Leadership   

Why are organisational misbehaviours such as cynicism, apathy, bullying and disengagement increasingly prevalent in the workplace? This course examines these tensions and how transformational, authentic and inclusive leadership styles offer an alternative to the more autocratic, job-centred and controlling leadership styles of the past. You’ll learn how the digital revolution, along with an increased focus on projects and teamwork, has dramatically altered the perception of leadership in a way that now demands all organisational members take on some form of self-leadership. And you’ll learn how this change is causing tensions between traditional leaders and the contemporary practices vital to maintain agility in today’s ultra-competitive marketplace. This learning will be complemented by structured activities such as video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts and written assessments.

Few capabilities focus agile like a strong analytics program. Such a program determines where a team should focus from one agile iteration (sprint) to the next. Successful analytics are rarely hard to understand and are often startling in their clarity. In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, you'll learn how to build a strong analytics infrastructure for your team, integrating it with the core of your drive to value.

In this course, you will learn the neuroscience of change, why we are so change-averse, how to train for change resilience, and most importantly, you will begin developing a practice to help you be prepared for changes in personal life and in your career.

You will learn specific strategies and tools for overcoming fear, anxiety and managing stress related to these changes. By the end of this course, you will know what you need to do to become truly unshakable. You will build a practice for getting stronger emotionally and mentally.

By understanding neuroscience and building awareness of yourself, you will build a solid foundation for understanding your team and the greater behavior of the business world.

Remember, these changes won’t happen if you don’t take action. You might be uncomfortable, you might find some of the exercises silly, you might have doubts, and you might want to quit. Babies don’t quit trying to walk because they fall a lot, and neither should you. The only way to truly change is to practice consistently.

This is a foundational course in the Agile Leadership Specialization. By the end of this course, you will build an understanding of key agile leadership concepts. You will begin building a toolbox that will give you an ability to evaluate and create a baseline for yourself as an agile leader. You will access your team’s readiness for change. You will also analyze to what degree an organization is agile, and evaluate its ability to respond to change triggers.

Teams are essential to the modern organization, but most never reach their potential. Co-workers miscommunicate, and groups struggle to adapt to changes in the market or their organizations. When teams lack self-awareness about these challenges, performance suffers. Based on years of team culture research and consulting experience, this course helps you understand the problems that hurt productivity, and gives you tools for creating positive change. This course also guides you through creating the ground rules and structure needed to set your team up for success.

You gain the skills to diagnose issues such as conflicts, groupthink and lack of commitment in your team before they get out of control. The course offers frameworks to adjust team behaviors and get the best performance out of your people. You also understand frequent stumbling blocks for common team types, such as startups and virtual teams, and learn solutions tailored to each one.

When taking this course, you will raise your own self-awareness and gain self-confidence for a better leadership.
You will discover a new approach to leadership based on trust and sense.
The “Savoir-Relier” leadership, a new approach of leadership, taught to HEC MBA’s student and top executives, enables better team leadership and encourages relationships between people in spite of their differences of opinion.

You will develop relational skills, self-knowledge and self-awareness on the way to unfold your own leadership style. You’ll learn the skills of The Savoir-Relier (SR) methodology for better connecting with yourself or others by going through the following 4 steps for successful leadership: Introspection, Conversation, Resilience and Responsibility toward Value Creation.
In this first MOOC of the "Inspirational Leadership" specialization, you will practice the first two steps of the method for successful leadership: Introspection and Conversation. You will get to know yourself better during the Introspection part and get a chance to improve your communication skills in order to better interact with others. You will meet people like you who will share their stories and their experience with Savoir-Relier and why it is so inspiring for them in their life. Together, you’ll develop greater self-awareness by developing a leadership self-portrait and going through fun activities to increase your empathy and communication.

Leaders from different organizations and participants of the HEC Paris Leadership Certificate, the program from which this course and specialization are inspired, will share with you their insights about what it takes to become a great leader and what they are able to achieve now that they apply The Savoir-Relier methodology.

This course is part of the specialization “Inspirational Leadership: Leading with Sense”. In the next courses, you'll go through the second two steps of leadership: Resilience and Responsibility toward Value Creation.

This course aims to prepare you for working in an cross-cultural Business setting. We'll learn about common cross-cultural theories and how they are relevant to everyday business practices in a globalised world. By combining all of your vocabulary, reading, speaking, and writing skills that you acquired in the previous three courses, you will learn how language plays an important role in cross-cultural communication. You will also enhance your cross-cultural understanding and will be able to use vocabulary, tone and style, and spoken and written communication skills within a cross-cultural Business context. Skills learned in this course help prepare you to deliver the professional business presentation in the Capstone project.

After completing this course, you will be able to:

- identify possible cross-cultural issues and misunderstandings in communication
- apply strategies to overcome possible cross-cultural issues and misunderstandings in communication
- produce documents with an appropriate style for business communication purposes within a cross-cultural situation
- deliver a speech with an appropriate style for business communication purposes within a cross-cultural situation

Are you a business executive or a manager who uses English in your career? Then you know that good business communication in English requires focus, vocabulary, and specific linguistic structures. In this course, you will follow along a recently promoted manager as she builds and leads her team to success. Together, you will practice the language and styles of communication needed in English for
• Recruiting and training a professional team to work together with integrity and respect
• Managing and participating in well-organized meetings
• Making telephone conferences more efficient
• Writing professional emails that are easy to read
The activities in this course will give you the opportunity to share your experience and receive immediate feedback from other business professionals around the world.

