Being a good manager is different than being a good leader. At Ivey, we teach students the skills and capabilities that will help them to become leaders who think cross-enterprise. In the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership classroom, students tackle the intricate, complicated issues of leadership through cases and simulations specifically designed to test their ability to think holistically about the enterprise. These practical hands-on learning opportunities will help them thrive as leaders in a complex global business world. More on teaching leadership ...
Ivey’s Case-Method of Learning
Real-world learning has long been a hallmark of Ivey's approach to business education. The School is distinguished by its case-method of learning, which builds critical judgment and decision-making skills through an interactive and challenging learning experience where students make tough leadership decisions from day one.
As the second-largest producer of business cases, after Harvard Business School, Ivey's cases are designed to encourage students to think broadly about the enterprise and to also see beyond to its place in a network of enterprises, in a manner we call leading cross-enterprise. By constantly seeing the big picture, cross-enterprise leaders will be more likely to lead initiatives that leverage the full potential of societal forces, such as globalization, competition and technology and make positive gains for their companies. More on learning with cases...
The Institute supports the development of leadership related cases, seeking to add to Ivey's large inventory of cases on leadership. To see our best-selling and latest cases click here.
Student Leadership
At Ivey, we believe learning does not just take place in the classroom, we also encourage students to put their classroom lessons into action in society to achieve tangible results and make a lasting impact. Our students take this sentiment to heart and contribute to society in a variety of ways.
Our Ivey Connects groups inspire students to share their time and managerial talent with those in need in our global community. They give back to society through initiatives such as community action days and providing free consulting to non-profit organizations.
The student-run Ivey LEADER Project sends Ivey's HBA, MBA, and PhD students to Eastern Europe to teach foundational business skills to university students and entrepreneurs in newly developing economies. In addition to giving back to society, the students gain a breadth of rich cultural and business-related experiences.
Ivey’s novel Learning Through Action course provides an opportunity for our HBA students to apply what they've learned in the real world, showcase their strategic consulting skills and make a positive impact outside the School.
Ivey’s student executive groups, the Ivey HBA Association and Ivey MBA Association also plan numerous student leadership activities.
Leadership Courses at Ivey
At Ivey, Leadership is not just taught in one course – in all degree and non-degree program we offer a variety of Leadership themed courses that delve deeper into the critical elements of Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership. Listed below are some of the Leadership courses that are a sample currently being offered:
Leading People and Organizations
The course evolves over three main modules: decision making in teams, managing yourself and managing people in organizations. The team management module focuses on issues and behaviors that can be obstacles to effectively participating and managing teams, including cross-functional and diverse teams. Approaches to effective team building are discussed. The module on self allows students to assess their own values and goals as they pertain to their future work and their private lives. The module on leading people deals with issues and behaviors that are essential to effectively leading organizations, including building commitment. Throughout the modules, the discussion searches for sources of leadership failure at the individual, group, and organizational level and explores approaches to preventing such outcomes. The course emphasizes the need for leadership from within individuals and to for organizations to contribute positively to societal goals.
Learning from Leaders
Learning from Leaders is a course designed for students who aspire to major leadership roles during their professional careers. Students discuss major concepts such as the key aspects of leading and following, the difference between leading and managing, self- assessment, the costs of and satisfactions from leading, areas and stages of preparation for leadership, mentoring, and planning for leadership roles. Intermittently, we invite a series of demonstrably successful leaders to the classroom to answer student’s questions about all aspects of their leadership experiences. Students review each leader’s biography prior to a discussion, and small teams write what they learned from their interactions with the leader. Students read a package of articles on leadership and the Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers: Stories of Success. Near the conclusion of the course each student writes a Personal Plan for Leadership.
Transcendent Leadership
The Transcendent Leadership course emerged from a year long dialogue with senior leaders around the globe about what we could learn from the economic crisis about leadership. The initiative was called “Leadership on Trial”. The Transcendent Leadership course is one of the primary vehicles to implement insights arising from the Leadership Forums about what it will take to develop the next generation of leaders.
We anticipate using a variety of methodologies to immerse students in leadership development including cases, role plays, speakers, exercises, and examining lessons from leaders in business and the arts.
The course is ideally suited to students who are prepared to take a strong self-reflective role to engage a learning experience that will be quite transformational. It should serve students who desire to bring the best of themselves to exert leadership whether that be in a for profit or not for profit organization, at the top of the firm or influencing from lower levels.
Cross-Enterprise Leadership
The course is focused on Cross-Enterprise Leadership. The course is consistent with the Ivey view of Cross-Enterprise Leadership: an action-oriented approach that prepares students to look beyond the walls, organizational charts and silos and approach business issues from a perspective that spans the entire enterprise. Cross-enterprise leaders have the breadth and capacities to see the bigger picture. The cross-enterprise perspective is essential for success in the world of business. We ask some "big" questions: What does it take to lead cross-enterprise? Who leads best; and how do they do it? How are great leaders developed? We have selected cases and activities with a strong cross-enterprise leadership flavor. Team teaching is a key feature of this course. The students can expect to have multiple instructors and high-profile guests visit the class to reinforce the cross-enterprise leadership perspective.
Leadership: A Habit of Mind
This course is designed to teach the profound importance of thought choice, habits and thinking style in determining a leader’s success. Based on evidence that we come what we think, the course argues that leadership is a disposition, more than a position; a thought choice, rather than a title.
Leadership comes from within, so assessment tools such as DiSC allows participants to gain a detailed knowledge of self, their strengths and opportunities for improvement. Self-awareness is seen as the prerequisite to reading others’ styles and as a result learning how to speak the language of the potential follower. With an emphasis on adapting to the other’s style in order to create trust and full buy-in, the course guarantees expanding your skills to persuade, influence and effectively lead others within both your personal as well as professional life.
