Academic department to provide curricula and classroom instruction in support of educating senior U.S. government, foreign military, and selected private sector personnel in Strategic Leadership. The Strategic Leadership Department's mission is to educate and develop senior leaders to bring strategic thinking skills and innovative approaches to the challenges of transforming organizations and formulating and resourcing our future national security strategy. To achieve its mission, the department provides ICAF’s Executive Assessment and Development Program (EADP), a core course on strategic leadership, and several electives that allow students to go into further depth on various leadership topics. Additionally, the department will sponsor several Commandant Lecture Series speakers on the topic of leadership and sponsor a panel discussion about Strategic Communication.
The purpose of the strategic leadership course is to help students develop into innovative strategic thinkers and change agents who can create and lead agile organizations to attain and maintain a competitive advantage in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous strategic environment. The course is divided into 22 lessons.
SL-1: The Challenge of Strategic Leadership
Comparison and contrast of challenges faced
and skills required at various leadership levels
Work of strategic leaders
Transformational and transactional leadership
SL-2: Assessing the External Environment
The strategic environment and environmental scanning
Nature of the external environment
Strategic communication
SL-3: Conceptual Capacity (Mental Models,Reframing,and Systems Thinking)
Systems thinking
Mental models
Perspective taking
Assessing and managing risk and uncertainty
SL-4: Critical Thinking
Tools for critical thinking
Relationship between critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making
SL-5: Creative Thinking
Creative thinking (individual and group)
Relationship between critical and creative thinking
SL-6: Interpersonal Skills
Interpersonal skills (generating respect and trust)
Emotional and social competencies (individual and group)
Dealing with toxic leaders
SL-7: Building and Leading Strategic Teams
Building and leading executive-level teams
Managing conflict in groups and teams
SL-8: Leveraging Power and Politics in Organizations
Analysis of organizational power and politics
Using power and politics to transform organizations
Working in a politicized environment
SL-9: Strategic Decision Making and Risk
Decision making in an ambiguous and complex environment
Consensus (as a process and outcome)
Collaborating across organizational boundaries (interagency)
Conflict management
SL-10: Decision Making Exercise
Dialectical inquiry
Consensus
Devil's advocacy
SL-11: Strategic Negotiation
Skills for informal influencing
Strategic negotiation (as a group process)
SL-12: Interagency Decision Making Exercise
SL-13: Shaping the Internal Environment
Internal organizational environment
Organizational structure, processes, and design
Impact of external environment on internal organization
What is an effective organization?
SL-14: Shaping Organizational Climate and Culture
Organizational climate
Organizational culture
How leaders shape climate and culture
Establishing an ethical organizational climate
SL-15: Building and Communicating a Strategic Vision
Elements of an effective strategic vision
How to create a strategic vision
SL-16: From Strategy to Execution
Building a strategy
Ways to align your organization with its vision
Metrics for success
SL-17: Leading Organizational Change and Transformation
Kotter and Cohen’s change model
Role of a strategic leader in leading organizational change
Why change efforts fail
SL-18: Influencing Organizational Change
Informal networks and organizational change
In-class exercise using a personnel computer simulation
SL-19: Achieving Organizational Agility/Resilience & Creating Learning Organizations
Organizational agility
Organizational resiliency
Learning organizations
Knowledge management
SL-20: Establishing Organizational Ethics and Values
Ethical decisions that get senior officers into trouble
Dealing with gray areas and “Right vs. Right” challenges
SL-21: Capstone
SL-22: Course Wrap-up
