive Environment
Out of Time: Managing Competing Demands
Overview: The United States Army and the environment it operates
in, is fast-paced, and is in a state of constant change and
transformation. As a leader you are continually confronted with
challenging circumstances, such as short-notice taskings and tight
training schedules. Given this environment, a leader’s time
management and prioritization skills are critical to both individual
and organizational mission success. This lesson introduces time
management techniques and how to overcome ineffective time
management practices. You will take an assessment to look at and
evaluate your time management. In the lesson you will learn the
symptoms of poor time management and underlying causes. You
will also be given an opportunity to reflect on any ineffective time management causes and be given
solutions to address those causes.
Associated Leader Competencies: Creates a Positive Environment; Gets
Results