Adaptive Leadership for Organizational Change II:Applications in Human Services

Catalog description

Every day we see significant challenges playing themselves out at the local, national and global levels. Despite the considerable human energy devoted and financial resources spent, it could be argued that we are not making the kind of progress or affecting the kind of community change that is possible. This is not to say that progress has been completely elusive. Inspiring change agents and organizations have emerged and much suffering has been alleviated. Yet, one could argue that these very organizations get bogged down in internal and external challenges that prevent them from doing their best work, and imperative social change is slowed as a result. A key premise of the course is that leadership requires helping communities and organizations make the adaptations needed to thrive and survive in rapidly changing contexts. Effective management must be deployed to preserve successful institutional behaviors whereas leadership is needed to ensure that practices no longer serving organizational or community interests are discarded and that new innovations are pursued to generate greater impact. However, such adaptive work can be extremely challenging when longstanding practices are hardwired into the DNA of organizations through years and even decades of practice. In this context, the work of leadership is about accompanying people through the realities and losses of necessary change while opening them up to the promise of the future. This course builds upon the first course in providing students with the opportunity to develop their own strategies for executing change in their organizations, to recognize, diagnose, and respond appropriately to complex environments and situations, to contribute to innovation around processes and services and foster an experimental mindset in the organization. This course is focused on the application of adaptive leadership concepts in…