Looking for additional leadership opportunities for your new supervisors and aspiring and emerging leaders? Want to bring training to your team? Join us for our GROW classes, indicted on our Classes & Training page by the icon at left. These affordable courses are designed to help you improve your skills in areas like conflict management, emotional intelligence, delegation, communication, performance management, and more.
Overview
Whether you are communicating with your employees, customers, or suppliers your ability to express yourself well and understand others is a major factor of your success. For this course, you will have the opportunity to take the DiSC Personal Profile and use the results to better understand your own communication style and strengthen your business relationships by learning how to better communicate with people who have a different style. You will leave the session with a personal plan for improving your communication skills.
The second half of the class will focus on developing delegation as a valuable skill that will allow you to enable your employees to willingly take more responsibility for performance and use their expanded authority well.
What you will learn:
- The most common causes of communication breakdown and the actions you can take to reduce them.
- What your DiSC behavioral profile is, how to interpret it and how to use it to communicate better with others.
- How to understand the different DiSC styles, their interactions at work and how you can use that to manage others.
- The what, why and benefits of delegation.
- The conditions necessary for successful delegation.
- The 5 steps of effective delegation.
Registration Summer 2025
Location: Grainger Hall, UW-Madison
Date: August 13, 2025
Time: 8:30 am – 4:30 pm
Course Fee: $339
Register here for Summer 2025 or call 608-262-2451 to register. This course can be taken as a standalone course, or as part of the Learning to Lead Series. By registering for the full series (3 courses), participants will save 15% off of their registration fee. To sign up for the Series and receive discounted pricing, click here and register for all three courses in the same transaction. Additional discounts do not apply.
Not taking the Learning to Lead Series? Place 2 or more paid SBDC courses in your cart, and use discount code SBDC10 for 10% off. Classes must be purchased in the same transaction.
Registration Deadlines
| Registration type | Date | Fee |
| Earlybird | Earlybird closes: 7/23/2025 | Earlybird Registration Fee: $296.10 |
| Late Registration | Late Registration begins: 8/5/2025 | Late Registration Fee: $361.90 |
| Course registration closes | 8/12/2025 |
Registration & Cancellation policies
- Payment will be required at time of registration. You must have either a credit card or valid UW-Madison funding string to be able to register.
- Cancelations at least 24 hours before the program begins will incur a $25 cancellation fee. Cancelations less than 24 hours before the start of the program will incur the full program fee. To cancel, call registration at 608-262-2451. Please note that in the case of a cancellation (by either the participant or the SBDC), participants can only be transferred one time into a new course.
Disability Statement: Reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities will be made if requested at least two weeks in advance. Contact the UW-Madison SBDC office at sbdc@bus.wisc.edu to request accommodations.
The Small Business Development Center at UW Madison is recognized by SHRM to offer Professional Development Credits (PDCs) for the SHRM-CP® or SHRM-SCP®.
[I liked] learning how and when to delegate tasks, learning my DiSC style, learning my coworkers' DiSC styles, and learning where I need to make improvements professionally and personally.
Owner, Different Shades of Healing, 2024 Communication & Delegation participant
Jeff is a great instructor. He makes his lessons very applicable in the real world.
2024 Communication & Delegation participant
[I appreciated] the depth of content [covered] in a short amount of time. Jeff had answer for every question. The resources provided are great tools to use in the future.
Bar manager, Catering a Fresco, 2024 participant
[I gained] a better understanding of myself and my leadership skills, and how to take that into account moving forward in my communication and leadership.
Front-of-House Manager, Banzo LLC, 2024 participant
I liked that there were lots of resources to take home and re-read, as well as step-by-step processes [to follow].
-Geospatial Engineer, Millennium Geospatial, 2023 participant
Jeff made the class interesting and fulfilling; I learned a lot of new skills to apply to my everyday work life.
-Geospatial Services Lead, Millennium Geospatial, 2023 participant
[I valued the] delegation framework, DiSC profile, and the ladder of inference. [This class had] a lot of great content - both discussion and handouts - to take back to my work and put into practice.
Jon Koliner, Slipstream, 2024 participant
Instructor
Jeff Russell
Jeff Russell, (MS, UW-Madison) co-director of Russell Consulting, Inc., specializes in helping organizations achieve their goals by successfully responding to the challenges of continuous change. With a focus on leadership, strategic thinking, leading change, and performance coaching, Jeff has guided organizations as diverse as Fortune 500 firms, social and public sector organizations, and small family businesses toward their goals. Jeff received his Masters Degree in Industrial Relations from the UW-Madison where he serves as an ad hoc faculty member for the Small Business Development Center. Jeff also is an adjunct faculty member at UW-Milwaukee, and UW–LaCrosse.
Jeff and his wife and business partner Linda have co-authored nine books. Recent publications include: Change Training, Strategic Planning Training, Change Basics, Strategic Planning 101, Ultimate Performance Management, and, most recently, Fearless Performance Reviews (McGraw-Hill, 2012). For more information on Jeff and his work, visit Russell Consulting, Inc.’s website at www.RussellConsultingInc.com.
The Wisconsin SBDC Network is a proud part of the Office of Business & Entrepreneurship within the Universities of Wisconsin.
It is funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities will be made if requested at least two weeks in advance. Contact us at sbdc@bus.wisc.edu or call (608) 263-2221.