Courses

Communication within an organization impacts directly/indirectly and internally/externally in four directions: colleagues, subordinates, superiors, and current and potential customers. All successful leaders are competent communicators and seek ways to develop their skills. This course provides a broad overview of communications and offers learners practical tools to improve their rapport with various audiences.

Leaders need to understand change in order to lead change. This course enables students to understand the impact of change, develop a better sense of leading complex change, and learn about various change process models, frameworks, and engagement principles to gain commitment and involvement. Students also develop an understanding of how to coach in the midst of change. Using a nine-phase change process model, students apply their learning to a change project or initiative.

An examination of the universal process of human development from a psycho-social perspective in order to understand personal responses to leadership and the perspective-taking requirements of the leader in leading others. This course provides an overview of different generations (Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials) and both their approach and responses to leadership challenges with a view to increasing the emotional intelligence of emerging leaders.

An examination of leaders' vocation discernment and career planning in the context of both modeling and mentoring. Emphasis is given to the leaders' identification of personal calling and the creation of their career development plans and how they use their self-development knowledge as life mentors to those they lead, bringing others toward personal and professional clarity and growth.

An examination of everyday challenges and weaknesses leaders face, and how to cope effectively. This course focuses on approaches and attitudes related to leadership aspects such as criticism, failures, successes, personal attacks, weaknesses, and persistence.

Students learn key principles and methods beyond general strategies of leadership, which lead to successful administration of private and public organizations. This course provides the student with an opportunity to apply learned leadership principles of the program in the context of a management application, thus demonstrating an understanding of both management and leadership, and acknowledging that a good leader is also a good manager. Topics include preparing strategic plans, modifying strategies, designing the organization to fit objectives, organizational governance, staffing the organization, budget building and defending, risk management and due diligence, and effective implementation of plans.

Examines leadership as a socially constructed process shaped by identity, power, and systemic forces. Drawing on critical social theory, students will explore how leadership practices can reinforce or transform unjust systems. Key themes include race, gender, colonialism and decolonization, Indigenous reconciliation, and the evolving impact of the digital age, including artificial intelligence and algorithms. Students will critically engage with the legacies of leadership and formulate biblically grounded approaches to equity, justice, reconciliation, and restoration.

Students are invited to use the discipline of leadership as a mode of inquiry to explore the relation between the leader as a person and the social world where the leader seeks to intervene. Emphasis is given to how a leader's awareness of human uniqueness and interconnectedness is practically expressed in, and informed by, social ways of relating respectfully to all others in order to create positive transformations in the workplace and society, locally, nationally, and globally.

Students are engaged in an experiential learning opportunity within a practical setting to apply knowledge and skills they have gained in their B.A. in Leadership studies. Applied projects are developed within the supervised environment of a business, non-profit agency, social service agency, or other institution related to the student's personal interests and future plans.