Get the tools you need to analyze, evaluate and recommend specific actions organizations can take to grow their value and avoid common growth pitfalls. In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and taught by top-ranked faculty, you will learn to determine how best to build value, whether by scaling existing markets, entering established markets or creating new markets through innovation and acquisitions.

A Capstone Project is an assignment designed specifically to apply and showcase the skills you learned in the Specialization. To this end, the Business Strategy Capstone Project, a comprehensive Strategic Analysis, provides an opportunity for you to synthesize concepts and knowledge from the four prerequisite courses in the specialization. In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, you will be guided through your project by top-ranked faculty. You may continue with the organization you selected for previous assignments or select a new organization for this project. You will analyze the current state of the organization, strategic issues facing the organization, strategic paths the organization might pursue, make a recommendation of the best path for the organization to pursue, and write an Executive Summary. Your finished project will serve as an artifact showcasing your ability to conduct research on/within an organization, select and apply the most appropriate analytical tools, build a well-supported case for a specific position, and effectively communicate key points with executive leadership.

By the end of this guided project, you will be fluent in identifying, and mapping variables for Gap Analysis using a hands-on example. This will enable you to map business states from the AS IS to the TO BE state which is important in for preparing and managing change in professional and personal life.

Change happens all the time and in being able to identify factors involved in change and preparing to manage change you increase your chances for success . This analysis will help you if you are in:
+ Strategy development
+ Program Management
+ Project Management
+ Business Process Re-Engineering
+ Product Development
+ Organisational Development
And much more. On a personal level this analysis can help you to map where you are and where you want to be for example:
+ Competing in sports
+ Having a professional goal
+ Developing a good habit

Furthermore, this guided project is designed to engage and harness your visionary and exploratory abilities. You will use proven models in change management with Miro to identify the gaps in products/services, and further equip you with the knowledge to utilise the learned concepts, methodologies, and tools to prepare for change in various settings.

By the end of this guided project, you will be fluent in creating a change implementation model using Route Analysis for a hands-on example. This will equip you with a systemic implementation framework for change that can be utilized in professional and personal life.

Change happens all the time, and in being able to identify factors involved in change and developing a model for how to implement change you increase your chances for success. This analysis will help you with:

+ Strategy development
+ Program Management
+ Project Management
+ Business Process Re-Engineering
+ Product Development
+ Organizational Development

Furthermore, this guided project is designed to engage and harness your visionary and exploratory abilities. You will use proven models in change management with Miro to develop your change leadership skills for various settings.

Construction Management is the planning, coordinating, and building of a project from conception to completion. This specialization is intended for Construction industry professionals, engineers, and architects looking to advance their careers. Students interested in learning about construction project management would also benefit from this specialization.

This course focuses on learning how to develop and manage a schedule. The first module provides an overview of the Construction Scheduling course. The second module introduces bar or Gantt charts and how they are used as scheduling tools. During the third module, learners will create activity precedence diagrams, also referred to as activity on node diagrams, which graphically represent the construction activities in a project and their relationships. The fourth module provides an overview of the types of construction activity relationships encountered in a construction project and how to represent them in an activity precedence diagram. Forward and backward pass calculations are covered in the fifth module, and during the sixth module, Professor Odeh discusses the importance of critical paths, including what it is and why it is important.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:
-Discover key project scheduling techniques and procedures
-Learn how to develop and manage a schedule, and understand scheduling tools such as bar charts, activity on arrow, and activity on nodes
-Explore the multiple relationships that connect all the construction activities in our project from start to finish
-Learn about creating a network diagram, defining the importance of the critical path in a project network, and defining project activities float
-Understand the fundamentals of bar charts, precedence diagrams, activity on arrow, Program
-Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), range estimating, linear project operations, and the line of balance (LOB)

In a very competitive workplace, demonstrating your ability to turn challenges into opportunities is an important to way stand out to hiring managers and to your existing management/leadership. In this course, you will learn how to utilize the knowledge and skills needed to leverage left- and right-brain thinking, analyze problems, spur creativity, and implement innovative ideas for your workplace. Using the power of design thinking and Creative Problem Solving models you will work toward data-driven solutions to workplace challenges. You will engage in an active process of identifying/defining a specific challenge, generating a plan to address the challenge, collecting and analyzing data/information in order to sell your solution to your leadership, implementing your data-driven solution, and evaluating success of the solution.

Course Outcomes:
1. Understand design, out-of-the box, whole brain thinking, Your workplace strengths
2. Apply qualitative and scientific research method for workplace problems, Setting priorities and analyzing for outcomes
3. Apply creative problem solving and creative thinking, using creative techniques to overcome challenges and bring about innovation
4. Create action plan, Learn to implement innovative ideas and present ideas

Please Note: This course is scheduled to close new learner enrollment on November 15th, 2021, and fully close on May 15th, 2022. All graded assignments, including peer reviews, must be completed by May 15th in order to be accepted for Certificate credit.

