Hi. I'm Greg Northcraft. Welcome to my course, Foundations of Everyday Leadership. This is a course about the challenges of people management in organizations. In this course, I'm going to help you understand why and how leadership skills are so critical to organizational success. I'm also going to help you learn the foundations of effective leadership skills, I'm going to help you learn how to use leadership skills to work more effectively with others, and I'm going to help you learn how to use leadership skills to organize and influence others to work more effectively together. In this course, you will of course learn skills, new ways to act more effectively as an everyday leader. But I'll also be teaching you some new ways of thinking about leading others, and even some new ways of talking about leading others. There are four modules in this course. The first module is the head and the heart of everyday leadership. It will lay out the two pillars, the most critical things you need to know about being an effective everyday leader. Then we're going to drill a little deeper into those two pillars. We're going to spend two sessions talking about decision-making. Module 2 will be about individual decision-making, Module 3 will be about group decision-making. When we finish those two modules, you'll know a lot more about how to manage the flow of information to make more 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 the things that we need them to do in our organizations. Each module in our course will include some background reading, a conceptual video, a supplemental video, which will allow you to drill a little deeper into a topic of interest, and finally a case study activity. The case study activities will provide you an opportunity to put into practice what you learn about everyday leadership from the readings and the videos. The case study activities are really the central vehicle for your learning in this course. The case study activities will put you into situations that leaders encounter every day. The case study activities will give you a chance to assess your own leadership tendencies and to improve them. So the more seriously you take your participation in the case study activities, the more you're going to learn. I'm going to ask you to identify some others, that is some friends of yours to do the case study activities with. One piece of advice, I would advise you to use different friends for each case study activity, because that way, you're also going to learn more by seeing how others react to the different case studies situations that you have to encounter. For those of you who might like to purchase a package of the supplemental readings for all eight modules of the Everyday Leadership courses, you can visit the LAD online Bookstore. You can also visit the LAD online Bookstore to purchase a two-page summary of the contents of each of the eight modules of the Everyday Leadership courses, 16 pages total prepared by me, Professor Northcraft. Each module in this course also contains some practice questions. These are multiple choice questions to help you assess whether you have learned what you need to know from each module, and then will wind up each module with either a short-term multiple choice quiz or a brief peer-evaluated writing assignment. The writing assignments will give you a good opportunity to consolidate what you have learned from 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.
