MIT’s brand of leadership.

At MIT, we believe leadership combines the courage to confront big challenges with the practicality of getting things done. If anyone knows how to tackle the hard problems, it’s MIT. Every day, we’re reshaping the conventional approach to leadership—turning it upside down and shaking it. Because the future demands it. 

Leadership is not a title or a person. It’s a process.

At MIT, we’re smart enough to know we’re smarter together. We’re less interested in the various definitions of the term leadership and more interested in enabling diverse individuals to collaborate in solving the world’s toughest problems. To us, rigor, innovation, and real outputs matter more than the appearance of success. 

Leadership turns analysis into action.

Great ideas are only as good as the actions they create. MIT leaders are both analytic thinkers and relentless experimenters. In our courses and programs, you will learn what it takes to translate ideas into collective action to make positive change. We believe that analytical skill combined with active leadership equals transformation. It’s an unbeatable combination. 

Leadership is a practice anyone can develop.

Leadership development at MIT means examining yourself and others, and how you can work together to maximize performance on three levels—individual, team, and organization. Key to our distinct leadership development process is a diagnostic component that allows you to identify gaps in your own skills, and an action-oriented component that will help you develop skills to close those gaps. And then, we’ll give you plenty of opportunities to put what you’ve learned into practice before you graduate. 

MIT's Leadership Development Process at Three Levels

Edgar Schein | Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus, Professor Emeritus, Work and Organization Studies
"We’ve put way too much emphasis on the leader as an individual and not nearly enough emphasis on leadership as a process. If you define leadership as doing something new and different and better, then you find leadership happening all over the place."
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