Learning: Leadership

Leadership

The LFM leadership curriculum provides a model for lifelong learning, continuous improvement, and personal development.

Although some aspects of leadership may be innate, leadership skills can also be learned. We seek to identify and enhance students' skills through integrated classroom education and experience, providing opportunity for everyone to develop.

During their first week on campus, students begin leadership development with The Universe Within, a week long required course that provides an intense intellectual and physical orientation.

Over the next two years, students acquire diagnostic tools, based on social science theory, for team structuring, participation, and organizational analysis. Leadership is developed through:

Skill development in communication, motivation, and change management.
Practice in dealing with the dynamics of organizational change, through case discussions, role-plays, project teamwork, the LFM internship, and participation on LFM standing committees.
Reflection that ensures time for dialogue, evaluation, and intellectual integration. LFM's emphasis on reflection acquaints students with theories of leadership, learning, and organization, and encourages shifts in thinking and expansion of the mental models people use to understand the world.

Orientation: The Universe Within

Students start their academic program with the required course The Universe Within. During this week of class, they spend one day on an Outward Bound experience that covers the theory and practice of leadership and offers ample opportunity to reflect on personal practice and lessons learned.

Throughout The Universe Within, films, role-plays, and exercises are used to encourage student dialogue to explore system concepts and "thought worlds" that characterize organizations, and how companies communicate, learn, develop, and sustain values. The class examines research, traditional ideas of leadership, and their own experiences.

The Universe Within is part of an ongoing two-year leadership curriculum that helps students become effective leaders, team players, and agents for change.

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Leadership Practice Opportunities

Students learn the systematic analysis conducted by recognized leaders - to walk into a setting, read situations and people, and act appropriately and effectively. The goal is to teach students to lead daily, balancing detachment with involvement, and facilitating innovation and action.

One module of the leadership curriculum helps students view company sites from a change agent's perspective, then relate observations to principles learned in prior classes. Students also work with faculty and industry partners on LFM standing committees, including the LFM Operating Committee, and help manage key activities that include the following:

Proseminars
Internship project definition and site assignment
Finance
Marketing
Process improvement
Plant treks

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Midstream Review and Second Year

Second-year students participate in a Midstream Review halfway through their internship assignments by returning to campus to examine experiences and progress with peers and advisors. They also meet with prominent government, industry and academic leaders who visit LFM to share reflections on leadership, ethics, values, and competitiveness at the macro level.

Students may prepare and teach case studies on organizational change and leadership, based on their internships, while they simultaneously assist first-year students in preparing for their upcoming internship experiences. Second-year students can elect to prepare a manufacturing case study or "learning tool" to be used in the curriculum.

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