Hi, I'm Jack Goncalo.
And I'm Jeff Loewenstein.
And together, we're teaching the course,
Foundations of Everyday Leadership.
This course was originally developed by our colleague and friend,
Greg North Craft, now retired.
In this course, you'll see videos of the two of us,
and you will also see Greg.
Together, we're going to help you understand why
leadership skills are critical to organizational success,
and help you learn how to be an effective leader.
Leading teams and organizations can be challenging, we know.
But our job is to help you engage others to work together to achieve collective goals,
so you can be a more effective leader.
You'll see there are four modules in this course.
The first module is the head and the heart of everyday leadership.
We'll be saying that a lot,
the head and the heart.
This is Greg North Craft's wonderfully concise way of
talking about the twin leadership challenges of managing information,
the ahead, and motivation, the heart.
One way to think about what a leader does is to think about a leader inspiring
people to gather the necessary information to make high quality decisions,
and then inspiring people to take action to implement those decisions.
It's not enough to have the information.
It's not enough to be motivated to act.
You really need both. That's why we talk about the head and the heart of leadership.
The whole course has built around understanding the head and the heart of leadership.
We're going to spend two sessions talking about decision making.
Module two will be about individual decision making.
And module three will be about group decision making.
And when we finished those two modules,
you'll know a lot more about how to manage the flow of
information to make effective decisions.
Our fourth module will be about managing motivation.
And in that module, we're going to talk more about what it takes to make
sure that people want to do things that we need them to do in our organization.
So each module in the course will include some background reading, a conceptual video,
a supplemental video which will allow you to
drill a little bit deeper into the topic of interest,
and finally, a case study activity.
Now that's really important. The case study activities are going
to provide you an opportunity to put into
practice what you've been learning from the everyday leadership videos, and the readings.
The case study activities are really
the central vehicle for your learning in this course.
These activities will put you into situations that leaders encounter every day.
These activities will give you a chance to
assess your own leadership tendencies and to improve them.
So the more seriously you take your participation
and the case study activities, the more you're going to learn.
Leadership is about working with other people.
And the case study activities involve working with other people.
This means, the course asks you to gather some friends and
colleagues to do the case study activities with.
One piece of advice,
work with different friends for each case study activity.
That way, you'll learn more because different people react differently,
and you need to lead a variety of people,
not just one person.
And for those of you who might like to purchase a package of the supplemental readings,
for all eight modules of the everyday leadership course,
you can visit the LAD online bookstore, and there,
you can also purchase two-page summaries of the contents of each of the eight modules.
Proffessor Greg North Craft prepared them all for your benefit.
Each module in this course also contains some practice questions.
These are multiple choice questions to help you
assess whether you've learned what you need to know from each module.
And once we're done with all that,
we'll wind up each module with a short term multiple choice quiz,
or maybe a brief peer-evaluated writing assignment.
The writing assignments will give you a good opportunity to
consolidate what you've learned so far in the course.
So, welcome to the course.
The course is intended to help you build
a strong foundation of knowledge needed to be an effective everyday leader.
The course is also going to provide you opportunities to read about,
think about, practice, and improve your everyday leadership skills.
They say, even the longest journey begins with a single step.
So get ready to take your first step on
the journey to becoming a more effective everyday leader.