University Courses

My goal is to recognize and encourage the unique talents of my students so that they can achieve a leadership role in their chosen fields.

Adjunct Professor

Mercy College MSOL Program
(Masters of Organizational Leadership)

 

Developing Learning Systems

Based on Peter Senge’s book, The Dance of Change, the course covers three main challenges of profound change—initiating, sustaining, and redesigning and rethinking. Using specific case studies from the course book, outside articles, and multiple, different exercises and role-plays, we explored:

• What change means personally, professionally, organizationally

• The differences between a mechanistic and biological approach to management.

• Brain research -why is it difficult to change one’s mind, mental models, and the specific factors that cause individuals to shift their perspectives and change their actions.

• Moving change from an idea into part of the corporate culture.

Personal action plans

 

 

Leading Team Projects
This course was intended to teach project management from the leadership perspective, rather than the detailed project manager perspective. Therefore I focused more on the art rather than the science of project management. I built a curriculum that focused on:

• Planning, emotional intelligence, decision making, motivation, creative team environments, trust, communication and conflict management, and dealing with change.

• Including specific sections from the course book (Leading High Performance Projects by Ralph Kliem), outside articles, and multiple, different exercises and role-plays.

 

 

Creative Team Environments/Organizational Creativity

This course section focused on specific ways that leaders could bring more creativity into their own thinking process, foster a creative environment regardless of the corporate culture, and a personal action plan for creativity in their own departments.

We explored:

• The 4 P’s of creativity (person, product, process, and press of the environment).

• Lateral thinking problems

• Associative thinking techniques.

• The lone creator versus group dynamics and collaboration

• The receptiveness of the system (or organization) to innovation.

 

 

Communication and Team Building

This course focused on role of leaders in team building through communication. Using articles, and multiple, different exercises and role-plays, we discussed topics such as:

             • Corporate culture, groups versus teams, norms, individual
              personalities, creative team environments, building a team,
              sustaining a team, measurement, offsite teams, and having fun.

 

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