CURRICULUM

Governance as Leadership is an online program.

Program Modules

The first two modules focus on what your board can do to govern in a more meaningful and consequential way.  Modules three and four focus on the types of leadership you as an executive can exercise in order to help your board govern more effectively.  (Some of these leadership frameworks will be more broadly relevant to your work as an executive.)

I. A Guiding Conceptual Framework: Governance as Leadership

• Understand the distinction between resource and governing contributions of your board and assess its contributions in each.
• Learn the critical contributions and distinctions that boards make in three governing modes: fiduciary, strategic, and generative, with special emphasis on the generative.
• Explore why the generative mode produces especially important governance value but is so often marginalized or overlooked.
• Using a diagnostic based on the framework, assess your organization’s generative profile.

II. Identifying and Responding to Practice Challenges

• Building on your generative profile, identify the barriers and opportunities for creating optimal generative governance at your organization.
• Explore practical strategies and techniques for overcoming barriers and building on opportunities.

III. The Challenge for Executive Leaders

• Explore a framework for understanding how leaders’ effectiveness is determined by their ability to understand their role, self, and work system.
• To better understand the role/self/system model and your own leadership challenges, diagnose and trouble-shoot a critical incident from your work with a board.

IV.Simulation: Case Study of a Difficult Board Situation

• Using a case study of an executive facing a difficult board, internalize and integrate key concepts and practices from the governance and leadership frameworks.

 V. Action Planning

• Using planning tools based on the course frameworks, develop action plans that focus on your role as a change agent in improving your board’s work.
  

In Modules I and III, participants will be introduced to a set of frameworks in a case and/or readings. Participants will then have the opportunity to consider the framework’s relevance for their organizations by taking part in online discussions with their colleagues and using electronic workbooks designed specifically for the program.  During each module, the instructor will hold a live online session with program participants.  In Modules II, IV, and V participants will focus on the practical applications of the concepts and frameworks through more in-depth diagnosis, trouble-shooting, and action planning, also supplemented by discussion with peers.

Program participants will be broken into groups and will take part in a substantial amount of collaborative, online work. This group work will provide a valuable opportunity to form a network of partnerships among colleagues and gain insights from fellow senior executives.

A typical schedule of each module follows:

Week 1:
Reading (focusing on a conceptual framework or case study)
Post responses to the discussion questions to your group’s discussion board
A nominee from your discussion group will post the consensus to the entire program’s discussion board

Online class with web lecture and discussion

Week 2:
Complete the exercises in the course workbook. You will share your workbook in a dyad or triad.
Participate in the live discussion session with the instructor, who will be responding to the discussion board.