There is mounting concern that organizational groups and teams often fail to learn from their past experiences. It’s pertinent to address this issue as groups and teams are often the main ways that work gets done in organizations.

In this course, we examine the main reasons that groups and teams are often ineffective, which include:
• The lack of organizational structures and support for teams and groups
• The lack of understanding and emphasis on learning
• Misaligned reward structures

So, what can be done to create an enabling learning culture in teams?

This course emphasizes practical and impactful ways to begin to address this state of affairs. Through the use of stories, scenarios with actors simulating different team issues, examples and dialogue, you learn how to:
• Understand teams in their larger organizational context
• Diagnose the learning strengths and barriers to learning on teams
• Identify ways to develop a team and group that continually learns and impacts the larger organization positively
• Create an organizational environment that encourages learning and innovation

Have you ever tried to find a solution to a problem only to realize you’ve been focusing on the wrong problem from the very beginning? Or you’ve proposed a solution only to have it shut down by your boss or coworkers? How stressful and defeating is that? With massive changes in our world that seem to create the most difficult of circumstances, both personally and professionally, your skills as a critical thinker and problem solver need to be further developed now more than ever.

By the end of this course you will have learned and memorized a practical model to solve problems on your own and with others. These 7 critical steps will ensure that you have looked at a problem from every angle and considered multiple solutions. In fact, this dynamic and holistic approach will help you solve problems once and for all!

We now live in a truly global, interconnected world in which every manager requires a high level of cultural intelligence. In a diverse work environment, a successful leader must understand the cultural backgrounds, beliefs and attitudes of the people around them – or run the risk of failing to achieve the organisation’s goals. This course, via structured learning activities (video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts, industry interviews and written assessments), will teach you that those with high ‘cultural intelligence’ – are good at spotting cultural differences and adapt their behaviour accordingly. You’ll develop cultural intelligence and sensitivity – key future-focused capabilities required of every leader.

Now that you have undergone personal information, you will be better prepared to empathize, understand, and mentor individual members of your team on a similar journey. Leading teams towards change-resilience is not as simple as knowing and understanding the psychology of individuals multiplied by a number of team members. It requires a different approach.

In this course, you will learn what influences human behavior in teams by looking at social psychology. You will evaluate your team’s level of change resilience and agility, and you will be applying practical tools for building Agile teams by applying Scrum project management framework.

You won’t stop there, you will learn how to be a servant leader. You will learn practical tools for organizing, leading, and facilitating a Scrum team.

Parts of the content are written from a Scrum Master perspective, and even though you will not be able to use it as a Scrum Master certification, I will be sharing tools and best practices learned through my own experience of being a Scrum Master.

Problem-solving and effective decision-making are essential skills in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing workplace. Both require a systematic yet creative approach to address today’s business concerns. This course will teach an overarching process of how to identify problems to generate potential solutions and how to apply decision-making styles in order to implement and assess those solutions. Through this process, you will gain confidence in assessing problems accurately, selecting the appropriate decision-making approaches for the situation at hand, making team decisions, and measuring the success of the solution’s implementation. Using case studies and situations encountered by class members, you will explore proven, successful problem-solving and decision-making models and methods that can be readily transferred to workplace projects.

Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
1. Identify key terms, styles, and approaches to effective problem-solving and decision-making
2. Explain both the affordances and limitations associated with problem-solving and decision-making
3. Reflect on how mindset and personal bias influence your ability to solve problems and make decisions
4. Explain and discuss how organizational decisions or non-decisions impact personal development, team dynamics, and company-wide performance
5. Articulate how both good and bad team decisions can benefit your professional growth

This course offers an action-oriented introduction to Giving Voice to Values (or GVV), an exciting new approach to values-driven leadership development in the workplace, in business education and in life.

GVV is not about persuading people to be more ethical, but instead it starts from the premise that most of us already want to act on our values, but that we also want to feel that we have a reasonable chance of doing so effectively. Through positive, real life examples, pre-scripting, rehearsal and peer coaching, GVV builds the skill, the confidence and likelihood that we will act on our values more often and more successfully. Based on research and practice, with over 1,000 pilots in educational settings and companies on all seven continents, GVV helps answer the questions: “What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?”

This course was developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and is taught by top-ranked faculty. You will come away from GVV with an expanded toolkit, as well as practice, in a variety of methods and techniques for voicing and enacting your own values and principles. You will develop and practice leadership skills in "peer coaching” with other learners. Through cases and stories based on recognizable workplace, classroom and life values conflicts, you will apply the GVV techniques and “re-frames”, expanding your repertoire for possible action as well as identifying and rehearsing responses that are likely to be most effective. Through this practice, you will gain greater confidence and competence in voicing and enacting your values effectively.

Organization is a fundamental theme to understand the real functioning of each company or, more in general, of any institution, and it is part of the basic know-how of each manager. Organization design implies decisions on how work is subdivided and how coordination between the various activities and people who autonomously perform them is guaranteed. Moreover, organization design is willing to consider also the interdependences between people daily activities (namely processes): in fact, processes are the real lever to achieve organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Lastly, organization design should also consider how people and units take their decisions, given that organizing and deciding are two central and complementary activities of the managerial function.

