BRAVE Leadership: Advanced certificate program

The BRAVE Leadership Toolkit

At the heart of the program are three fundamentals that are explored and applied throughout the modules of the program, supporting leaders to create their own BRAVE Leadership Toolkit.

The toolkit has three areas of leadership skills that are built throughout the program in the individual, team, and organisational context:  emotional agility, compassion and courage.

Leaders who participate in this training will cultivate knowledge and skills that will enable them to respond effectively to challenges and crises and to support themselves, their teams and their organisations to be successful through the transformations needed in our changing world of work.

Module 1: The BRAVE Leader (Half-day – 4 hours)

Module 1 explores the importance of mental health and wellbeing as core to organisational success and introduces the BRAVE Leadership approach as a key business imperative in the volatile and changing 21st century global context.

In this module, leaders will build an understanding of a systems approach to mental health and wellbeing that emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals, teams and the organisation, and examine “additive and depleting factors” that can support or create challenges for mental health at work.

Leaders will develop foundational skills to help them with their own wellbeing and begin building their BRAVE Leadership Toolkit that will enable them to respond compassionately and effectively to ongoing, current and emergent workplace challenges that impact individual and collective wellbeing.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize the business imperative of creating organisational conditions that foster wellbeing and mental health in a context of challenges and change
• Describe the psychobiology of mental health and wellbeing at the system 1 level – the individual
• Identify key elements of a systems’ approach to workplace mental health and wellbeing
• Recognize biases and stigma, their impacts and ways to work with them
• Define the core skills of BRAVE Leadership: Emotional Agility, Compassion and Courage
• Begin building your BRAVE Leadership Toolkit

Module 2: The Team: Creating a climate of wellbeing (Half-day – 4 hours)

Module 2 focuses on the “how” of building climates of inclusion and mental wellbeing amongst teams and reducing mental health stigma, bias and workplace exclusion. Habitual work practices that lack psychological safety and foster untenable stress levels are explored, including common behavioural, cognitive and emotional traps.  Leaders will explore how exclusion and discrimination, socio-cultural factors, and stigma contribute to workplace mental health challenges.  Leaders will explore the importance of kindness at work and practice ways that the BRAVE leadership skills of compassion, emotional agility and courage can be employed as antidotes to common workplace challenges.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize characteristics of collective wellbeing in system 2, the team climate
• Describe the role of kindness in fostering a team climate that supports mental health and wellbeing
• Recognize common behavioural, cognitive and emotional “traps” that erode wellbeing in the workplace
• Examine the impacts of bias, exclusion and discrimination on the team
• Explain the characteristics of psychological safety
• Employ BRAVE Leadership Tools for cultivating psychological safety and promoting wellbeing within the team climate

Module 3: The ecosystem of organisational wellbeing (Half-day – 4 hours)

Module 3 prepares leaders to understand and respond to challenges and crises impacting system 3: the organisation by examining organisational factors that impact mental health, wellbeing and performance outcomes. They will explore areas of influence allowing them to act as agents of change in their organisational context, including the role of organisational values as benchmarks to support BRAVE Leadership actions as an ally and advocate in the workplace. Module 3 brings all systems together with opportunities to explore BRAVE Leadership strategies that support conditions for flourishing at all three systems levels.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify the importance of strategy, governance and culture as factors in cultivating organisational wellbeing
• Discover ways leaders can leverage these areas to improve mental health and wellbeing outcomes at work
• Discuss ways to cultivate awareness, and enact allyship and advocacy as a BRAVE Leader
• Problem-solve workplace situations using the BRAVE Leadership toolkit
• Utilize organisational values as benchmarks to analyse and address workplace challenges
• Examine a VUCA-context crisis and explore BRAVE Leadership responses at all systems’ levels
• Reflect on your BRAVE Leadership next steps

Module 4: eLearning and Exam (online)

Module 4 begins with an eLearning program that guides participants to review key ideas explored in Modules 1-3, guides them through finalizing their BRAVE Leadership action plan, and helps them prepare for the exam. Upon successful completion of all program components, including a passing grade on the exam, participants will be awarded a Certificate of Completion recognized by Queen’s University.