Adapt your leadership style

Go to Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/leadership-adapt-your-style

Introduction

### Course Review: "Adapt Your Leadership Style" on Coursera Leadership is often considered an innate trait, a skill set reserved for a select few. However, the course "Adapt Your Leadership Style" on Coursera challenges this notion, offering a comprehensive exploration of contemporary leadership in the context of today's diverse and dynamic workplaces. This course serves as an essential resource for anyone looking to enhance their leadership capabilities and adapt to the shifting landscapes of modern organizational life. #### Course Overview The course delves into why organizational misbehaviors—such as cynicism, apathy, bullying, and disengagement—are becoming increasingly common. By contrasting transformational, authentic, and inclusive leadership styles against traditional autocratic models, it provides learners with alternative approaches to today's workplace challenges. Additionally, the course examines how the digital revolution and a growing emphasis on team-based projects have reshaped perceptions of leadership. #### Syllabus Breakdown 1. **The Leadership Challenge**: The first week introduces foundational concepts of leadership. Learners are encouraged to critically analyze various leadership theories, establishing a baseline to navigate the complexities of the leadership landscape. 2. **The Practices of Individual Leadership**: Week two focuses on individual leadership traits and behaviors. Here, students explore different leadership styles and the variables that influence decision-making, examining both theoretical frameworks and practical applications. 3. **Leading Teams**: Transitioning from individual to team dynamics, the third week emphasizes essential skills such as communication, coaching, and conflict resolution. Participants learn to navigate the complexities of team interactions, setting the stage for leadership in collaborative environments. 4. **Leading the Organisation**: The fourth week dives into organizational leadership, discussing the critical shift from transactional to transformational leadership. Learners will explore how leaders can evoke emotional engagement through charisma and vision while managing diverse groups. 5. **Leadership and Ambiguity**: In the fifth week, the course examines leadership in the face of ambiguity. The lessons focus on developmental stages of leadership and the adaptive strategies required to navigate complex, uncertain environments effectively. 6. **Critical, Pragmatic, and Popular Perspectives on Leadership**: The final week challenges mainstream leadership theories by exploring radical and pragmatic perspectives. This segment highlights the darker sides of leadership and the ongoing struggle against toxic behaviors in organizations. #### Course Highlights - **Interactive Learning**: The course utilizes engaging content such as multimedia presentations, case studies, and forums to foster interaction among participants. This dynamic learning environment allows students to share insights and experiences, enhancing the overall educational experience. - **Practical Applications**: The course does not limit itself to theoretical concepts; it emphasizes practical application through real-world examples and includes tools for immediate implementation within your leadership practices. - **Expert Instruction**: The course is taught by experienced instructors who bring valuable industry insights and research into the curriculum, ensuring that the content is both relevant and relatable. ### Recommendation "Adapt Your Leadership Style" is highly recommended for anyone seeking to strengthen their leadership skills, whether you're a new manager, a seasoned executive, or an aspiring leader looking to enhance your capabilities. This course equips you with the necessary tools to navigate the complexities of modern organizational dynamics and develop a personalized leadership style that resonates with the changing workplace environment. By completing this course, you will not only become more aware of the prevailing leadership styles and their implications but also develop a unique approach that embraces inclusivity and authenticity. Thus, whether you aim to inspire your team, drive innovation, or foster a productive workplace culture, this course is an invaluable investment in your professional development.

Syllabus

The Leadership Challenge

Welcome to your first week in the Adapt your leadership style course. This week you will take a look at the material that will be covered in this course, what you can expect to learn, and the questions that you explore. This week presents you with a number of models and tools to help you develop a helicopter view of the challenges of contemporary leadership and become confident in your ability to critically analyze the wide range of ideas and theories you will encounter. This week you will examine the concept of leadership as something possessed by an individual, looking at personality traits, profiles, attitudes and behaviors associated with the practice of leadership.

Welcome to the second week in the Adapt your Leadership Style course. This week you will deepen your understanding of leadership as a set of behaviours or traits possessed or displayed by an individual. In doing so, you will see how the relatively self-enclosed leadership concepts presented in the first week have increased in sophistication and complexity via notions of leadership styles and decision-making variables. The models examining this range from the academically pure, but perhaps unrealistic in practice, contingency models of leadership, to the highly pragmatic interpretations of leadership action and style found in the politics and power struggles of organisational life.

Welcome to the third week in the Adapt your Leadership Style course. This week you will leave the ideas of individual leadership traits, behaviors, and styles behind and focus on the theories and practices of team leadership. Building from the baseline skills of communication, coaching and conflict resolution, you will then examine the complex interrelationships in teams through concepts of in-group and out-group behavior, and leader-follower roles and interactions. Finally, you will examine how teamwork itself is becoming complex and varied, with many people charged with leading virtual teams or displaying informal leadership qualities in self-managed teams.

Welcome to the fourth week in the Adapt your Leadership Style course. Having covered individual leadership theories and the demands of leading teams, it is now time for the big league – how to lead an organization. Starting with an examination of the shift from transactional to transformational leadership, this week illustrates why the challenge of leading a contemporary organisation can be so mystifying. Ranging from the way in which leaders must generate emotional responses in their followers through charisma, vision and culture, to the complex challenge of leading diverse groups of people, this week concludes with the concept of authentic leadership – which questions the very validity of all the theories that precede it.

Welcome to the fifth week in the Adapt your Leadership Style course. This week you will examine two established, but somewhat alternative, concepts of leadership that examine how leaders have to learn to deal with ambiguity in order to lead effectively. You will first explore the idea that leaders go through developmental stages, which are formed through progressively more sophisticated and multi-level perspectives and practices. Following that, you will examine how leadership is never easy but risky and necessarily adaptive, injecting discomforting ambiguity into seemingly obvious situations at its highest level. Finally, you will look at how contemporary ideas about organisational conditions might be pushing such perspectives on leadership increasingly into the mainstream spotlight.

Welcome to the final week in the Adapt your Leadership Style course. This week you will leave mainstream theory behind and examine some radical and pragmatic perspectives on leadership. The radical perspective will examine how leadership and followership are contested perspectives that have a darker side that can be used to “legitimize” some unenlightened behaviours. Taking these claims seriously, you will see how some pragmatic ideas on leadership have revealed the degree to which “bad” or “toxic” leadership has proliferated, how leadership development seems to struggle to solve this challenge, and the behaviors and misbehaviors associated with this problem. Finally, you will examine some ideas proposed by populist leadership gurus and look at the ways in which leadership might be conceptualized in the future.