Change Leaders | Track curriculum

Practical Information

The extracurricular Change Leaders programme consists of three courses (5 ECs each) and is spread out over three quartiles (November to early July). Contact time, in Q2 and Q3, will be on Tuesday evenings, from 18:45 – 21:00, on the UT Campus. Q4 has fewer meetings as you primarily work on your own change project while engaging in (online) coaching sessions with an assigned personal coach.

The programme culminates on a Friday afternoon, at the very end of the academic year, during which everyone presents their results to each other. The official graduation ceremony will take place after this session.

You should invest an average of half a day per week in the programme by attending lectures or tutorials and working on your weekly assignments. The language of instruction will be English. The programme is free of charge for qualified UT students.

Structure

The three courses of the programme have both a cognitive and an experiential character. For each quartile, you will receive a syllabus, including the ‘ins and outs’ of the assignments:

1. Change Leaders & Management (Q2)

You will start the programme with the cognitive part (Q2), which is devoted to various topics within the fields of change management and leadership. The teaching in this component consists of interactive lectures and written pre- and post-meeting reflections (e.g. on the assigned literature). This will enable you to learn about key topics in the domain and get to know your fellow Change Leaders and their varying ways of functioning. You will conclude the first part with a group paper on a topic of your own choice (with a group of students of your own choice as well). You have to write a literature review on the basis of desk research to enable deep learning on a topic of your own interest: to reduce the risk of ‘fleeting’ knowledge. This group assignment is unique, given that the rest of the programme is more individual; solid networking with like-minded (and at the same time entirely different) persons in Q2 comprises one of the goals of this Change Leaders programme. Some possible literature review topics:

the leadership of effective (virtual and/or agile) teams;
collaborative processes between external consultants and (members within) the client organisation;
biological roots of excelling in leader- and/or followership;
adoption of high-tech organisational practices to reach high efficiency and employee meaningfulness/inclusivity;
gossip and emotional and/or moral intelligence at work.

2. Experiential Skills Training (Q3)

The aim of the experiential skills part is to develop leadership, consulting and change skills and insights: through reading about, training and reflecting on various skills. In other words, in this second course, you will sharpen your own personal change and leadership skills and gradually learn to see your own points for improvement. Close to the beginning of the second course in Q3, all the students in the programme get a well-known customised personal preferences assessment (of 20 pages). The results of this assessment will be used as a guide to further your personal development in this programme, and in the context of the coaching during your project in Q4. Thus, at the end of quartile three, you will have a personal development plan including a set of well-developed personal goals that you will work on in Q4.

3. Project Execution & Coaching (Q4)

In Q4 you will work on your own, self-chosen change project while receiving personal coaching from an assigned coach who is a trained member of our university’s community. Examples of projects are: organising an event as a board member of an association; starting your own business, or initiating or finalising a project. An internship or Master's thesis project potentially qualifies as a change project, as long as your leadership skills will be honed by it. Halfway through the Q4 course you will present your change approach, including any preliminary results, as well as provide peer feedback to invoke your collectively developed change knowledge, insights and skills. You will write a final report on the outcome of your project and your own learning experiences. You will be provided with individual feedback on this report.

To finalise the programme, the group of Change Leaders must self-organise a Friday afternoon (in early July) in which all students demonstrate to family, friends, coaches and other interested parties what they have (personally) learnt in this programme. Typically, each cohort’s final booklet will also be unveiled on this occasion. This booklet is a tangible result of a cooperative process among the Change Leader students themselves: note that this (booklet and final afternoon event) is a self-managed group process. Upon successful completion of all programme parts, you will receive a UT Master’s degree Honours certificate.