Wow.
Our inaugural cohort of our Leadership Development Lab (LDL) just ‘graduated’ last week following a very intense and powerful offsite retreat. We are extremely proud of our LDL ‘pioneers’. In addition to their full 2nd year MBA course-load, they all devoted themselves to our weekly experiential sessions over the course of the year, opened themselves to all manner of experiences and feedback from faculty and peers to build on the foundation they built for themselves in the Self-Development Lab in first year.
For those who haven’t heard about the LDL, a brief description follows.
The Joe Weider Foundation Leadership Development Lab is an innovative program that helps students develop personally and professionally across a number of dimensions critical to leadership. The program is offered to qualified and selected second year MBA students in parallel to their full complement of second-year MBA courses. The LDL is distinctive both for its content as its pedagogy.
Designed around the latest thinking in Leadership Development, the program takes powerful concepts such as accountability, responsibility, initiative, self-discipline etc… and creates experiences whereby participants have an opportunity to both understand and self-assess the extent to which they embody the various dimensions of leadership. Rich feedback from faculty and peers provides a means to further develop their leadership capabilities.
The program involves specialized modules as well as an integration and application stream. Each module is focused on a specific dimension of leadership and lead by experienced faculty. In addition to the modules, an Integration and Application stream throughout the entire program encourages participants to draw together the learnings and insights from the modules into an integrated and intentional Leadership Development Plan that would be advanced throughout the year. The plan is informed and refined on an ongoing basis through faculty and peer feedback as well as guided self-reflection.
The program is not a course of study, but a series of experiences and exercises that allow participants to become increasingly self-aware and at the same time supported and guided in their own self-development as leaders. Pedagogy is based on Adult-Learning principles: learning that is relevant to one’s context, immediately applied, active, and provides multiple cycles of feedback and reflection.
For our inaugural cohort, the results for many have been nothing short of amazing! Pushing themselves further than the smart, accomplished, and hard-working young professional they were when they came in, it was rewarding to see many of them leave with a completely different presence and way-of-being about them. More confident, centered, self-directed and in control of themselves and their career.
I’m already looking forward to next year’s LDL cohort, comprised of those students that were most active in the Self-Development Lab in 1st year. I’m getting further excited by the buzz the LDL has created among prospective students, and looking forward to meeting more and more folks who have chosen Rotman because of they are dedicated to developing themselves and their Leadership skills.
Hope to see you soon!
Scott Rutherford
Associate Professor
Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking
Executive Director, Leadership Development Lab
Rotman School of Management