Leadership Labs is a required course for first-year Stanford MBA students, in which students practice core leadership skills in a team setting.
Leadership Labs provides an experiential component to the autumn-quarter curriculum, when students are focused on a set of broad managerial perspectives. Other courses first-year students take provide frameworks and case studies in strategic decision-making, critical-analytical thinking, and organizational behavior, which provides a broad context for those aspiring to serve in executive roles. In Leadership Labs, the theory gives way to practice.
Teams of students, or “squads,” participate in a series of exercises and simulations designed to create the urgency and ambiguity that frequently accompanies real-life leadership challenges. At the end of each simulation, they analyze the decisions and behaviors they exhibited in order to build greater self-awareness. Each squad is coached by an Arbuckle Leadership Fellow.
