This course focuses on reaching your leadership potential by assessing personal leadership styles and strengthening them through effective communication. You will understand how subtleties in communication and relationship management a huge impact on how an organization may have is run, defined and perceived. We will examine the forms of power and influence and how to become a trusted advisor with senior executives. This course is designed to help you shape a better future for yourself and the communities you serve. 

Crisis and conflict can sharpen the thinking of your teammates, spark creativity and galvanize a virtual dispersed team. Or it can leave teammates speechless, defensive, squabbling and discouraged. Your leadership can make the difference. This course will show you how to step in, reach out and take charge of contentious issues, whether they surface in live meetings, e-mail volleys or teleconferences. It will equip you to surface the "real issues" that need to be faced and resolved, before they create a crisis. It will show you how to bridge cultural, personality, age, gender and professional differences to get the best of each other's thinking. And do all of this in a way that increases your credibility and advances your career.

This course takes a communication approach to addressing the challenges and opportunities created by local and global leaders in fostering cross-cultural perspectives: providing a framework for looking at culture and leadership from a communication perspective; looking at the role of leadership in developing the needed competencies among organizational members for successful cross-cultural communication; and, proposing strategies for developing and maintaining cross-cultural communications for successful global undertakings.

Storytelling through Innovation examines how technological advancement is impacting the field and communication with the public. Specifically, the course will focus on two ongoing areas of potential significant change in the way public relations professionals create messaging and storytelling to influence attitudes and behaviors: artificial intelligence and deep fake technology, and the ethical issues surrounding them that professional communicators should be dealing with. The concept of purpose will also be examined.

Some of the most critical skills in modern communication management include a strong understanding of research methods, digital analytics, data driven insights, and performance evaluation. This course introduces you to these concepts, key metrics and their meaning. You will learn how to connect communications data to corporate goals, analyze digital metrics, find data driven insights, and present the data story in a compelling way. This course provides students with the basics of digital tools and the key metrics analyzed for communication disciplines. Students will learn some of the most common digital measuring and analytical tools in the industry and become better prepared for the modern communication world.

An organization is only as effective as its communication. Poor communication dynamics impact everyone within an organization, from the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to the evening maintenance staff. This course will approach organizational communication from three lenses: Power, networks of association, and ethical standards. It will offer an overview of a diverse range of communicative acts engaged within an organization at the individual, dyadic (i.e. two people), small group, and meso (i.e. organizational) levels. Students will also focus on how communication is enacted within and between these levels, and how these dynamics impact an organization achieving its goals. The digital, social, and mobile communication revolutions have not only created new opportunities for an organization to improve its communication effectiveness but present a variety of challenges as well. This course will expose students to the risks and rewards provided by emerging technologies.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to a company's commitment to allocate resources to benefit society and the environment. This course introduces students to theories behind the concept of corporate social responsibility and involves an examination of whether organizations should expand their focus from serving stockholders to also considering the impact of the firm's activities on diverse stakeholders. Practicing CSR requires a corporation meld business goal with societal expectations. To do so means addressing complex questions such as: What obligations do businesses have to the societies in which they operate? Can the interests of corporations and their outside stakeholders be aligned, or are they in inherent conflict? This course examines these and other questions without prescribing simple solutions.

This course introduces students to the concepts and principles of significant theories in communication. The theories covered in this class are specifically chosen to enhance a student's understanding of the contemporary professional workplace experience. This course focuses on the social contexts and social dynamics that shape the modern organization. These contexts and social dynamics include interpersonal, organizational, group communication, mass media, persuasion, culture, and social media. An emphasis is placed on integrating these theories into the student's daily communication practices, areas of interest, and/or professional development.

In this final project, each student will draw upon what s/he has learned in the M.S. in Communication Management program and apply it to a real-world situation. The final project will utilize specific skills, information, and concepts to solve a critical communication problem (structural and/or procedural) affecting an organization's ability to communicate efficiently or effectively at internal and/or external levels. In solving a problem, your strategic management plan needs to account for organizational employees, stakeholders, and customers. The format is a 20-minute video-recorded PowerPoint oral presentation to be submitted to the Department of Communication and Social Influence project evaluation committee.