Study Programme

USG8140

This course helps you to gain insight in the complexity of working as a leader in international organisations and to prepare for a role as a leader in an international workplace. During this skills training you will move into the leadership role and work with different skills and intervention options that come with this profession.
We will work on typical leadership skills like personal effectiveness (personal style, international differences), conversational techniques (feedback, direct/indirect communication), leadership (from instructing to delegating, influencing styles) and third party interventions (mediation in conflicts).

We will approach these leadership skills from an international point of view: the situation in which you, as an participant of the course, already find yourself in. The world is globalising at high speed: societies and organisations become more and more international. When we live or work together with people of different backgrounds, we realise that our own behaviour is no longer self-evident. Other people can have different ways of solving problems, organising meetings e.g. Therefore it is important to develop skills to help us understand and handle this kind of interactions. 
Therefore, we work with an academically recognised model (IRC) that distinguishes four competences in particular: increasing sensitivity, building commitment, improving communication and managing uncertainty. Training these competences contributes to your effectiveness as a leader in an international context and also provides insight into your professional attitude in this role.

You write an individual learning report about the skills, insights and knowledge acquired during the training. In addition, you will get acquainted with the role of leader in practice by spending a day(part) with a leader in an international organisation. You process your experiences in a concise analysis report.
At the end of the course, you organise and lead a workshop yourself on a self-chosen, relevant theme in the field of international leadership to further increase your knowledge and skills.

Meetings are organised as interactive training sessions with discussions of literature and experiences, individual and group assignments, student presentations and simulation games. You will also actively visit international settings outside the classroom, and reflect on the acquired experiences. You will meet and interact with people having other backgrounds from whom you can learn and with whom you can train your skills. 

USG8180

This course helps you to develop the capacity to initiate and organise collaborative change projects. You will acquire professional skills to organise and build up relations with key stakeholders, work with them and influence them. You will experience and learn to deal with questions of interpersonal coordination and practical organisation in grassroots initiatives by forming small groups and working together on common change projects.
By organising a workshop in which relevant stakeholders will participate you will be exposed to how grassroots initiatives organise themselves to produce change.

At the start of this course you will read and discuss literature on how to develop communal vocabularies, create a shared discourse about joint objectives, initiate and foster activism and organise change through collaborative efforts and stakeholder cooperation. You will learn how to create a safe environment for effective group work. During the first class discussions you will articulate your own diverse identities, positionalities, and interests. Guided intervision by trainers will help you to explore how your own identities and the complementarities between them can help to understand your perspective towards organisations and issues in the public domain.
You thus learn member capacities essential to cooperation among professionals, such as being knowledgeable of each other’s norms and perspectives; viewing others as legitimate, capable, and experienced; and helping each other to identify members’ innate expertise.

In small subgroups you will identify a concrete change project to work on during the remainder of the course.
You will develop your abilities to coordinate and manage a grassroots change initiative
by developing a common understanding of relevant issues, by choosing an issue for a collaborative workshop, dividing tasks and actually work together.
In the latter part of the course you will prepare and execute this workshop in collaboration with external stakeholders.
Trainers will help you to design ways to develop and maintain positive internal and external relations in and around your change project.

In an individual assignment paper you will reflect on essential programmatic capacities such as how to identify intermediate goals of grassroots change initiatives, and how to be pragmatic and recognise achievable goals when working together with primary stakeholders.
Training and intervision sessions are part of the teaching methods of this course.

USG8011

Do you consider to start working as a consultant when you complete your Master’s programme? This course offers practical and theoretical knowledge about organizational consultancy in the public sector. You will gain insights and skills by carrying out a consultancy assignment with fellow students in a consultancy team for a (real) public organization.

Three key elements in the advisory process - the intake, the quote and the advisory meeting - form the guideline of the course. Based on this you train consultancy skills. For example, you gain experience in conducting an intake interview with a (real) client and practice your conversation skills aimed at reaching agreement with the client on the quote and final product. You do this in collaboration with fellow students in your consultancy team. In addition, we discuss literature and visit a consultancy firm. Finally, you reflect thoroughly on your own actions in the role of consultant, supported by feedback from fellow students, the supervising lecturer and the client.

Please note: during this course, you will occasionally visit organisations outside Utrecht for guest lectures or assignments. These travel costs are not compensated for by the programme.

USG8160

Creating impact has become more and more important for scholars and practitioners alike. Yet conventional academic training often focuses largely on rational approaches to address social and organisational issues. In this course you will become acquainted with the way impact can be created through creative interventions. Creative practices are particularly suited to this end because they offer ways to address complex social issues through the sensory, embodied and emotional realms. Thus, creative interventions can provide new and innovative ways of thinking and feeling around issues that people are ‘stuck’ on.

You will learn about different creative practices that can be used to create an intervention. Through tutorials, field trips and hands-on workshops by artists or interventionists, you will become familiar with the ways in which photography, storytelling, dance, performance art and poetry can be mobilized within an intervention to create impact. You will learn about interventions aimed at organisational processes (e.g. to improve collaborations within an organisation) and those aimed at specific themes (e.g. to create awareness around climate change or burnout).
In small subgroups you will design and organise your own creative intervention. You will be asked to try out this intervention on your fellow students and facilitate a meaningful exchange, suited to the focus of the intervention. The course will be wrapped up with both collective reflections on the presented interventions and individual reflections on your own development and functioning as creative interventionist.

Teaching methods to be used in this course are training tutorials, hands-on workshops, presentations, field trips, vlogs, discussion, reflection.

Please note: during this course, you will occasionally visit organisations outside Utrecht for guest lectures or assignments. These travel costs are not compensated for by the programme.