Leadership Studies

Focuses on building personal capacities in a global setting by developing self-awareness and self-management skills in regard to each individual’s values, beliefs, practices, and assumptions. Students will engage in developing intercultural communication skills that support authentic and collaborative relationships with others who have different values, beliefs, and behaviours. Students will explore and describe their own orientation to the world so as to enhance adaptability and resiliency in complex, changing environments. Students will learn the fundamentals of global leadership in complex environments. Students will learn to apply systems approaches to understanding complex organizational and societal systems, adopting different ways of knowing and considering political, social, cultural and spiritual perspectives. Students will explore dynamics of power across generational, gender and class divides and learn how to tap into the creative potentials of diversity, conflict, change and complexity. 

Examines the theory and practice of personal leadership including the pursuit of self understanding, self management of continuous learning, and professional responsibility and accountability. Develops students’ abilities to incorporate action inquiry and continuous learning in the practice of leadership and the ability to model espoused principles and values. Provides opportunities to enhance personal strengths and address challenges. Fosters an appreciation of the interdependent and contextual nature of effective leadership.

Examines the theory and practice of leading productive teams and of facilitating groups. Fosters appreciation of students’ abilities to communicate effectively in working relationships in support of productive collaboration. Develops students’ expertise in promoting effective decision-making, optimizing the benefits of diversity, planning and implementing of team goals, and assessing of outcomes. Promotes awareness and application of ethical principles and concepts. Encourages a systemic perspective to ensure fluid communication with the immediate organizational environment and knowledge of influences of the environment on the team.

Develops an appreciation for organizations and communities as open and interconnected systems by focusing on the interdependencies of contexts, structures, and relationships on their limits and possibilities. Combines systems thinking theory and concepts with leadership experience in the cohort, as a learning community and in an organization, to develop practical knowledge and skill in creating learning and work environments that generate engagement, productivity, and continuous improvement.

Emphasizes the development of leadership strength for dealing with unpredictable challenges through values-based approach to decisions and actions. Fosters exploration, in theory and in practice, of key constructs of values-based leadership and its relationship to adaptability, resilience, authenticity, responsibility, emergent learning, reflective practice, and wisdom. Enhances ‘values fluency’ in articulation of core values, and alignment of behavior and values in complex contexts. Promotes awareness of the relationship between leadership practice and the realization of others’ potential and creation of organizational environments.

Develops leadership knowledge and the ability to evolve a common understanding of purpose and shared values for creative and sustainable collaboration in teams and partnerships. Examines, in theory and practice, values-based leadership as a foundation for creating trust, fostering reflective dialogue, leveraging difference and diversity, and generating innovation in and through relationships. Develops an understanding of conflict in relation to motivation and as a source of innovation.