Required Courses
L100: Developing Organizations and Leaders
L100 is the first of two CGSOC leadership courses that prepare students succeed as organizational leaders and commanders. L100 is a graduate survey course that introduces students to key concepts in organizational development and leadership. It examines how organizational leadership is different from direct leadership and how organizational leaders accomplish missions while improving organizations. At the end of L100, students will be better able to:
- Improve organizations.
- Lead organizations in complex environments.
- Think critically and creatively.
- Communicate with clarity and concision.
- Continue personal study of organizational leadership.
L400: The Art of Command
L400 examines command at the organizational level command—how commanders understand complex problems, visualize solutions, and make decisions. L400 focuses on the human dimension of warfighting—the cognitive, social, cultural, and ethical factors organizational leaders must understand to be effective commanders.
Organizational-level commanders face ambiguous, complex problems in dynamic, uncertain environments. Commanders must gain situational understanding and make sound decisions under these challenging conditions. Commanders must also provide purpose, direction, and motivation to subordinates, while ensuring the organization has a healthy, ethically aligned culture. L400 analyzes these challenges and examines strategies commanders can use to overcome them.
At the end of L400, students will be better able to:
- Exercise command in war
- Gain situational understanding and make sound decisions in complex environments
- Maintain an ethically aligned culture in war
Electives
A710 - Holistic Fitness: The Leader's Mind Body & Spirit
The purpose of this 24-hour course is to provide leaders with a learning experience that educates, inspires, and equips them to enact sustained, positive changes in their units, their families, and in their personal lives. It provides participants with evidence-based approaches and skills for improving fitness in five domains: emotional, social, family, physical, and spiritual. The course is designed to provide participants with a thorough understanding of the five domains, what it means to be fit in those domains, and methods to achieve fitness in each. It is heavily weighted towards practical application and dedicates approximately four hours to each domain. The elective covers useful skills for increasing self-awareness, thinking accurately, and communicating effectively. We also explore the impact of physical fitness on cognitive functioning, as well as alternative forms of physical fitness including nutrition and sleep habits. Graduates have the opportunity to develop the skills and habits necessary to experience better health, improved work performance, and stronger relationships.
A713 - Mentoring
This 24-hour course is designed to give you valuable tools to help you become a better leader, mentor and mentee. It builds upon concepts from the common core and AOC lessons such as leader development, developing leaders, critical and creative thinking, and organizational leadership, and puts them into the context of organizational and strategic-level leadership through the use of doctrine, academic writing, audio visual media, and expert lectures. The course will challenge your thinking on leadership and mentoring through the analysis of a wide variety of topics such as what is mentoring and why do so many people see it differently, how your own self-awareness can determine the success or failure of mentoring, and the broad range of academic research that exists in the field of mentoring. You will wrestle with numerous challenging questions such as how to create trust in your organization and mentoring relationships? How to know if you are the right person to be a mentor? And why you should look more broadly for mentors and mentees beyond your race, gender, and branch?
A714 - Hacking the Tactical Brain
A714 improves students' ability to make high-quality decisions in battle. Mid-career officers have enough tactical knowledge to understand tactical decision-making. However tactical knowledge alone is not enough to make effective battlefield decisions. Leaders must apply their knowledge and avoiding thinking errors under conditions of time pressure, stress, emotion, uncertainty, and risk. The ability to make effective decisions under these conditions does not naturally develop from routine training. This course bridges the gap between what mid-career officers know about warfighting and how they apply that knowledge in battle. Using cognitive training methods, this course improves students' ability to apply what they know under adverse battlefield conditions. This is not a tactical doctrine course. This course uses cognitive science to apply tactical knowledge more effectively. This is not a planning, MDMP, or analytical decision-making course. This course focuses on the cognitive aspects of decisions that require a blend of intuition and rapid analysis. At the end of the course, you will be better able to:
- Make better decisions under pressure.
- Avoid thinking errors caused by cognitive biases, uncertainty, emotion, and stress.
- Manage tactical risk.
A716 - Leadership: A Force for Change
As part of A716 you will study and evaluate leadership involved in leading change and develop a broadened perspective of change issues facing the military. Initially you will identify and study the factors that influence these change issues. You will then focus on leadership techniques used in changing organizations. Finally, you will complete an analysis of leading a specific issue of change in an organization. The goal of A716 is to expand your understanding of change concepts, apply this knowledge as an organizational-level leader, and improve your organization.
