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Leadership & Teams

Leadership is a team activity

The ability to both lead and work effectively in teams is essential to success in any organization.

Yale SOM Students
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Yale SOM Students

While leadership is a theme throughout our integrated curriculum, selected core courses are designed specifically to elevate your leadership capabilities, on four distinct levels:

Individual

Develop the individual skills, knowledge, and expertise to deeply understand your industry and organization. Understand your own values, strengths, and weaknesses. Get the insights into negotiation and human behavior you need to communicate and persuade.

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Introduction to Negotiation

Learn to simultaneously make the pie bigger—that is, to create value—and get the largest possible slice for yourself. Develop a repertoire of negotiation strategies and skills.

Team

The Yale SOM approach to building great teams helps you learn by doing. Throughout your MBA career, you’ll go through the process of forming and managing teams—seeing what works and what doesn’t. You’ll then apply those lessons to the next challenge.

Preview image for the video "The Team Experience: First Days".
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Managing Groups and Teams (MGT)

Develop a conceptual framework for analyzing group dynamics and practical skills for building effective teams.

Global Virtual Teams

Extend the skill set developed in MGT to diverse, distributed groups, with all the challenges created by time zone shifts, cultural differences, and reliance on technology. Then put that learning into practice by completing a for-credit assignment with students at other Global Network schools.

Organization

Learn to see your organization as a whole, not as slices defined by function or geography. This approach cultivates innovative thinking and an ability to engage with a wide range of stakeholders.

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Organizational Perspectives

The courses at the heart of the Yale core curriculum combine material from a variety of business disciplines and teach you to view multiple perspectives on each question, developing an understanding of how the pieces of an organization work together.

Global & society

Taking on global challenges—think climate change, financial stability, and inequality—requires thinking and action that crosses industries, sectors, and regions.

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State and Society

Understand the array of non-market forces, including political leaders, NGOs, and societal trends, that can have a significant impact on the opportunities and risks faced by business leaders. Across a wide range of contexts and scenarios, reflect on the differences between what is customary, what is legal, and what is right.

The Executive

In the capstone course of the MBA core, draw on skills learned throughout the curriculum to analyze complex, interdisciplinary cases that closely mimic the kinds of challenges faced by top leaders today.

Preview image for the video "Integrated Curriculum: The Executive".

Beyond the core

Customize your leadership training by pursuing additional insights through elective courses at Yale SOM and throughout the university. Every Yale MBA student must fulfill the Leadership Distribution Requirement by taking at least one elective that focuses on leadership in a particular industry or looks at the major ethical and societal challenges leaders must address.

Opportunities for leadership thinking and learning are almost limitless. You can further develop leadership skills at the individual level in a course like Interpersonal Dynamics, which rigorously develops emotional intelligence and skills through giving and receiving feedback. Or explore the role of business leaders in society in Strategic Leadership across Sectors, which brings top CEOs into the classroom to talk candidly about the strategic challenges they face.