In order to be effective, leaders need a high tolerance of complexity. Beyond this, they need to inform their people and the outside world of their strategies, policies and decisions. Effective leaders are often inspiring communicators – their own high tolerance of complexity helps them reduce this complexity to a concise and powerful message.

Your sensemaking mindset is therefore of critical importance to motivate others to follow and support you. Your ability to inspire and convince is largely dependent on the way you frame your message, and on your skills at playing the game of framing and reframing. You will learn from a large variety of (video) cases and analyse a large number of situations where leaders’ communication and sensemaking skills are tested and probed. This will ensure that you are equipped to build winning coalitions in your own organization.

As an engineer in a leadership position, you will be faced with new responsibilities and tasks. These may include developing a business (unit) strategy and a business plan and being involved in strategic planning. Your success in dealing with these new responsibilities will largely depend on your ability to have a helicopter view of a situation and to make sound decisions. In order to make decsions to move your organization forward, leaders will need to ensure that business goals are achievable and well-balanced while also taking into account the uncertainty of future developments. In a complex business environment, a sound strategy is the result of applying a strategic mindset and systematic approach to decision making.

This course will help you in building and applying an analytical toolkit, including:

scenario analysis
stakeholder analysis
goal analysis
multi-criteria decision analysis
The focus of the course will be on utilizing your analytical skills in a business context, allowing you to unravel complex decision situations to formulate a sound business strategy.

Engineers have unique skills that give them the potential to be highly competent business leaders. As leaders, engineers have clear advantages: they are analytical, technically skilled, project-based, good with numbers and well-used to problem-solving. However, engineers cannot rely on this skillset alone when exercising leadership in today’s world. Problems have to be solved within complex networks of stakeholders, each with their own dynamics, interests, perspectives and power.

In this course you will learn how to develop and apply an additional mindset. You will learn about power and interests in networks of autonomous actors. You will gain experience in leading groups and learn to define roles and norms. You will learn how to deal with group dynamics such as conflict and cooperation and how to motivate group members to ensure successful group performance.

This course helps you to answer questions such as: How should you deal with information asymmetry? How can you deal with resistance? How to build trust with stakeholders with different interests? We call this the influencing mindset – because you will have to operate in such a way, that your teams and stakeholders are motivated to support you.

The content of the course is diverse and includes videos, real-world assignments and practical skills such as negotiation and dealing with group issues.