ORGL 515: Leadership and Human Potential

Professor: Dr. Deborah Hedderly

Taken: Summer 2023

Course Description: Continuous innovation is critical to organizational health and happens when we find the keys to unlocking human potential. In this course, you will learn how to reframe attitudes and unlock creativity to find solutions to challenges in a whole new way. Tap into your own ability to facilitate change and engage those around you to come up with new ideas. You will learn tools to address the frustrations sometimes present in group dynamics in any organization, including school groups, community organizations and fortune 500 companies. You will become familiar with the following strategies and interventions: design thinking, growth mindset, appreciative inquiry, future search, open space, and world café that will help you create healthy interactions and organizational culture focused on growth.

Course Reflection: The course on leadership and human potential showcased the need to engage with people where they are, determining what they need, and how they can support. I was required to investigate my own biases in this course and understand how I need to reshape my thinking to meet people where they are to influence change. Even if change is what’s best for a company or institution, change is difficult and empathizing with people, involving them in the solutioning process, is key to being a change advocate. This course also identified the necessity of including leadership throughout the change process. Change requires top-down support and learning how to gain leadership-level support is instrumental in being able to connect the necessary changes to strategy and drive towards alignment. I needed to dive into how I could be a change champion by using appreciate inquiry to define, discover, dream, design and deploy.