Coursera - Organizational Leadership Specialization by Northwestern University

Successfully Lead in an Ever-Changing Business Environment. Master key strategies to successfully lead an organizational change effort in just five courses plus a final capstone project.

High Performance Collaboration: Leadership, Teamwork, and Negotiation
Are leaders born or made? Learn the essential skills to develop and expand your leadership repertoire, design teams for collaboration, and craft win-win negotiation strategies. High Performance Collaboration: Leadership, Teamwork, and Negotiation focuses on leadership, teamwork, and negotiation. Students will engage in self-assessments to analyze their leadership style, develop team charters to optimize their groups, and develop a game plan for effective negotiation.

Leadership Communication for Maximum Impact: Storytelling
Storytelling is an essential part of leadership. Effective leaders communicate to inspire talent to excel; to partner with investors and communities; to engage with customers and clients and to grow their impact in the world as part of a global community. Cultivating an authentic, trustworthy and compelling narrative is vital to a leader’s success. This course helps leaders find their own story through personal branding; develop storytelling success with all constituencies; initiate an effective voice for crisis; interact well through social and third party media; and communicate a vision for innovation.

Leadership Through Social Influence
This course will provide learners with a systematic general framework for analyzing persuasive influence situations. Learners will be able to identify different challenges faced by persuaders and to fashion appropriate strategies for addressing those challenges. The broad goal is to provide learners with not only an extensive persuasion tool kit, but also with an understanding of how different tools are useful in different situations. Specifically, the course will address four broad topics: strategies for influencing people’s personal attitudes; strategies for affecting social factors influencing behavior; strategies for affecting people’s perceived ability to undertake the desired behavior; and strategies for inducing people to act on their existing intentions.

Leadership Through Marketing
The success of every organization depends on attracting and retaining customers. Although the marketing concepts for doing so are well established, digital technology has empowered customers, while producing massive amounts of data, revolutionizing the processes through which organizations attract and retain customers. In this course, students will learn how to identify new opportunities to create value for empowered consumers, develop strategies that yield an advantage over rivals, and develop the data science skills to lead more effectively, allocate resources, and to confront this very challenging environment with confidence.

Leadership Through Design Innovation
Today’s workplace calls for a new style of leadership to embolden and accelerate innovation. Design offers a novel way to discover market opportunities, experiment to validate concepts and mitigate risk, and deliver value to all stakeholders. This course offers hands-on experience applying human-centered design process to real-world challenges, and requires you to explore the world around you. Learn how to engage with end users, effectively frame problems, identify potential solutions, and build prototypes to test assumptions and learn what works (and doesn’t). Then dive into a range of ways large and small to bring design innovation into your organization.

Organizational Leadership Capstone
In the case study, you will be asked to assume the role of the incoming chief executive officer of a fictitious privately held medical device company. From the company’s standpoint, its customers are the clinics that use and dispense its products, rather than the end-users of the company’s products. The company is currently facing a range of challenges, including obstacles to access for world-wide users of the company’s product, as well as internal conflict about the company’s priorities and a new disruptive technology. You will be asked to help the board address key changes in the industry, by developing a strategy to meet these challenges. Specifically, you will submit artifacts responding to a series of challenges related to the case. The artifacts will be peer-assessed on how effectively you applied concepts and skills explored throughout the specialization, assessed your own skills as a leader, evaluated the data to help you make an informed decision, developed a customer-facing design process, and communicated your strategy to relevant stakeholders.