Executive Program in Leadership: the Effective use of Power

Develop a leadership style and an action plan tailored to your personal objectives that inspire innovation in your team, your company, and the world.

The Executive Program in Leadership begins with a pre-program questionnaire on leadership style sent to your team and finishes with a personalized 100-day action plan you create to keep you accountable and increase your success.

In the classroom, you will interact with Stanford GSB faculty and peers from around the globe. You will explore the sources and uses of power, learn new methods for developing personal influence through collaboration, and come to understand the role of coaching in empowering your teams.

Throughout the week, you will use the results of the questionnaire and your new insights to develop a leadership plan tailored to your objectives and the needs of your company.

Key Benefits

Explore the dynamics of power, learn strategies for influencing others, and become a more collaborative and successful leader.

• Learn how your personal leadership style impacts those around you
• Develop strategies for using personal power to build strong mutual-influence relationships within your organization
• Build a strong, cohesive team by leveraging the leadership potential of all members
• Create a personalized leadership action plan to make you more effective and accountable back at work

Program Highlights

Leading Change

As a leader, you will sometimes come into a new situation — a new district, school, or business unit — in a leadership role. The evidence shows that outside succession in senior positions is frequently a failure, and even coming into a new unit within the same organization poses challenges. You are an outsider, unknown to many or most of your new colleagues.

Moreover, if you are expected to lead change and improvement efforts, you will need to have people do new things in new ways — moves that challenge the status quo and the history of the unit. To be successful, you must develop credibility and, most important, the power and influence required to be successful.

Building Power and Influence

Leaders have and use power, and when your power and influence wanes, you will soon lose leadership roles. Nonetheless, the topic of managing organizational dynamics is one that makes many people uncomfortable. In our first session together, we will see explore some of the fundamental behavioral principles of influence and see two video examples of leaders talking about their “lessons in leadership.” At the end of the session, we will have a brief opportunity for you to do some peer coaching on which aspects of your approach to building and using power you might think about changing to become even more effective and successful.

The Challenge of Change

Why do industry leaders often lose their innovative edge, and how can they retain it? Based on research and consulting over the past 10 years, it appears that short-term success may actually increase the chances of long-term failure. To avoid this “success syndrome” managers must be effective at managing incremental change and leading revolutionary or discontinuous change.

The purpose of this module (two sessions) is to explore how you as leaders of your organization can balance the tension between the short- and long-term, with particular attention to the use of culture in their organizations as a potential source of competitive advantage — or disadvantage. Our emphasis will be on providing you with a framework and set of tools for thinking about culture as a social control system, especially in the face of disruptive change.

Team Engagement Through Vision: The Power of Stories

Successful innovation creates a new normal, a new way of being for individuals or businesses. Successful innovation disrupts industries; it drives success. We all want to innovate, but how do we do it? To innovate, you not only need a big idea; you also need people to create it and people to buy into it. Story fuels innovation. Stories have long held the power to transform the listener, to take listeners on a journey that changes how they think, feel, or act.

In business, stories can drive innovation and impact by painting a clear picture of what is and what could be for everyone from employees to customers to investors and the media. In these two sessions, we discuss the following: What does it mean to tell stories in business? What makes an effective story in business? And when can you use stories in business? We will focus on innovation, but also explore other applications of story.

Coaching Talent

Coaching is among the most powerful and yet undeveloped or underutilized skills at a leader’s disposal.

These two sessions will introduce you to coaching fundamentals (listening, inquiring, reframing, and setting up experiments) as well as provide an opportunity to practice and further develop these competencies.