Leading Organizational Change

Catalog description

This course is designed to advance your skills in leading organizational change. The course will improve your understanding and skills in leading positive change in groups and organizations, and on how to create, foster and manage organizations in which people thrive and perform at their best. The course helps you develop strategies, approaches, and mindsets that help you to create a high-performance culture. The course helps you to drive transformation and foster inclusive, sustainable change, to empower others in your organization to unleash their leadership potential. We will particularly adapt a strength-based approach, a systematic search for those capacities and processes that strengthen a human system. The core question that we will seek to address is: how can we create and lead human systems that are as intelligent as its members? Our learning approach will involve not only readings and lectures, but also active inquiry. The rationale for this approach is simple -- leading organizational change is an active and non-linear process that is accomplished with others and requires an understanding of non-traditional models. The purpose of this course is to appreciate the dynamics of leading change in complex systems. The course will increase your capacity to diagnose complex human systems and understand the dynamics by which teams and organizations learn and change. This course is both philosophical (i.e., reflective) and practical. It is philosophical in the sense that you will be encouraged to think about implicit assumptions regarding human nature and how organizations function and you will be challenged to expand some of these theories. It is practical in the sense that emphasis will be placed on strategies and technologies for diagnosis and planning. Organizations are a combination of structures, values, processes, and relationships that bring people together to achieve a common goal. However, organizations do not operate in isolation--they are embedded in complex social, political and financial contexts. Effective leadership requires the ability to discern and balance competing demands and tensions that are inherent in organizations. This course provides an overview of organizational theories to help leaders understand and be successful in these contexts. By looking at organizations through metaphorical lenses, such as machines, brains, and organisms, students learn how to create new options for organizational success in ever-changing operating environments. We will use theories and case studies to develop insights and innovative approaches to organizational change. Your final deliverable will be the creation of a plan to map out your capstone applied research project. The fields of organization development and human systems change are going through a theoretical metamorphosis in which change has become much less about detection of error, analysis of chronic problems, or exclusive treatment of what is deficient, broken or missing. Like the exciting shift in medicine from anti-biotics to pro-biotics or the movement in psychology from analysis of dysfunctions to examination of human strengths, the field of organization and management theory finds itself in the midst of a positive revolution in change. This shift is elevating and extending our images of what it means to organize, what it means to transform organizations, and what it means to be a change leader or change agent. Cameron, Dutton, and Quinn (2003) have framed this move as an "exciting new field of study in the organizational sciences"--the field of "positive organizational scholarship." This course is designed to advance your understanding and skills in leading strength-based change and on how to create, foster and manage organizations in which people thrive and perform at their best. Key Learning Objectives: 1. To understand the human dimensions of change management. 2. To review best practices in managing organizational change with particular focus on overc