Faculty Chair(s):
Martin Linsky , Dean Williams
OVERVIEW
View Faculty Chair, Marty Linsky's, blog here.
We are pleased to welcome Dean Williams as Faculty Chair of the May 2010 session of Leadership for the 21st Centrury. Dean Williams is the author of Real Leadership: Helping People and Organizations Face Their Toughest Challenges (Berrett-Koehler, 2005), and Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He has led major change processes for many large companies and government organizations, including the reform of the state educational system in Queensland, Australia. He has has done extensive leadership development work in Colombia, throughout Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States. Dean Williams will be joined by other prominent leadership educators, including Marty Linsky, author of Leadership on the Line (Harvard Business Press, 2002) and The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (Harvard Business Press, 2009).
In our daily lives, we all operate from a certain set of assumptions by which we make decisions. Whether we know it or not, we are often guided by our gut. Leadership for the 21st Century: Chaos, Conflict and Courage is an executive education program offered at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that delves into why we lead the way we do. The program offers a personal, stimulating, and challenging week that invites you to learn how to act courageously and skillfully when exercising leadership.
The program is different from the average leadership development programs that focus primarily on building a distinct set of skills and tactics. Leadership for the 21st Century does more by pushing you to reflect on your deepest assumptions and most strongly held values, and encouraging you to consider how your values and beliefs may have limited you in the past. It challenges you to look beyond formulating quick technical solutions that act as band-aids to deeper organizational challenges, and instead asks you to examine yourself and the competing commitments and loyalties in your organization or community.
The five-day course requires participants to be actively engaged on several levels - in the classroom, in small groups, and in individual reflection. You will discuss issues like creating and claiming value, understanding the relationship between leadership and authority, exercising influence, and managing the individual and institutional dynamics of change. We will explore a wide range of leadership strategies and practice new ways of exercising leadership, whether in a position of authority or just one member of a group. We will confront the dangers and risks associated with exercising leadership – the chaos and conflict – and explore how you can build up your capacity to navigate unpredictable waters.
Where is your leadership taking you? Do you have the courage and skills to exercise leadership for the purposes you care about most? Leadership for the 21st Century is a provocative seminar that introduces a set of conceptual frameworks and a unique teaching method designed to challenge your fundamental assumptions about how you can courageously and effectively exercise leadership and authority during hard times.