Curriculum & Courses Prior to Fall 2021

In this foundations course, students will examine the impact of industry dynamics (i.e., external industry trends, shifting workforce and workplace challenges) on human capital management (HCM) solutions and the competencies required of human resources (HR) professionals. Students will learn about effective strategies for designing human capital solutions and people development programs, including business-aligned and integrated approaches to talent management and cross-functional collaboration with organizational leadership. Students will be introduced to the latest practices related to advancing human capital implications for high-impact organizational performance and have an opportunity to apply practices to current industry and organizational challenges. The course will also introduce foundational approaches to measuring the effectiveness of human capital investment.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Identify the shifting contexts and evolving challenges in the field of HCM

• Describe the changing competencies needed for world-class organizations and effective agile HR professionals

• Analyze the organizational benefits of a business-aligned and integrated approach to talent management

• Explain current and emerging human capital related-theories, constructs, and public policy

• Describe current and emerging HCM quantitative and qualitative strategies and methods

As strategic business partners, HR professionals must be able to align business objectives with employees and senior management across an organization’s business units. In this foundations course, students will review the various approaches to corporate strategy and development that companies use with an emphasis on business partnership. That is, students will look closely at a range of complex business scenarios while working to developing the knowledge, competencies, and communication skills necessary to take on the role of strategic business partner/consultant. Working in project groups, students will participate in a semester-long consulting simulation that will challenge them to manage and resolve complex employee relations issues; conduct thorough and objective business unit investigations; offer guidance and solutions; and communicate effectively through each stage of the simulation. Students will receive peer and instructor feedback throughout the semester and will use course texts to ground their practical group work in theoretical best practices.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Demonstrate leadership and communication skills necessary to build support and buy-in for human capital management initiatives

• Partner with organizational leadership to leverage Human Capital Management initiatives for competitive advantage

Increased globalization and multilayered talent and workforce management strategies across geographic and organizational boundaries require an integrated talent management approach that provides an organization a clearer understanding of its talent, the ability to make adjustments to its current approach, and the information necessary to plan for the future. Differentiated capabilities, such as connectivity between talent processes like career management and learning and leadership development, enables the organization to better prepare leaders and more efficiently use talent management investments.   In this course students will examine how connected organizational processes are designed to attract, manage, develop, motivate and retain key people. Through in-depth investigations of key talent processes—such as performance management, career management, succession management, leadership development, learning and capability development, total rewards, and talent acquisition—students will apply these insights in an industry-based exercise designed to demonstrate how an organization’s overall capabilities are more effective when integrated through a common interface, data platform, workflow, and cross-process reporting and analytics.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Analyze how connected organizational processes are designed to attract, manage, develop, motivate, and retain key people

• Evaluate best-practice processes for selecting, developing, and maintaining talent within an organization

• Assess the role of technology in enabling integrated talent solutions

Successful organizational leaders are increasingly turning towards human capital analytics (HCA) for workforce reporting to help make better, more informed, decisions about their human capital in terms of current needs and future goals. Helping to drive organization performance, HCA linked with decision making can deliver competitive advantage throughout an organization. This course provides students with skills necessary to take a strategic view of HCA and form effective hypotheses for the development of organizational insight. Students will review in depth systematic data collection techniques, analysis methods, and ways that data can be effectively presented. Looking closely at performance measures, students will practice planning, interpreting, and clearly articulating an organization’s “people metrics” with the goal of improving decision-making about talent, financial measures, and the organization as a whole.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Articulate the value that analytics bring to an organization, including basic data reporting, benchmarking and advanced reporting, survey analytics, and predictive analytics

• Describe the affordances and drawbacks of common analysis techniques

• Craft stories resulting from solid hypothesis and data analysis that communicate organizational insights in a clear and compelling manner

• Leverage analytics to support more informed, evidence-based decision making throughout an organization

