Professional Leadership Development

The Professional Leadership Development courses are organized around a series of modules or components primarily for behavioral competency development, and are designed to serve as a “Bridge to Business.”  This Leadership program consists of a series of planned activities which stress confidence-building, oral and written communication, goal-setting, results orientation and time management.  This program is facilitated through team activities in “company” and “club” settings.  A continuous array of challenging projects and functions is carried out through the companies and clubs. Students in the Professional MBA Program are required to take nine (9) semesters of PLD courses to fulfill their requirements for graduation. The first course is intended for 1st year business students and is designed to encourage future professionals to continuously enhance their communication skills, business sophistication and other aspects of behavioral competence throughout their careers. The final courses are designed to train students to be leaders.  The students are assessed on their leadership skills in these courses.  The program has proved to be an effective way of helping students understand and function in the business environment.

Expected Outcomes:  After completing these courses, the students should demonstrate:

• Ethical Understanding and Reasoning Skills – the ability to identify and evaluate ethical issues and develop a framework for making appropriate decisions across organizational environments.
• Leadership Skills – the ability to influence the activities of an individual or a group in efforts toward goal achievement.
• Critical Thinking/Analytical Reasoning Skills – the ability to identify, isolate and find relationships among concepts or problems and to draw sound inferences from multiple perspectives.
• Content/Discipline Knowledge and Skills – the ability to demonstrate discipline- specific knowledge and business sophistication and apply the in-dept content  knowledge they have acquired to real business situations.
• Communication Skills – the ability to influence and inform others through the effective presentation of ideas utilizing oral, written and graphic expressions.
• Multicultural and Diversity Understanding – the ability to understand the importance of multicultural and diversity issues in business decisions.