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First-year students meeting with their squad during a leadership lab pilot course.
![[photo - First-year students in a leadership lab]](../../photos/students_SHG_2555.jpg)
Leadership Laboratories
When students graduate from Stanford, they face a world that expects them to demonstrate not only talent and knowledge, but also capacity for effective leadership. Developing this capacity requires practice. In recognition of this, Stanford's MBA curriculum includes a series of hands on Leadership Labs that allow students to practice a set of core leadership skills in a work-team setting; skills such as motivating others, building relationships, and influencing outcomes.
The Leadership Labs provide an experiential component to the Fall quarter curriculum, when students are focused on a set of broad managerial perspectives. Other courses provide frameworks and case studies in strategic decision-making, critical-analytical thinking and organizational behavior, providing a broad context for those aspiring to serve in executive roles. Once students enter the Leadership Labs, however, the theory gives way to practice, as they participate in a series of project-based exercises and managerial simulations designed to create the mixture of urgency and ambiguity that frequently accompanies real life leadership challenges. Students then analyze the decisions and behaviors they exhibited under such conditions, to build greater self-awareness.