Master of Leadership Courses
Master of Leadership Core Courses
The Master of Leadership requires 30 credit hours, including 27 hours of course work and a 3-hour capstone class. The 27 hours of course work consists of 18 hours of required core classes and 9 hours of electives.
An intensive exploration of the intellectual and moral virtues in the context of cultivating leadership characterized by magnanimity and humility and built on the cardinal virtues (i.e., prudence, justice, self-control, and courage). Students develop an advanced capacity for self-awareness and managing oneself. Connections between ethical, authentic, servant, and transformational leadership styles and virtues are examined and applied to personal leadership style and ethical decision making. This course requires concurrent enrollment with Business and the Common Good.
1.5 Credits
Classroom/Online
An examination of business as a creation of man and collective contributor to society according to its responsibilities articulated by the tenets of Catholic social teaching including the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, the dignity of the human person, worker, and work, and a preference for the poor. Emphasis is placed on how managers and their organizations effect change for a more sustainable planet and just society. This course requires concurrent enrollment with The Virtuous Leader.
1.5 Credits
Classroom/Online
The course introduces logic while giving students the opportunity to make arguments. The course will cover persuasion through defining and explaining what rhetoric is. The course also addresses the practice of social influence; marketing politics, interpersonal relationships, and groups. The course will teach students how to communicate effectively in business situations.
3 Credits
Classroom/Online
This course introduces the fundamentals of leadership, both its challenges and opportunities. We will study key examples of good and bad leadership.
3 Credits
Online
We think using stories. We plan and strategize using stories. We understand ourselves and others using stories. But stories can also mislead, obscure, and confuse. Stories are not simply entertainment. They provide the substance of our cognitive efforts and our social lives. In this course, students will learn how to create powerful stories of different kinds, for various purposes. The focus will be on story-telling as a tool in business. This will include its role in marketing, branding, and group dynamics. The most fundamental concern, however, will be with how to use stories to think strategically. Thinking strategically requires that you think critically, and so students will also learn how to see through and resist false and distorting narratives. By the end of this course, students will have begun to master the art of story-telling as a primary mode of thinking in both business and everyday life.
3 Credits
Online
This is an advanced course that is designed to stimulate creative and critical thinking about leadership and strategic change initiatives in a new reality that is volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous (VUCA). The course materials are selected to prompt thinking about the complexity of modern organizations from a wide variety of perspectives. The course is also an applied leadership course. Students will be expected to apply a variety of models of the organizational change process to an actual change process in their organizations. Thus, the major deliverable in this course is a comprehensive strategic change plan.
3 Credits
Online
This course investigates the practices of effective problem-solving, tactical judgment, critical communication and strategic thinking.
3 Credits
Online
Taken in the last semester of the program, this course will enable students to utilize their leadership course work in the exploration of a real-world problem. Projects might include interviewing business leaders, assessing leadership and organizational cultures, or developing a strategic leadership case-study of a specific company or business scenario. Students may work individually or in teams under the supervision of a professor. Leadership capstone approval is required to enroll.
Prerequisites: completion of 24 hours of Leadership courses. Students may enroll in the Leadership Capstone concurrently with another course with prior approval.
3 Credits
Online
Master of Leadership Elective Courses
The Master of Leadership program requires students to take 9 hours of electives. Electives are drawn primarily from Leadership, English, and Business courses.
Facilitates the development of interpersonal and team skills leaders need to function effectively. Focus is on the integrated behavioral competencies that organizations value today; self awareness, communication, collaboration, and relationship-building. Students will plan and implement new behaviors relevant to individuals who hold leadership positions, as well as those who informally assume leadership roles as they work with others to achieve business goals.
3 Credits
Classroom/Online
Examines the social, political, legal and regulatory environments that constitute the background in which a for-profit business firm conducts its activities in domestic and global contexts. Corporate social responsibility and the ethical dimensions of decisions that impact stakeholder groups and corporate sustainability in a competitive environment are discussed. Prerequisites: MANA 5F50.
3 Credits
Classroom/Online
An employee-centered analysis of organizational value creation through the leadership of human resources. The intersection of organizational theory, behavior, development and change serves as the context in which students are challenged to develop knowledge, skills and ability necessary to plan, evaluate, implement and improve human resource initiatives. Emphasis is placed on critically evaluating multi-dimensional value creation perspectives. Prerequisite: MANA 5F50, or LDRS 6320 or BUAD 6305.
3 Credits
Classroom/Online
This course is an advanced seminar designed to examine the ethical aspects of the leader - follower relationship. Specific attention will be given to the ethics of the individual leader, the ethics of the leader's means, and the ethical evaluation of the outcomes of the leader's actions. The moral responsibility of followers will also be examined.
3 Credits
Classroom/Online
When faced with complex decisions, leaders often reach for analogous historical prececents to guide them. Leaders often make inferences from their own and other’s experiences. While history may provide useful templates, historical reasoning is often flawed. This course is designed to help decision-makers become more attentive to the proper “uses of history” by reviewing the common traps in historical reasoning in order to help leaders prevent these pitfalls, while strengthening the ability to analyze particular situations and contexts. The course uses historical events to develop and utilize seven systematic methods for the proper use of history in decision-making.
3 Credits
Online
This course examines the important role of spirituality in the life of a leader. Attention will be given to the development and integration of the leader’s spirituality in the practice of leadership. The course will emphasize images of leadership developed in the Christian scriptures. In addition, the course will focus on the lives and leadership processes used by several biblical leaders including Moses, Joshua, Nehemiah, David, and Paul. Particular emphasis will be placed on the life and ministry of Jesus as a model of servant-shepherd leadership. Students will be invited to use biblical images of leadership and the biographies leaders as presented in scripture to explore their own motives, gifts, and approaches for leadership in a variety of contexts.
3 Credits
Online
A consideration of the social construction of reality. The cultural context of individual experience is explored with cultural manifestations of psychological life. Social behaviors are related to the ethological heritage and ideological contexts. Psychological texts, such as body language, gender displays, fashion advertisements, and media, are viewed as both reflecting social attitudes and revealing influences upon the individual.
3 Credits
Classroom/Online