Leadership and Critical Thinking Specialization

Leadership is everywhere. It is involved in nearly every social action, in some form. Many people who have the potential to be leaders do not realize it. Many who become leaders do not know how to manage those responsibilities.

Great leaders can inspire change; bad leaders can cripple their followers with stress and frustration. What differentiates these two is a clear vision, an effective plan, and knowledge of how people work. In this class, you will learn the foundations of psychology at work, so that you can better understand others and guide them to shared goals. Along the way, you will answer these questions: Why do you want to be a leader? What kind of leader can you be? How can you persuade and influence people? How can you motivate and inspire people? Whether you are a formal or informal leader.

Making decisions in today's world, a world increasing in complexity, with broad changes and uncertainty, creates the need of approaches that allow us to discern the real problems and the causes that create them. Identifying these problems, in most cases, requires challenging the assumptions on which we base our judgments, regarding the world and its realities.

Critical thinking could be defined, as "that way of thinking - on any subject, content or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his thinking by seizing the inherent structures of the act of thinking and by subjecting them to intellectual standards". Critical thinking helps making decisions within a company, selecting the best action for the organization. In this course of critical thinking the students will learn the tendencies, approximations and assumptions on which their reflections are based, and the conditions and the outcomes derived from their ways of thinking. This reflective thought is the active, careful and persistent examination of all beliefs in the light of the fundamentals that support them and their conclusions. The reasoned decisions that the world requires, occur in many different areas, especially in business decisions, related to strategies, in the solution of problems in organizations, in the solution of social problems and in corporations’ social and ethical responsibility. In this online course the approaches will be oriented to analyze the critical thinking required in these areas.