Organizational Change and Leadership Certificate

By integrating course concepts of leadership styles and theories with a leadership field experience, students will be able to assess their skills as a leader and create a plan for growth and development for future success. Each student will be required to create a leadership learning agenda and development plan at the beginning of the semester based on their current leadership experience. The learning agenda will identify goals for achievement and strategies for assessing and improving upon their effectiveness as a leader.

This course focuses on the understanding of the global forces and trends that impact countries, organizations, and people across many dimensions. Student will learn concepts about global issues and examine the financial, cultural, political, environmental, military, technical, economic and demographic trends and forces affecting today's and tomorrow's organizations. Students learn to use critical thinking, analytical, and problem solving skills to envision the future and challenge thinking patterns. Readings, discussions, written assignments, and tests are part of the class.

This course focuses on the development of the essential skills needed to be an effective team member and understand the characteristics of high-performing teams in the workplace. Students develop a strong framework for building effective teams through topics that include group and team theory research, individual behavior styles and their functions in a team and team leadership, evaluation of team effectiveness, and understanding of negotiation, persuasion and conflict resolution. This course is highly interactive, with projects that require the student to participate in a team to evaluate cross-functional work teams, self-directed teams, and integrated work teams. Learning takes place through lectures, case studies, simulations, and group projects that develop strategies to build strong teams.

Organizational culture exists in all kinds of organizations including profit-seeking firms, non-profit organizations and government agencies. It is a primary determinate for how well employees function together and like working in the place they do. Ultimately organizational effectiveness and success depends on a healthy organizational culture. This course introduces organizational culture and methods of analyzing it. The course takes an interdisciplinary functionalist view of organizational culture and subcultures as being: (a) things observed, felt, heard and expressed by employees; (b) organizational values espoused in mission statements, goals, ideals, norms, standards, and moral principles; and (c) underlying assumptions of employees about their roles, responsibilities and relationships given available resources relative to client/constituency performance expectations, applicable labor-management agreements and regulatory/safety compliance issues. Methods for analyzing the health of organizational culture and subcultures are related to various kinds of circumstances faced by firms, organizations and agencies.

Sooner or later all organizations change in certain to many respects and for several reasons. This is true for organizations in profit, non-profit and government sectors which all have many things common. Ongoing organizational success frequently depends on how well change is managed given new opportunities, challenges or threats faced by organizations. Managing organizational change requires knowledge of things in an organization that may need to be changed including an organization’s mission, goals, fiscal health, budget, operations and/or production/service capabilities, facilities, unit structure, personnel, culture, technology and other resources. Effective management of organizational change also requires knowledge of and skills in ways to introduce, guide, support, monitor and evaluate changes once they are implemented. This course takes an interdisciplinary applied approach to managing organizational change teaching SOAR-based strategic planning, SWOT analysis, total quality management (TQM) and continuous quality improvement (CQI) among other change models and methods.

This interdisciplinary course focuses on theory and techniques for building and sustaining an efficient, creative organization that promotes problem solving and collaborative learning. Learning organization principles of systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning are studied. Included is an analysis of the conditions limiting an organization's capacity to learn and remediation of organizational learning disabilities.