Leadership Development Program

The Leadership Development Program is a cohort experience that actively supports your professional and personal growth, organizational resilience, and focused networking. Enhance your business knowledge and skills for advancement as a decision maker and leader in today’s rapidly changing global workplace

Certificate requirements

You are required to complete the graduate certificate in the Leadership Development Program in nine months.  The certificate consists of nine courses (15 credits). 

Required courses (15 credits):

21st Century Leadership (non-credit)

This course offers you the opportunity to learn and participate in design thinking: a human-centered process utilized by some of the most creative and competitive business organizations. With emphases on research, ideation, and prototyping, design thinking helps you leverage your creativity and collective expertise to achieve innovative solutions. During this course, you will work in teams to solve complex problems while applying the entire design thinking process. A large component of the course is experiential, but you will examine design thinking through multiple academic lenses (design and design theory, organizational behavior, and social psychology).

BU.210.620 Accounting and Financial Reporting (two credits)

This course emphasizes the vocabulary, methods, and processes by which business transactions are communicated. Topics include the accounting cycle; basic business transactions involving assets, liabilities, equity, revenues, and expenses; as well as preparation and understanding of financial statements, including balance sheets, statements of income, and cash flows.

Building and Leading Organizations (one credit)

This experiential learning course is designed to develop agile and creative business leaders who understand how to build sustainable, impactful businesses within developing communities around the world. The course provides an understanding of the needs of Black, Latinx, Indigenous and urban communities around the nation and world. You will engage with entrepreneurs, public officials, faculty, and non-government organizations, exploring critical business development issues. Develop an understanding of the complex systems that prevail in the economy, the role of appropriate technologies and interventions in solving pressing problems, and the sustainable business opportunities embedded in these community needs.

BU.120.601 Business Communication (two credits)

Communicate orally, across cultures in context, and in writing and messaging as managers both to internal and external audiences. Through analyses and practice of communication strategies adopted by successful business and organization professionals, engage in methods to become a proficient cross-cultural communicator who can succeed in current and future global environment. It is important to note that the various cultures do not all share communication behaviors both verbal and nonverbal.

BU.141.710 Effective Teaming (two credits)

In today’s businesses, teams are a basic organizational building block. Teaming is perennially listed as one of the top skills that recruiters look for in graduating MBAs. This course conveys knowledge and practical tools that help you become a more productive team member and leader. Topics include the characteristics of high- performing teams, leadership strategies for creating performing teams, strategies for avoiding dysfunctional team dynamics, and best practices for managing diverse and virtual teams.

BU.142.620 Leadership in Organizations (two credits)

The goal of Leadership in Organizations is to help you learn how to leverage organizational behavior to enhance your ability to lead. Specifically, this course seeks to provide you with both the analytical frameworks and the practical experience necessary to better lead individuals and groups in organizations. The analytical frameworks will help you understand leadership; the practical experience will help you put that understanding into action. The aim is to help you lead, even if you do not currently find yourself in a formal leadership role. The practices that are discussed will promote effectiveness at any level.

BU.142.720 Managing in a Diverse and Global World (two credits)

Business organizations and other critical organizations operate in both a market and nonmarket environment. A major focus of the course is examining contextually global diversity, inclusion, and multicultural issues through the lens of multiple dimensions. Successful, globally minded managers align the firm’s capabilities with the demands of both its market and nonmarket environment. This course examines political, regulatory and societal factors of influence. Learn to analyze the motives for focused intervention to better judge when and how political developments may affect business or organization interest. It explores the rise of “private politics” (activists, civil society networks, and non-government organizations), which are increasingly complementing conventional “public politics.”

This new plurality also opens exciting new nonmarket strategic opportunities for profit and socially driven business, providing it with new potential allies. This course stresses collective moral agency and the ethical dimensions of business and management in such a global political economy. Explore cross-cultural perspectives on economics and business culture and how to analyze and proactively manage the nonmarket environment through integrated market and nonmarket strategies. Cumulatively through class interaction and team activities, you will develop strategies for managing aspects of global diversity and inclusion within the context of a real organization opportunity.

BU.410.620 Marketing Management (two credits)

This course covers principles of market-driven managerial decision making that determine competitiveness in dynamic consumer and organizational markets. Particular areas of emphasis include industry analyses, dynamics of competition, market segmentation, target marketing, channels of distribution, and product and pricing decisions. In-depth analytical skills are developed through case analyses, class discussions, and applied projects.

BU.510.601 Statistical Analysis (two credits)

Learn statistical techniques for further study in business, economics, and finance. The course covers sampling distributions, probability, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, regression and correlation, basic modeling, analysis of variance, and chi-square testing. The course emphasizes statistics to solve management problems. You will use case studies, spreadsheets, and Excel Add-in Data Analysis ToolPak computer software.