To achieve these goals, this course aims at explaining you the main concepts of organization, with a strong practical orientation: illustration of typical organizational problems through real corporate examples will be used. But a solid theoretical background is provided as well: the main theories behind organizational design will be used to dig into the main areas of investigation.

The course investigates three main areas:

the analysis and design of a proper organization, at the micro level (individual) and at the macro level (group of multiple individuals);
the analysis of how to effectively manage processes, in terms of activities, performance and principles;
the analysis of how to rapidly take decisions, in terms of process, constraints, models and game theory approach.

This course teaches you the simple principles expert managers use to improve and motivate employee performance. You’ll never have to avoid telling an employee “the truth” again, because the seven techniques we teach will not make employees defensive or afraid. As a manager, or someone who would like to be a manager, you’ll also learn specifically what feedback is, how negative feedback is weighed more heavily than positive, and how positive feedback can super-charge behaviors such as creativity and teamwork.

Giving feedback is a skill which develops over time. We give you a process you can use to improve your feedback skills and deliver it with confidence. You will find that there is a scientific basis for many of your observations and intuitions about feedback—such as, it is hard to give correctly, people don’t like it, and more. This will be reassuring as you learn how to overcome these difficulties. We hope you have a fantastic time becoming a better manager!

With this course you will position your own leadership style and grow your resilience

In this course, second course of the "Inspirational Leadership" Specialization, you will discover the characteristics of charismatic leadership.
You’ll personally learn how to embody these traits through the “Savoir-Relier” (art of connecting and leading with sense) methodology, which covers 3Gs: being Genuine, Generous, and Generative.
You will then choose which style of leadership best fits you, why and when so you can adapt to more complex and difficult situations with resilience.
In a “Self-Portrait” and “Conversation” with your classmates, you will be able to adjust your own ideas about your leadership styles and strengths, allowing you to increase your self-awareness, improve your relational intelligence, and prepare you to confront crises and resolve conflicts.
You will also be better prepared to face difficult situations and make better decisions by relying on both your perception and analytical skills. All these skills will help you create sense in your team so you can lead it better.

This course is part of a Specialization on Leadership called “Inspirational Leadership: Leading with Sense”, so you may want to take the course “Building Your Leadership Skills” prior of taking this course.
As where in course 1 “Building Your Leadership Skills” you have mostly worked on your inner-self and on the relation between you and the other, in this course you’ll work on the relationship between you and the group, improving your leadership skills when interacting in a team.

Leaders from different organizations and participants of the HEC Paris Leadership Certificate, the program from which this course and specialization is inspired, will share with you their insights about what it takes to become a great leader in a group or team and what they are able to achieve now that they apply The Savoir-Relier methodology.

Do you want to promote diversity and inclusion? This course will empower and equip you to develop inclusive cultures where everyone feels valued and respected. You will learn how highly inclusive leaders from around the world use processes of social influence to interact effectively with individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds. You will deepen your understanding of the benefits of diversity. And, you will explore a wealth of perspectives and practices to help you to reap those benefits.

This course is for current or aspiring leaders in ANY type of workplace, in ANY leadership role - a CEO of a corporation, a head of a department, a manager of a workgroup, a team leader, a chair of a committee, you name it!

Course highlights include studying signature traits of inclusive leadership (based on global research), strengthening self-awareness, developing your communication skills, and improving your ability to help others feel a strong sense of belonging. Course content covers traditional and timely topics -- from listening, feedback, and collaboration, to privilege, implicit bias, microaggressions, and micro-affirmations.

The instructor for this course is nationally recognized educator, leader, and public speaker, Dr. Brenda J. Allen (Communication Professor Emerita). Dr. Allen is a retired Chief Diversity Officer who offers highly-rated workshops, consultations, and presentations on topics such as inclusive leadership, racial equity, strategic planning, respect in the workplace, and diversity recruitment/retention practices. She has a proven ability for explaining complex and sensitive topics in non-threatening ways. She clearly explains concepts and offers compelling real-life examples - including her own experiences.

This course will help you be a better negotiator. Unlike many negotiation courses, we develop a framework for analyzing and shaping negotiations. This framework will allow you to make principled arguments that persuade others. It will allow you to see beneath the surface of apparent conflicts to uncover the underlying interests. You will leave the course better able to predict, interpret, and shape the behavior of those you face in competitive situations.

In this course, you will have several opportunities to negotiate with other students using case studies based on common situations in business and in life. You can get feedback on your performance and compare what you did to how others approached the same scenario. The cases also provide a setting to discuss a wide-ranging set of topics including preparing for a negotiation, making ultimatums, avoiding regret, expanding the pie, and dealing with someone who has a very different perspective on the world. Advanced topics include negotiating when you have no power, negotiating over email, and the role of gender differences in negotiation. To close out the course, we will hear insights from three negotiation experts: Linda Babcock, Herb Cohen, and John McCall MacBain. Enjoy.

The digital age is dramatically reshaping the rules for organizational success. The new context demands renewal of your capabilities and development of different mindsets. In this course, you’ll learn the different components of emotional intelligence at work. For example, you’ll learn how you can work effectively in teams, build cooperative relationships with your key stakeholders, exercise effective influence, handle difficult conversations, and create energy and enthusiasm to foster meaningful change. Our modules will begin with powerful stories that are illustrative of typical challenges faced by front-line leaders. We’ll analyze the case illustration using the ideas from emotional intelligence theory, and highlight the key lessons that you should take away in terms of mindsets and skills that you should master to distinguish yourself as a leader.

