Hello and welcome, my name is Elizabeth Luckman I'm an educator and a coach. I support people seeking to flourish in their personal and professional endeavors. I work as a clinical assistant professor of business administration here at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. This is a course about leadership, but more specifically it's about developing as a leader. This course is not designed to offer you the definitive body of knowledge on leadership. There's no slide decks, there's no real memorization required. Instead, you should immerse yourself in the content, absorb what is most relevant to you right now. Experiment with those ideas and then return to other concepts when those types of issues inevitably emerge in your work life. The ideas, research, frameworks and overall content of this course could be valuable to someone at the front end of their career or someone looking to brush up on some skills later on. Someone with a formal leadership role or someone who's simply looking to grow as an effective team member. We wanted to provide a course that acts as a springboard to provide the fundamentals for you to grow as a leader wherever you are on your leadership journey. To enact this vision we've designed a docking course. The videos will include lectures from the faculty leading the course as well as a variety of others who have given their time to share their perspectives on leadership. You'll hear from myself as well as professors, Denise Lu and Lloyd and Carrie Keating who teach this course with me and high degrees programs here at Gies. You'll also hear from other Gies faculty who research and teach in various departments throughout the college. You'll hear from Gies leadership, including the dean of our college and our executive Associate Dean of academic programs. You'll hear from authors, practitioners who have codified their experiences by writing books about leadership. And you'll hear from a variety of people in industry, including some alums of our degree programs here at Gies who are working as leaders in different companies, different contexts and with different experiences. And you'll hear from Larry Gies himself, you'll see portions of the interviews that we conducted with all of these individuals throughout the course. And it was these interviews along with data collected from previous high degree students and other industry professionals that helped to shape the overall content of the course. We wanted to provide content relevant to being a leader in today's world, adaptable to a variety of different contexts and foundational for any leader. To be fair, the number of people interviewed who appear in this document class is still very small. We were able to talk to many of these folks in person while some of the interviews were conducted over Zoom. These are not the only people in the world who can help us become better leaders, but they were all carefully selected to contribute valuable and unique perspectives on effective and ethical leadership. A few notes about what this course is, not. As I mentioned, it's not the definitive body of knowledge on leadership, not really sure what that would even look like. Since leadership is such a broad concept and such a subjective experience, there is no absolute knowledge on how to be an effective leader. It is highly individualized and contextual, you will not complete the course and say, aha, I have learned all I need to know about leadership. Further this course is not a course about organizational design strategy, nor does it address the specific challenges of leaders in the most senior positions. If you would like to learn more about leadership from an organizational design perspective or business strategy. The Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois offers courses in these areas and will include links to those here. There is so much information out there in the world about how to be an effective leader. As I've been building this course, I have come across new perspectives daily that I have wanted to incorporate in some way. I'm learning all of the time, I think about leadership a bit like a language, whatever language is native to you, that language you grew up speaking, there's still elements of that language that you have yet to learn or experience. Maybe one day you learn a new word or maybe someone uses an expression or an idiom that you hadn't heard before. Maybe you learn a new pronunciation for something. The point is that most of us do not have 100% mastery of our native language, just like we cannot have 100% mastery of leadership, simply part of our growth as humans. But that's the one great thing about the language analogy, it also means that everyone has leadership expertise. You don't need to spend your career studying it to have a general idea of what makes a good or bad leader. In fact I'd argue most of us have a general idea of what a good leader looks like. It's enacting those qualities, that's difficult and that's what this course is designed to help you do practice, enact and do. As you work your way through the course, I hope you come across new ways of thinking about leadership that spark your interest. I hope it validates some of what you already know about effective leadership. I hope you come across things that you question because they don't align with your experience. But most of all I hope you test out some of these ideas, reflect on their effectiveness and grow as a leader. I was having dinner recently with some friends and we were talking about what leaders do to motivate and demotivate their teams. Obviously I'm a very entertaining dinner guest. One friend said to me, leadership is about being the shining light in a dark room and I thought that was such an elegant description because at the heart of it, an effective leader is the beacon of light for the team. They don't always have all the answers, they aren't always right, but they set the course and generate the space for others to be the best versions of themselves. So when you're stuck on, how to act as a leader, shining the light in a dark room is a good place to start. Thanks for putting your trust in our team as we lead you through the course, leading teams developing as a leader.