A721 - Women and Leadership
This 24-hour (1 credit) course is for the women and men who will lead the next generation of women in the military. How has the military changed since women officially joined the ranks? What do those changes mean for leaders now?
A few women have successfully navigated their way to general officer rank and key, senior level leadership positions. With additional knowledge and proven strategies, we can create an environment to help the next generation achieve even greater success. We will learn about the challenges facing women who want to lead an organization that is predominantly made up of men and strategies to help them succeed. Our military culture is the first challenge. Most adults picture a man, not a woman, when they picture a military leader. In this course we explore how women can be successful leaders in a culture that struggles to recognize them as leaders.
At the conclusion of this course, you will be able to understand the different challenges women and other minorities face as they lead in the military. You will be aware of your own role in maximizing the potential contributions of the women in your organization. And you will have resources to address some of the most common barriers women face in gaining credibility as a leader. You are an organizational level leader in the military at a time when women will be in almost every unit. This class will help you lead them confidently.
A722 - Emotional Intelligence for Leaders
This 24-hour course is designed to help leaders understand and use emotional intelligence to become better leaders. The course will assist you in developing the skills to understand the emotions in yourself and others and how to constructively and effectively apply them. The course will look at how to lead with emotional intelligence in the areas of: self-development; self-management; relationship building; influence; decision-making; leadership skills; organizational development and change; and resiliency.
Upon course completion you will be able to develop an emotional intelligence personal action plan for self development and understand the influence of emotional intelligence on leading organizations. In addition, you will be able to evaluate and assess problems and decisions from an emotional intelligence perspective.
A724 - Case Studies on Organizational Leadership in Combat
In this elective, you will analyze the leadership attributes and competencies of organizational-level commanders and the outcomes of their decision-making in combat or preparing for combat.
The intent of this approach is to contextualize your future roles as an organizational leader in major operations.
This elective introduces and builds on the leadership instruction during the core course and complements the leadership instruction in the Advanced Operational Course to develop you for future command or other organizational leadership positions.
You will analyze organizational leadership styles, attributes, and competencies. You will apply the leadership themes and topics examined throughout L100 and L400 as presented using historical case studies. The case studies (films) were selected to expose you to different operational environments and types of operations in the 19th and 20th centuries.
A726 - Preparation for Battalion and Brigade Command
A726 focuses on the challenges that battalion and brigade commanders face as they develop their organizations and subordinate leaders in the contemporary operational environment. The intent is to make you think about the types of challenges you will wrestle with in order to expand your leadership perspective, inform your intuition, and further develop your command philosophy and associated tools. Lessons are facilitated by instructors who have successfully commanded at the battalion and/or brigade levels. Classes consist of readings, classroom discussions, student presentations, self-directed learning activities, and discussions with former, current or future commanders.
A731 - Mass Atrocity, Genocide and the Military Role in Identification, Prevention, and Intervention
The focus of the course is on familiarizing international military officers with the concept of genocide prevention. Students will gain the tools necessary to advise and assist their governments in recognizing and preventing genocide. The course will examine and analyze the military’s capacity to assist in policy making and understand the ability of enlightened military action to prevent genocide. It will be conducted at U. S. Army Command and General Staff College. Military leaders will apply the learning objectives of the course to real world situations to assist in developing guidance on genocide prevention and response to a genocide or mass atrocity event and incorporation of the concepts of genocide prevention into military doctrine, training and education. The course teaches military leaders the warning signs of genocide and how the warning signs should be “an automatic trigger” for military policy review. A syllabus will be provided on the first day of class.
A734 - Genocide and Mass Atrocities Studies Seminar
This course will allow students to develop an analysis framework for understanding the who, what, and how of genocide and mass atrocities (GMA). The students will apply research and develop an understanding of different aspects of genocide and mass atrocities focusing on prevention of future incidents by understanding the past. During the course the students will conduct individual and team research on a variety of topics. The students will focus on three categories of people within a genocidal or mass atrocity situation - perpetrators, bystanders, and interveners. Additionally the students will learn about the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, functions within the UN related to R2P, and the legal framework set up from the UN.
Convention on Genocide through the Rome Statutes and applications for policy makers and the Department of Defense, the economics of genocide and the history of different events.
A740 - Military Ethics Symposium Independent Study
The United States Army Command and General Staff College, Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and the CGSC Foundation, Inc. will co-host the annual Military Ethics Symposium on Tuesday, 2 April 2024.
This 24-hour independent study provides students the opportunity to research, write and present on a 10-12 page ethics paper at the symposium.