Storytelling is an essential part of leadership. Effective leaders communicate to inspire talent to excel; to partner with investors and communities; to engage with customers and clients and to grow their impact in the world as part of a global community. Cultivating an authentic, trustworthy and compelling narrative is vital to a leader’s success. This course helps leaders find their own story through personal branding; develop storytelling success with all constituencies; initiate an effective voice for crisis; interact well through social and third party media; and communicate a vision for innovation.

Meet Jim Barton, the new CEO of Santa Monica Aerospace. Jim's job won't be easy: the company's hemorrhaging cash, struggling to regain investors' trust after an accounting scandal, and striving to transform its culture to become a more global competitor. In this course, you’ll travel with Jim as he takes on leadership challenges ranging from strategy execution, to inspiring people, to maintaining an ethical approach. Experts agree that twentieth-century leadership practices are inadequate for the stormy twenty-first-century present. This provocative course equips you with the insights you'll need to rise with the occasion of a rapidly shifting business landscape.

The course is based on a book, Harder Than I Thought: Adventures of a 21st Century Leader, by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O'Donnell, published by Harvard Business Review Press. Purchase of the book is optional. If you want more information about the book or wish to buy it, see https://hbr.org/product/harder-than-i-thought-adventures-of-a-twenty-first/an/10332-HBK-ENG or http://www.amazon.com/Harder-Than-Thought-Adventures-Twenty-First/dp/1422162591

After taking the course, you'll be able to:
o Enact your own personal leadership approach, derived from your ongoing evaluation of how Jim Barton has handled his leadership situation, as well as from established leadership concepts and frameworks;
o Avoid leadership actions that might have worked in the past, but are not suited to a newly challenging 21st century world;
o Navigate treacherous new 21st century leadership challenges, such as greater reliance on specialized workers or the need to respond to external scrutiny in an increasingly transparent world (and many more);
o Avoid "slippery slope" ethical failures, and think more clearly about the separation between public and private life for a 21st century leader.

This course will provide learners with a systematic general framework for analyzing persuasive influence situations. Learners will be able to identify different challenges faced by persuaders and to fashion appropriate strategies for addressing those challenges. The broad goal is to provide learners with not only an extensive persuasion tool kit, but also with an understanding of how different tools are useful in different situations. Specifically, the course will address four broad topics: strategies for influencing people’s personal attitudes; strategies for affecting social factors influencing behavior; strategies for affecting people’s perceived ability to undertake the desired behavior; and strategies for inducing people to act on their existing intentions.

In this course, you will learn how to build your team, improve teamwork and collaboration, and sustain team performance through continuous learning and improvement. Specifically, you will learn best practices for composing a team and aligning individual and team goals. You will also learn how to establish roles, build structures, and manage decision making so that your team excels. This course will also help you manage critical team processes such as conflict resolution and building trust that have a profound impact on your team’s performance. You will discuss some of the best ways to harness the productive potential of teams while mitigating the risks and traps of teamwork.

In modern organization, most of work is done in teams, yet the results of teamwork are exceptionally mixed. Many teams are poorly designed and structured, fraught with dysfunctional conflict, experience coordination breakdowns and serious motivation challenges. As a result, many teams fail to realize their potential and frequently underperform even individuals working on similar tasks. After completing this course, you will acquire a set of tools and practices that enable you to effectively set up, run, evaluate, and continuously improve your team. Such insights will both make you a more effective team leader but also a standout contributor in team settings.

We live in a globalised world of continuous change. Your ability to successfully manage change will allow you to have a positive impact on your work and your life. Via structured learning activities (video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts and written assessment) this course will teach you how to effectively influence change by developing a ‘change mindset’, creating a productive change cycle, and leading yourself and others on the change journey. You will learn how to re-imagine change by redefining the change problem and developing a balanced and reflective change mindset. Change is inevitable but you can influence how it affects your organisation.

Do you (or do you want to) manage employees? Have you ever wondered how to get better performance out of those you manage? Are you unsure if you are communicating effectively with your employees? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then this course – and its associated specialization – is for you!

Leadership and management responsibilities have changed dramatically, particularly in the last decade. In order to be an effective manager in increasingly fast-paced and complex organizational environments, coaching has become essential.

In this course, you will learn what coaching is and learn how to differentiate between it and all of the other myriad roles managers are expected to perform – managing, mentoring, leading, and training. You’ll learn about the importance of strong leadership and learn to describe your current point of view as a leader, and evaluate when to adjust your thinking in order to be more effective in managing and leading in a rapidly evolving workplace.

And finally, you’ll be introduced to the Thought Model, a coaching technique you can use to develop better thinkers and better performers. So if you’re ready to learn all about how to be a more effective and valued manager using coaching techniques, join us as we explore more successful managing through coaching!

In this course, you will learn best practices for selecting, recruiting, and onboarding talent. You will also learn about the key approaches to measuring performance and evaluating your employees. In addition, you will learn how to develop and coach your talent so that they can realize their full potential at work. Altogether, you will gain a thorough understanding of the complete cycle of managing talent and creating a robust talent pipeline for your team and organization.

