The goal of this course is to help you understand what an organizational leader does and to help you develop skills to be an effective leader. The course draws on theories and empirical work from psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior relating to interpersonal and organizational dynamics. The course is based around the idea that a leader does not need formal power or authority to lead. Rather, leadership arises from the ability to mobilize people around a particular challenge and to inspire commitment to take action. In addition to developing leadership skills, as students of the world, we want to have a lens that helps us to evaluate the contributions and consequences of leaders. Not all leaders are effective, and given the wrong motivations or circumstances, leaders can be quite destructive. Thus, as we go through our weekly readings, I will often ask you to reflect on particular leaders and assess what they did well or not so well. Leaders assemble the skills, talents, and resources of individuals and groups into combinations that best solve those organizational challenges. Effective leaders are able to solve these challenges, improve their teams, cultivate new leaders, accomplish organizational goals, and (hopefully) improve society in the process. In order to accomplish so many things, they must be able to diagnose problems, make effective decisions, influence others, tap into and motivate the human and social capital of organizational members, optimize cross-functional teams, and drive organizational change.