Leading in a Complex Environment (edX)

This course is intended for people working in the modern-day global organization and will teach you how to tackle these complex and challenging issues, including:

• How global issues, such as global warming and geopolitical tensions, impact an organization's decision-making process and how to navigate these challenging issues.
• How leaders respond to and manage issues such as social responsibility, environmental sustainability, crisis management, and cultural differences.
• How leaders represent their organizations and why it’s important they demonstrate virtue and authenticity to build trust.

This course draws on the diverse knowledge of both leadership scholars and experienced leaders. Through a series of engaging videos, interviews, case studies, written reflections, peer feedback, and other self-insight activities, this course alerts learners to intractable problems that are too often ignored. The course will not provide convenient off-the-rack answers, but asks students to dig deep into their own soul to firstly acknowledge the problems in our contemporary world and then reflect on whether they have the capacity to negotiate them.
This course is part of the Business Leadership MicroMasters Program.

What you'll learn

• External influences in leadership, the macro-conditions that shape the global context.
• What the nature of power is and how to use it virtuously when representing your organization.
• How to lead with social responsibility and for environmental and social sustainability.
• How virtuous leadership needs to be representative and inclusive.

Syllabus

Module 1: The planet, people and leadership
Focuses on human responsibility for the planet and the underlying need for leadership virtue, considering broader social issues.

Module 2: The planet
Examines a range of philosophical concepts as frameworks to understand and address global leadership challenges.

Module 3: Leading for sustainability
Successful and virtuous leaders provide insight on how to become a reflective and virtuous leader when faced with the challenges of working in organizations that are largely oriented to short-term, profit-based criteria that often reward the wrong leaders.

Module 4: Persuasive leaders: avoiding greenwash and spin
Considers authentic persuasion as an important leadership characteristic, and explores how inauthentic persuasion in organizations and in politics using greenwash and spin leads to a loss of public trust.

Module 5: Being "political"
Considers the real issues of power, how leadership theory rarely deals with these and how an authentic leader negotiates situations and uses power virtuously to achieve life-affirming outcomes.

Module 6: Courageous leadership
Considers different types of courage, namely physical and moral courage. Also explains the the concept of conation, which is moving from intention to action, in defining courageous leadership.

Module 7: Women in leadership
Focuses on the enablers needed for women to achieve positions of influence within their organizations and society at large and identifies success factors and opportunities for the current and emerging generations of women leaders.

Module 8: The wise leader
Introduces the concept of wise leadership, providing an understanding of how wisdom is theorized in contemporary times and its relevance to leading for sustainable global development and fair organizations in order to promote human flourishing.

Module 9: Practical wisdom in organisations
Considers how wisdom can be practically applied in organizational leadership settings and draws attention to the difficulty of being wise as organizations become more complicated by bureaucratic discourses.

Module 10: Indigenous leadership
Considers ancient wisdoms that have been retained within Indigenous cultures despite having suffered devastating oppression and exclusion.