Johns Hopkins Carey Business School recently welcomed the inaugural cohort of Executive Education’s Applied Leadership Capstone course to Carey’s Baltimore location.

As the concluding project in the Executive Certificate in Organizational Leadership, the Applied Leadership Capstone course challenges participants to take the skills they learned in the first two courses of the certificate–Foundations of Leadership and Management and the Manager’s Toolkit–and apply their new skills to complex, real-world organizational challenges.

Adjunct instructor at Carey Business School and faculty instructor of the course, Adriano Pianesi says, “we often approach change by force. When we want to change something, we master our resources and our ideas. And when change does not happen, we get disappointed and sometimes cynical.”

Pianesi, along with two additional Executive Education faculty members–Erik Helzer and Erin Watley–designed the course to activate knowledge from across the organizational leadership certificate program and add new concepts and frameworks that allow participants to lead diverse organizations through change and growth effectively.

“We want to rekindle your idealism about change, give you concrete ways to see that change can actually happen, and no matter your level of authority, you can lead it through a positive outcome,” Pianesi says.

Practical applications

One of the key features of this program is the emphasis on solving real-world problems to enhance leadership styles. Participants keep an individual leadership portfolio throughout the course, which keeps track of goal setting, reflection, and professional planning.

“The course gave me an opportunity to reflect on my ‘generous purpose’ – why I do the work I do and how I want to work with others. This reflection has been key for this stage in my career as a relatively new manager and remaining grounded during challenging situations,” says Ellie Decker, Research Program Manager at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing.

The cohort combined the new tools and practices with the conceptual knowledge they gained from previous certificate courses to ideate solutions in a collaborative and creative environment.

“The course provides opportunities to tackle a real-world leadership concern in your area or department in a meaningful and engaging way,” says John Niemi, ‌Assistant Director of Academic Advising at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. “We spent three-days focused on addressing the issue through previous leadership knowledge, leading inclusively, engaging leadership theories, and creating an artifact representing our experiences.”

“The Applied Leadership Capstone is a class that teaches you state-of-the-art technologies for bringing about change in organizations. We’ve designed this course to activate knowledge from across the certificate program and add new concepts and frameworks that allow you to lead diverse organizations through change and growth effectively.”

If you’re interested in learning more about Johns Hopkins Executive Education, reach out to us at carey.execed@jhu.edu.