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Curriculum and Schedule

The 14-Month Curriculum

The EMPL course map is designed to build knowledge and skills in key areas to prepare students for senior leadership positions. Students take all 11 courses in the program following the order in which they are offered. All students participate in a short, intensive immersion experience at the start of the program.

COURSE + DESCRIPTIONS

Gateway Course

May

Monday-Thursday All Day (4 days total)

Gateway to Executive Leadership

PA 280E

The EMPL program will begin with a four-day intensive gateway course for all students. This course is designed to accomplish four goals. First, it will build community among students, nurturing a set of personal connections that will facilitate intellectual collaboration and professional networking. Second, the gateway course will help prepare students for the reading, writing, and analytical expectations of the program. Third, students will take part in a multi-­rater leadership assessment and begin work on a personal leadership development plan that will be interwoven and addressed throughout the EMPL course of study. Fourth, and perhaps most important, the gateway course will introduce key concepts of leadership that will underpin all student work in the EMPL program. The gateway course will occur over four consecutive days in late May, before the summer semester begins. It will be a two‐credit full‐time course for those four days. Students must attend all sessions.

Summer

May - August

Friday Evenings - Saturday Afternoons

Understanding & Shaping Opinions

PA 381E

Strategic communication is a vital part of a public leader’s role. A principle of strategic communication in any public entity is understanding and shaping opinions, with a variety of internal and external stakeholders. Internal stakeholders include staff at the leader’s agency and staff across the organization, and all public boards or commissions that are pertinent to an agency’s mission. External stakeholders include the public, media, interest groups, and lobbyists. The goal of this course is to enable public leaders to implement strategies to understand and shape the opinions of these diverse stakeholders. The class is divided into three sections including:
  • Message Development (covering principles from communication, marketing, social psychology, and sales and addressing best practices in audience analysis, language use, nonverbal persuasion, and narrative);
  • Message Delivery (including role-play activities ranging from crafting email messages to speaking to staff, media, and public boards and commissions); and
  • Messages in Action (framing public conversations employing traditional and social media, responding to difficult situations, and delivering bad news).
Class sessions will include discussion of the readings, case studies, exercises, lecture, role-play activities, and guest speakers with expertise in presenting to boards, communication campaigns, and social media.

Organizational Excellence and Executive Leadership

PA 383E

This course will examine the factors that make excellent organizations and the role of executive leaders in such organizations. The instructors draw on sources in the public, private and nonprofit sectors to develop these concepts.  Attention will be given to the attributes of excellent organizations and the roles and priorities of leaders in achieving and maintaining such organizations, including a range of leadership strategies and activities.  Specific topics include: strategic people issues, working in teams, creating collaborations and alliances, political savvy, engaging in policy development and executing policy, ethics in organizations and scenario planning.  This course is intended to be the first of two linked courses on elements of organizational management and should serve as a foundation in the development of a variety of program core competencies.  Course Activities/Assignments:
  • Regular reading assignments
  • Short postings on reading assignments
  • Introduction of topics, discussion, case studies, and periodic guest speakers
  • Team Exercise

Leading Organizational Change

PA 383E

The research on the success of organizational change efforts is not encouraging. Some sources indicate that as many as 70% of major organizational change initiatives fail to achieve some or all of their intended objectives. At the same time, some leading authors in the field propose that the function of leading organizational change is one of the defining, core responsibilities of leadership.  Senior level leaders in government must achieve a better record than that! The course will be organized to cover the following areas:
  1. Theories and models to help us think about organizational change. Which aspects of these theories and models are similar, which are different, and how are these helpful – if indeed they are -­‐ in understanding change efforts in your organization?
  2. Understand how people experience change. Why do people resist change and is what we perceive as resistance always resistance? What strategies are helpful for reducing resistance and getting buy-­‐in from staff? How do we make it easier for people to get on board with change initiatives?
  3. Understanding organizational culture and readiness. Changing culture is one the hardest challenges leaders face. Understand how cultures can support or thwart change efforts and use systems thinking principles in identifying the structures that most influence behavior in the organization.
  4. Assessing the implementation of change. How do we measure progress in implementing change? Measurement strategies and tools will be introduced and used to assess change efforts in the theories, models, and practices discussed in class.
The course will utilize different learning approaches, including lectures, group discussions, case studies, and a computer-­‐based simulation. There will also be a number of guest speakers/panels who will discuss their experiences and challenges in leading and implementing organizational change efforts.

Fall

August - December

Friday Evenings - Saturday Afternoons

Working Constructively with People: Teams, Partnerships, Negotiation and Mediation

PA 381E

This course for students in the Executive Master in Public Leadership Program will examine factors that enable organizations and leaders to become excellent and exemplary executives, respectively, as assessed by people within and without an organization. The class emphasizes the creation of effective teams, coalitions and collaboration; dispute prevention; negotiation; dispute resolution; and mediation. The class reinforces through group exercises the application of these tools, skills and competencies to organizational effectiveness. The class is about working with people and leveraging relationships to enhance leadership and accomplish organizational goals.    Accomplishing goals requires meeting challenges through constructive engagement with people, both within and outside of the organization. This class discusses how to cooperate with others, addressing disputes (or proactively avoiding disputes), mediating, negotiating, gaining support (internally or externally) with coalitions or alliances, preventing or resolving differences of opinion (real or imagined), creating more productive work relationships (bosses, peers, or subordinates), benefiting from a diversity of perspectives, leveraging team performance, as well as practice working with governing boards or legislative bodies (city councils, legislatures or nonprofit governing boards). This course provides students with knowledge and skills to allow them to achieve these ends. The Instructors will draw on their experiences in both the public and private sectors for germane material (not just “war stories”) for this course. All participants are encouraged to share their knowledge and experience as well, where it can inform the learning experience for the course. We will learn together.

