Coursera - Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Leadership and Business Skill for Immediate Impact. Apply practical strategies to becoming an effective organizational leader.

Foundations of Everyday Leadership
In this course you will learn about the “head and heart” of everyday leadership, individual decision making, group decision making, and managing motivation. The objectives are to understand why and how leadership skills are so critical to organizational success, and learn the foundations of effective leadership skills.

Learners: • Understand why and how leadership skills are so critical to organizational success • Know how to use leadership skills to work more effectively with others, and are able to organize teams to work more effectively together • Will be able to apply the foundations of effective leadership skills to everyday situations faced by leaders. This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.

Applications of Everyday Leadership
This course covers the following topics: negotiation, feedback and coaching, conflict management, and leading change. The objectives are to learn how to use leadership skills to work more effectively with others, how to use leadership skills to organize others to work more effectively together, and to apply the foundations of effective leadership skills to everyday situations faced by leaders.

Designing the Organization
Organizations are complex and can be difficult to manage well. So managers need tools to help them better understand and deal with the many complexities and challenges associated with organizational life. In this course, you will learn theories, principles, and frameworks that will help you to design more effective organizations. We will view organizations from different perspectives that we will use as lenses to help us bring common organizational challenges, and solutions to those challenges, into focus. Some of these common challenges include clarifying the organization’s purpose, setting up effective governance systems, measuring organizational effectiveness, choosing an appropriate organizational structure, dealing with growing pains, and responding to changes outside the organization. As you learn and apply the principles from this course, you will be better prepared to effectively navigate the challenges that you face in your own organization.

Managing the Organization
This course is intended to help you become a better manager by helping you to more fully understand and deal with some of the complexities and challenges associated with managerial life in organizations. In this course, you will learn theories, principles, and frameworks that will help you to more effectively manage and lead the organizations that you belong to. We will view organizations from different perspectives that we will use as lenses to help us highlight common managerial challenges and point us toward solutions to those challenges. Some of these common challenges that we will explore in this course include using power effectively, implementing organizational change, understanding and managing organizational culture, decision-making including decision-making pitfalls and ethical traps, and leadership. As you learn and apply the principles from this course, you will be better prepared to navigate some of the complex challenges that you face as a manager.

Business Strategy
In this course you will learn how organizations create, capture, and maintain value, and how it is fundamental for sustainable competitive advantage. You will be able to better understand value creation and capture, and learn the tools to analyze both competition and cooperation from a variety of perspectives, including the industry level (e.g., five forces analysis), and the firm level (e.g., business models and strategic positioning).

Corporate Strategy
In this course you will learn how corporations create, capture, and maintain value, going beyond the management of a single line of business. It is thus a complement to (and should typically follow) a course on Business Strategy, which focuses on developing and sustaining competitive advantage for a single business unit. Here, you will be able to better understand and learn the tools to analyze and manage decisions from a corporate-level perspective, which emphasizes the management of multiple businesses and multiple stakeholders. Examples of such decisions include vertical integration, diversification, mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances, international expansion, global strategy, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility.

Strategic Leadership and Management Capstone
The capstone is a strategic leadership and management plan where you’ll apply what you will learn to an actual business situation with participation by one or more focal companies. The deliverable will be designed to create value from the perspective of potential employers while achieving pedagogical and experiential goals for learners.