Leadership Development at Harvard MBA: LEAD, Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development and More..

At Harvard Business School, Leadership development is an integral part of the MBA curriculum. During the first year, students are required to take two leadership courses: Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD), and Leadership and Corporate Accountability.

Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD)

LEAD course gives students an overview of managing the human side of a Business. Mostly it teaches students to manage Emotional Intelligence and bring positive change in the Enterprise.

Leadership and Corporate Accountability

This course utilizes HBS Cases to understand the responsibilities that today’s leaders have, and looks into the ethical, economic and legal side of a managerial decision. Leadership and Corporate Accountability also teach how to use personal values for effective leadership in companies and how to propagate these values throughout the organization including the conduct of the employees.

During the second year, students can select leadership themed electives from courses like Authentic Leadership Development, The Board of Directors and Corporate Governance, Great Business Leaders-The Importance of Contextual Intelligence, Leading Innovative Ventures, Leading Professional Service Firms, Managing Human Capital, Power and Influence, and Leading and Governing High Performing Non-profit Organizations.

Two interesting courses from the electives are Authentic Leadership Development & Leading Innovative Ventures.

Authentic Leadership Development (ALD): Unlike other courses where you get guidance through tools and contextual tips, ALD looks at your personal values and develop leadership skills in complete alignment with your core values. To do that, the course explores your life experiences with exercises and case studies, and creates a personal leadership development plan.

Leading Innovative Ventures: For students interested in taking an Entrepreneurial route, this course will teach you how to launch a venture in a new industry or create a new market segment for your products/services.  Instead of looking at Innovation as a pure right brain activity, the courses introduce framework and tools to manage an innovative venture. The concepts that are evaluates are from multiple domains that include marketing, strategy, operations and organization behavior.

Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development (FIELD)

Harvard Business School was the first school that introduced MBA curriculum revival in 2011, with the Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development (FIELD) course. This course lasts for one year and gives students hands on experience across different global markets on how Business processes are managed & customers developed. It gives insight on the environment surrounding each Business.

The course primarily caters to emerging markets and requires students to develop a product or service idea for Global Partners. Some of the interesting FIELD project definitions in 2011-12 were:

Consumer Products (Brazil): What new differentiated luxury cinema experiences can be developed that is also economically viable?

Service (South Africa): What new consumer-based mobile application for banking can be developed that would enable clients to leverage mobile technology to extend one of their core business applications in South Africa?

Consumer Products (Turkey): What design improvements can be made to "white goods" products in order to make these household appliances more accessible to disabled consumers?

Service (Vietnam): Your partner organization seeks to create a product or service that encourages local residents in flood-prone areas to invest in preventative safety. In addition, the organization would like to create a product or service that encourages homeowners to build a savings account for these same potential disasters. What would encourage this savings?

FIELD exercises are not just limited to developing products and services. Students will also learn about their core leadership values, individual skills and develop leadership intelligence through personal reflection, peer review and leadership exercise.  Some of the recent FIELD exercises include Storytelling and Improv Workshop, Feedback Workshop,Hay Group Emotional and Social Intelligence Assessment (EISI) and CareerLeader Results Report.

For Executives, Harvard Business School has some interesting leadership courses. Here are
a few interesting ones:  Leadership Capacity of Individuals and their Organizations, Authentic Leadership Development, High Potentials Leadership Program, Leadership Best Practices, Leadership for Senior Executives and Leading with Impact: Staying on the Fast Track.

Related Downloads

1) Harvard MBA Essay Guide
2) Harvard MBA Interview Guide
3) Harvard MBA Interview Guide + Interview Videos

Recommended Reads

1) HBS Leadership
2) HBS Leadership Courses for Executives
3) Ryan's Experience at HBS