Effective human resources (HR) leaders and leading human capital management (HCM) strategists rely on financial acumen to use financial data to make decisions, allocate resources, and justify budget expenses. Through a rigorous combination of theory and practice, students will explore the basics of financial management and measurement and their connection to efficient, effective, and operationally sound HCM strategies and solutions.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Describe key operating assumptions and dependencies behind financial data

• Use organizational income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements to identify implications for HCM insights

• Analyze the connection between fiscal implications and human capital strategy

• Predict the return on investment on people strategies and solutions

• Tell stories with financial information to better support people and organizational goals

• Develop financial acumen for HR functions (e.g., leaders, teams)

Students in this course will explore the legal framework governing labor relations, workplace ethics, and employee rights in the workplace. In addition to a review of current developments and best practices, the course will cover collective bargaining, union organizing, disability law, privacy, and employment litigation. Other subjects will include handling EEOC complaints and working with legal counsel on the resolution of those complaints. The overall goal of the course is to develop the knowledge necessary to minimize legal exposure and to communicate effectively with legal counsel on a variety of labor and employment law issues.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Outline the legal framework for collective negotiations and labor communications

• Discuss what comprises unfair labor practices

• Differentiate between federal and state enforcement agencies in dealing with labor strikes and scope of bargaining

• Articulate proactive and reactive strategies for dealing with organizational conflict

Organizational Strategy and Learning is a full-semester course that is designed specifically to improve understanding of the intersection of strategy, human capital management, operational planning, and organizational development. In today’s fast-evolving business landscape, the skills to evaluate, champion, and implement an integrated approach to organization-wide development programs that link strategic planning with learning initiatives are critical. The course teaches Human Capital Management (HCM) students how to continuously integrate strategy and learning as a powerful and effective tool to build agile and resilient learning organizations. These types of successful learning organizations are able to achieve accurate self-assessments, support change and innovation, attract, retain, and develop top talent, and maximize manager effectiveness.

This required course will explore the connections between organizational strategy, human capital management and development as core catalysts for competitive advantage and fiscal survival.

As part of the HCM program, this course will support students in mastering the following program objectives:

• Developing integrated workforce strategies and talent solutions that are responsive to a diverse and dynamic marketplace, sustainable, and aligned to organizational goals.
• Developing leadership competencies required to serve as a trusted and agile advisor on human capital implications relating to the talent lifecycle and to organizational opportunities and challenges.
• Using meaningful patterns in HR data to create clear and cohesive stories that have an action-driven people analytics strategy.
• Developing rationales grounded in financial and business acumen and connected to organizational objectives for investments in human capital management initiatives

In addition to reading relevant case studies, theoretical and conceptual texts and participating in real-world scenarios, role-plays, and projects, students will interact in meaningful ways with invited guest executives and scholars. Throughout the course, students will collaborate to discuss, develop, design, and present strategies and implementation plans that aim to address the fundamental challenges of the modern global business world. Students will also participate in site visits or guest lectures to leading organizations to observe covered theories in practice, and experience, in real-time, how organizations establish a strategy and align it with their talent development efforts. 

For organizations to be successful, human resources and human capital management leaders must be able to work across business lines and functions to effectively manage total reward programs and align these programs with both the strategic and financial needs of an organization. In this course, students will focus on how to (re)define total rewards programs—both tangible and intangible. That is, students will review and discuss transforming compensation and benefits across all levels of an organization to better align with organizational objectives and goals. Through rigorous and varied coursework, students will demonstrate the leadership competencies necessary to understand and communicate the advantages and costs of performance-based compensation and benefit programs for a variety of business and industries. Students will also apply integrated talent solution principles to the creation of innovative performance management solutions that combine industry-based people, process, and technology elements.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Articulate the changing nature of compensation and benefits

• Communicate evolving trends in total rewards across all levels of an organization

• Identify ways to re-align total rewards programs to the strategic objectives and financial needs of an organization

• Assess the opportunities and challenges of industry competitive integrated performance management solutions

The digital capabilities of the organization and the digital acumen of its leader are constant game changers in the changing world of work. Data-driven insights and management of human capital is essential to the success of the enterprise. Systems and tools—such as a human resource information system (HRIS)—allow professionals to more readily understand the organization’s operations in real time. Digital disruption is occurring across industries at an unprecedented rate. This disruption is creating new approaches to human capital management including the emergence of a new world of work.

