Strategic Resource Group Leadership Certificate

Driving Strategy for the Future

Certificate Program Description and Objectives

This course is designed to help you in your role as a resource group leader or executive and help you develop and take those lessons learned into your future career by providing you with useful overall leadership skills and by giving you opportunities to be a thought leader in the profession. Managing a volunteer organization, as is the case with resource groups, is not easy. You are responsible for creating a strategy for your group while also building benefits for the members. At the same time, you are asking members to work additional hours in a volunteer role. Your job is to create a group that meets the needs of those members while also providing value for your organization overall.

You do all that in an environment where there is no right or wrong way of creating or managing resource groups. Despite the years of evolution of resource groups in organizations worldwide, there remains extraordinarily little research and published learning on this topic. Thus, in this program, we will use what is available, but more importantly, we will learn from each other. You are part of a cohort of leaders who have been coming together since our first Summit in 2012.

How the SRG Certificate Works

While you learn, you accumulate points toward earning the certificate. This unique program offers participants several ways to earn the credits needed to earn the certificate. Many of the methodologies are focused on work that will help expand your learning and build your membership’s knowledge base.

Learning Goals

The focus of the certificate program is to help you optimize your learning while in the leader or executive role. By supplementing this experience with learning from the sessions, individual coaching, and time with peers, you will have an opportunity to enhance your skills. There are so few times when organizations provide employees with a high-impact opportunity to engage in true experiential learning. We encourage you to lead with passion and take that leadership role to the next level in your career. Resource group leadership is a path to business leadership, and this program aims to give you business-related experience and content to help you develop as a better business and thought leader overall.

The program focuses on leveraging resource groups to solve multiple and complex organizational problems, including inclusion, innovation, crisis management, individual development, improving teams, and more.

Benefits of the SRG Leadership Certificate

• Experientially based, guided learning, working individually with faculty outside the class
• Gain practical, applicable skills and knowledge
• Develop working relationships with a cohort of peers and mentors
• Learn through a combination of required and elective learning events
• Take away best practices from other resource group leaders based on live case study work
• Share experiential work based on your own company needs
• Gather insights, learnings, and skills that develop your abilities in your current position
• Develop a solid grounding as you move ahead to future leadership positions

Experiential Learning Focused on the Participant’s Organizational Needs

The Certificate program is designed to provide participants with significant experiential learning. Projects and other program work focus on deliverables that will help participants advance in their own organizations.

Examples of projects include:

• Research on new resource group types and how to implement them
• Best practices for starting a new SRG program in an organization
• Building leaders through resource group work
• Case study focused on resolving specific problems or optimizing opportunities within the participant organization’s resource group program
• Globalization of the participant’s program
• Matching structure to the participant organization’s business strategy
• Creating new resource group structures to help drive future growth
• Establish research initiatives and data-driven programs to evaluate success
• Use tools focused on building businesses to enhance resource group work