At its core, leadership is about unleashing others’ potential—providing them with the environment, resources, motivation, and strategy to succeed and reach their goals. Yet before you can bring out the best in your employees, you need to do the same for yourself.
Transitioning from an individual contributor to a leader requires different skills, perspectives, and frameworks.
“All individuals who are asked to take on leadership responsibility find themselves on a path of personal development,” says Harvard Business School Professor Joshua Margolis in the online course Leadership Principles, “learning how to conduct themselves in new ways to enable those they’re leading to thrive and get their work done.”
While learning as you go is an option, strong leadership requires working in advance to set yourself and your team up for success. Studying leadership can prepare you with actionable frameworks, perspectives, and foresight to be the leader you want to be.
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DOWNLOAD NOWHow to Study Leadership
There are several ways to study leadership, each with its own benefits and drawbacks, including:
1. One-time leadership sessions:
Attending trainings and talks by senior leaders within your organization or field can be an effective way to glean key insights, often for free. The downside of these offerings is that they only cover so much within their given time constraints and typically don’t come with credentials.
2. Master of business administration (MBA) or master of leadership degree programs:
Although a bigger investment of time and money, an MBA program can provide a holistic understanding of business and how to lead across geographies and departments. For a similar experience with a greater focus on leadership, consider a master of leadership degree program.
3. Leadership certificate courses:
If you want to gain deep expertise that aligns with your leadership goals on a relatively short timeline, a certificate course could be the right fit. Although still an investment of time and money, certificate courses can provide the skills you need for various facets of leadership and bolster your resume.
While the method you select depends on your goals, budget, and time constraints, studying leadership can position you for increased responsibility. Here are seven reasons to pursue it.
Related: How Leadership Training Can Help You Transform Your Organization
Why Study Leadership? 7 Reasons
1. Identify Your Leadership Style
A critical part of preparing for leadership is introspection. Purposeful self-reflection can help you identify your strengths, areas for improvement, and how you’d like to shape your personal leadership style.
In the online course Leadership Principles, HBS professors Anthony Mayo and Joshua Margolis prompt learners to reflect using three frameworks:
- Imprint: How the people you lead experience you
- Function: The method by which you provide structure, direction, support, and development to your team
- Motivation: The desires, stimuli, and incentives that drive you to pursue a specific course of action
Each framework has several components that invite further reflection. What’s your current leadership style? Which areas do you want to change or strengthen? Leadership Principles also provides self-assessments and opportunities to receive peer feedback on your developing style.
A leadership course can guide you through the reflection process and provide real-world examples of leaders with varying styles to help you decide the kind you want to be.
2. Make Decisions to Lead and Manage Change
While leadership and management aren’t the same, the most effective managers are also leaders. If you manage a team, knowing how to lead and manage organizational change is imperative.
In the course Management Essentials, leading change is likened to being the architect who designs a building and managing change to being the builder who constructs it. In some roles, you must be both, making critical decisions that impact your team or organization.
“For modern business, change and instability have become the new normal,” says HBS Professor David Garvin in Management Essentials. “Today, companies are evolving and industries are changing more quickly than ever before.”
He adds, “To succeed in this type of environment, managers today not only need skills in execution, they must also learn to initiate and manage change.”
A leadership and management course can give you the skills to design, direct, and implement organizational change.
3. Leverage Power and Influence within Your Organization
To be an effective leader, you must understand how power and influence work and use both to make positive change within your organization.
In the online course Power and Influence for Positive Impact, power is defined as the ability to influence a person or group’s behaviors—whether through persuasion or coercion. As a leader, you must influence your team members’ mindsets and behaviors using persuasion and motivate them to do their best work.
The power associated with a leadership title—called positional power—only extends so far. To gain the hearts and minds of your team, you need to cultivate and leverage personal and relational power, too. A leadership course can provide a framework for thinking about power and tools to cultivate it for leadership success.
4. Remain Agile and Create Value in Negotiations
As a leader, you likely need to negotiate on behalf of your team or organization. Negotiations can be stress-inducing and have devastating results if approached incorrectly.
The online course Negotiation Mastery provides analytical tools for approaching negotiations and simulation exercises to test your skills with fellow learners.
Equipping yourself with the mindset, tools, and tactics to negotiate successfully can help you be a more effective leader.
Related: 6 Characteristics of an Effective Leader
5. Navigate Ethically Challenging Situations
Your responsibilities shift when transitioning to a new leadership role, as do the stakeholders you answer to. Those responsibilities include ethical, legal, and economic demands that impact investors, customers, suppliers, employees, and society.
“Business leaders often need to navigate the gray area where responsibilities conflict, pressure is real, and there’s no one right answer,” says HBS Professor Nien-hê Hsieh in a video for Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability. “What’s best for an organization’s bottom line could cause legal complications or raise ethical considerations.”
Studying leadership can provide an understanding of those responsibilities and a roadmap for navigating them when they conflict.
6. Establish an Environment for Successful Strategy Execution
“Implementation is the fundamental job of management and one of the hardest to do well,” Garvin says in Management Essentials. “When I speak with managers, they usually cite strategy execution as the biggest challenge they face.”
As a leader and manager, you’re responsible for creating an environment in which your team can successfully execute your organization’s strategy.
In the online course Strategy Execution, HBS Professor Robert Simons teaches you how to evaluate roadblocks and tensions surrounding your organization’s strategy execution, design effective measurement systems, and empower employees using proprietary frameworks and tools.
Creating an environment designed for smooth, communicative, measured, and purposeful processes can help you lead your team through strategy implementation.
7. Broaden Your Leadership Scope and Scale
Leadership studies aren’t reserved for those new to the field. If you want to become a higher-level leader, you can benefit from a leadership course.
If you’re an experienced leader, Organizational Leadership can prepare you to broaden your scope and scale.
“What do we mean by scale and scope?” Mayo says in the course. “Scale refers to the sheer size and magnitude of what you’re leading—how many people, how large a budget, and how many teams, locations, and operations you oversee. Scope refers to the range and diversity of what you’re responsible for—people, teams, business lines, locations, operations, and facilities.”
Because leadership’s phases come with different challenges and opportunities, taking leadership courses specific to each can help you gain the skills and confidence to face them.
Finding the Best Leadership Course for You
If you’re considering a leadership certificate course, the number of options can be overwhelming. To find the best course for you, ask:
- What are my leadership goals, and will this course help me reach them?
- Which format works best for me: in-person or online?
- Is the course taught by instructors with high levels of expertise?
- Is the content presented in an engaging manner?
- Will I have the opportunity to connect and network with peers?
Selecting a course that aligns with your goals, experience level, and learning style can position you for leadership success.
Are you interested in elevating your leadership skills? Explore our online leadership and management courses. Download our free flowchart to find the best fit.
