High Stakes Leadership: Leadership in Times of Crisis

This course has been designed to help leaders like you learn how to effectively manage the challenges that arise from significant organisational disruption. As a participant in this course, you will learn why understanding the perspectives of different stakeholders can empower a leader and significantly improve their response to events that threaten the very survival of the organisation. This course also focuses on understanding and developing individual and organisational resilience – the ability to anticipate potential threats, cope effectively with adverse events when they occur, and adapt to changing conditions, ensuring a viable path forward for yourself, your team and your organisation. These topics are particularly relevant in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the course examples will reference the lessons that leaders around the world have learned from this far-reaching health crisis. Over the course of eight modules of the course, spread over four weeks, participants will explore topics such as: Why crises are becoming increasingly common in a VUCA world; Characteristics of resilient organisations and how to build resilience; Stakeholder value propositions and how they are threatened in a crisis; an organizational framework for assessing the types of crises an organization might face; the unique and complex nature of crisis environments; the foundations of crisis leadership; and building a plan to prepare yourself, your team, and your organization for the next major crisis, which in today's world is not so much an "if" as a "when." Professor Mike Barger, the instructor for this course, served as a TOPGUN instructor in the U.S. Navy and was the founder and CEO of JetBlue Airways. His professional experiences have given him a wealth of insight into crisis leadership and a true understanding of what it means to be resilient. Throughout the course, Professor Barger will use numerous practical examples that will make the content in this course easy to digest, understand, and translate into practical lessons that you can immediately apply to your organization. Crisis leadership is a topic that is exciting, daunting, and nearly impossible to master. However, with a little time and effort over the course of four weeks, you will be able to develop an exceptional set of crisis leadership tools that will serve you throughout your professional career.