Risk and Crisis Management

PA 381E

Crises are inevitable. At some point, something will happen outside or within any organization that will spark a crisis. How that crisis is handled shapes the reputation of the organization and the careers of every leader of that organization. Handled well, reputations are enhanced; handled poorly, careers are ruined and organizations falter. Indeed, one the major responsibilities of organizational leaders is effectively handling crises. In this class, we focus on the issues leaders of organization must consider before, during, and after a crisis. We begin the class by defining crises, noting the sorts of crises organizations face, and the value, intrinsically and extrinsically, of good crisis management. We highlight the importance of preventing, anticipating, and planning for, crises. Then, using a stage model of crises we explore what leaders need must do to recognize crises early, handle them well, and recover from them promptly. We emphasize how what leaders say and do matters immensely during crises. Finally, we discuss the role of the media in crises and how leaders and organizations need to both understand and effectively manage the media throughout a crisis. The goal of the course is give participants a deep understanding of crisis management and provide a variety of practical tools and skills participants can use when faced with crises. Instructionally, the class includes readings, exercises, lectures, case studies, as well as invited speakers who have successfully handled crises in the past.

Data Analytics/Predictive Analytics

PA 382E

Leaders use data to drive decision making. This course provides students with the skills and experience to understand how to use data to make informed decisions. The course will use real-world examples to teach students about statistical inference, research methods, and how to be sophisticated consumers of evidence. Students will also learn to present evidence to communicate with multiple audiences.

Spring

January - May

Friday Evenings - Saturday Afternoons

Management Concepts and Skills: An Executive Toolkit

PA 383E

This course is designed to help you develop the management capabilities expected of senior managers/leaders in the public sector. The course assumes you have already had basic managerial experiences and are preparing yourself for more senior roles. The course will cover four broad topics that you can expect to face in your role as a senior executive in the public sector (government or non-­‐profit organization). These topics include:
  1. Developing and executing strategies designed to prepare and strengthen your organization in order to carry out its mission. This topic involves consideration of the various levers or tools executives use to execute the strategy of their organization.
  2. Measuring and managing organizational performance in order to effectively lead the organization. This includes using and managing information systems to help control the organization and its work.
  3. Strategically managing organization talent – finding the right people, putting them in the right roles, and developing their capabilities in order to carry out the mission.
  4. Managing complex systems – increasingly the work of executives revolves around managing portfolios of projects, programs that rely on networks/agreements/contracts with other organizations (public, private, non-­‐profit), and complex cross-­‐functional business processes within your own organization.
The course will utilize different learning styles, including: (a) lectures; (b) group discussions; (c) guest speakers/panels; (d) case studies; (e) writing assignments keyed to ‘real world’ management problems; and, (f) selected readings in management theory and practice. Students will be expected to share their own management experiences with the class and discuss them with our guest speakers.

Leadership Strategy and Decision-­making

PA 383E

This course will introduce mid-­career professionals to key concepts, insights, and experiences related to the strategic leadership of modern organizations. The course is designed to increase students’ understanding of what it means to think strategically, lead an organization, and marry strategy with leadership. Course activities will center on readings, discussion, and short think-­piece papers. Students will not learn a formula for strategic leadership. Students will, instead, gain an appreciation for the different kinds of strategic leadership, and their relevance for current and future professional needs.

Course Activities/Assignments:

  • Weekly reading assignments of approximately 150 pages.
  • Weekly three-­paragraph response essays, posted on Canvas, about the assigned readings.
  • Two 10-­page reflection papers on strategy and leadership. The first paper will examine concepts. The second paper will describe contemporary applications.

Enterprise Management (Budgeting & Finance)

PA 382E

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of public financial management at senior levels of government. Its objective is to develop executive capabilities in the analysis of financial operations and the management of public sector financial resources. The course will cover the principles of budget, finance, accounting, and fiscal administration. The course will cover the full range of fiscal management issues, from development of budgets to review of account data and financial reports. Other topics will include taxes and revenue collection, debt financing, investments, cash management, audit, pensions, cost analysis, and procurement.

Course Activities/Assignments:

  • Regular reading assignments
  • Short essays on reading assignments
  • Introduction of topics, in-­‐class discussion, case studies, and periodic guest speakers
  • Issue papers analyzing and making recommendations on contemporary topics and projects

Capstone

May – June

Research Capstone

PA 389E

All EMPL students are expected to work closely with the academic director and other professors to identify a project that will build on their studies in the program and contribute to their leadership success in their current employment. The capstone course offers an opportunity for each student to work one-­‐on-­‐one  with a faculty member in completing this project. Projects   will include a research, writing, and presentation component.

Course Activities/Assignments:

  • Regular and frequent meetings with faculty supervisor during the semester.
  • Submission of a project proposal for approval.
  • Completion of a draft of the final project in time for feedback and revisions before the end of the semester.
  • Presentation of the project at a gathering of all EMPL students and faculty.
…the entire curriculum – leadership of self, leadership of teams and leadership of organizations – in its totality…has been most useful.

patricia vojack

EMPL Graduate


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