The emergence of the digital enterprise provides intelligence from non-human resources (HR) systems that enable multivariant analyses of people-related issues, opportunities, and solutions. This course provides students with an overview of this landscape, building their ability to develop a strategic, interdisciplinary, and integrative approach to using technology to measure and manage human capital. Students will also explore specific systems and frameworks for investigating and selecting technology solutions. Through class discussion, case exploration, tool demonstrations
and group activities, this course will provide opportunities to apply tools and information in order to understand the advantages of using technology to enhance the contributions of the human resource function across an organization.

Guided by the capstone instructor, students will work to develop a thesis-level capstone project that pulls from required and elective coursework to offer a targeted solution to a real-world human capital management (HCM) problem. At the beginning of the course, students will be assigned a partner organization that will provide the real-world context for this experiential capstone. Similar in weight to a thesis, but more flexible, the capstone project allows students to synthesize and theoretically apply core concepts acquired from across the program. The capstone seminar is structured to support students through the individual work of consulting to better understand the situation; analyzing the internal and external contexts; designing and writing a proposal; and presenting their capstone projects at the end of the semester. Engaged in iterative inquiry throughout the semester, students will draft sections of their capstone projects for peer and instructor feedback. In addition to an individually written paper, students will create a presentation of their capstone projects that they will present in a cohort showcase at the end of the semester.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Design and articulate a solution to a context-specific, student-defined HCM problem

• Develop and evaluate programs and initiatives that address HCM problems within an organization

• Demonstrate leadership and communication skills necessary to build support and buy-in for HCM initiatives

This course will cover the essentials necessary to lead and work across cultures in high performing global organizations and matrixed systems. The course will cover various cultural frameworks, identity work-style differences impacting interactions, communication, leadership, negotiation, conflict-resolution, and decision-making in complex environments. In this course, the core theories of culture will be examined and applied in relation to authority, power, leadership styles and work practices, as well as intercultural communication across cultural groups, including multicultural team dynamics and group leadership.

This course aims to:

• Address cultural differences and orientations of people across national, societal, and organizational cultural context and the way we communicate and work.
• Expand our cultural knowledge and competence about employees, management, and -organizational system across global and business contexts.
• Provide a framework for understanding cross-cultural differences, learning how to solve problems in a culturally complex environment. Including how to observe, assess, predict, and adapt culturally to achieve mission goals using theories, cultural models, real-world case studies, and current events.
• Cover cultural competence models including how culture influences perception and thought, and how one’s cultural bias can distort cues and cause miss readings of a situation (i.e., perspective-taking).
• Explore cultural assessments to build self-awareness and cultural domains, and orientations such as interpersonal relations, concepts of time, attitude towards interpersonal space, thinking/reasoning styles, values, beliefs, power.

This course will meet online and in person throughout the entire semester.

Professional Consulting Approach to Business Transformation

Conflict, Social Networks, and Communications Technology (NECR PS5212) will analyze the relationship between conflict and communications technologies and will explore the challenges that individuals and networks face in using online technology for collaboration and conflict mediation purposes. The course will demonstrate how recent software and social media innovations can facilitate knowledge acquisition, network building, and the analysis and presentation of conflict-related data. Finally, it will analyze contemporary cases where developments in communications technologies have played a critical role in exacerbating and/or resolving conflicts. The course focuses on international peacebuilding, business, and human rights cases.

The course will also instruct students in the use of social software (such as blogs, wikis, curation, and visual mapping) and improve their “digital literacy” on a range of technologies. It will also provide practical (and often provocative) examples and challenge students to reflect on how these tools will be useful in their professional development and work environment.

