Course Learnings

This course began my exploration of leadership theory and styles and helped me better define which leadership style I aligned to best. For me, this meant transformational leadership where I help to evolve individuals and organizations on the journey to be better versions of themselves. In this course, I started the journey toward the growth mindset and understood more deeply how to look at an organization and its leadership through the five frames theory and how each can contribute to evolving an organization. It was the course that helped give structure and gravitas to the concepts I was already using in my work, which gave me confidence when I employed them.

This was the first “communication” centric course in my learning and was a fun one for me. So much of what I do is communication based and laced and the learnings here about how communications flow and land within an organization, as an extension of systems thinking. The audit project in this course really helped to solidify my understanding of measuring communication and choosing the right communication vehicle for the right audiences.

This was the first course in my program that spoke to leading change, another area of focus for me in addition to communications. Understanding how change can be designed, the roles in change and what my strengths and gaps are in being a change agent were hugely beneficial. Understanding human centric change and how getting individuals engaged in change was powerful. Completing the change agent analysis helped me uncover my specific gap areas, many of which I used in sharing with my manager. I shared the analysis and my learnings, and we used it as a springboard for my professional development and to align me to enterprise projects where I could put those skills into action and build more of that muscle.  

This course really helped me embrace systems thinking more holistically and identify how I could help others embrace it as well. The learnings here helped me solidify the relationship between the system components when considering an organizational issue. I also found the simulation we did with Everest to be a real study in group dynamics and how to apply systems thinking in real-world scenarios. I learned more about the complexity of systems thinking and how interdependencies can affect how one assesses a root problem and works to identify a solution.

The lessons in design thinking, appreciative inquiry and action research were invaluable from this course. Rooting all of it in dialogic organization development made it all make sense, especially as one looks at solutions to organizational issues that need to be evaluated and considered. The coursework focused on slowing down to speed up, forcing us to not just look at the goals and hopeful outcomes, but understand why the goals are important and being collaborative in designing solutions which incorporate voices, thoughts, and ideas from many people at all levels. Further diving into the growth mindset and how one can design for growth happened here. I use these learnings in my current work today as I work with the executives of my company to evolve our culture to support scale.

This course was fascinating in the application of communication techniques to both internal and external crises. In many communication scenarios, you have the luxury of planning messages and testing them for audiences, working with many people over time to craft communications. In crisis situations, that moves much more dynamically, and you have much more to consider. Learning about other factors beyond audience, including type of message, vehicles for delivery, leveraging of partners, media, and employees was fascinating and a little stressful. When crises hit companies, today, where everything can be known instantly – you also have to deal with the stakeholder of “public opinion” and manage that stakeholder carefully. It was an eye-opening course for me, for sure.