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First-year students meeting with their squad during a leadership lab pilot course.

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, the new GSB curriculum will include 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 will provide an experiential component to the Strategic Leadership course, which all students take in their first quarter. Strategic Leadership incorporates frameworks and case studies in strategic decision-making 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 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.

Leadership Lab Topics

The following is a list of topics that will be covered in the Leadership Laboratories.

• Analyzing Your Team Contributions. An intense experiential activity, this module is consistently ranked as one of the most popular sessions. Teams of students are given a challenging task and then videotaped as they work on the project. 
• Maximizing Team Effectiveness. This module introduces a framework for analyzing group process and team dynamics, specifically addressing how to move through conflict to productivity. 
• Executive Action Skills. Our Executive Action Skills sessions (EAS I and EAS II) provide students with the basic building blocks of good interpersonal communication.  Taught as two modules, this lab helps students improve their listening, feedback, and performance management skills. 
• Managing Diverse Teams. Using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI), this interactive three-hour session helps students identify their own personality type and develop appreciation for how they differ from others.
• Conflict Management. The ability to consistently settle employee, supervisor, customer, supplier and vendor matters in a timely fashion is crucial to the future success of our students.  This module examines the principles and methodology of managing conflict that include: collaborating, competing, compromising, avoiding and accommodating.