Become an effective leader in your organization and leverage your key leadership capabilities to drive business growth.
Women remain underrepresented in top leadership positions, globally. To succeed, women need to learn to both navigate the external factors that are hindering their access to leadership positions and the internal factors that lie within themselves. This online course, the newest in the Women’s Leadership family, provides access to women seeking a more convenient way to empower themselves and advance their organization.
The Yale School of Management Executive Education’s online Women’s Leadership Program helps you develop your full professional potential as a leader in business and society. You’ll enhance your unique strengths, skills and traits, harness your networks, and maximize your innovation potential. In a world that will soon be dominated by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and increasingly complex systems, these skills — and the integrative, collaborative solutions they bring about — will ensure you are poised for success.
Guided by Program Co-conveners Emma Seppälä and Rodrigo Canales, you’ll gain the ability to leverage your core values, networks, and emotional intelligence to effectively lead your teams and propel your organization forward.

Program Dates
Registration closes: April 08, 2025
Start date: April 16, 2025
Program Details
Length: 6 weeks (excluding orientation)
Commitment: 6 – 8 hours per week
Fee: $2,950
Outcome: Harness your unique skills and access powerful business tools to effectively lead teams and organizations
Yale SOM developed this program to be administered by our program collaborator, GetSmarter. Please direct all program-related inquiries, including questions about fees and registration, to GetSmarter.
Looking for other programs that prepare women to advance in senior management? Explore our Programs to Promote Women page.
A mentor, who had gone through this experience, convinced me to take this program. What a life-changing experience. I now know myself better. I know and can articulate my core values. I know how to align them with what kind of a leader I want to be. I began this course by describing my emotions on my new leadership role as 'excited and terrified.' After this program, I can say with confidence that I feel excited and have great expectations!
About the Program
What to Expect
- Develop the skills and knowledge to leverage your unique strengths and characteristics as powerful leadership tools for propelling yourself, your team, and your organization forward
- Learn to harness relationships, connections, and interpersonal interactions to drive business growth and achieve your goals
- Create a self-development plan that will help you identify your strengths and guide you towards future growth and success
- Join a cohort of diverse women seeking to add value to their organizations
Who Should Attend
Built for women in mid to senior-level leadership positions and those who support them. Relevant to corporate, non-profit, and government leaders.
Agenda
- Orientation Module
- Module 1: Values-driven leadership
- Module 2: Self-knowledge and self-mastery
- Module 3: Leading growth through experimentation
- Module 4: Emotionally intelligent feedback
- Module 5: Networks and structures of innovation
- Module 6: Positive leadership
Taking this course prepared me to be a more inclusive leader, to be more self-aware, and to always work towards my goals while keeping my values and strengths in mind.
Faculty
Program Co-conveners

Rodrigo Canales
Kelli Questrom Associate Professor of Management and Faculty Director, Social Impact Program at the Boston University Questrom School of Business; former Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management
Areas of Expertise: Economic Development, Emerging Markets, Entrepreneurship, Globalization, Organizational Behavior, Social Enterprise
Read the full bio
Rodrigo Canales does research at the intersection of organizational theory and institutional theory, with a special interest in the role of institutions for economic development. Rodrigo studies how individuals can purposefully change complex organizations or systems. Rodrigo's work explores how individuals’ backgrounds, professional identities, and organizational positions affect how they relate to existing structures and the strategies they pursue to change them. His work contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that allow institutions to operate and change. Rodrigo has done work in entrepreneurial finance and microfinance, as well as in the institutional implications of the Mexican war on drugs. His current research is divided into three streams. The first focuses on the structural determinants of the quality of startup employment. The second explores the conditions under which development policies and practices integrate rigorous evidence. The third, with generous support from the Merida Initiative, explores how to build effective, resilient, and trusted police organizations in Mexico.
Rodrigo is faculty director of Questrom’s Social Impact Program. Before, he was Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management, where he taught the Innovator Perspective. He sits on the advisory board of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT; he spent the 2014-2015 academic year advising the Mexican government on the US-Mexico bilateral relationship; and sits on the Board of Trustees of the Nature Conservancy.

Emma Seppälä
Lecturer in Management
Areas of Expertise: Positive Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Well-being, Social Connection
Read the full bio
Emma Seppälä, Ph.D., is a best-selling author, Yale lecturer, and international keynote speaker. She teaches executives at the Yale School of Management and is faculty director of the Yale School of Management’s Women’s Leadership Program. A psychologist and research scientist by training, her expertise is the science of happiness, emotional intelligence, and social connection. Her best-selling book, The Happiness Track (HarperOne, 2016), has been translated into dozens of languages. Seppälä is also the Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education.
Registration Information
Program Details
Registration closes: April 08, 2025
Program starts with orientation: April 16, 2025
There are no prerequisites for this program. Register to get started. Our online program collaborator, GetSmarter, will welcome you and guide you through the steps to secure your place in the program.
Program Fee Assistance
A program fee reduction of 15% is available for those working in the nonprofit or government sectors; Yale University alumni; small groups of 3-6; and those who have previously participated in a Yale Executive Education program with Yale SOM or 2U/GetSmarter.*
*Discounts cannot be combined
This program does not qualify for veteran financial aid or veterans benefits at this time.
Program Collaborator
This program is presented entirely online in collaboration with leaders in digital education, GetSmarter, a brand of 2U, Inc. Technology meets academic rigor in GetSmarter’s people-mediated model which enables lifelong learners across the globe to obtain industry-relevant skills that are certified by the world’s most reputable academic institutions. This interactive, supportive teaching model is designed for busy professionals and results in unprecedented certification rates for online courses.
View the Women’s Leadership Program Online on the GetSmarter website.
Modules are released on a weekly basis, and can be completed in your own time and at your own pace.