Leadership Development
Open to Executive MBA (Shanghai) Students
If there is one topic that spans across all areas of business—from accounting and finance to marketing and logistics (and, of course, people management)—it is leadership. Leadership is often implicated as the key factor that drives either the success or failure of an organization. And, accordingly, the factors that drive effective leadership have been the focus of a considerable amount of attention from researchers, businesspeople, and popular press commentators. Yet, despite the volume of interest in this topic, it often seems mysterious. People hold widely varying views about what makes someone an effective leader, what behaviors constitute effective leadership, and even the very concept of leadership effectiveness. That is, what does it mean for someone to be “effective” as a leader?
The purpose of this course is to resolve ambiguity about the meaning and drivers of leadership effectiveness. By doing so, this course will contribute to your capacity to exhibit effective leadership and your ability to coach and mentor others to lead more effectively. After taking this course, you will be able to:
- …identify the individual attributes, processes of attribution, and situational/contextual factors that shape views of someone’s leadership style and effectiveness—including your own.
- …understand how leaders act as architects to influence organizations by shaping their formal design and informal culture. You will thus be able to analyze your own organization’s formal design and informal culture to critically evaluate its alignment with strategic priorities and with your own leadership approaches.
- …articulate how leaders act as enablers of others’ action by directing people’s investment of time, effort, and energy into specific goals and objectives. Accordingly, you will have an enhanced understanding of how your own leadership style and interactions with others influence their motivation.
- … envision how leaders serve as agents of reorientation, proactively altering an organization’s architecture and their own behavior in response to environmental changes or strategic shifts. Turning inward, you will be able to critically assess opportunities to adjust your own organization to enhance its effectiveness.
People Metrics
Open to BSBA, MBA, and Specialized Masters Students
Metrics are at the core of people analytics. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the foundations of assessing behavior in organizations using novel measurement approaches and large datasets. Through classroom discussions and real-world applications, this course will enable you to add value to organizations through the development, use, and interpretation of innovative people metrics. Specifically, after taking this course, you will be able to:
- Develop a clear and logical conceptual measurement model. A conceptual measurement model is the foundation of creating novel and useful new approaches for assessing intrapersonal characteristics (e.g., personality) and interpersonal behavior (e.g., knowledge sharing, teamwork).
- Identify novel sources of data for innovative people metrics. Organizations are awash in the traces of individual behavior and social interactions. Decoding how data that already exist in an organization can be used to understand behavior is an essential skill for adding value in the field of people analytics.
- Apply a rigorous process for validating new people metrics. Developing a measurement model and finding sources of data are necessary, but insufficient for adding value through people metrics. New measures must be validated.
