Leadership Courses
Learn how to be an effective and successful leader with free online courses in inclusive leadership, communication, management and more. Build the leadership skills you need to stand out and take your career to the next level.
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What is Leadership?
Leadership is the ability to empower, contribute, solve problems, be innovative and most importantly, be able to guide a group of people into achieving goals.
Leaders help themselves and others do the right things. They set a direction with a vision, and map out where their team needs to go in order to win as an organization; a leader is someone who is dynamic, composed and inspiring.
Leadership is the ability of a company's management to set and achieve goals, take rapid and decisive action, outperform the competition, and inspire others to perform well. It is tough to put a value on leadership. Leaders provide a direction, employees need to know the direction in which they are headed in order to reach the destination and be successful in order for the company to move forward. Leadership involves showing workers how to effectively perform their responsibilities and regularly engaging with the employees and supervising the completion of their tasks.
Leadership is also about setting a positive example for staff to follow. A leader is someone who possesses the ability to adapt to a setting so everyone feels empowered to contribute creatively to solving problems.
Leadership Training
Improve your leadership skills with training programs and courses from edX. The University of Queensland Australia offers a program, Business Leadership, where you will learn how to understand the strengths and weaknesses of various leadership styles and gain insight into your own leader tendencies. You will also learn how to improve your ability to lead complex modern organizations by developing your decision making skills. In the end, you will be challenged to apply your learning in a realistic simulation based on real world leadership experiences.
Courses on Leadership and Leadership Development
Leadership and management are different but complementary skills. Leadership is a soft talent. It revolves around influence, motivation, drive, and other unquantifiable skills. Yet, while leaders set the direction, they must also use management skills to guide their people to the right destination, in a smooth and efficient way.
Leadership is not a skill that can be learned overnight, it requires hard work, dedication and time. EdX offers leadership development courses that can help you enhance the qualities and skills required to be a successful, effective and charismatic leader. Courses such as Inclusive Leadership by CatalystX, Adaptive Leadership in Development by UQx and Leadership for Engineers by DelftX are some of the courses offered on edX that can help build on your skills and help you towards becoming someone who demonstrates effective leadership.
Famous Leaders
Some great examples of famous leaders are Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany; Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford Motor Co.; Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway; Dalai Lama, Spiritual leader of the Tibetan people; Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com; Geoffrey Canada, CEO of Harlem Children's Zone; Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever; Gabrielle Giffords, Co-founder of Americans for Responsible Solutions (ARS); Wendy Kopp, CEO and co-founder, Teach for All; Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx; Mary Robinson, President of Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice; Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, Chairman of BRAC, the largest non-profit in the world, Malala Yousafzai, Advocate for education rights; and of course, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple.
When reading about great leaders, it can be seen that they have been produced from all over the world. The backgrounds and education history of all these leaders are completely different, yet, at the end, their admirable qualities and way of life were the driving forces that lead them into becoming outstanding leaders.
Become a Leader
Colin Powell said, “The way I like to put it, leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.”
Gain the skills needed to accomplish things beyond one’s imagination. Advance your career by taking these MicroMasters Courses: Business Leadership by UQx, Digital Leadership by BUx, Leadership in Global Development by UQx. Completing any of these programs will play a vital a part in improving your leadership skills.