Graduate Certificate in Organizational Leadership

Overview

Most people are promoted into leadership on the strength of doing the previous job well, and then discover the new one runs on things nobody taught them: being understood, being trusted, reading a room, getting agreement from people who do not report to you.

This certificate is about those things, and it is built to be practised rather than studied. Strategic communication in a demanding, fast-paced, virtual or global workplace. Identifying your own leadership style, your tendencies and your preferences as a professional and understanding how you take in information and act on it. Experiential learning is a large component: you practise the skills at work during the course and record what happened in a Leadership Development Portfolio, which you keep.

The cohort is part of it. You work through the same problems alongside peers leading in other organizations, which is the closest thing to a comparison group most managers ever get.

What you will learn

By the end of that course you will be able to:

• Communicate strategically in a demanding, fast-paced workplace, including a virtual or globally distributed one, where tone and timing carry more weight than they do in a room
• Identify your own leadership style, your tendencies and your preferences, with enough precision to work with them rather than around them
• Recognise how you take in and apply information, and where that habit helps or hinders a decision
• Practise the skills at work during the course rather than afterwards, experiential learning is a large component by design
• Build a Leadership Development Portfolio recording what you tried, what happened and what you would do differently, a document you finish with and keep
• Test your judgment against peers leading in other organizations, in structured discussion