Leadership is a team activity
The ability to both lead and work effectively in teams is essential to success in any organization.
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.
Featured course
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.
Featured courses
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.
Featured courses
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.
Featured courses
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.
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.