Programs & Teaching

Prominent thinkers in the leadership development area believe that leadership develops for more from experience than from time in the (traditional) classroom.. Even as a professor, I agree! I believe that action learning is a foundation of personal development and as build my course work at Michigan around various Experiential exercises that allow people see things about themselves that they haven't seen previously. A mindful engagement perspective, though, takes issue with the notion that experience alone teaches. In developing this tool, my colleague, Scott DeRue and I propose that two people can go through the same experience and learn vastly different amounts and that how much is learned depends on how mindfully engaged individuals are with the experience and with their development in the experience. The tool lays out a set of practices individuals can follow prior to, during, and after specific experiences to learn more from them regarding who they are as a leader, how they impact others, their strengths and weaknesses, and so forth. This tool would be helpful to professionals entering a new experience such as being appointed as a manager for the first time, taking an expatriate assignment overseas, heading up a high profile task force, or shutting down a plant -- any experience that is novel, visible, and challenging has the potential to teach, but only if the individual going through the experience is actively and mindfully engaged in their learning. I hope you will find it useful.

Helping people to learn how to act effectively in a crisis situation is quite difficult. Crises occur often suddenly and are quite costly if mismanaged. It is often easy to say what one would do in a crisis when involved in a discussion in the safety of the classroom. It's much more difficult to both plan what one would do and actually do it in a real crisis situation. And yet that is exactly the preparation that will help future managers deal with real crises in their organizations. To address this issue, I created a teaching intervention called the leadership crisis challenge. This challenge involves students directly in the role of crisis responders. They need to come up with a plan and be able to defend it. They are given a short time to do this and during their planning time, further aspects of the crisis are brought to their attention. This simulates an unfolding crisis situation. The challenge then asks them to defend their plan in front of a Board of Directors (typically our faculty or second-year MBA students). This is a true defense – with very little formal statements and a lot of challenging Q & A. Student teams are then confronted by a press corps with video cameras rolling they leave the board room and are asked further questions. The best students from this round make a formal press release presentation with microphones, video cameras, hot lights, and so forth. The press corps and students in the audience pick the best team and they are given a prize. The leadership crisis tool can be used in this extended format, or use as a crisis case in the class discussion as well. That class discussion can be supplemented by some of the role playing suggested in the format described above. Students have found this to be an exceptional learning experience. They are taken out of their comfort zones, out of the safety of adding one comment to an overall class discussion and really put on the hot seat. The leadership crisis challenge would be a great exercise to do in a pre-term orientation program, a leadership class, or as a stand-alone, co-curricular event as we do at Michigan. Our program is voluntary, and students compete to get into it – it's that popular.