Aspirations Discovered and Achieved

This course examines two tracks. The first track is a foundational understanding of leadership and provides the student with information to begin their journey into leadership. The second track is a review of the challenges of graduate student work and studies, which includes graduate work versus undergraduate work, time management, research challenges and basics, technology skills for the graduate student, and a discussion of academic integrity/plagiarism.

This course is designed to help leaders understand and influence human behavior on an individual, interpersonal, and institutional level. The foundation is a knowledge of individual differences and how those unique characteristics affect each person’s thoughts, actions, and motivations. However, it is not enough to simply understand people on their own, separate from others and their environment. Teams and groups have a powerful impact on their members and people behave differently around others than they do alone.

This course covers four areas: ethical awareness, ethical analysis/ethical decision making, current ethical issues in business, and ethical management in an organization. This course provides the skills required to make reasoned responses to ethical dilemmas, deal with daily and long-term ethical challenges, and build an ethical culture in an organization. The course explores the emotional influence on behavior and decisions, and it explains how to learn from success and failure.

Increasingly, leadership of business organizations is intertwined with local, national and international legal and ethical frameworks that define, regulate and support the business enterprise. The effective, successful business leader must understand the basic components and operations of those frameworks as well as the basic policy assumptions that emanate from that legal framework and influence business decisions.

This course is designed to help leaders communicate effectively by developing the credibility necessary to persuade and influence others. Successful managers need to demonstrate competence in verbal communication in a variety of situations, such as individual conversations, small group meetings, and large presentations, both face-to-face and virtually, as well as written communication using text, instant messaging, email, social media, letters, proposals, and formal reports.

Teamwork is an essential element of effective leadership. However, it is rarely taught and frequently overlooked in both academic and professional training for leaders. This course Focuses on leading and managing teams, thereby creating teamwork throughout the Organization. There are several dysfunctions of a team to include absence of trust, fear of Conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results. Through Various exercises, students learn to plan, prepare, practice, review, analyze, assess, and Strategize for expected and unexpected events as a team.

This course focuses on the importance of leading organizational change and building positive engaging strategies using organizational development (OD) interventions. Students acquire effective approaches for leading change, evidence-informed research for positive change and coping mechanisms for the increasing pace of change. Students reinforce OD concepts and organizational change skills through the analysis of case studies as change agents or consultants for nonprofit and for-profit businesses.

This course examines a wide range of leadership research and theories using a practical perspective. Students apply and practice different approaches of leadership using case studies and questionnaires to gain knowledge and measure the individual’s leadership style. Students are then challenged from their prospective as the leader, to determine how the theory contribute or fail to contribute to the leadership process or organization.

This course approaches strategic management from a practical perspective. Students develop an understanding of business strategies, formulation and implementation of major goals to better identify organizational initiatives. Real world examples communicate important stages, components and major roles of exceptional managers to gain and sustain a competitive advantage.

The ability to gather and analyze data to form a strategy is essential in management. This course examines two levels of analytics from a descriptive and predictive viewpoint. Using spreadsheets, visualizations and research, students develop a working knowledge of analytics as it applies to business decisions within the field of management. Topics include database analytics, data visualization, forecasting techniques and data mining.

Students prepare and execute a project demonstrating in a real-world context the techniques learned within the program through leadership crisis management. The capstone course introduces tools and a framework to guide the leader, organization and protect the core assets of the business through a crisis. Topics include but are not limited to exploration of crisis communication techniques, research-based methods to assist in preparing, prevention of and recovery from crises. Students are equipped with a range of tools to increase competencies and confidence in an organizational crisis context.

In this online orientation, students are introduced to the courses within the MSM program, the faculty and fellow students. Students are also oriented to The College and the educational resources available to GS students.