What Is Organizational Leadership?
November 17, 2024
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Successfully Lead in an Ever-Changing Business Environment. Master key strategies to successfully lead an organizational change effort in just five courses plus a final capstone project.
Instructors: Elizabeth Gerber
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How do aspiring managers succeed in an ever-changing business environment? How do they lead different groups to action? This specialization equips aspiring managers to lead change and leverage different roles and functions within for-profit institutions to create lasting value in the marketplace. Throughout the five courses, we will explore how great leaders assess themselves and lead collaborative teams that effectively manage negotiations and conflict. We will discover how leaders communicate through storytelling and employ other communication strategies to influence. Furthermore, we will learn how organizations start with the clarity of purpose that comes from an understanding of customers’ needs, including leveraging data analytics, and use that focus to drive the design of products and services to meet those needs effectively. At the end of the coursework, students will create a capstone project that allows them to apply what they have learned.
Each of the individual courses can be audited for free: 1-High Performance Collaboration: Leadership, Teamwork, and Negotiation, 2-Leadership Communication for Maximum Impact: Storytelling, 3-Leadership Through Social Influence, 4-Leadership Through Marketing, 5-Leadership Through Design Innovation.
Are leaders born or made? Learn the essential skills to develop and expand your leadership repertoire, design teams for collaboration, and craft win-win negotiation strategies. High Performance Collaboration: Leadership, Teamwork, and Negotiation focuses on leadership, teamwork, and negotiation. Students will engage in self-assessments to analyze their leadership style, develop team charters to optimize their groups, and develop a game plan for effective negotiation.
Recurring course sessions repeat every 2 weeks on Monday with an enrollment period of 5 days.
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.
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.
The success of every organization depends on attracting and retaining customers. Although the marketing concepts for doing so are well established, digital technology has empowered customers, while producing massive amounts of data, revolutionizing the processes through which organizations attract and retain customers. In this course, students will learn how to identify new opportunities to create value for empowered consumers, develop strategies that yield an advantage over rivals, and develop the data science skills to lead more effectively, allocate resources, and to confront this very challenging environment with confidence.
Today’s workplace calls for a new style of leadership to embolden and accelerate innovation. Design offers a novel way to discover market opportunities, experiment to validate concepts and mitigate risk, and deliver value to all stakeholders. This course offers hands-on experience applying human-centered design process to real-world challenges, and requires you to explore the world around you. Learn how to engage with end users, effectively frame problems, identify potential solutions, and build prototypes to test assumptions and learn what works (and doesn’t). Then dive into a range of ways large and small to bring design innovation into your organization.
The capstone project consists of a case study that must be addressed to complete the specialization.
In the case study, you will be asked to assume the role of the incoming chief executive officer of a fictitious privately held medical device company. From the company’s standpoint, its customers are the clinics that use and dispense its products, rather than the end-users of the company’s products. The company is currently facing a range of challenges, including obstacles to access for world-wide users of the company’s product, as well as internal conflict about the company’s priorities and a new disruptive technology. You will be asked to help the board address key changes in the industry, by developing a strategy to meet these challenges. Specifically, you will submit artifacts responding to a series of challenges related to the case. The artifacts will be peer-assessed on how effectively you applied concepts and skills explored throughout the specialization, assessed your own skills as a leader, evaluated the data to help you make an informed decision, developed a customer-facing design process, and communicated your strategy to relevant stakeholders.
Northwestern University is a private research and teaching university with campuses in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, and Doha, Qatar. Northwestern combines innovative teaching and pioneering research in a highly collaborative environment that transcends traditional academic boundaries.
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Time to completion can vary based on your schedule, but most learners are able to complete the Specialization in 3.5-4 months.
Each course in the Specialization is offered on a regular schedule, with sessions starting about once per month. If you don't complete a course on the first try, you can easily transfer to the next session, and your completed work and grades will carry over.
This course is best suited for aspiring leaders who are already leading, to a certain degree, within their organizations but not necessarily large teams.
We recommend taking the courses in the order presented, as each subsequent course will build on material from previous courses.
Coursera courses and certificates don't carry university credit, though some universities may choose to accept Specialization Certificates for credit. Check with your institution to learn more.
(A) Optimally design a team for success (B) Negotiate in a collaborative fashion in large and small business situation (C) Utilize primary action strategies to achieve personal branding (D) Develop strategies for initial crisis response (E) Analyze techniques for communication to different constituencies (F) Formulate strategies for storytelling for innovation (G) Develop strategies to influence others (H) Create a market focused strategy (I) Use analytics to improve marketing efforts (J) Utilize design methods to identify opportunities and develop a range of solutions (K) Bring human-centered design approaches inside the organization to build a culture of innovation
This course is completely online, so there’s no need to show up to a classroom in person. You can access your lectures, readings and assignments anytime and anywhere via the web or your mobile device.
If you subscribed, you get a 7-day free trial during which you can cancel at no penalty. After that, we don’t give refunds, but you can cancel your subscription at any time. See our full refund policy.
Yes! To get started, click the course card that interests you and enroll. You can enroll and complete the course to earn a shareable certificate, or you can audit it to view the course materials for free. When you subscribe to a course that is part of a Specialization, you’re automatically subscribed to the full Specialization. Visit your learner dashboard to track your progress.
Yes. In select learning programs, you can apply for financial aid or a scholarship if you can’t afford the enrollment fee. If fin aid or scholarship is available for your learning program selection, you’ll find a link to apply on the description page.
When you enroll in the course, you get access to all of the courses in the Specialization, and you earn a certificate when you complete the work. If you only want to read and view the course content, you can audit the course for free. If you cannot afford the fee, you can apply for financial aid.
This Specialization doesn't carry university credit, but some universities may choose to accept Specialization Certificates for credit. Check with your institution to learn more.
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