Photo Credit: UggBoy

One of my goals for this blog is to share resources with you that could help you in developing yourself as an engineering leader. As of yet, I haven’t really put much out there in terms of educational resources, but today I’d like to change that. Over the last few months, I’ve been scouring the internet for excellent quality, cost-effective courses, books, conferences, and whatever else I can find that has to do with general engineering skills or leadership. When I find something promising, I buy it and check it out for myself.  Today, I’m really excited to share one of those resources with you. It’s a course that I recently bought and listened to, and loved called “Transformational Leadership: How Leaders Change Teams Companies, and Organizations” by Professor Michael A. Roberto, offered through a site called The Great Courses.

So What Exactly are “The Great Courses”?

I found this website through my younger brother, who’s been raving about it for years. Basically, The Great Courses is a company that offers university-level short courses in subjects across the board: from English Literature to Science and Math, from Fine Arts to Business. You can find just about anything on their site. The courses are delivered in streaming audio or video, or you can have a DVD or CD mailed to you (which I think is kind of cute, actually).

All of the courses are developed and taught by actual university profs. This leadership course that I’m talking about is a good example. It’s taught by Michael A. Roberto, who got his MBA and DBA from Harvard, taught at Harvard for a number of years, and currently teaches at Bryant University. He’ s won a number of academic awards and has consulted with major corporations around the world including Apple, Target, and Federal Express. I’ve never seen this kind of academic fire-power behind a course anywhere outside a formal academic institution, so to me this is pretty cool stuff.

About the Course

“Transformational Leadership: How Leaders Change Teams Companies, and Organizations” was delivered in 24 half-hour long lectures, with each lecture covering one major topic. In short, the whole course is about transformational leadership. Transformational leadership is about setting a vision for an organization, influencing others, motivating people, building effective teams, and promoting innovative thinking. You can think of this course as a handbook on leadership. People who take this course will have an excellent understanding of the concept, and will be able to start applying the principles in their own work and organizations.

Lectures

The various lectures covered in the course include the following. I’ve bolded my favourites.

• The Challenge
• Portrait of a Transformation
• Do Great Leaders Share the Same Traits?
• How Much Does Context Matter?
• Charismatic and Transformational Leadership
• Resistance and Reactions to Change
• Phases of Transformation
• Harnessing Emotion
• Making Change Stick
• Extrinsic Motivation and Reward
• Beyond Money—Intrinsic Motivation
• Power—Getting It and Keeping It
• Key Levers of Power
• Influence—Tools of Persuasion
• Give and Take
• Negotiating as a Way of Life
• Avoiding the Zero-Sum Game
• Building and Leading Teams
• Guiding Teams as They Evolve
• Observation and Organizational Learning
• Deliberate Practice and Experiment
• Stimulating Creativity
• Leading Innovation
• Developing Leaders

The Good

There’s lots of good to say about the course. The content was excellent in terms of both quality and quantity. With respect to quality, Professor Roberto is an absolute pro. He’s an expert in his field, and an incredible lecturer. He’s very particular about referencing which research papers he’s getting his information from during his lectures. Not only does that lend additional credibility to the content, it gives you a chance to dig into the material a bit more if you’d like (for those interested, check out Google Scholar). As far as quantity is concerned, these lectures are just like normal university lectures – there’s a LOT packed into them. The nice thing here is that you can always rewind to go back and listen to (or watch if you buy the video version) something over again if you like. I listed to a few lectures twice just to make sure that I got it all.

Beyond the content itself, the format was really easy to use – I was able to port everything over to my iPhone and listen to it during my commute and while chores. I finished everything within about a week, which was amazing to me. Who knew I had 12 hours of listening time available to me? Sweet.

Finally, the price was incredible. When I bought it, the audio download version of the course was only $34.95 USD. Holy cow. That’s less than 5 cents a minute, which makes it cheaper than a long distance call to grandma. Not that I’m saying you shouldn’t call grandma… but still. Now, I know that what I paid was a sale price, and the regular rate is about $130 (which would still be an absolute steal), but if you’re interested, I would jump on it.

The Not So Good

There are three downsides to this particular course that I would share. One is that you don’t get any formal certificate or anything for having listened through these lectures. If you’re looking for a resume-builder, this ain’t it. You won’t get any particular certificate or credential. if you’re only interested in the material, then great! If you’re looking for a piece of paper to go with it, then you’ll have to keep shopping.

Another thing I would caution my readers about is that the material is definitely geared towards people with corporate gigs – not engineers who are new to industry. Some people might be put off by that. I still really enjoyed it because a) I like business-y stuff, and b) I can still see how the fundamental concepts can be applied to my personal work. I just wanted to make sure you knew that in advance though, so that there are no surprises ;-)

Finally,  I found the whole download process to be a bit cumbersome. You have to install a download client on your computer before you can get any of the files, which is a pain. Not a big deal – especially for computer-savvy folks like you, but still a pain.

Final Recommendation

Do it! One of the best ways to develop yourself once your out of school is to take short courses in areas that are interesting to you. I think this is a phenomenal opportunity for people interested in leadership. For $35, its cheaper than a night at the movies with popcorn. I really, really, enjoyed it, and I’m sure you will too.

You can buy the course here.

Once you have, come on back and let me know what you thought using the comments section below.