Overview

Leadership Development with a Personalized Approach

We believe understanding your talents and recognizing undeveloped areas that may need bolstering set the foundation to help you achieve your career and personal goals. 

The Vanderbilt Executive MBA approach to your development is comprised of 3 pillars: individual leader development, career management, and the C-Team experience. Tailored and personalized to you, our approach has one goal: to help you develop your individual capacity as a leader, no matter what function, industry, or current role you have (or desire). 

For each pillar, you have access to coaching resources that support you and help you gain insight to facilitate the process and challenge your thinking. 

Leadership Development Program

Individual Leader Development

Don't Just Lead Learn Business. Learn to Lead.

Through our top-tier Leadership Development Program, you’ll have your own personal executive coach, plus an assessment used by Fortune 500 companies. Your executive coach can help you see your leadership traits and natural tendencies from a different perspective. Understanding your leadership style will expand your individual capacity as a leader now and into the future. 

Leadership Development Program

What to Expect?

The process of executive coaching is holistic and engages you in self-reflection and self-insight as you address questions and discover new ideas and perspectives. It will often begin with an analysis of the data you have about yourself, including your strengths, weaknesses, motivators, and values.

Your executive coach will be a “thinking partner” and sounding board with whom you will have dialogue over the course of five sessions. They will collaborate with you in a thought-provoking and creative process to maximize your personal and professional potential.

 

In addition, you have the opportunity to leverage The Hogan Assessment, which will help you gain insight into your strengths, challenges, how others perceive you, and how you can manage yourself differently to achieve personal leadership goals.

As you move through the process, you will become armed with new insights and learning which you can apply immediately in real-time. You will have the time to reflect on each experience, expand your perspective, and improve your capabilities.

Understand that leadership development is not a linear process. It will often feel messy, confusing and, at times, slow. Personal development is an incremental process. Alongside your executive coach, you will also have the LDP Team to support you as you do the hard work. Our goal is to offer guidance as you drive towards achieving your personal and professional goals and help you develop a habit of self-reflection as you learn from pivotal experiences throughout your career.

Career Management

Wherever you’re aspiring to go in your career, our career management team is here to help you get further, faster. If your aim is to rise higher in your current organization, our career resources and coaching are designed to teach you career enhancement and advancement. If your aim is to find new opportunities elsewhere, our team can show you how to make yourself more marketable to employers and teach you to navigate the job search. 

Career coaching is more than updating your resume and LinkedIn profile. We can help you explore:

What do I want to do with my MBA?

Do I want to move to the next level in my career?

Do I want to make a career switch?

What do MBA careers look like?

 

How do I conduct a successful job search?

What does a successful job search strategy look like?

How do I conduct industry research?

How can I leverage the Vanderbilt Business network?

Do I have marketable job search tools?

What is my personal brand?

Is my brand reflected in all of my job search channels: resume, LinkedIn, and other communications?

 

What career resources does Vanderbilt’s Executive MBA program provide?

One-on-one career coaching

Beyond B-School tip sheets and videos

LinkedIn Guys Missing Manual

Career assessments, resume samples, career webinars, and more

C-Team Experience

Each C-Team comprises 4 to 5 individuals who bring diverse skills and experiences to the table. Diversity comes not only in job function and industry but in age, gender, ethnicity, and more. Those unique backgrounds create the ideal opportunity to maximize the learning experience. Intended to simulate a real-world corporate C-Suite team, the Executive MBA C-Team becomes a supported “learning lab,” in which members can draw on the team's expertise while stretching to reach their leadership potential. 

Learn more about our C-Team experience.

 

By the numbers

17

The number of years Vanderbilt's business school has incorporated the Leadership Development Program into its programs.

See more facts>

FAQ

Executive MBA Leadership Development

Q. What is the Hogan Assessment?
A.

Hogan is a personality-based assessment used by more than half of Fortune 500 companies to hire and develop individual leaders like you. Hogan was developed to improve workplace performance and is used among companies globally to do so. By taking Hogan, you will get three reports that give you insight into your natural leadership style, how you approach stress, and your values and motivations.

Q. What is executive coaching?
A.

It is a collaborative, mutually designed relationship between you and a qualified executive coach. It is a formal engagement for a period of agreed upon time and to reach agreed upon goals. It is about exploring together to create a path of where you are today and where you want to be in the future by determining what the gaps are and how to close the gaps through learning and action.

Q. Who are the executive coaches?
A.

Our executive coaches in the Owen Coaching Network are a carefully vetted, high-performing set of independent coaches whose full-time job is to coach executives, leaders, and future industry leaders. Five coaches specifically work with the Executive MBA students. Their primary clients are corporate leaders, and they take on as many Owen student coaching clients as their schedules will allow in a given year. Our coaches are qualified and certified by the International Coaching Federation, and the coaches who work with Executive MBA students are a specific sub-set of the larger network. Our coaches all have extensive experience working as executives and/or coaching experienced executives.

Q. What happens after I have completed my coaching sessions?
A.

Throughout the Executive MBA program, the LDP Team is always a resource to you. We are happy to meet with you one-on-one to support you during coaching, if needed, as well as once you have finished the coaching engagement to determine the best course of action for you.

Q. What are the types of things students work on with their executive coach?
A.

It varies widely from student to student, by design, but here are some examples: increasing confidence, dealing with ambiguity, becoming less of a perfectionist, managing stress, reducing self-critical thoughts, managing conflict, speaking up when you aren’t an expert on a topic, enhancing listening skills, and asking more questions just to name a few. 

Since the leadership journey is a lifelong one, we try to help you break down the larger themes into manageable chunks with specific strategies and tactics for addressing them. Despite starting with small and seemingly simple tasks to help improve each desired area doesn't mean that those specific strategies and tactics are easy, which is what makes leadership so challenging and so rewarding. 

Our goal is for each student to leave Vanderbilt with greater self-awareness and improved leadership skills and for them to leave with the tools for continuing to grow their leadership capabilities throughout their career.

Q. How does leadership development differ from career management? What are the synergies?
A.

Leadership development is about empowering you with the tools and skills to assess your strengths, weaknesses and effectiveness so that you can better learn from your experiences and build personal development growth habits as you progress through your career trajectory. Career management is about planning and evaluating your career trajectory.

Q. What if engaging with an executive coach for a 6-month period seems overwhelming or is not appealing?
A.

There are several options, depending on how much (or little) you would like to focus on your personal leadership development journey. Your meeting schedule and/or programming may also differ depending on which program track you select. Learn more on the Leadership Development Page. If your priority and/or focus is career, then participate in programming offered by the Career Management Center.

Q. Is the leadership development program part of the curriculum?
A.

No, LDP is not part of any curriculum at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. By design, LDP supplements your academic work to help you develop as a more capable, well-rounded business professional. Just like in business, when your company offers you access to resources dedicated to high-potential leaders, your level of initiative, openness to new challenges, and drive for success is demonstrated by how you leverage those resources.