Course Goals
Exercising Leadership helps you to become more impactful and strategic as a leader.
This class helps students:
- Learn to recognize key moments in teams and groups in which you can initiate and lead
- Practice initiating interactions with others in order to have impact, even when it feels tricky or risky
- Survey your strengths and growth points for leading
- Identify and pursue development goals aimed at becoming more skillful when leading
- Practice critical tactics for influencing teams and groups such as recognizing and managing conflict, building alliances, and building informal authority
- Learn to manage your own development by taking calibrated risks in your interactions with others in order to build new skills and sensibilities
The principle aim of the course is to help students to become more confident in leading and more strategic and skillful in exercising leadership.
The Class Experience
In addition to readings, class discussions, activities, and short lectures, part of each class meeting will use a less familiar practice called case-in-point. The premise of case-in-point is that leading is best approached in a setting where students experience firsthand the conditions that make leading challenging. Case-in-point experiences take a variety of forms from more structured classroom simulations to very unstructured, open-ended problems for the entire class to resolve as a group. These experiences provide opportunities to observe and respond to the difficulties of leading in real time.
An organizing principle of case-in-point is that the class is more than a collection of individuals. Instead, we treat the class as a social system whose dynamics tend to mimic patterns in other social environments. Thus, within class we can observe many of the same dynamics and persistent problems faced by companies, public entities, startups and organizations of all sizes.
Case-in-point entails a slightly different set of responsibilities, both for the instructor and for students.
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As the instructor,
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As a student,
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I endeavor to help establish an environment conducive to experiencing real world dynamics
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Engage fully and genuinely with class room experiences
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To introduce real-world dynamics, I sometimes increase the sense of support and comfort in the room and at other times increase the sense of challenge and discomfort
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Notice the balance between support and challenge in the room and respond in ways that reflect your genuine point of view
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I seek to make the risks students take in class yield worthwhile and lasting insights
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Take responsibility for your own choices and learn from the practice of doing so
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I seek to model, in real-time, essential practices of leading
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Respond to what you observe and always strive to exercise leadership based on the dynamics of the moment
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