LGBTQ Executive Leadership Program

Catapult your career with the only program from a leading business school to address LGBTQ leadership in the C-suite.

Lead with strength. Lead with impact. The LGBTQ Executive Leadership Program teaches you how to do both — authentically, effectively, and confidently. This highly specialized one-week program combines personal leadership assessments and insights with design thinking innovation.

It starts with a pre-program leadership assessment and on-campus debriefing to guide your personal development. Next, your week is filled with interactive classroom sessions, hands-on experiential workshops, small group discussions, roundtable forums, and visits from guest speakers. All in a stimulating environment on the Stanford campus, led by Stanford GSB faculty.

Best of all, you’ll share this experience with other lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ) executives and build a powerful and personal network to support you and your career for a lifetime, wherever in the world your career takes you.

Key Benefits

Strengthen your influence, build a valuable network, and develop new models and mindsets for innovation using design thinking.

• Learn how your LGBTQ identity influences and strengthens your personal leadership style.
• Assess and refine your interpersonal skills to become a more authentic leader.
• Strengthen nonverbal and verbal communication skills.
• Identify best practices for building LGBTQ employee networks and career paths within your organization.
• Build a strong network of LGBTQ peers with whom you can share ideas and experiences.

Curriculum

How can you become a more authentic leader? How can you effectively enhance your power and influence? What can design thinking teach you about building strong LGBTQ and ally networks?

The LGBTQ Executive Leadership Program gives you the strategic insights, personal leadership skills, and powerful network to accelerate your career.

This is the only Executive Education program of its kind offered by a leading business school to address the significant gap in leadership in the C-suite among lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people, and those who consider themselves queer or questioning.

Program Highlights

Leading Out Loud: Executive Presence for the LGBTQ Leader

Presence — the ability to communicate in words and actions in a way that inspires others to follow our lead — is an essential, yet challenging, skill for all leaders. Whether expressed in person or virtually, you will explore frameworks and develop tools for exploring your own leadership style.

Introduction to Design Thinking

Design thinking — a human-centered, prototype-driven process for innovation — can be applied to products, services, and even business and organizational design. We believe that innovation is necessary in every aspect of business, and that it can be taught.

You will first have the opportunity to experience how the design thinking process works in a hands-on exercise. Then, small teams will work together to craft solutions to different design challenges centered on creating and/or strengthening LGBTQ networks within and across organizations.