Educating current and future leaders is a key part of our mission at Chicago Booth.
In The Chicago Approach to leadership, you’ll experiment, collect data, and learn from experiences in order to develop the insight and action skills essential to working with and leading others. It’s a proven approach that empowers you to develop your own unique leadership tool kit—and deploy these skills throughout your entire career.
Your MBA journey begins with LEAD, a hands-on, experiential course designed to help you identify your strengths and opportunities as a leader and integrate those insights into an active, intentional and ongoing process of leadership development. One of the first experiential MBA leadership development courses at a major business school, LEAD is an integral component of all MBA programs at Booth.
All MBA students at Booth participate in LEAD, but the format of the course varies depending on whether you’re a Full-Time MBA, Evening MBA, Weekend MBA, or Executive MBA student.
For Full-Time MBA students, LEAD begins during Orientation+, a two-week orientation to life at Booth, and continues into the first quarter of classes. Led by second-year students who serve as facilitators, you’ll participate in discussions and hands-on exercises around team-building, communication styles, and more. Along the way, you’ll explore who you are as a leader, what you stand for, and how others perceive you—and develop an individualized plan to support your development as a leader throughout your time at Booth.
For Evening MBA and Weekend MBA students, LEAD provides you with foundational leadership concepts and frameworks to support your success, growth and continued development as a leader during your Booth MBA program. LEAD builds insight and action skills that can be applied to situations you face at work, in class, in groups and in your community.
For Executive MBA students, the LEAD course begins in Chicago during Kick-Off Week in Autumn Quarter and continues throughout the first year of their time with the program.
The course is delivered in interrelated sessions that focus on individual and team development. Utilizing self-awareness, reflection, and leadership theory based around “Rethinking Management Education: A View from Chicago,” by Harry L. Davis and Robin Hogarth, you will develop actionable insights to advance your skills.
Beyond the LEAD course, we encourage Executive MBA students to participate in one-on-one and small-group executive coaching, leadership assessments, professional development workshops, and facilitated events.
At Booth, “we are trying to develop skills that are not just relevant for the first job but are helping people get a better sense of who they are and how they can become better for every job they take on.”
—Harry L. Davis, Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Distinguished Service Professor of Creative Management
The Davis Center for Leadership supports students and alumni as they develop their leadership identities and skills.
Harry L. Davis Center for Leadership
LEAD is just the beginning of your leadership journey at Booth.
Throughout your Booth experience, MBA leadership development courses and cocurricular opportunities empower you to reflect on your goals, generate new insights, and prepare for lifelong learning from experience. Here’s a sampling.
Launched in 2019, this course leverages the highly effective T-group (training group) method to help you build more effective relationships. Working with trained facilitators, you will learn how you are perceived by others and how you can shift those perceptions.
Learn to establish yourself as a leader within a new work context and practice your skills in developing credibility, coaching others, and communicating a shared vision. You’ll also meet one-on-one with a personal coach to enhance your learning and skill development.
This one-of-a-kind course helps you access and own more leadership qualities for the varied roles you will take on in your career. The course combines classroom work with fieldwork and coaching in a rehearsal space to build your agility and authenticity.
Do you want to create new things, question rules, find better ways of doing things, develop your creative muscles, and lead productive change within established organizations? This experiential, skills-based course will arm you with tactical tools that are critical for identifying and executing on innovation opportunities.
Learn how to lead a team, encourage creativity, ensure coordination, deal with difficult members, improve group performance, and manage the boundaries between the team and other parts of the organization. In this course, you’ll analyze cases, and then complete a group project and analyze your own teamwork and outcomes.
This class introduces conceptual models, tactical approaches, and self-assessment tools that can help you to manage workplace power dynamics more wisely and skillfully. You will also explore specific, real-world examples and examine your views on the ethical exercise of power and influence in your work life.
This is primarily a course about ethics, but it is far from a typical ethics course. Students will not spend time discussing ethical dilemmas, or trying to decide what is right or wrong in ethical settings. Instead, students will adopt a psychological approach to understanding ethical behavior. Students will try to provide some answers to the most fundamental problem in all of ethics: Why do good people sometimes do bad things?
This leadership course places you directly at the center of how to make things happen for your business. Case discussions and team exercises will strengthen your decision-making power, improve your negotiation techniques, and help you understand the components of a successful team.
Use the social structure around you to identify opportunities to create value, mobilize resources, and organize to deliver value. Case-based class discussions serve as a framework for exploring high-performance teams, corporate culture, reputations, leading strategic change, leveraging best practices, communicating a vision, reading the informal organization, and integrating operations across business units.
This course is a highly practical guide to expressing your ideas more persuasively. We’ll take simple techniques for improving and sharpening our arguments, and practice delivering them in a compelling way.
This class introduces conceptual models, tactical approaches, and self-assessment tools that can help you to manage workplace power dynamics more wisely and skillfully. You will also explore specific, real-world examples and examine your views on the ethical exercise of power and influence in your work life.
This course is an introduction to the ways certain people and groups have a competitive advantage because of their social network.
This course aims to help students excel in one of the business world's most important competencies: the ability to construct and to deliver a powerful, influential narrative.
The most effective way to grow as a leader is to practice your leadership skills in real-world situations, reflect on your experiences, and adapt your approach based on what you’ve learned. Here are just a few ways to apply your leadership skills at Booth:
Work one on one with a leadership coach, participate in workshops dedicated to essentials of leading, and attend weekend retreats. Specialized programs also address the interests of specific student populations, such as two annual programs for women, Booth Women Advance and Lead(HER)ship.
Personalized Learning
Booth is home to the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge, one of the top accelerator programs in the nation. And the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation provides the knowledge, skills, and experience you need to turn your ideas into successful companies, products, and services.
Support for Startups
Booth students serve in leadership roles throughout the administration, including conducting admissions interviews. You can also develop leadership skills by participating in and leading Full-Time MBA student-led groups or Evening and Weekend MBA student-led groups.
Leadership Roles
Get firsthand experience in nonprofit management through our Net Impact Board Fellows program, which matches Booth MBA students with nonprofit organizations to complete a real-world project and prepare for future board responsibilities.
Board Experience
Test your theories and gain valuable experience in some of the world’s most prestigious competitions on campus and around the globe.
Participate in a Competition
Each year, Full-Time, Evening, and Weekend MBA students can attend a number of different weekend retreats. These retreats help you exercise self-leadership and take responsibility for your development. You can work together in small groups, create goals for your life at Booth and beyond, and make plans for how to put plans into motion. These retreats takes place at a variety of destinations.
Self-Leadership
This program brings together students from across the university, empowering them with the skills to tackle their communities’ most pressing challenges.
University of Chicago Obama Foundation Scholars
The Full-Time MBA Program provides you with freedom: academic freedom, freedom to take risks, and freedom to define your impact in the world.
Full-Time MBA Program
Our top-ranked Evening MBA and Weekend MBA Programs accommodate the schedules and lifestyles of working, goal-oriented professionals.
Part-Time MBA Programs
To gain a global perspective, you need an MBA from a global school. Earn an MBA from Booth in Chicago, London, or Hong Kong without interrupting your career.
Executive MBA ProgramQuestions about leadership development at Chicago Booth? Reach out to us.
Email Leadership Development for:
Full-Time MBA
Evening MBA and Weekend MBA
Executive MBA