The timing can be determined by your university. Options for when to offer the program include: during a school break; the week after graduation; the week before the beginning of a new semester; during class time as an elective course; as a credit or non-credit course.
Program Components
Class sessions would potentially include the following:
Leadership Sessions
Sample Leadership Sessions include (but are not limited to):
• The Characteristics of an Effective Leader
• Doing Good and Doing Well: How to Balance Your Passion and
Your Paycheck
• Don’t Let Having a Career Prevent You From Having a Life (Work-
Life Balance)
• The 9 Strategies of Effective Time Management
• Managing People: How to Walk the Tightrope Between Flexibility
and Control
• Leadership Style/Know Your Blind Spots
• Leadership Communication
• Becoming a Change Agent (Discover the Selfless Motivation Within)
• Balancing Success and Happiness
• Real Power (Empower Other Leaders)
• Make Peace with Disapproval/Don't Tie Your Self-Confidence to
Your Performance
• The Currency of Leadership: Building Trust
Skill-Building Sessions
These sessions cover the ‘hard skills’ of leadership. In the life of a university student, these are the concrete skills that will help him or her to rise to the specific challenges awaiting them after graduation: to find a career that will motivate them for a lifetime, to excel in that career, and to balance their professional aspirations with a fulfilling personal life. These sessions focus on the university-to-career transition, with an emphasis on transactional career-building skills – such as resume-writing, networking and interviewing – through the lens of the transformational leader.
There are also sessions on work-life balance and time management to help students create personal strategies before entering the world of employment to balance their ambitions with their capacity to reflect on and enjoy life. If your university already covers these topics, The Center for Social Leadership would co-facilitate these sessions with your instructors. We can also invite professionals/practitioners from various sectors of the economy (private, public, nonprofit) to serve on panels during these sessions based on the professional interests of the students. Possible session titles include:
• Interviewing for Success
• The Job Search
• Developing a High-Quality Resumé
• Networking
• Expanding Your Influence and Navigating Through Office Politics
Goal-Setting Sessions
Participants learn a new, revolutionary goal-setting system that enables them to transform their loftier dreams into concrete, deadline-driven goals and upgrade them for a lifetime. Each participant creates their own Vision Statement – a timeless, unattainable summary of their core values and what they want to accomplish in their lives. In parallel, they design a time-sensitive, attainable Action Plan that enables them to transform their Vision Statement into concrete personal and professional goals with the guiding theme that “A goal is a dream with a deadline.”
Leadership Reflection Sessions
Student participants reflect on what they are learning in the program about leadership and about themselves. In each of these sessions, two students review the leadership lessons learned the previous day, with examples of how they can apply them in their everyday lives. Then two additional students each share a new Leadership Principle from the curriculum (they do the readings beforehand) and again share how they can apply it to the leadership challenges they face in their daily lives.
Breakout Sessions
Student participants break into small tables of four or five students. Each participant has the opportunity to work through some of the specific leadership challenges they are currently facing in their career and life through Breakout Sessions where 3-4 other participants and roving consultants/resource people/your instructors dedicate themselves entirely to consulting with the participant and helping them find solutions to the challenges they have identified.
Program Costs and Potential Revenues for the University
The University Leadership Program can be financed in a number of ways. One structure that has worked well in the past: a percentage of the fees charged to student participants are allocated to the university to cover local expenses such as registration, classroom, audio-visual and food expenses; and the other percentage is allocated to The Center for Social Leadership to cover travel, student materials and instructional fees.
Another potential pricing structure is that the university obtains the funding from student tuition fees and pays a set fee to The Center for Social Leadership.
Program Sustainability
If the students evaluate the program highly and are enthusiastic about continuing, CSL could return to offer the program the following semester or year. CSL could also offer an Advanced University Leadership Program in the second year to alumni from the first-year’s program.
CSL’s model is flexible and open for discussion. Our aim is to tailor the University Leadership Program to suit your university’s needs. Professors from your university can teach some of the sessions, and CSL is also willing to train them in how to teach the entire University Leadership Program to make it locally sustainable over time. Also, you can invite some of your professors and university administrators to participate in the leadership program free of charge – hence providing them an extremely high-quality professional development opportunity as part of the leadership training package.
