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This course is a part of Re-Imagining Leadership, a 6-course Professional Certificate series from edX.

Please note: the UMD Power Lab is an optional lab, highly recommended, and costs an additional fee. Please read the important statement at the bottom of the description

Great leaders are just ordinary people with the right skills at the right time. To become a great leader, however, you have to know yourself well. This means acknowledging and embracing your strengths. It also means understanding and learning to manage your weaknesses. It’s tougher than that sounds. How do you know what your strengths and weaknesses are? What are your core personality attributes? How do you make decisions? What’s your decision-making style? How do you know? How do you know accurately?

This certificate offers an extraordinary opportunity to spend some quality time with yourself to assess your current level of soft skills, clearly define your core self, and build soft skills which are essential to professional, not to mention life, success.

Knowing what you can change and what you can’t is invaluable knowledge. Stop investing in trying to change the unchangeable -- your traits -- and learn to work with them. Stop trying to change others’ traits, too. Learn to work with your strengths, build new skills and perfect existing ones. Then do the same for your team. To start, you must have self-awareness.

Within self-awareness are several dimensions essential for effective leadership::

emotional intelligence

personal values

cognitive style, how you think

orientation to change

core personality attributes

With the exception of core personality traits which are much less open to change, all other areas of self-awareness are open for development.

Verified learners can access the Power Lab to take self-assessments and receive confidential, benchmarked results. In this course, self-assessments include: core self-evaluation, core personality attributes, self-awareness, and cognitive style, how you make decisions.

From these assessments, verified learners can identify their current strengths and opportunities for growth. You can set goals for your own development with confidence. And, you will learn key practices for how to move from goal to action to strength.

Immediately useful takeaways from this course include enormous self-knowledge of your:

self-awareness and how to improve it

core personality attributes and benefits

thinking styles and how to deploy them

best practice management skills

personal SMART goals to develop

self-awareness

thinking styles

management skills

Verified learners who enroll in the Power Lab will have these additional takeaways:

know current level of self-awareness

know core personality attributes

know details of how you make decisions, thinking style

know current level of management skills

set SMART goals against benchmarked self-assessments for your personal development

Confidently deploy your current strengths

You’ll learn how self-awareness is the super Power Skill, the foundation of all other skills needed to be an effective leader.. They are the most sought-after skills by recruiters and hiring managers. Power skills are key to becoming a great leader.

Get the Models - Understand what self-awareness is including emotional intelligence, thinking styles, orientation to change, core self-evaluation, personal values. Understand the key skills within management and leadership.

Get Why It Matters - Understand the business case for self-awareness and its components and managerial/leadership skills.

Get the Data - Establish your personal baseline for self-awareness and its components as well as management and leadership skills.

Set the Goals - Set personal development goals for increasing self-awareness and managerial/leadership skills

Learn the Tools - Learn tools and techniques for how to build self-awareness and managerial/leadership skills.

Take Action - Build effective action plans to increase self-awareness and managerial/leadership skills

Make the Change - Practice new skills to increase your ability to act with self-awareness and improve your managerial/leadership skills

Get the Benefit - Be able to develop as a great leader able to create great culture: build positive workplaces where individuals flourish and organizations thrive

The UMD Power Lab includes a curated set of self-assessments offered at a discounted price paid separately from the edX content and certificate. These self-assessments are rigorously developed and cannot be supplemented with free versions that would mislead learners with poor-quality alternatives. The UMD Power Lab is optional but highly recommended for any verified learner in the course. It costs $89 per year and only needs to be purchased once per year for the entire suite of courses in the Re-Imagining Leadership Professional Certificate.

We've done everything we can to reduce these costs for you, and have built a free SMART Goals Mobile App to help you achieve your goals. Used together this forms a revolutionary design to coach learners at scale in leadership and power skills as a premium but low-cost experience above and beyond learning the course content and earning the edX certificate.

What you'll learn

• why great leaders are self-aware
• what you can change and what you can’t about yourself and others
• what is self-awareness
• value of self-awareness personally and professionally
• what is your level of self-awareness
• how to improve self-awareness to engage in personal development
• what is your current level of management skills
• what is your decision-making style
• what is the best use of your decision-making style
• value of management skills
• set SMART goals for development of management skills
• set SMART goals for use of strengths in management skills
• where to learn the skills needing further development