Leadership Demystified

Catalog description

Despite a mountain of leadership theory, research, and advice, great leadership is elusive. Through a unique combination of study and dialogue, self-reflection and real-time practice, this course aims to demystify leadership. The course explores the nature of leadership through reading, dialogue, and real-world experience, including the story of Antarctic expedition leader Ernest Shackleton and his crew. In examining questions such as why leaders succeed or fail, what makes people want to follow you, and how leadership is learned, students refine their own point of view by integrating personal experience with scholarly and practitioner perspectives. Alternating seminar-style inquiry with experiential learning, the course treats leadership as a practice - one that begins with knowing oneself and expands into the ability to influence, adapt, and bring out the best in others. Drawing on emotional intelligence and the Enneagram of personality, students engage in personalized learning, weekly behavioral experiments, and experiential exercises that bring leadership out of theory and into lived experience. Rather than offering a single formula, the course invites students to see leadership as a process of continually renewing ourselves and our institutions, requiring self-awareness, conscious adaptation, and the capacity to keep learning as roles, contexts, and demands change. By the end of the course, students will have a clearer understanding of their own leadership style and a practical method for leadership development that can serve them throughout their careers.