(Select One)
MBA620: Cultivating Leadership Capacity (4 units) OR
MBA630: Leading Organizations and Change (4 units) OR
MSS6200, Civic Leadership, Diversity, and Systems Thinking (4 units)
MBA620 Cultivating Leadership Capacity (4 units)
This is the first of two courses exploring leadership capacities for complex change and transformation for self, teams, and organizations. This course will focus on leadership as a collaborative process and ongoing practice, guided by anti-racist, community, and feminist interventions that center justice and honor our interdependence in relationship to each other and the environment. Embracing the leadership as practice paradigm where we respect the process as much as the outcome, the course will provide opportunities to build and refine leadership skills in service of developing strategies for sustainable engagement and complex change across sectors and among diverse stakeholders. By examining the political and social structures that contribute to our understanding of leadership, this course will encourage critical reflexivity and a willingness to sit in discomfort in service of re-imagining leadership beyond the confines of neoliberalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. We will explore how to transform systems of power and privilege, cultivate dialectical humanism and the generosity mindset comprised of trust, empathy, hope, and resilience that will define what kind of change is possible.
MBA630 Leading Organizations and Change (4 units)
This course frames organizations as complex adaptive systems with purpose, structures, boundaries, and dynamics, whether for-profit, non-profit, or community-based. It explores the influence of leadership in the overall dynamics of these complex systems and their emergent properties of organizational culture, employee engagement, people development, and environmental and social impact. Team dynamics are studied in the context of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the development of higher levels of psychological safety, collaboration, innovation, learning, wellbeing, and performance. Change in organizations is explored as an ongoing and iterative process emphasizing fairness in change equity, decision-making, and communication. Students have the opportunity to practice Agile as a team project management process and Action Inquiry as a method for personal and team change. Students also get to design an organizational operating system aimed to put people and the planet first and address the complexity needed to drive lasting social change.
MSS6200 Civic Leadership, Diversity, and Systems Thinking (4 units)
This course applies systems-thinking rubrics to community engagement and civic leadership. Students complete a minimum of twelve immersive civic experiences, including a self-selected portfolio of experiential learning (EL) activities that require direct civic engagement, systems analysis, evaluative research, and structured inquiry with intentional consideration of power, privilege, and the Common Good. Students engage in significant inter-residency fieldwork with local, national, and international organizations, with emphasis on cultural competency, allyship, practitioner teamwork, facilitative leadership, and sustainability as a function of environmental, economic, and social justice.