Executive MPA Course (EXEC-GP)

To complement coursework and advisement from Wagner faculty and staff, EMPA students engage in co-curricular programming throughout their first year of study. These mandatory sessions—roughly every other Saturday before the afternoon class period—provide opportunities to enhance your skills, reflect on your professional identity, learn from leaders in the public and non-profit sectors, and obtain important program and career advisement. This year-long series is open only to EMPA students. It will provide structured and open time for you to network and collaborate with members of your cohort and our guest speakers, which will include EMPA alumni. The EMPA Co-Curricular Series carries no academic credit, is not graded, and will not appear on your transcript, but your attendance and participation is required.

To complement coursework and advisement from Wagner faculty and staff, EMPA students engage in co-curricular programming throughout their first year of study. These mandatory sessions—roughly every other Saturday before the afternoon class period—provide opportunities to enhance your skills, reflect on your professional identity, learn from leaders in the public and non-profit sectors, and obtain important program and career advisement. This year-long series is open only to EMPA students. It will provide structured and open time for you to network and collaborate with members of your cohort and our guest speakers, which will include EMPA alumni. The EMPA Co-Curricular Series carries no academic credit, is not graded, and will not appear on your transcript, but your attendance and participation is required.

This four-day course aims to develop your ability to build, lead, and participate in high-performing teams. We will draw from research in psychology, management, strategy, behavioral economics, and sociology to discuss best practices for designing, launching, participating, and coaching in-person and online teams. We will also focus on the benefits and challenges of making difficult decisions in challenging environments; working across demographic, functional, and cognitive differences; creating structures that support creativity, collaboration, psychological safety, and voice; understanding conflict; and using the congruence model for problem-solving. This course will be of most value to those who have some work experience.

This course is designed for public and non-profit leaders and managers rather than human resource professionals, and provides a broad overview of human resources and talent management dynamics and responsibilities. Topics will include basic human resources functions such as recruitment, job design, professional development, employee engagement, performance appraisal and providing feedback. It will also explore current issues within human resources management, such as aligning people, processes, and technologies to deliver organizational value, identity and inclusion in the workplace, the role of organized labor, or other topics. The course will include practical application through case discussions and reflection on student’s prior management experience. While it will focus on values-based organizations, public, non-profit and for-profit sectors will be considered and analyzed.

The goal of this course to is help Executive MPA students learn financial tools to apply to decision-making within mission-driven and governmental organizations. Designed for the experienced mid-career general manager of a nonprofit, governmental, or healthcare organization, the course is intended to meet these leaders where they are by guiding them in developing a range of financial analysis skills through a combination of class discussions and analyses of case studies of specific organizations. The goal is to place financial analysis and decision-making in the context of the complete range of tools used by social sector: this work will demonstrate especially the complex relationships between finance, impact, strategy, and governance. Where appropriate, we will also integrate best practice tools from other disciplines including performance measurement and the alignment of financial and social returns.

All public and not-for-profit organizations must assemble and report information on their performance. The need for performance measures goes beyond legal and regulatory requirements. To provide services effectively and efficiently, managers need information to make decisions. This course focuses on what performance measures are needed, how they should be created and what forms of communication are most effective.

Only open to students in the Executive MPA Program. Strategic Leadership is an intensive leadership course designed to equip mid-career students with the tools, perspectives, and frameworks for executing high-impact strategy within mission-driven organizations. Course topics are organized around four themes: 1) cultivating purposeful leadership, 2) analyzing conditions to build a theory of change, 3) mobilizing commitment to change, and 4) achieving change. Within this four-part model we will explore conceptual frameworks for understanding high impact organizations and the role of strategic leadership, analytical tools for developing and assessing strategy, approaches to working with stakeholders to mobilize commitment, and methods for leading change.

Only open to Executive MPA students. This course exposes students to contemporary thinking about institutions, governance and the reinvention of the public sector. We focus on specific reforms intended to improve government performance and promote good governance as rapid economic, political and social changes-both global and local-- evolve in different countries at various stages of development. Major topics include establishing and enhancing rule of law, property rights, and regulatory regimes; developing more effective organizational structures, civil service systems and anti-corruption mechanisms; and creating and enhancing frameworks and policies for public sector fiscal management, decentralization, public-private partnership and citizen engagement. As we work through the topics, we consider competing theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence. An underlying theme is the need to go beyond the mainstream tendency to use pre-packaged tools and narrow frameworks in pursuit of single "right" answers. Rather, the course uses diverse case material to challenges students to use rigorous and creative analysis to seek levers of change that matter and are feasible in particular contexts.

