High Stakes Leadership: Leading in Times of Crisis

This course has been designed to help leaders, like you, learn how to effectively navigate the challenges of significant organizational disruptions. As a participant in this course, you’ll discover why an understanding of various stakeholder perspectives can inform and dramatically improve a leader’s response to events that threaten an organization’s very survival. This course is also about understanding and developing individual and organizational resilience—the ability to anticipate potential threats; to cope effectively with adverse events when they occur; and to adapt to changing conditions, ensuring a viable path forward for yourself, your team, and your organization. These topics are particularly relevant in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Many course examples will reference lessons leaders around the world have learned during this far-reaching healthcare crisis. During the eight course modules, which are distributed over four weeks, participants will explore topics such as: Why the VUCA world is making crises more common; Characteristics of resilient organizations and ways to increase resilience; Stakeholder value propositions and how these are threatened during a crisis; Organizing frameworks for estimating the types of crises an organization might encounter; the Unique and challenging nature of the crisis environment; the Fundamentals of crisis leadership; and Building a plan to prepare yourself, your team, and your organization for your next major crisis—which, in today’s world, is not so much an “if”, as a “when”. Professor Mike Barger, your faculty member for this course, has served as a TOPGUN instructor in the United States Navy and as a founder and executive at JetBlue Airways. His professional experience has helped him learn a great deal about crisis leadership and to gain a true sense of what it means to be resilient. Throughout the course, Professor Barger will draw upon many practical examples that will make the content of this course