How can you become a more authentic leader? How can you effectively enhance your power and influence?

The LGBTQ Executive Leadership Program curriculum is carefully designed to meet the unique needs of rising LGBTQ professionals. And it’s the only one of its kind offered by a leading business school to address the significant gap in LGBTQ leadership in the C-suite. The curriculum and experience are innovative, thought-provoking, and empowering.

The highly-tailored curriculum is delivered through interactive classroom sessions, hands-on experiential workshops, small group discussions, roundtable forums, and visits from guest speakers. Learn how LGBTQ identity influences and strengthens personal leadership style. Expand your knowledge and strengthen your network of mentors and colleagues.

Below are just a few of the sessions you’ll attend as part of the program.

Charting Your Path as a Queer Leader

In this session, you’ll be asked to declare yourself as a leader. Having clarity on what you want to learn can help you to frame and link together the coming program sessions. Knowing not only your own goals, but the goals of others, will help us support each other and embrace our own identities and others too.

Research suggests one factor may be key to helping us persist in the hard work of attaining worthy goals: self-compassion. We’ll review this research and understand its meaning for LGBTQ leaders, and you’ll have an opportunity to discuss it with others and apply it to your work this week.

Authentic Leadership

What does it mean to be an authentic leader? In these sessions, we’ll review the challenges of leaders in contemporary organizations. We’ll give you an opportunity to reflect on a key dimension of Stanford GSB’s brand of leadership: how to use your full self to connect to and influence others around you.

“Bringing your full self” has been challenging for LGBTQ people in the workplace, as in life – making this issue familiar, but problematic, territory. What level of self-disclosure best contributes to your connection to and influence with others? How does self-disclosure influence - or mask - your authentic leadership style?

Creating Inclusive Workplaces

Most leaders appear to understand the link between diversity and innovation and are actively trying to increase the diversity of their workforce, boards, and leadership teams. Yet, many still grapple with how to reduce gender, racial, and other forms of biases in critical functions like recruitment, hiring, and performance evaluations. The cost? Companies unintentionally turn away or lose high-potential talent. For rising LGBTQ leaders, this knowledge may sound very familiar.

In this session, we’ll discuss how to identify biases in organizational functions that block our ability to fairly and accurately assess talent across various dimensions of diversity. We’ll then draw on empirical case studies to develop evidence-based strategies for more effectively identifying, retaining, and promoting top talent.