Students interacting during a leadership lab.
![[photo - students in a leadership lab]](../../photos/students_SHG_2569.jpg)
- Highlight: Executive Challenge provides finale to first-year Leadership Labs
- Student Coaching and Mentoring Options
- MBA Curriculum Overview
- Leadership Fellows Program
- Leadership Labs
- Leadership Electives at the GSB
- Visiting Leaders at the GSB
- Leadership In Focus: Video Vignettes
New product:
The Center has developed a series of leadership case videos around key leadership topics. In each video, leaders present a real leadership challenge, the issues they grappled with and how they ultimately handled each situation.
Read more
Can 'Leadership' Be Taught?
Developing innovative, principled, and insightful leaders who change the world is not for the meek, but it is part of our mission at Stanford.
Research suggests that for most people, developing as a leader entails a fundamental transformation. It involves reexamining beliefs and assumptions that they hold about their professional identity, their role, the tasks they perform, and the people they work with. Leadership encompasses both complex competencies and unspoken mindsets that color the way people look at the world and view their roles and responsibilities within it.
As a result, traditional forms of teaching often fail to challenge students in a way that provokes such self-examination. Rather, we seek to provide challenging experiences that, combined with conceptual frameworks, enable students to build a greater capacity for leadership.
A Leadership Transformation
The Stanford MBA Program has always been grounded in general management knowledge. With the launch of its new curriculum, however, it will place a greater emphasis than ever on personal development, building the capacity of students to lead teams in complex organizational environments. The program begins with students taking General Management Perspectives and General Management Foundations courses primarily in the first year, and MBA electives in the second year.
Several components of the first year curriculum will focus on the challenges that students will face as leaders, and will provide a greater emphasis on experiential learning opportunities. A new course on Strategic Leadership will include a Leadership Lab component, supported by the Center for Leadership Development and Research, as well as conceptual frameworks for organizational leadership. A select group of students become GSB Leadership Fellows, giving them a unique opportunity to get hands on experience developing others, building high-performance teams, and shaping culture.
Students also have the opportunity to expand on this learning through several electives on topics related to leadership.
