Organizational Leadership Online Master's Degree Program

Explore concepts and frameworks for how to lead effectively in today's ever-changing world. Using an integrative reflective practice approach, students examine their own approach to leadership and create an initial plan for their own leadership development, as well as the leadership development opportunities for their organization.

Explore the formal and informal communication strategies that help leaders influence beyond their formal authority. Topics will include how to have generative conversations, communication tactics for engaging stakeholders, cross cultural communications, managing conflict, building impactful narratives that engage and inspire, and the impact of technology on communication in today's organizations.

Throughout history, technology provided opportunities for innovation, resulting in changes in business and society at a global scale. These technologies often disrupted business policies and processes, impacting jobs and organizational structures. Students examine how technological innovation is experienced in society and viewed over time and into the future by business people, philosophers, and sociologists. Students explore the question, How do we imagine that business, society and our place within will be affected as technology continues to advance?

Examine how to cultivate meaningful relationships across an organizational system, from co-workers, to team members, to broader stakeholders. Attention will be given to how to leverage both formal and informal relationships to create positive impact. Topics include perceptions, motivation, emotional intelligence, building teams, and conflict management.

Explore how to accelerate organizational change by focusing on and leveraging the core strengths of individuals and the collective system. Learn how to challenge the traditional deficit mindset that pervades organizations, and how to use evidence-based appreciative practices to cultivate shared leadership across a system.

Explore organizational dynamics from a holistic viewpoint and how leading ethically and socially responsibly results in enhanced performance at the individual, group and organizational levels. Special focus will be given to exploring one's own ethical orientation, issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as how leading with a higher purpose can result in both accelerated organizational and broader social impact.

Students use a framework to explore the dynamics of human interaction within and between organizations. Throughout the course, they will use a perspective that a key function of management is to negotiate for resources and use that perspective to develop collaborative relationships with employees, vendors, suppliers, and interested communities.

Explore how to strategically lead continual organizational evolution and apply new business models needed for success in today's ever-changing world. Attention will be given to leading sustainable growth with an intraprenurial mindset, managing disruption, the implications of the digital transformation on organizations, and the power of leading with a purpose.

Explore how to uncover creative insights and innovative solutions for today's organizational challenges through a systems-thinking and human-centered lens. Learn how to apply design thinking, build innovation-ready teams and cultures, and lead creative change across diverse organizational settings.

This course culminates in an applied leadership capstone project to support the translation, application and synthesis of core concepts from previous courses to a final capstone project, through action research and reflection. The project will reflect a real-life situation and will include a description of the situation, stakeholder mapping, identification of key leadership opportunities and challenges, and conceptual basis for recommendations derived from qualitative and quantitative data collection, personal reflections as well as both prior learnings and content from the degree program.