Managing and developing talent is one of the top 3 issues on the minds of CEOs from around the world. In fact, CEOs cite managing and developing their leadership talent as the issue that is most important to the future success of their business but that their organizations are least capable of addressing effectively. This course will provide you with the insights, frameworks and tools to effectively manage and develop talent in your teams and organizations.

The aim of the course is to provide you with a comprehensive framework for understanding both the traditional principles of management inside companies today as well as the alternative principles that are becoming increasingly important. It provides both theoretical and practical perspectives on the nature of management in today’s organisations.

This course is intended to help you become a better manager by helping you more fully understand and deal with the complexities and challenges associated with managerial life in organizations. You will learn theories, principles, and frameworks that will help you more effectively manage and lead your organizations.
You will be able to:
- Analyze common managerial challenges and develop solutions to these challenges
- Use power effectively and strategically to implement organizational change
- Understand the foundations of organizational culture and decision-making
- Navigate common decision-making pitfalls and ethical challenges
- Apply principles of organization management to common challenges of management

This is the sequel course to Foundations of Mindfulness that will continue to provide a broad overview of the fundamental concepts, principles, and practices of mindfulness. With interactive exercises to help students explore their own attitudes, mental habits and behaviors, Foundations of Mindfulness series offers a pathway for living with more freedom, authenticity and ease. Featured components of the course include experiential exercises, guided meditations, personal reflection and interactive discussions.

Living with Balance and Ease will not only cover some of the fundamentals of mindfulness, but will focus on connecting to the innate resources and abilities that will allow for a more effective response to life's challenges, build resiliency, and invite peace and ease into everyday life.

Although this course can be taken as a standalone, it is recommended to take the first Foundations of Mindfulness course before beginning this course.

Most professions these days require more than general intelligence. They require in addition the ability to collect, analyze and think about data. Personal life is enriched when these same skills are applied to problems in everyday life involving judgment and choice. This course presents basic concepts from statistics, probability, scientific methodology, cognitive psychology and cost-benefit theory and shows how they can be applied to everything from picking one product over another to critiquing media accounts of scientific research. Concepts are defined briefly and breezily and then applied to many examples drawn from business, the media and everyday life.

What kinds of things will you learn? Why it’s usually a mistake to interview people for a job. Why it’s highly unlikely that, if your first meal in a new restaurant is excellent, you will find the next meal to be as good. Why economists regularly walk out of movies and leave restaurant food uneaten. Why getting your picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated usually means your next season is going to be a disappointment. Why you might not have a disease even though you’ve tested positive for it. Why you’re never going to know how coffee affects you unless you conduct an experiment in which you flip a coin to determine whether you will have coffee on a given day. Why it might be a mistake to use an office in a building you own as opposed to having your office in someone else’s building. Why you should never keep a stock that’s going down in hopes that it will go back up and prevent you from losing any of your initial investment. Why it is that a great deal of health information presented in the media is misinformation.

Whereas the focus of traditional literacy pedagogy has been the written word in its standard and literary forms, this courser expands the scope of literacy learning to encompass contemporary multimodal texts and the wide range of ways of making meaning that occur in different social and cultural contexts. Another course, "Literacy Teaching and Learning: Aims, Approaches and Pedagogies" addresses pedagogical aspects of literacies. This "Multimodal Literacies" learning module does not require or expect that participants will have already completed the "Literacy Teaching and Learning" module.

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Recommended Background
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This course is designed for people interested in literacy teaching and learning, including people who may wish to join education as a profession, practicing teachers interested in exploring future directions for a vocation that is currently undergoing transformation, and community and workplace leaders who regard their mission to be in part "educative."

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Related Resources
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Online resources are available here:
https://newlearningonline.com

Book:
https://www.amazon.com/Literacies-Mary-Kalantzis/dp/1107578698/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1661288799&refinements=p_27%3ABill+Cope&s=books&sr=1-1&text=Bill+Cope

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Join our Online Communities!
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CGScholar (Create an account and join the New Learning community)
https://cgscholar.com/community/community_profiles/new-learning/community_updates

Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/newlearningonline

Twitter
https://twitter.com/neolearning

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Take this Course for Credit at the University of Illinois
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This course has the same content and anticipates the same level of contribution by students in the Assessment for Learning course offered to graduate certificate, masters, and doctoral level students in the Learning Design and Leadership Program in the College of Education at the University of Illinois.

Of course, in the nature of MOOCs many people will just want to view the videos and casually join some of the discussions. Some people say that these limited kinds of participation offer evidence that MOOCs suffer from low retention rates. Far from it – we say that any level of engagement is good engagement.