As an elective offered by the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (NECR) program, Conflict, Social Networks, and Communications Technology builds on students’ conflict analysis skills (PS6125, PS6150), their ability to understand and apply relevant theories and frameworks to complex issues (PS5101), and their assessments as to what influences the behaviors and cultural understandings of conflict parties (PS5105, PS5107, PS5124, PS5205). The aforementioned courses will contribute to the understanding of this course’s content and should, in general, be taken before this (or any other) electives.

In this course, we will explore negotiation from several points of view and approaches. We will also look at characteristics that impact the quality of our negotiations and the outcomes, such as the role of emotions, cultural considerations, effectiveness of our communication, and opportunities to seek out negotiation to transform relationships. The course will be a blend of concepts and skills, theory and practice. On some occasions, you will be introduced to a concept and then asked to apply those concepts in an experiential activity. At other times, you will be asked to engage the activity or simulation and then the concepts will be elicited based on your experience. You will have several opportunities to practice developing your skills throughout the course, in terms of enhancing your practice and honing your analytical and conceptual understanding.

This course will help you identify critical leadership skills and behaviors, and will provide ideas and tools for improving them. A central theme of the course is selfawareness: the goal is to help you think about your leadership behaviors—and other people’s perceptions of your behaviors—and then leverage this awareness to improve in areas that matter to you. Leadership effectiveness is also determined by the larger social systems in which leaders are embedded, including their organizations. This course will explore different contexts and the effects that certain organizational factors have on our ability to lead others effectively.

In this course, students will gain an overview of major concepts of management and organization theory, concentrating on understanding human behavior in organizational contexts, with a heavy emphasis on the application of concepts to solve managerial problems. Students will work in a combination of conceptual and experiential activities, including case studies, discussions, lectures, simulations, videos, and small group exercises.

By the end of this course students will:

• Develop the skills to motivate employees
• Establish professional interpersonal relationships
• Take a leadership role
• Conduct performance appraisals

Availability: 

On Campus: Every term
Online: Every term 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is an increasingly salient practice in the charitable sector. Done well, DEI practice – such as more diverse recruitment policies, more inclusive organizational culture, and greater attention to the equitable distribution of programmatic outcomes – helps nonprofit and foundation managers and leaders attract and retain talent, improve programmatic outcomes, and lend greater credibility to the work of the charitable sector.

The need for such practice is evident: most nonprofits and foundations are not representative of the communities they serve; the accumulation of wealth that enables large private foundations to exist exacerbates the very issues they may seek to combat; and in seeking to help those affected by inequality, nonprofits and foundations may reproduce the same patterns of inequality within their own organizations.

Despite the growing need for effective DEI practice, much of the knowledge of it is diffuse and disconnected. At times, practitioners can’t even agree on the basic terms. Yet in this disagreement lies a clue: pursued deeply, a DEI analysis leads one to conclude that mainstream institutions, and the broader society of which they are a part, are ultimately designed to make DEI difficult to understand, much less enact. This means that DEI practice eventually names and pushes back on the very power relations and institutional dynamics that surround us in the charitable sector and make our work possible. To reckon fully with DEI means to question the very assumptions and relationships on which our sector is based.

This course aims to equip students with critical faculties and practical tools to be informed and ethical practitioners of DEI in the charitable sector while remaining alive to the tensions between DEI and current sector practice.

This introductory course sets the context for the unique and fundamental role the nonprofit sector has played in American society, both historically and in current communities. In particular, the course will address the distinctions among nonprofit, government and private corporate culture and structure, including inherent opportunities and challenges the nonprofit sector by necessity confronts and embraces. Changing perceptions of the nonprofit sector, as well as fundamental changes in how the nonprofit sector represents itself, will be explored. Students will be exposed to current policy issues and the trajectory of the evolution of the field...

The field of conflict resolution has been developed academically as a discipline from diverse fields of knowledge. This course provides an introduction to the major schools of thought that contribute to the developments in social psychology, law, political science, social work, and business. The field of conflict resolution is also dynamically transforming, and the course introduces recent developments, particularly in the area of complexity and dynamical systems.

