Becoming a Sustainability Leader

Catalog description

While there are many career paths in sustainability, one skill remains essential in all of them - effective leadership. To achieve your career goals in working toward meaningful sustainability solutions, you need technical expertise and a talent for innovation, to be sure. At the same time, you also need to know how to get things done. You will not be able to do it alone. Instead, you must learn how to lead and manage others. That is the purpose of this course: to arm you with practical leadership skills. This course is an adapted version of the required leadership course ("Organizational Behavior") taught to first-year MBA students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. After developing and teaching that course for the past 17 years, I will now offer it exclusively to students in the Sustainability School. I appreciate that sustainability students have highly diverse areas of expertise and passions. Indeed, one of the benefits of this course is that you will have the opportunity to collaborate with peers across disciplines - to learn from them and build a community. Together you will develop leadership skills that prepare you to make an outsized impact in your field. Each of the sessions in this course is highly interactive, relying on group exercises, role plays, class discussion, and guest speakers in the sustainability space that bring the course content to life. My aim is to help you understand how to lead others by sharing the best insights from behavioral science - covering topics that include decision making, negotiating conflict, communicating effectively, managing collaborative work, and motivating teams. After taking this course, you will be better able to: (1) craft more compelling communication that encourages others to recognize the value of your ideas, especially in cross-discipline spaces; (2) build dynamic, mission oriented, and highly…