On the other hand, if you would like to take this course for credit at the University of Illinois, you will find more information about our program here:
https://ldlprogram.web.illinois.edu/overview/

And you can apply here:
https://education.illinois.edu/epol/programs-degrees/ldl

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The Learning Design and Leadership Series of MOOCs
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This course is one of a series of eight MOOCs created by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis for the Learning Design and Leadership program at the University of Illinois. If you find this MOOC helpful, please join us in others!

e-Learning Ecologies: Innovative Approaches to Teaching and Learning for the Digital Age
https://www.coursera.org/learn/elearning

New Learning: Principles and Patterns of Pedagogy
https://www.coursera.org/learn/newlearning

Assessment for Learning
https://www.coursera.org/learn/assessmentforlearning

Learning, Knowledge, and Human Development
https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-knowledge-human-development

Ubiquitous Learning and Instructional Technologies
https://www.coursera.org/learn/ubiquitouslearning

Negotiating Learner Differences: Towards Productive Diversity in Learning
https://www.coursera.org/learn/learnerdifferences

Literacy Teaching and Learning: Aims, Approaches and Pedagogies
https://www.coursera.org/learn/literacy-teaching-learning

Multimodal Literacies: Communication and Learning in the Era of Digital Media
https://www.coursera.org/learn/multimodal-literacies

In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and taught by top-ranked faculty, we will be discussing the emergence of a new story about business. This new story locates business within a societal framework. Almost every business creates or destroys value for customers, suppliers, employees, communities and society, in addition to shareholders and other financiers. A number of new models of business can be built on this idea such as corporate responsibility, philanthropy, shared value and sustainability. Profits and stakeholder value go together, and this course explains how. The final session explores the idea of how to become a stakeholder entrepreneur and create a business that makes money and makes the world a better place.

Peter Drucker, a pioneer in the field of management, once said that people have a perverse tendency to behave like human beings. Of course, we are not machines, and certainly not programmable. But through the study of organizational behavior, we can gain insights into what makes people tick within a work context. Increasing your understanding of your own behavior and that of your colleagues, teams and leaders, is an important first step to bringing positive change to how you and your organization work.

The objective of this course is therefore to provide insight into four key areas:
• Motivation. In this course segment we will understand the concept of motivation and review various perspectives that will help you understand how we can motivate others.
• Leadership. In this part of the course, we will analyze the concept of leadership and consider various perspectives and approaches to help shed light on leadership emergence and effectiveness.
• Teamwork. Here we look at team functioning and effectiveness. Using the widely used input – process – output model of team effectiveness, we consider such topics as team diversity, team processes, and team outcomes.
• Culture. Finally, we'll move to the level of the organization and consider the concept of organizational culture, also touching upon the concept of national culture. We look at the various ways in which culture is expressed, and discuss the implications of culture for people within organizations and cross-cultural collaborations.

An actionable leadership improvement plan enables you to leverage strengths and close the gaps on weaknesses. In this course, you will build your own plan that you can put into practice immediately and realize goals within the next two years. It lays the foundation for an evergreen process of selection and prioritization of skills, and action planning for sustained leadership development.

Knowing yourself, your team, your manager, and your organization are keys to personal and business success. What were once labeled soft skills are now modern requirements in today's workplace - especially if you are trying to get in the door or are already leading a team. This course is specifically designed for the:

-Job Seeker: You will create a usable cover letter with feedback from your peers as well as develop exceptional responses to some of the most common, yet challenging interview questions. We will get you the skills to help get in the door!

-Team Member: You will develop an action plan to confront your personality weaknesses and highlight your strengths so you can ace your annual review. We will also cover strategies that will help you uncover your true worth so you can ask with more confidence. We will get you the skills to get ahead!

-Manager: You will create an effective action plan for an employee, team, or organization based on your new knowledge of personality types and you will create a 360 degree review plan to better identify your strengths and weaknesses. We will get you the skills to rise above the rest!

We will dive deep into the types and teach you how to translate your new knowledge into business success by leveraging personality and emotional intelligence in the workplace - wherever you may be! Join us!

To be a successful engineer, you must work and play well with others. This course focuses on developing the skills you will need to build and sustain professional relationships and networks. Learn to coach and mentor others, manage conflict and build power and influence in the workplace.

Part of being an effective leader is learning how to play to your strengths and overcome characteristics that don't lend to good leadership practices. During the course, you will examine your own strengths and learn ways to use them in a leadership role. Learn to manage stress and solve problems creatively. Throughout the course, you will also build a tool kit of useful techniques that you can begin using right away in your engineering career.

This course is designed for engineers who are interested in and have the desire to advance into leadership and management roles. You don't need any leadership experience to do well in this course. We ask you to reflect on your personal experiences pretty often, so some work experience will help you in that aspect, but we hope that most of what you learn here will be applicable to many areas of your life.

Looking to advance even further as an engineering manager & leader for Industry 4.0? Rice University's top-ranked School of Engineering now offers a Master of Engineering Management & Leadership, 100% online for your convenience. Visit www.rice.edu/engineeringleaders to learn more.

In the professional realm, most speeches and presentations we give are informative in scope. A scientist needs to explain her recent research findings. A financial officer needs to report on quarterly earnings to his company’s board. A technology professional needs to educate a consumer about a new product. Any time you need to convey ideas or demonstrate a process, you’re dealing with informative speaking.

Informative speaking is a fun puzzle. You need to think from the perspective of your audience to identify what they need to hear in order to understand the key ideas. How much does the audience already know? What are the most important elements to convey? How should one convey these ideas with appropriate breadth and depth given the time constraints of the speech? This demands a strategic approach to speech design that we’ll undertake in this class.

