Kravis Leadership Institute: Leaders in the Making
By Kristin Baker P'20
A key part of the CMC mission is to "educate its students for thoughtful and productive lives and responsible leadership in business, government, and the professions." To that goal, the Kravis Leadership Institute (KLI), located directly across from the Cube at the Kravis Center, is an incredible resource for our students. KLI is a premier academic and research center that provides CMC students unique opportunities to develop real-world leadership skills for public, private, and social sectors. Since joining CMC in January 2017 as professor of psychology and academic director of KLI, Professor David Day has been instrumental in developing a new and more relevant leadership competency model, aligned with President Hiram Chodosh’s vision for CMC students and the College.
“Everyone comes into CMC with different leadership skills and experience,” explains Professor Day. “Our goal is to have them leave CMC with a clear idea of what makes a great leader and goals to improve their leadership ability in their chosen career paths.” To this end, Professor Day and his colleagues have implemented a leadership initiative, based on the KLI competency model, that provides students with the ability to develop leadership capabilities through a wide range of opportunities. Professor Day explains the initiative as an “interconnected nexus of assessments, challenges, and support that helps drive a student’s leadership development over a long period of time.”
Based on the new leadership model (see diagram) KLI is coaching our students to Lead Courageously, Lead Creatively, and Lead Collaboratively. Leading courageously involves developing an entrepreneurial mindset; purposeful, value-based behaviors; and resilience. Leading creatively involves the ability to problem solve, spark change, and effectively engage with others. Leading collaboratively is centered around building meaningful relationships through empathic listening and teamwork.
One component of KLI’s leadership initiative focuses on individualized skill assessment and development. Students select a capability that he/she would like to develop (i.e. a student may want to improve his/her empathic listening skills, a capability necessary to lead collaboratively), and on an easily accessible mobile-digital platform called LeaderAmp, the student would:
- perform a pre-self-assessment to obtain his/her current level of empathetic function
- set goals based on feedback from the pre-assessment
- receive leader-centric coaching on how to become a more empathic listener
- journal about his/her experiences and challenges in trying to reach his/her goal
- perform a post-self-assessment to gauge his/her development on this leadership capability
This type of leadership curriculum has many advantages. Students can self-select which capabilities are of interest to them at a particular point in their development and work on them at their own pace, addressing the fact that people start at different points and change in different ways when developing leadership skills. This customized approach also provides students with an empirical foundation for the evolution of his/her “soft” leadership skills.
This curriculum is designed to work in conjunction with other components of the KLI leadership initiative as well, such as leadership programs, conferences, and internships, all of which are described on the KLI website. Interested students can also join the KLI Facebook page to receive information about events and opportunities at KLI.
Students also have the option to take a leadership sequence, a multidisciplinary minor, comprised of a core, ethics, breadth, experiential, and capstone course requirement. Professor Day acknowledges that students typically want to minor in more technical areas like finance or data analytics, but emphasizes that employers are looking for students who can demonstrate capabilities around leadership.
Through the KLI leadership initiative, CMC students have access to a comprehensive framework that facilitates and accelerates individualized leadership development. Professor Day hopes each incoming CMC student will get involved early in developing his/her leadership competencies so that they leave CMC with knowledge and insight on how to self-identify developmental challenges, overcome these challenges, and grow as a leader throughout their career and lifetime.
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