04-604   Global Leadership Seminar

Course description

This course explores key concepts of leadership including influence, collaboration, conflict resolution, cultural intelligence, and organizational management. Students will learn about and debate questions in leadership theory such as: Is a good manager automatically a good leader? Can one lead a team of people with different cultural norms? How does a leader honestly appraise personal and organizational success?

The course also hones each student’s professional and personal development to lead and serve others by focusing on six leadership pillars: visionary, ethical, engaging, tactical, technical, and reflective. Class meetings include guest speakers who embody the six leadership pillars and are highly respected leaders in technology, academics, finance, and government representing diverse cultural backgrounds.

The course includes required readings/videos/podcast material, reflective writing assignments, individual and group activities, experiential assignments, and a final project and presentation.

Learning objectives

Students will be introduced to six leadership pillars and gain a greater understanding of what it means to be a leader who is:

• Visionary: with clear goals for one’s self, organizations, and communities
• Ethical: with core values and steadfastness in the face of competing objectives and the resilience to deal with conflicts without moral compromise
• Engaging: with empathy, attentive interpersonal attributes, outstanding formal and informal communication skills, and the capacity to inspire
• Tactical: with an ability to operationalize strategic goals and bring them to fruition, creating the ideal environment for individual and group success
• Technical: based on one’s own high-level skill set and the ego strength for inclusion of others with complementary realms of expertise
• Reflective: manifesting in the honest appraisal of personal and organizational success against metrics, and the ability to redirect based on assessment

Outcomes

After completing the course, students will be able to:

• Understand key concepts of leadership, influence, collaboration, conflict resolution, cultural intelligence, and organizational management.
• Embrace a personal philosophy of leadership and teamwork, aligning concepts of strategic planning, design thinking, and organizational innovation.
• Develop a refined, systematic model for inspiring and leading positive change, whether to solve existing problems or to forge new opportunities for advancement.
• Strengthen their cultural intelligence, sensitivity to inclusion, and awareness of differences across diverse groups, including in communication, hierarchical structure, decision-making, and time management.

Prerequisites

None

Faculty

Kathy Lachenauer