XBUS-970 - Strategic Thinking & Leadership - A Georgetown University Leadership Academy
Course Description
The Strategic Thinking & Leadership Academy is a comprehensive 3-day intensive program designed to empower aspiring leaders in government, industry, education, and nonprofits with the skills and knowledge needed to make informed decisions, implement strategies, and lead effectively in today's complex environment. The academy offers five key modules:
Strategic Thinking and Problem Solving: This module helps you understand the decision-making process, how to break down complicated information, and make better choices by applying analytical and critical thinking. Ethical considerations in decision-making are also highlighted.
Putting Ideas into a Plan and into Action: This module enables you to grasp how strategy works at different organizational levels. It also helps you understand the tools to measure strategy performance and how to tackle cultural and global challenges in strategy implementation.
Becoming a Discerning Leader: This module focuses on personal and ethical leadership qualities. It helps you reflect critically on your own abilities and teaches you how to lead ethically. It introduces a reflective framework and resources for decision-making, especially in situations involving ethical ambiguity.
Strategic Storytelling for Influence: Effective storytelling is crucial for impactful leadership. This module teaches you to develop and share compelling narratives while being an ethical steward of the stories within your organization.
Succeeding with an Inclusive and Aligned Culture: In a world growing increasingly divided, this module helps you identify your core values and align them with your organization’s culture for greater success. It also helps pinpoint any gaps between stated and actual organizational culture and values, and how to bridge these gaps effectively.
Each module is intentionally designed to offer practical skills, ethical frameworks, and cutting-edge tools for effective leadership and decision-making.
Course Objectives
- Learn how to make better decisions by discovering and overcoming mental blocks in your thinking and judgment
- Recognize multiple ways to solve problems and embrace divergent thinking
- Critically reflect on your own leadership qualities and the qualities necessary to lead ethically in today's professional reality
- Identify interior practices that cultivate self awareness and social awareness needed to lead ethically in today's world
- Understand best practice tools to measure strategy performance
- Understand organizational-level, business unit, and functional strategy integration and the importance of alignment
- Create a suite of influential stories based upon a purposeful planning process for use within your organizations.
- Learn practices to synergize organizational culture and leadership for success and thriving.
- Identify both the stated and the enacted leadership and organizational culture, values and commitments, including how diverse people experience the organization and leadership