Strategic Leadership – Online M.S.

Career and Professional Pathways

Strategic leadership skills transfer across industries because the program focuses on capabilities leaders use in many professional settings: analyzing complex problems, navigating organizational change, resolving conflict, exercising influence, communicating effectively, and making ethical decisions.

Graduates can apply these capabilities across areas such as:

• Corporate and nonprofit leadership
• Healthcare leadership
• Government and public service
• Higher education administration
• Protective service leadership
• Human resources and organizational development
• Organizational analysis and consulting
• Communications and public-facing leadership

The program can also provide preparation for continued graduate or professional study, including doctoral education or law school.

Program Delivery

The Master of Science in Strategic Leadership is offered 100% online, allowing students to complete the program without relocating. Leadership courses include weekly live online class meetings, combining the flexibility of online graduate education with direct faculty interaction, discussion, and engagement with a cohort of professionals from varied fields.

Leadership is practiced through relationships, communication, judgment, and interaction. Weekly live classes therefore give students opportunities to discuss complex problems, test ideas, learn from professionals in other fields, and develop leadership judgment through active engagement with faculty and classmates.

Program Structure

The Strategic Leadership master’s program requires 30 graduate credits and is designed to be completed in five semesters. The Strategic Leadership course sequence uses accelerated seven-week sessions, allowing students to focus on one leadership course at a time. The curriculum is intentionally sequenced so that concepts and analytical frameworks introduced in earlier courses are revisited, extended, and applied throughout the program.

Program Cost

Strategic Leadership tuition is $500 per credit. Additional fees may apply.

Course Overview

The 30-credit curriculum develops leaders through the study of strategic thinking, critical problem solving, organizational change, ethics, power and influence, sustainability, digital practices, conflict analysis and resolution, and research. Together, these courses prepare students to understand complex organizational environments and make thoughtful, strategic leadership decisions within them.

Course Highlight: LDR 615 — Leading Digital Citizens
Leading Digital Citizens examines leadership in technologically mediated environments, including digital citizenship, AI literacy, ethical responsibility, human judgment, and the leader’s responsibility for shaping the digital environments others must inhabit.

Curriculum (30 credits)

• GEN 502 – Methods of Research
• LDR 600 – Foundations of Leadership
• LDR 603 – Organizational Ethics
• LDR 604 – Theories of Change
• LDR 605 – Politics of Leading
• LDR 610 – Sustainability Leadership
• LDR 615 – Leading Digital Citizens
• LDR 621 – Strategic and Critical Problem Solving
• LDR 625 – Conflict Analysis and Resolution
• LDR 640 – Power and Influence
• LDR 635 – Leadership Comprehensive

What You’ll Learn

Through the Strategic Leadership master’s program, students develop the ability to:

• Analyze complex organizational problems using strategic and critical problem-solving approaches.
• Understand organizational change and evaluate how leaders can respond to changing conditions.
• Exercise leadership ethically and understand how power and influence operate within cultural and organizational contexts.
• Navigate conflict through negotiation, analysis, and consensus building.
• Understand communication, relationships, and influence as central dimensions of leadership.
• Make socially responsible decisions in complex organizational and public environments.
• Apply leadership judgment to complex contemporary organizational and social challenges.

Interdisciplinary Leadership for a Complex World

Leadership does not occur in isolation. Leaders work within organizations shaped by relationships, culture, communication, power, competing values, institutional expectations, and changing social conditions. Immaculata’s Strategic Leadership master’s program draws from multiple disciplines to help students understand these forces and apply that understanding to real organizational challenges.

Students examine how power, culture, ethics, communication, relationships, and organizational structures shape leadership and decision-making. Rather than learning a collection of disconnected management techniques, students develop analytical frameworks they can apply across industries and professional settings.

The curriculum is intentionally sequenced and cumulative. Concepts introduced in one course are revisited, tested, and expanded in later courses, allowing students to build increasingly sophisticated ways of understanding leadership, change, conflict, and influence. Students also learn alongside professionals from varied fields, bringing multiple organizational perspectives into live class discussion.

Graduate Certificate in Strategic Leadership

Students may complete the 12-credit Graduate Certificate in Strategic Leadership as a standalone credential. With advisement, those credits may be applied toward the Strategic Leadership master’s program or other applicable graduate programs.

This allows students to begin with a focused graduate leadership credential while preserving the option to continue into an applicable graduate degree.

Admissions Requirements

Applicants to the Master of Science in Strategic Leadership are required to:

• Hold a bachelor’s degree from a regionally accredited institution.
• Submit official undergraduate transcripts demonstrating a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher on a 4.0 scale.
• Submit a current résumé.
• Provide two letters of recommendation addressing academic ability.
• Complete a department interview.

A business or leadership undergraduate degree is not required.