Teaching
Negotiations: Debunking Myths and Improving Performance
Negotiations are central to your professional success regardless of your functional area or organizational context. Although your work may require analytical skills in management accounting or operations, you will always need a broad array of negotiation skills in order to get ideas accepted and projects implemented. Of course, you already are a negotiator, but you can become better by deepening your understanding of the bargaining process and by learning more sophisticated techniques for creating mutual gain. This set of classes (flexible in length depending on the level of mastery you want to achieve) will teach you the art and science of negotiating with hands-on exercises and real-time feedback.
Improving Decision Performance
Executives make thousands of decisions every day, often in complex and dynamic environments. Most important decisions require careful consideration but unfortunately, practice shows that even highly motivated individuals fail to capitalize on all their resources. Moreover, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, most organizations operate in turbulent environments where crises can arise routinely. Leaders must make bold informed decisions quickly in these uncertain times. Thus, the ability to continuously make effective, efficient strategic decisions in dynamic environments is a necessary skill for any leader. This series of classes will teach you how to diagnose your own biases and blind spots to improve your insights and decisions in both routine and turbulent environments.
Data Analytics for Leaders
This course teaches you how to be a good creator and consumer of data. Data are simply pieces of information and it is through the selection and analysis of data that information is transformed into knowledge. Such knowledge, when integrated with broader knowledge, can be turned into wisdom. Data is useful and powerful but all data have limitations and boundary conditions, moreover, the sheer amount of data available amplifies the potential to find spurious relationships or to misinterpret real ones. For those of you who shy away from data and statistics, this course should help you overcome your misgivings around metrics. For those of you enamored with data, this course should help mitigate your captivation. For everyone, this course will teach you how to recognize good evidence and interpret it validly to make evidence based judgements.
Leading from Strength
Effective leadership requires both self- and situational awareness. Leaders must be able to quickly and accurately diagnose social situations and understand what motivates others. Regardless of industry, role, or technical expertise, as you advance in your career, you will likely find that your time is increasingly focused on leading and harnessing the efforts of others rather than relying on your own technical skills. This course develops your social intelligence by increasing self-awareness and growth as a leader, teaching you how to leverage diversity and increase others’ engagement. Social intelligence is crucial for influencing, persuading, motivating, and leading people and change. Drawing from behavioral science research, professional practice, and your own experiences the course develops your inherent leadership potential.
Developing Women Leaders
If you are not proactively navigating your career, you are not leveraging all your opportunities to advance. This course is designed as a complement to your other business school classes that offer a wide range of information about specific business contexts and problems. In contrast, this course is about you—about building your knowledge, skills, abilities, and networks in order to make the most of professional career. Although women have been a large part of the managerial workforce for decades (currently over 50% of the labor force), they still have not breeched the penthouse in representative numbers. It is time to change these numbers. The ground work for female advancement is in place; women are now more likely than men to earn both bachelors and masters degrees. But to speed change for you, now, requires cultivating your human and social capital. This course offers specific prescriptions, grounded in current research, for developing and leveraging your human and social capital.