This course is offered in block week format, typically held in January.

The economy of the world is changing. The goal of this course is to understand the drivers of the change, study organization exemplars innovating to harness these drivers for advantage, and provide the tools and strategies for staying competitive and successful. We will explore the changing nature of work, provide the means for better understanding what is occurring, and develop strategies for successfully navigating this new world.

This course will start by noticing how platforms, robotics, AI, automation, data, digitization, and the speed of technology has changed work. We will then connect technology innovation with the ultimate advantage of people and the adaptive and value-centered capabilities of leaders that are taking these advantages to the next level of delivering notable value.

This will lead to learning from the forward leaning “See’ers and Do’ers” from teams and organizations that are harnessing successes in three vital areas of “intangibles” — leadership, knowledge, culture — the pillars necessary for success in the many potential futures of work organizations are facing. The course focus will be on offering students an understanding of the critical capabilities necessary for success, and providing skills that can be applied to successfully navigating the future of work for themselves, their team, and their own organization.

Our core question is, how to start, build, and sustain capabilities for successfully navigating the future of work? The course will answer this question by looking to current leaders and success organizations who are demonstrably leading the way. This will be combined with research that validates a set of core principles. Our learning bias is based on action and doing. Therefore, the course will require students to engage in reflection, discussion, activities, and assignments aimed at personal unlearning and learning.

Invited Speakers

• Alicia Aitken, Executive Investment Management, ANZ Australia 
• Alison Bakken, SVP, Thomson Reuters 
• David Dabscheck, GIANT Innovation 
• Stephane Kasriel, CEO, Upwork 
• Navy Tactical Advancements for the Next Generation (TANG) Design Team 
• Greg Robinson, NASA, Program Director, James Webb Space Telescope 
• Barry O’Reilly, CEO, Unlearn, Best selling author 
• Alan Richter, QED, Ethical Standards and Decent Work 
• Lt. Gen, Sattler, Chair – US Naval Academy Center for Ethical Leadership 
• Ben Williams, COO Exyn, Entrepreneur in Residence, UPenn

When we understand our cognitive, personality, temperament, motivational, learning, and communication styles, we can blend and capitalize on our strengths and manage our weaknesses. This course reviews the body of work that studies essential influences and the dimension of the intrapersonal dynamics that contribute to who we are and how we work. The course emphasizes a systems approach to understanding self and will be highly interactive, incorporating the participants' personal experiences and self-assessments (MBTI, The Bar-On Emotional Quotient Index, Communication Skills Assessment, Learning Styles Inventory).

The course will be a blend of concepts and skills, theory and practical application. You will have opportunities to practice developing your skills throughout the course, and develop and implement an individualized plan for guiding strengths and managing weaknesses.

Successful charitable sector leaders must lead change in their mission-based organizations, not only manage those organizations; the sustainable solutions they seek can be achieved only by finding common ground among diverse internal and external stakeholders who may share similar missions but have disparate goals and milestones that are often difficult to measure. Charitable sector leaders are challenged by complex desired outcomes such as generating value by influencing public policy, advancing ideas, programs and movements, providing public leaders with insights about community interests in a democratic society, collaborating with the private and governmental sectors, and accomplishing whatever relevant constituencies and stakeholders judge to be beneficial at a specific time. All of that in line with the Mission of the organization. With knowledge about this existing and expected landscape, students in this required core course will deepen their understanding about how the development of personal attributes and abilities lays the groundwork for mastering core leadership competencies that are essential for high-impact change management in the charitable sector, as well as improve their toolbox to be effective managers. Students in this course will develop specific, high-demand attributes and abilities including self-awareness, authenticity, self-management, analysis of complex environments, and continuous learning. Through dynamic interactions between the instructor, students and other experiences, each student will develop a more complete and holistic approach to a philosophical, theoretical, and leadership framework, oriented to an effective management of a nonprofit organization.