2024 CGSC Military Ethics Symposium Title and Theme: TBA
A741 - Ethical Leadership
This 24-hour seminar-oriented course will explore key dimensions of ethical leadership, with particular attention to what is necessary for military leaders to exemplify and employ leadership excellence at the organizational level. While A741 expands on elements of ethical leadership introduced in L100 and L400, it will specifically give students the opportunity to analyze, synthesize, and conceptualize their own personal moral-ethical leadership philosophy. The course will help students analyze the importance of the leader’s ethical identity and competency, further explore theoretical and practical approaches to ethics, investigate the nature and scope of ethical leadership at the organizational level, and further codify the ethical dimension of their leadership/command philosophy.
Sub-topics that may be explored and discussed over the course of the term include: historical theories in ethics; ethics-based leadership theories/approaches; the nature and influence of the leader's character; the correlation between emotional intelligence and morality; moral courage in the face of evil; and factors inherent to fostering an ethical organizational context. As a result of this elective, students will have a more holistic understanding of effective organizational-level ethical leadership and their own ethical identity as leaders, be better equipped to promote an ethically-aligned organization, and be able to more effectively navigate ethical challenges in the future.
A797 - Future Hunters
This 24-hour course will provide emerging Army leaders vital tools and skills to understand, plan for and make decisions regarding long term future operating environments. The course takes as its point of departure the fact that the future is uncertain, complex and unpredictable in key ways. It will introduce you to Strategic Foresight (also called Futures Studies), a discipline in which systematic thinking and rigorous frameworks are applied to complex, uncertain environments to generate logical projections of potential future conditions, which in turn, serve as decision support tools.
This course will begin to instill in emerging leaders a mindset and skill set that enables them to plan, procure, design organizations and execute activities with the expectation that the future will not be like the past. They will leave the class as Future Hunters -- professionals who know how to prowl for signals of future change in the present, and who courageously pursue the implications of potential change to shape their decision making.
Course instruction stands on four pillars:
- Futurist mindset. Readings, discussion, activities and self-assessments will provide participants with leading edge insights from neuroscience, cognitive psychology and behavioral economics on how the human brain manages claims and decisions about the future. These insights will be congruent with and support insights they will learn in other leadership electives.
- Contextual environment. Participants will apply their new skill of identifying trends to assess the global context in which governments and militaries function and how the transactional environments are shaped. They will learn how to draw connections between contextual environments and the battlefield.
- Futurist skill set. Instruction will focus on identifying trends and how to use these trends to guide planning. This pillar will introduce different methodologies of strategic foresight, from mathematical to crowd-based scenarios, and how to use these different methods for planning and analysis.
- Leading in uncertainty. Readings and simulations will grant emerging leaders the opportunity to steep themselves in the cutting-edge of leadership knowledge and practice, communicating at scale, crossing silos, inspiring and influencing stakeholder behavior, and engendering diversity of thought.
A798 - Focused Research Project
This 24-hour course is designed for the student to take on special projects for senior military leaders or outside organizations. This course provides elective credit for significant participation in these special projects. On this special project, the lesson author receives a request from an outside agency or through the chain of command. The opportunity is advertised to all US students. An initial interest level briefing is held on the scope of the project, expectations, and deliverables; which typically include one formal brief to the requesting organization by VTC and one 8-10 page paper. There are typically in-progress performance reviews (IPRs) once a week that last from 1-2 hours. Each student must give a progress report on his or her assigned topic at each IPR. Typically, Army Research Institute (ARI) also joins the research group. In the past, research groups have researched the following topics: Ethics and the Military Leader, Leadership Challenges of Assigning Women to Combat Units, The Importance of Honor in Combat, and The Role of Character in Developing Trust.
A799 - Independent Study in Leadership
This 24-hour course consists of independent research and study in the area of leadership, which results in a 12 page argumentative essay suitable for publication in a periodical such as Military Review. Officers interested in independent study present a 1-2 page written proposal to their leadership instructor for consideration NLT two weeks prior to the end of the Instructor Permission enrollment period. Students will not be enrolled into A799 until their proposal is approved. Late requests will be considered on a case by case basis. The paper will address the topic, thesis statement, scope of the paper and in which elective term the student wants to enroll.
The officer, their leadership instructor and the A799 POC will meet face-to-face to discuss the proposed paper. Because this course involves independent study, research, and writing a paper, students who are interested must be capable of doing independent work.