This course will explore the fault lines within the field of philanthropy and prepare students to effectively leverage resources for their organizations. The course will examine different approaches to grantmaking including: social entrepreneurship, effective altruism, venture philanthropy, social justice grantmaking, and strategic philanthropy. Students will learn the differences across these conceptual frameworks and understand how they influence the ways in which foundations establish goals, develop strategies, evaluate grantees, and determine grant awards. By exploring both the conceptual and pragmatic dimensions of across grantmaking frameworks, students will understand the tensions and debates within the philanthropic sector and be well prepared to identify those foundations most likely to support their work. Coursework will include case studies, individual foundation research, and opportunities for students to become familiar with the research by and about the philanthropic sector. Classes will combine lectures, guest speakers, and class debates to understand and analyze different approaches to grantmaking, identify how they shape foundation priorities, and learn how to effectively position their work within the philanthropic sector.

Cross-sector collaborations are a response to the increasing recognition that many of the pressing challenges of our time are complex and requires a systems approach. Such challenges must involve multiple stakeholders, guided by principles of inclusion and equity, and draw on a full range of resources to achieve results that cannot be achieved by working in silos, including stakeholders’ expertise, experience and insights, relationships and networks, and financial contributions. Cross sector collaborations can catalyze adoption of innovations and policies and strengthen resilience when confronted by the unknown and unpredictable. While promising and extolled in principle, cross-sector collaborations can be difficult in practice due to structural and institutional barriers, as well as distinct assumptions, works styles, and disciplinary backgrounds of those engaged. This course encourages students to understand the value and challenges of cross-sector collaborations and to gain insight on the skills and approaches required. The course is structured around student engagement and learning on collaboration cases that span geographic context and levels of action: domestic, national and global contexts. Through frameworks, practitioner testimonials and applied practice, students learn relevant frameworks for collaboration, explore assumptions from each sector, clarify and challenge their own assumptions and preconceptions about sectors, and identify their own strengths and gaps to become competent collaborators.

The public/nonprofit administrator, whether primarily concerned with management, policy or finance, is called upon to manage or becomes involved in a wide variety of conflicts. Conflict is ubiquitous - within and between organizations and agencies, between levels of government, between interest groups and government, between interest groups, between citizens and agencies, etc. The increasing complexity and interrelatedness of the issues that the public sector is called upon to address, and the increasing sophistication and engagement of groups representing both public and private interests, compounds the challenge. In this environment, it is essential for public and nonprofit administrators to know how to manage conflict effectively. Effective conflict management involves analyzing a conflict, understanding the dynamics between the parties, and determining the appropriate method of conflict resolution. In the absence of confidence and skill in conflict management, most public officials resort, often counterproductively, to the use of power, manipulation, and control. Possessing confidence and skill, one can exercise other options. Through readings, discussions, and simulations you will develop an understanding of conflict dynamics and the art and science of negotiation and will be introduced to the role that can be played by conflict resolution techniques such as mediation. The course will emphasize the theoretical as well as the practical, the reflective as well as the applied.

Management consultants work in all corners of the public and nonprofit sectors on every imaginable topic—from organizational strategy to technology implementation, education to migration. But what is management consulting? Why do so many public service organizations rely on it? What skills and experience do you need to be a management consultant? And how much good can management consulting really do for the public and nonprofit sectors? Management Consulting for Public Service Organizations will answer and invite debate on all of these questions. You will learn how to deliver what clients really want and how to improve the chances your recommendations are adopted. Through our readings and discussions we will explore scholarly and practitioner thinking on strategy, problem solving, innovation and the costs and benefits consulting has in the public and nonprofit sectors. As in consulting, your assignments will be both collaborative and reflective and your final deliverables will be evaluated by current and former management consultants and nonprofit consulting clients. You will leave this course more clear on what a public service-facing management consultant does, having practiced some of the skills they use, and with insight into how you can add the most value to the organizations and sectors you care about.

The first course in the Executive MPA (EMPA) core curriculum, Leadership Confronted is an experiential seminar that supports EMPA students in practicing leadership under real conditions — pressure, ambiguity, competing truths, and imperfect choices. Building an action-learning community, students will examine how their inner landscape (beliefs, motivations, habits, nervous-system responses, and values) shapes how they lead, and then translate that self-knowledge into concrete relational and systems-facing leadership moves. The course focuses on self-leadership while preparing students to lead change through complexity and paradox within and across teams, organizations, and systems. Students will practice influencing without formal authority, working across boundaries, and coordinating action with diverse stakeholders. Concepts may include voicing values, emotional intelligence, inclusive leadership, resilience, and adaptive approaches to change. The course emphasizes practice and application that can later be synthesized into deeper reflection and a coherent leadership narrative across the EMPA core curriculum.

This course provides the basis for EMPA students to engage in deep, intentional reflection before completing the program. This culminating course centers on slowing down and paying attention as powerful tools for leadership practice. This discipline is critical to building the habits of mind to become impactful public service leaders in today's increasingly complex, uncertain, and volatile world. The course is designed to guide students toward producing a culminating individual project that gives them a clearer sense of who they are as a leader and how they think they'll be able to make an impact going forward. To this end, this course will explore: the issues of self at work, including ways of paying attention to the individual, small group, and large group dynamics of organizational life; the concept of knitting together past work as evidence of development and growth; the use of work experience as a place of leadership learning; and ways to create space for reflection.