Develop yourself further as a leader at one of the most reputed universities in the world. Join us at the only lvy League Business School situated at the heart of business – New York City. Effective leadership requires self reflection and here you will embark on your Leader’s Journey, think deeply about the future and plan your legacy as a leader by developing your personal Leader’s Credo.

Hero’s Journey: Through Conflict to Achievement

Bruce Craven

In this session participants have the opportunity to harness their own capacity for creativity and will put “pen to paper,” to investigate how storytelling – both written and verbal – can positively impact their professional interactions and their leadership capabilities by helping them identify how to confront a leadership challenge and succeed. Participants will select a future leadership goal and craft a personal story focused on exploring and successfully resolving the obstacles to completing this future goal. Based on the story-structure identified by Joseph Campbell in his famous book on global mythology “The Hero of a Thousand Faces”, each participant will see himself and herself as the hero in their own personal journey. They will identify their internal challenges and doubts, as well as the external threats that they must overcome to achieve their goals as leaders. Executives will build the resolve to overcome future challenges, using storytelling to lead themselves and their constituents forward against adversity. This workshop develops each participant’s motivation to pursue success and be resilient in their effort.

Leadership Credo: Introduction and Lifeline Exercise

Bruce Craven

During this hands-on workshop, participants will review and share personal life experiences, and reflect upon the lessons learned, identifying insights that influence their approach to leadership. The Lifeline exercise serves three important roles in the executive education classroom. First, it provides an opportunity for participants to look back at their lives and identify when they benefitted from the leadership of other people, as well as identify times they learned lessons that are relevant to their leadership. Second, often these learning moments had an important impact on their lives going forward and can be the content of delivering important leadership messages to their stakeholders. These significant moments on the Lifeline can be used in developing effective Leadership Credos. Third, when groups of participants share their Lifelines with each other, they recognize the unique histories of their classmates and gain a greater understanding of the leadership development of their peers in the class. The Lifeline is an effective session to run with the Hero’s Journey and the Leadership Credo, because the Lifeline helps each participant realize that their future leadership success in terms of identifying goals and creating messages to achieve those goals is also supported by a lifetime of learning and previous leadership development.

The Relationship Between Leadership and Choice

Sheena Iyengar

This is a firm that undoubtedly spends enormous energy and resources considering “choice” from the consumer point of view. But what about internally? How can leaders at the organization think about the art of choosing in a way that fosters a more productive team and workplace? Questions we will consider: Why is choice so important to us? How can leaders give direct reports the ability to make choices in a way that improves performance, increases their ability to be creative, and makes them more satisfied with their jobs? Why do we often disagree about choice? What do cultural backgrounds teach us about choice? How much choice we should have, how should a choice should be made, who should make the choice, what constitutes a meaningful choice? How do we manage all our choices? We need to better manage the choosing experience for ourselves and for others around us. We will discuss techniques that help manage the choosing process better from the perspective of choice providers and choosers. How do we become choice wise to get the most from our choices? It is gut and reason, developed and refined over time through experience, judgment, and wisdom? Here, we will discuss how leaders can improve this “informed intuition.”

Value Based Leadership

Paul Ingram

Individual’s values fundamentally shape what motivates them, how they relate to other people and what levers they use to influence others. In this session, participants will go through an exercise to identify their structure of values as a way of gaining increased understanding of what drives their behavior.  Then, we will consider how situations in which people’s values are being violated might be changed to be a better fit with individual and corporate values.

Strategy and Leadership in the Future of Work

Stephan Meier

As leaders pivot to a post-COVID economy, this program is timely, as it provides business and HR executives with insights into the key decisions you need to make to manage the future of work. Business leaders need to assemble an integrated portfolio focusing on the redesign of work (integrating people and machines on super-teams), workforces (managing talent marketplaces and ecosystems), and workplaces (implementing hybrid strategies with an emphasis on management and culture). This program, based on recent leading corporate cases, will explore these issues and their impact on corporate strategy and leadership requirements. Whether managing a large corporation, a division or a smaller team or a start-up, the future of work (FoW) was accelerated by the pandemic and decisions and priorities about the FoW are more urgent and timelier than ever. What are the most critical decisions and how can you be prepared to shape them for action and impact?

Leading and Deciding in Crisis

Jessica Engelman/Dennis Letts

Today’s tireless leaders face difficult challenges every day. Market fluctuations. Competitive pressures. Crisis situations like natural disasters or product failures. Complicated situations and critical circumstances demand a level head, clear vision and a team focused on surviving the temporary tumult. – in MIT Leadership Center

When you’re running an intensive 24/7 operation, the smallest details can make a big difference. Small things can have a profound impact of a team’s energy and morale.

Humility does not mean being passive or abdicating authority, it means subjugating self-interest for a greater purpose – especially listening. The overwhelming impulse for most is to react. Yet when leaders listen to their people, powerful things happen.

Empowering others creates trust. When people are encouraged and feel comfortable, they will create solutions and work together for a collective goal

Leadership Credo

Bruce Craven

In this session, participants will learn how to use clear, authentic messaging to gain the commitment of their teams and to drive strategic goals, offering their colleagues, direct reports, and various stakeholders’ clarity on why the speaker of the Credo is an accountable leader. Developed at Columbia.

Business School, the Leadership Credo is a proven framework that will provide participants with the structure and delivery insights to present their leadership expectations in a natural, energizing, and impactful way. The Leadership Credo is a method that is adaptable to everyone’s natural communication style and offers a framework for messaging that can be used to confront various leadership challenges in order to gain maximum commitment from that leader’s team.

Learning outcomes from this session include:

• Understand how to structure an effective leadership message

• Deliver message in one’s own, authentic way

• Motivate colleagues, direct reports, and customers by leveraging past experiences

• Learn the importance of connecting a tactical leadership value the messaging

• Build communication resources by practicing an exercise in personal reflection

• Identify and practice – one’s natural presentation style

Leadership Jazz

Chris Washburne

Outstanding results in a complex business environment are never 100% guaranteed. In our view, an organization which can comfortably cite “listening to be responsive” as a cultural norm is better equipped at appropriate risk-taking, and agility. Using the jazz experience as an organizing metaphor, participants consider the origins of jazz — an art form born of conflict and crisis — and how lessons for leadership from a jazz ensemble can help teams and organizations work better together.