ORGL 600: Foundations of Leadership

STATED OBJECTIVE:

The purpose of this course is to develop the internal skills of the student as a leader, and these inevitably mean spiritual, emotional, and intellectual aspects of what it means to be an individual working with other persons toward some common purpose. The expert leadership practitioner would, therefore, be aware of their motivations and the motivations of others would understand the need for collaboration in working with others and would be motivated to create dialogic organizations where all perspectives can be integrated.

IMPACT QUOTES:

“Any situation in which ‘A’ objectively exploits ‘B’ or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression” -- Paulo Freire, from Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

"The sum of our experience in mathematics and physics, in experiment and theory, we can make the tentative suggestion that the universe is a computer, with our thoughts and actions acting as the programs whose instructions create what our brains (our poorly understood brains, remember) interpret as reality. Is this as delusional as Newton’s insistence on the ‘clockwork heavens’ – an interpretation based on the technology of his time? Perhaps. After all, we are simple creatures, easily fooled by our senses, our inner logic and our desire to bring simplicity to our interactions with the world. These difficult topics expose our weaknesses and leave us open to failure. Making sense of them is hard. The beauty of human beings, though, is that we are fierce and indefatigable. We have shown ourselves determined to grapple with the universe around us until it surrenders its secrets to our inquiries. That is why we go to the edge of uncertainty: to quest, and question, and fight with ourselves and others until we have an answer. Then, aware that we have brushed against other questions and surprises, we stow our new discoveries safely, and dive back into the dark waters to wrestle more things into the light. We have been doing it for centuries, and we can only hope we will be doing it for centuries to come. This is, after all, the best thing humans have ever done. This is how those mysterious and powerful brains compel us to behave: they endow us with the curiosity, the bravery and the tenacity to hunt out the truth as best we can. It’s not an easy way to live. By the end of this journey to the frontiers of human certainty and beyond, your brain will feel battered and bruised. But it will also cry out for more. Adventuring is addictive. You have been warned" -- Michael Brooks, from At the Edge of Uncertainty: 11 Discoveries Taking Science by Surprise.

Competencies Gained:

The most important skills that students in this class will develop are primarily internal ones, i.e., perception, insight into causes of problems among individuals within group contexts, and understanding into the dynamics necessary for long-term solutions to problems.

After participation in this course, students should have a greater ability for self-reflection, a more integrated philosophy of leadership, and a deeper understanding of how they and others in organizational contexts create meaning. Implied in the above \competencies is a more in-depth awareness of barriers to their attainment: dysfunctional thinking, rigidity in leadership approaches, and segmentalism in organizational decision-making and behavior.

These questions (both in content and order) approximate the approach of Ignatius of Loyola (the founder of the Society of Jesus—i.e., the Jesuits—and of the Jesuit educational tradition of which Gonzaga University is a part) to personal and spiritual transformation in his outline for the Spiritual Exercises. Each question builds upon the answers to the previous one to lead toward the transformation of the person, the key to being a fully actualized human, whether the particular focus is spiritual, emotional, or intellectual.

Course Instructor:

Timothy Keator, Ph.D.

Reference Materials:

Angelou, M. (1994). Wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now. New York: Bantam.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Kouzes, J. M. & Posner, B. Z. (2012). The leadership challenge (5th ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Northouse, P.G. (2015) Leadership: Theory and Practice (7th Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Wheatley, M. J. (2006). Leadership and the new science: discovering order in a chaotic world (3rd ed.). New York: Barrett-Koehler.