I recently received a question from an organization about how I would propose to set up a leadership curriculum for undergraduates. This has been a great thought exercise, and I have come up with some ideas that I’d like to share. Here are three that I would advocate:
1. Participants share their work with others. Traditionally, schools have a system that has students create work and share it with a teacher. No one sees what is written on a test, and essays are rarely shared with classes except perhaps in creative writing courses. But outside of a school, work has to be shared. Marketing, sales, business proposals, any kind of writing in academia or for publication, the media: everyone has to share what they create.
In my proposal, assignments would be created and posted on a website – think of it as an online student portfolio. Part of the classroom feedback would be from other students who would read or watch and comment on the work each student creates. Ideas could be selected and shared more widely in a newsletter or publication on Leadership for the community or, in these days, for any interested person around the globe. The portfolio would eventually be a great talking point for future job interviews or for providing real-world proof of what the person can do.
1. Participants share their work with others. Traditionally, schools have a system that has students create work and share it with a teacher. No one sees what is written on a test, and essays are rarely shared with classes except perhaps in creative writing courses. But outside of a school, work has to be shared. Marketing, sales, business proposals, any kind of writing in academia or for publication, the media: everyone has to share what they create.
In my proposal, assignments would be created and posted on a website – think of it as an online student portfolio. Part of the classroom feedback would be from other students who would read or watch and comment on the work each student creates. Ideas could be selected and shared more widely in a newsletter or publication on Leadership for the community or, in these days, for any interested person around the globe. The portfolio would eventually be a great talking point for future job interviews or for providing real-world proof of what the person can do.
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2. The program sequence would be set up in cross-disciplinary modules. Ideally, there would probably be seven or eight modules that would be offered on an ongoing, rotational basis. However, for a four-module segment, I would use these four areas:
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- Leading Others (with Business) This module would explore management and leadership styles, theories of leadership, and look at various leadership experiences from history and practice. There would be more in-depth work on concepts appropriate to future leadership including the Japanese-style lean management techniques, collaborative leadership, and the pros and cons of using various analytic and measurement processes.
- Leadership and Learning (with Education) The one key variable for leaders today is that what we learn today will change in the future. Learning is the way humans deal with change. Leaders have to learn new skills; they have to learn to get their teams to try, experiment with, and adapt new processes and ideas. They will also have to learn about leading people who are not like them: people who are much younger or older; people who are from a different culture or country; people with different educational backgrounds or beliefs.
- Leadership in Practice (with Social Science) This culminating module will focus on leadership through real engagement with others. Experiences in early modules with direct leadership will be expanded through team and individual projects. Challenges, problems, and ideas would be brought into the learning group to discuss and brainstorm best practices. Students would also learn from more readings and in-depth examples of how leaders have solved problems in the past, and how insights from the social sciences can help us be better leaders today.
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3. I would link each student with a participant in a similar program in another country. This would give a chance to get some very different and direct perspectives on the work, encourage contacts with other countries and other ways of thinking about projects, and potentially set up an opportunity for future travel or collaboration.
There are countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Africa, and Ireland which are diverse and primarily English-speaking; in most other countries, English is a second language, particularly among the students who would be working in the Leadership domain. A cross-country exchange program is now relatively easy and very inexpensive to do via text and video. ***** These core ideas all contribute to an externally focused, practical curriculum with roots in several dimensions of the liberal arts. |
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