Programme Content
How can you become a more authentic LGBTQ leader? What will it take to create fully inclusive workplaces?
The LGBTQ Executive Leadership Program curriculum is thoughtfully designed to help you lead with confidence and consciously take risks to accelerate your career. And youll be learning, growing, and networking in great company with a highly qualified and motivated global cohort of leaders and world-renowned Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty and notable guest speakers.
As the first leading business school to develop a program for LGBTQ executives, we have the experience and expertise to meet the unique needs of rising LGBTQ professionals. Our experience tells us that designing specialized curricula that deftly address the needs of diverse populations often provides a more personalized, relevant, and rewarding education experience while also finding common ground.
Maximize your learning with a range of sessions, including:
Core Leadership Sessions
From the neuroscience of leadership to negotiations, youll dig into core leadership topics that help you build your competencies and confidence.
Experiential Learning Sessions
Engage in hands-on workshops and group activities where youll learn to negotiate team dynamics as you experience challenges that explore topics around LGBTQ and gender identity. Collaborate, share, exchange ideas in a supportive environment.
Research-Based Sessions
Get exposed to the most cutting-edge, social and behavioral science research on LGBTQ leadership. Then, think about how to translate that research into practical guidance and develop effective strategies for bringing new insights into organizations in meaningful ways.
Micro Learning Sessions
Small group discussions after breakfast give you the opportunity to discuss timely and relevant topics in an informal and intimate setting to strengthen relationships with your peers and learn from the perspective of others.
Below are just a few of the sessions youll attend as part of the program.
Charting Your Path as a Queer Leader
In this session, youll be asked to declare yourself as a leader. Having clarity on what you want to learn can help you to frame and link together the coming program sessions. Knowing not only your own goals, but the goals of others, will help us support each other and embrace our own identities and others too.
Research suggests one factor may be key to helping us persist in the hard work of attaining worthy goals: self-compassion. Well review this research and understand its meaning for LGBTQ leaders, and youll have an opportunity to discuss it with others and apply it to your work this week.
Authentic Leadership
What does it mean to be an authentic leader? In these sessions, well review the challenges of leaders in contemporary organizations. Well give you an opportunity to reflect on a key dimension of Stanford GSBs brand of leadership: how to use your full self to connect to and influence others around you.
Bringing your full self has been challenging for LGBTQ people in the workplace, as in life making this issue familiar, but problematic, territory. What level of self-disclosure best contributes to your connection to and influence with others? How does self-disclosure influence - or mask - your authentic leadership style?
Creating Inclusive Workplaces
Most leaders appear to understand the link between diversity and innovation and are actively trying to increase the diversity of their workforce, boards, and leadership teams. Yet, many still grapple with how to reduce gender, racial, and other forms of biases in critical functions like recruitment, hiring, and performance evaluations. The cost? Companies unintentionally turn away or lose high-potential talent. For rising LGBTQ leaders, this knowledge may sound very familiar.
In this session, well discuss how to identify biases in organizational functions that block our ability to fairly and accurately assess talent across various dimensions of diversity. Well then draw on empirical case studies to develop evidence-based strategies for more effectively identifying, retaining, and promoting top talent.