Effective dialogue is one of the single most important activities of leaders today. Whether you are confronting a team member who is not keeping commitments, critiquing a colleague’s work, disagreeing with a spouse about financial decisions, or telling someone no, critical conversations are often avoided or handled in clumsy ways. This course will provide the theory underpinning these conversations, diagram their structure, and provide specific strategies for approaching them successfully.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a deep and broad understanding of stories and how they can be used in strategic communication. Drawing from a wealth of evidence-based and field-tested work on storytelling from both local and global contexts, students will learn why stories tend to be so powerful and—with a focus on the written, performed, and transmedia aspects of storytelling—gain experience in telling stories to achieve organizational objectives. Your skills will be sharpened through lively seminar discussions, storytelling exercises, workshop-style coaching, and presentations and on-camera practice.  By the end, students will walk away with a new mindset and a host of strategies that can be immediately implemented in their everyday work.

The global knowledge economy, cross-border market permeability, and worldwide talent mobility have accelerated the rise of multinational and domestic organizations comprised of individuals from many different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. As these trends strengthen, so, too, does the likelihood that the 21st-century worker will spend a significant part of her/his professional career in a multicultural workplace. While such diversity affords great benefits to organizations, their employees and clients, it is often accompanied by a rise in communication misfires and misunderstandings that can undermine individual, team, and organizational performance.

As the pace of technological change accelerates, and market and social disruptors lurk around the corner, organizations and policy makers find that traditional hierarchies pose a huge disadvantage. Decision-making is often layered and ponderous, insular cultures block new ideas, and information moves inefficiently. Increasingly, managers find that, to compete, they need novel operating models. Organizations and institutions need to readily access resources and markets. At the same time, they need diverse intelligence, large multidisciplinary data sets, and novel product ideas. The answer lies in the network, an organizational construct that involves people engaging across boundaries, organizations, and/or geographies with shared knowledge-creation goals. 

For-profit and nonprofit organizations, alike are embracing networks to share insights and data, act as a voting block, serve customers, and innovate. For example Proctor & Gamble, World Health Organization, the World Bank, and German Aerospace and Technology Center are all leveraging networks. The ideas of “open” and “contagion” are no longer seen as a rarified university experiment. Now these present a viable means for a growing number of purposes: get to market faster, thwart climate change, clean the oceans, and find cures to intractable diseases. 

“The Science of Communities and Networks” presents the quantitative structure, impacts, and practical work of networks. There are many different forms of network, varying in size, shape and purpose. Yet there are some common practices and behavior patterns and models that trace their origins back to the science of the human brain, mathematics and social and behavioral psychology. After computing and interpreting the metrics of social network structure, we will use the Knowledge Network Effectiveness Framework, a logic model flowing backwards from outcomes, to individual and social behavior, to dynamics, to design. We will also use other scholarly research, along with practical cases, to study different network forms: communities of practice, knowledge-networks, crowds, open source, open data, and open innovation. Students will envision, diagnose and design networks for “cooperative advantage.” We will do that while considering that networks operate in the context of human bias, complex contagion, common-pool resource dilemmas, and technology advancement.   

IKNS and other SPS students will find that the course incorporates both social science and data science on the future of work, in which operations and innovation come increasingly from parties outside the organization or department. The course relates to three main themes of the IKNS curriculum, digital transformation, future of work, and collaboration.

Organizations are seeking to leverage human capital to differentiate and gain a competitive market advantage in today’s rapidly changing business environment. That leverage and advantage often come through talent strategies deployed with strategic workforce planning (SWP). SWP has the potential to connect talent strategy to actionable, integrated talent management plans. It also supports organizational continuity. SWP practitioners play the role of diagnostician, analyst, and solution orchestrator to focus human resources and organizational resources for maximum impact within their organizations.

In this course, students will learn SWP processes and techniques by a data-driven approach. There will be a heavy focus on the practical application of SWP in today’s business contexts. Students intending to pursue careers in any HR domain will benefit from this course.