By the end of the course, you should be able to explain complex ideas vividly and accessibly, design clear and compelling presentation slides, convey your passion for a topic while maintaining your professional credibility, and speak dynamically from notes and/or a manuscript. Learners will record speeches, providing and receiving peer feedback.

In the professional realm, we need to be able to argue without being argumentative. Whether you are fundraising for a nonprofit, pitching a business proposal, or suggesting a change to company policy, you are making arguments. In making the case for your topic, you often want to raise awareness, identify a pressing problem, discuss appropriate solutions, and outline specific steps for the audience.

To be persuasive, you must be clear (the audience may have little to no existing knowledge), you must be convincing (you are trying to sway the audience that your argument is valid), and you must be compelling (you are trying to motivate the audience enough so that they want to take specific actions). Persuasive speaking thus requires clarity, strategy, topic mastery, plus a sense of style and presence.

By the end of this course, you should be able to design persuasive speeches that address problems and solutions and that motivate audience members. You should be able to use rhetorical style strategically and deliver passionate and compelling speeches. Learners will record speeches, providing and receiving peer feedback.

Strategic Organization Design will introduce new topics and modules with even more real world examples and opportunities for student interaction than its predecessors Competitive Strategy (https://www.coursera.org/learn/competitive-strategy) and Advanced Competitive Strategy (https://www.coursera.org/learn/advanced-competitive-strategy).

The final course in the Competitive Strategy and Organization Design specialization covers the internal workings of an organization and its interactions with the outside world. Where the first two courses mainly covered the way firms interact with the outside world, in particular competitors and complementors, the third course looks at the way a firm’s organization should be designed to compete effectively.

Avoid the pitfalls of strategy planning and execution with the tools and skills from this course. In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and taught by top-ranked faculty, you'll learn the pillars of strategy execution--analysis, formulation, and implementation--and how to use the 4A model to effectively approach strategy execution. Finally, a panel of leaders from entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and industry, share their expertise gleaned from years of successful strategy planning and execution.

Being a successful professional requires creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial thinking, and to continually have a problem-solving mindset. As a systems thinker, you are expected to engage complex problems from multiple perspectives and different angles, viewing them holistically. This course exposes the student to a variety of tools used to engage stakeholders, collect data, and more deeply understand the community. This course will have three modules. Techniques for Data Collection will reinforce the importance of built trust and rapport with your client and stakeholders, which in turn creates buy in. Students will then learn how to enter a community, conduct rapid assessments to provide a snapshot of the community or organization, and maintain ethical conduct throughout. System Mapping & Analysis will focus on mapping systems and stakeholders, two different techniques that are useful to visualize systems and identify and evaluate a network of stakeholders. Finally, in Conducting Interviews & Surveys, students will learn different techniques to collect information. From focus group interview to one-on-one interviews, to surveys, systems thinkers need a mix of approaches in their toolbox to identify assess needs and assets, engage stakeholders, and collect information throughout all phases of project implementation.

This is class 3 in the MOOC specialization, Become a Sustainable Business Change Agent.

This class looks at the big issues companies are fixing - climate change, water, worker satisfaction and supply chain issues.
You will learn tools to help your company address these issues intelligently.

The class ends with an assignment to set a science-based carbon reduction target for a small company. Tis is absolutely cutting edge material. Only about 300 companies in the whole world are doing this as of July 2017. You could put your company in the elite group!

With the knowledge and tools you have acquired from the 3 classes in this specialization you are well on your way to making a difference in your company, and making the future brighter for everyone.

Thank you for being part of this program!

Behind the success and failure of teams lies team culture. But what exactly is culture? How and why does it contribute to success and failure? In this course, you learn how to recognize aspects of team culture of which most people are typically unaware. It is often these seemingly unimportant aspects that have the greatest effect on the outcomes of group tasks. Your recognition of them enables you to form, join and lead teams more effectively. You also come to appreciate the role of ritual and symbols in the daily operation of teams, as well as in situations of change and crisis. Knowledge of the ideas and information in this class enables you to be a better team player and a more effective team leader.

In this course you will engage in a series of challenges designed to increase your own happiness and build more productive habits. As preparation for these tasks, Professor Laurie Santos reveals misconceptions about happiness, annoying features of the mind that lead us to think the way we do, and the research that can help us change. You will ultimately be prepared to successfully incorporate a specific wellness activity into your life.

THE SCIENCE OF WELL BEING WAS PRODUCED IN PART DUE TO THE GENEROUS FUNDING OF THE DAVID F. SWENSEN FUND FOR INNOVATION IN TEACHING.

Gender Analytics underpins inclusive innovation, and inclusive innovation will require organizational transformation. The missing link between insights and actions is change leadership. How can you get people to collaborate? How can you overcome resistance to change? How can you embed intersectional, gender-based insights in everything an organization does?

In this course, you will learn to be an inspiring and effective change agent by developing a toolbox of leadership skills for building and managing diverse teams. You will hear from experts who have led Gender Analytics in various settings from companies, to non-profits, to the government. In short, this course will help you develop skills to be a transformational leader as you work towards creating inclusive products, services, processes and policies.

This is the fourth course of the Gender Analytics Specialization offered by the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE) at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. It is great on its own, and you will get even more out of it if you take it as part of the Specialization.