12 Manager Soft Skills Courses (Free & paid)

Setting clear expectations for subordinates is a vital role of every team manager. By bringing everyone on the same page, no one will be left off and confused about their tasks or deadlines. This, in turn, will ensure higher productivity and efficiency in the workplace.

SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s course on Expectations Setting will provide you with an insightful take on improving this soft skill, helping you establish and maintain a culture of clarity and accountability, as well as foster good communication. Here, you’ll go through the crucial steps of deconstructing and framing performance expectations, and the psychological effects of setting high and low expectations.

This manager soft skills course will also show you why it's important to listen to your employees, alongside a list of questions that you can ask them to find out their personal goals and expectations. 

Perfect for all the busy bees out there, this course only contains 4 micro-lessons that you can complete in just a few minutes. Applying the principles of the microlearning design model, each slide only contains bite-sized chunks of information, reducing cognitive overload. This strategy puts managers in a better position to absorb the key messages of this course.

SC Training has collaborated with former Australian cricket superstar Shane Watson to share his leadership insights, drawn from intense years spent on the oval. This course offers practical knowledge on becoming high-performance leaders, equipping your managers to inspire teams no matter the challenge.

Throughout the course, Shane shares valuable tips, examples, and techniques for creating productive environments built on discipline and positive mindsets. He also covers the responsibilities of leadership and managing expectations, helping your leaders thrive.

The mission of this SC Training manager soft skills course is to help managers become a positive influence on their employees and inspire them to perform better in their jobs. It starts with a lesson highlighting the significance of personal passion and assertiveness, and how it attracts and inspires employees to perform better.

It also emphasizes the importance of being outspoken with your beliefs and following them through with your behavior and actions. Another key concept discussed in this course is the importance of building trust and harmonious relationships with your employees and how they can gain their loyalty and commitment.

Like all SC Training courses, lessons are delivered in bite-size to stay true to their micro elearning platform. It also contains a gamified quiz at the end of the lesson to find out how much you've learned so far.

The Performance Management course is another manager soft skills and leadership training course by SC Training that focuses on establishing role clarity, addressing weaknesses, and managing underperforming employees. This course begins by explaining role clarity and identifying the responsibilities and tasks of each of your employees to spot performance gaps.

Then, it proceeds with discussing how to give, receive, and process feedback effectively through radical candor. Lastly, it provides significant techniques on how you can undergo negotiation and communicate effectively with underperforming employees.

This course is delivered through SC Training’s mobile learning app, where you can enjoy self-paced learning using your hand-held mobile device. 

Time management is essential for effective leadership and successful management. Learn how to balance your management work and personal life through this time management course by Universal Class. It has a wide range of topics, such as goal setting, task management, and productivity tool usage.

This soft skills training for managers also highlights how your own values and beliefs can help achieve team goals and success while improving your time management skills. Just a quick heads up that this is a lengthy course, which will take 6 months to complete. It can also provide you with a Continuing Education Unit (CEU) certificate if needed. 

This Coursera course is facilitated by exceptional leaders from the University of Michigan and Morgan Stanley. Here, they will share their insights, experiences, and some expert recommendations on creating a shared vision for your team and communicating it to them without authority.

Expect a series of lectures and practical leadership assignments, where you will learn how to effectively manage, inspire, and motivate people and teams and help bring out the best in them.

Apart from discussions, they will also guide you on how you can put their theories into practice and apply them to your own teams and leadership, developing your leadership and social skills and allowing you to become a more effective leader. This course is 100% online, which can be accessed anytime using desktop and mobile devices.

This edX course was designed to help managers develop positive attitudes and high communication skills that they can use to effectively inform and persuade their teams and build strong relationships at work.

It consists of a total of 4 sections, covering topics like the fundamentals of professional communications, strategies for in-person communication and virtual presentation, and tips for writing effective email invitations.

It will also go through the step-by-step process on how you can apply these skills to implement effective teamwork and project management so that everyone on your team be a team-player, hone their verbal communication skills, improve their ability to communicate, and grow their presentation skills.

A final assessment and course recap will be provided at the end of this course to demonstrate your mastery of the content. While it’s not free, this course can be taken and completed at your own pace. 

Take advantage of this course by Study.com to improve your soft skills and establish a better-functioning work environment that you and your employees will all benefit from.

In this course, you'll get to know the true definition of soft skills, their role in the business environment, and how you can use them to promote better business productivity. You will also learn the vital relationship between soft skills and self-management, and how you can combine these skills to achieve team success. 

The content of this course will be delivered through insightful videos, lectures from field experts, lesson quizzes, and end-course assessments to ensure retention. 

Emotional intelligence is a sought-after skill that gives managers the ability not only to build positive relationships with others but also with themselves. In this manager soft skills course by FutureLearn, you’ll be able to dig deeper into the key concepts surrounding emotional intelligence, its connection to empathy and patience, and how it drives better leadership and management in the workplace.

It will also walk you through the central components of this vital soft skill and how you can develop and apply them in certain situations to better your self-awareness and boost your active listening, problem-solving, and conflict-resolution skills. 

The lessons of this course are split into weeks and delivered into bite-sized videos and modules, which you can complete at your own pace. 

Building and maintaining a culture of trust can help you drive better teamwork and collaboration in your workplace. After all, employees who have strong faith in their managers are more likely to give their all at work and collaborate with one another to reach a common goal.

In this SC Training manager soft skills course, you’ll get to know the key elements that make a manager trustworthy in the eyes of their people, along some tips on how trust can be maintained from a leadership perspective. For those planning to adopt a blended workforce, it also contains a helpful guide on building and maintaining a trusting relationship with your people, despite this challenging work setup. 

At the end of this course, there will be a series of quizzes to improve your knowledge retention. For a more fun and exciting learning experience, they are delivered through game formats, like matching words, true or false, missing words, the classic multiple-choice, and more.  

Achieving and maintaining a strong workplace culture creates a more structured and more productive work environment that inspires everyone in the team to achieve greater success. SC Training’s course on Maintaining Culture will open your eyes to the most significant contributors to forming a culture, its role and essence in an organization, and most of all, how to maintain it with consistency.

You’ll also learn how to keep open and transparent communication with all levels of the organization, encourage critical thinking, prevent the set-and-forget mindset, and become a responsive leader. 

The content of this course is delivered in a series of micro modules, combined with timed and untimed games in between slides to ensure higher engagement and participation rates. Yet the best part? This course is mobile-friendly, so feel free to take and complete this course anytime and anywhere using your smartphone devices.

SC Training’s change management course can develop your managers’ adaptability to evolving markets, hierarchies, and businesses. This training helps them navigate significant shifts by meeting objectives, controlling risks, and streamlining processes. 

Including this in your soft skills training courses also equips managers to secure smooth organizational transitions and transformations. They can learn motivational techniques, team preparations, and goal-setting tools that maintain profitability and efficiency.