Course Catalog

Organizational Design & Implementation

94-700

Units: 6

Description

This introductory course (there are no prerequisite courses) is designed to improve your effectiveness as an individual, manager and leader by introducing you to frameworks for understanding organizations, organizational processes, and necessary skills. Organizations have been studied from the perspective of several social science disciplines, including psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, and political science. The field on which this course is based, organizational behavior, draws from all these disciplines and applies the insights derived from the pertinent research. This course will introduce you to this research and offer ways to apply this knowledge situationally through analysis and subsequent class discussion of case studies.

While building the collective technical and quantitative skills of an organization is important, the human skills of managing, organizing, and communicating are arguably even more so. The reality is that people, not quantitative and technical skills, are the backbone of any organization. And yet, this self-evident fact continues to get overlooked as we presume our own level of competence in this area. Unfortunately, we tend to overestimate our human skills and engage our colleagues in unsystematic and unreflective ways.

This course is designed to get you thinking more mindfully about how we engage others in our professional environments. At times we will manage others and at times we will be managed by others. We will always be working with others. As we progress through the course, we will explore various human elements of organizations and think about ways in which we can optimize performance using what we’ve learned. The course will provide you with opportunities to develop and practice your interpersonal and leadership skills within a team context while also providing you with an opportunity to reflect and share.

Learning Outcomes

Successful completion of this course will:

Improve your awareness of interpersonal contexts and enable you to approach your relationships with intentionality.
Give you a diverse set of tools applicable to your various professional roles and situations.

Improve your ability to understand and navigate individual, team, and organizational dynamics.

Develop your overall leadership and managerial skills.
Get you thinking about the ways organizational structure impacts individual behavior so that you can effectively develop and adjust those structures in your future leadership roles.

Additionally, students in this course will:

Use course concepts to reflect on their personal experiences.
Build effective communication skills (e.g., public speaking, class participation, class presentations, teamwork, etc.)
Describe applications of course concepts and explain how they apply to their individual and professional lives .
Learn the importance of establishing personal and professional networks and begin establishing network connections.
Use teamwork skills to work effectively in small groups.

Prerequisites Description

None