Overview

Leadership of complex technical organizations is being challenged by the rapid pace of technology development, innovation and the new flexible workplace where employees working from anywhere demand to be engaged, motivated and recognized. This first Leading Technical Organizations course, "Leadership Style and Building a High-Performance Team", explores your personal leadership style, how value is created, how a leader multiplies their abilities by building high performance teams, and how your executive presence is essential to be a leader of leaders. This course can be taken for academic credit as part of CU Boulder’s Master of Engineering in Engineering Management (ME-EM) degree offered on the Coursera platform. The ME-EM is designed to help engineers, scientists, and technical professionals move into leadership and management roles in the engineering and technical sectors. With performance-based admissions and no application process, the ME-EM is ideal for individuals with a broad range of undergraduate education and/or professional experience. Learn more about the ME-EM program at https://www.coursera.org/degrees/me-engineering-management-boulder.

Syllabus

Leadership and Your Personal Style and Strengths

This module will introduce the Leading Technical Organizations Specialization and describe how it fits into the University of Colorado’s (CU’s) Engineering Management Program (EMP) leadership progression. The learner will also complete assessments that will inform them about their predominant personality type and strengths. This unique personality type and strength information will be used to throughout this course and specialization to create peer-reviewed responses that are unique to the learner.

Reaching Your Full Leadership Potential

This module will give learners six specific areas to focus on throughout their career in order to meet their full leadership potential. It will discuss how leadership expectations have changed and how corporate organizational structure vary and are evolving. It will introduce a fictitious corporation called “LTO” that will be used as a backdrop for Leadership Learning Scenarios across the course and specialization.

Building a High-Performance Team

This Module starts with an examination into the importance of developing individuals and how that is critical to outstanding performance of the whole organization. It then introduces the importance of embracing diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace and the associated benefits, and concludes with the question; “are you ready to take the Leadership Leap?”

Executive Presence and Why it Matters

This Module is dedicated to the analysis of executive presence, different models that help learners to understand it and ultimately taking an introspective look to define how you want to shape your executive presence. Personality type and strength assessments from module #1 will help learners form the executive presence that is best suited for them.

Leading Through Leaders

This final Module in Course #1 of Leading Technical Organizations examines aspects of building an effective team with an emphasis on leading through leaders. The concepts of career and succession planning as well as delegation are important because they are some of the first responsibilities that leaders of leaders are often exposed to.