Strategic Leadership: The Paradox of Leading and Managing
This course is designed to help you “wrap your brain” around the paradox of leading and managing. Organizations need leaders with a long-term perspective. This means that they need executives who are willing to accept risk and willing to invest in employee development and training, market research, and research and development. Organizations also need executives with a day-to-day perspective. This means that they need executives who define levels of required return, specify budgets and evaluate subordinates on the basis of objective financial information in addition to the strategic process that led to their organization’s performance. Unfortunately, the requirement to invest long-term means that the bottom line does not look as good as it could in the short-term. On the other hand, making the bottom line look good in the short-term may mean a lack of strategic investment that damages the firm in the long-term. When you have two self-evident, co-existing truths that are contradictory, you have a paradox. The paradox created by the necessity for today’s executives to be both leaders and managers is the focus of this course. The course materials challenge students’ current thinking about leadership and suggest ways to enhance the long-term viability of the organizations for which the students will eventually work. In addition, students will be encouraged to become better managers so that their organizations will be financially stable in the short-term. Finally, students will be encouraged to embrace visionary and managerial leaders in the organizations in which they will work and to become strategic leaders themselves.
Leading Action and Change
Whether incited by technology, competition, globalization, or inspiration, organization change has become a constant in today’s business world. This course is designed to achieve three key objectives. First, to understand how to design, build and maintain effective organizations. Second, to understand the nature of organizational change. Third, to hone change management skills by analyzing resistance and support for change, by using appropriate change strategies for overcoming resistance and building support, and by creating and implementing an effective change plan. The course explores key concepts around change management through a variety of topics and pedagogical approaches.
Negotiation for Leaders
This course is designed to help participants develop their negotiation skills and ability to understand and analyze conflict situations. A basic premise of the course is that while leaders need analytical skills to develop optimal solutions to problems, they also need strong negotiation skills to get these solutions accepted and implemented in their organizations. Further, leaders need to constantly negotiate their interdependence with various internal and external stakeholders in order to achieve their objectives. The course allows participants the opportunity to develop these skills experientially (through participation in negotiation role-play exercises) and to understand negotiation in useful analytical frameworks.
Managing People for Exceptional Performance
Key to effective leadership is the ability to lead and collaborate with others in order to get tasks accomplished effectively and efficiently. This course is organized around six sets of activities critical to managerial success, each involving face-to-face interaction and a high degree of interpersonal skill. Within each set of activities, specific practices that differentiate highly successful managers from average or below-average managers are provided as guidelines to behavior. The activities that are considered include: selection; coaching for exceptional performance; mediation and resolving interpersonal conflict; getting commitment to goals and standards; conducting performance reviews; and managing problem employees.
The Operating Manager
The fundamental premise for the course is that every leader has both an operating and a strategic sector in his or her job. Even CEO's spend part of their time making things happen in the short term. The emphasis in "The Operating Manager Course" is on immediate decision making, action planning and implementation tactics. The point of view is most often that of a leader in his or her early job tenure, who must develop the ability to lead, to take action, and to operate effectively in a system generally designed by others and in an environment often not under his or her control. Case situations describe situational leadership opportunities wherein there may be a hundred ways to lose and only one or two ways to win. Case situations allow students to repeatedly practice the 4E's of effective leadership - envision, enable, encourage, and enjoy.
Women in Leadership
This course is for students, both men and women, who want to promote the movement of women into leadership positions in Canadian business organizations. Through case studies, debates, and conversations with senior women leaders, we will investigate the factors enhancing women’s career opportunities and identify the skills that it takes for women to build successful careers. The objectives of this course are to: (1) Build knowledge of the current status of women as Canadian business leaders; (2) Deepen understanding of the factors affecting women’s opportunities in business; (3) Identify strategies for enhancing women’s movement into senior leadership positions; and (4) hone the personal skills to build one’s own career (regardless of whether you are a man or a woman). Students will find the course a valuable tool for enhancing their understanding of women’s career development and for building their own career success.
Creativity and Leadership
This course uses creative literature, music, art and film as a way of exploring fundamental leadership challenges. It contends that one of the best ways to learn about the perils, paradoxes, and joys of leadership is to experience them as creative artists have realized them in their works. Texts studied include Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the poetry of William Butler Yeats, jazz, da Vinci’s art, Shakespeare’s plays, and the films of Woody Allen.
The course also explores the essential link between creativity and leadership. It explores different approaches to creativity—psychological, intellectual, and organizational—to investigate the nature of creativity itself. It invites students to experiment with their own creativity to become more creative thinkers.
Business Ethics
Business leaders are called upon to make key decisions that affect everything from day-to-day operations to long-term strategic planning. More often than not, these decisions have embedded in them ethical components, although in many cases these components are not in plain sight. Effective leaders are able to expose and confront the moral aspects of complicated business decisions. Through this short elective course students are introduced to the complexity of ethical decision-making. Cases studies allow students to develop skills for identifying and analyzing moral issues, conflicts, and responsibilities that arise in business. Students learn how to construct and communicate rational, responsible, and realistic approaches to addressing the core ethical issues.
Communication and Society
This course is about stakeholder communication, an essential element of corporate leadership. It explores how corporations do and should communicate with the public. It attempts to define “the public” in relation to “business,” and to work out a framework for ethical dialogue between corporations and society. Because this dialogue is tense at many times, the course also explores how to handle difficult conversations successfully.
Cross-Cultural Management
This course states a management theme, yet it is truly about leadership with respect to culture. The course starts off with an introduction to culture, including its definition and dimensions, and then moves on to the issues and problems managers may face with when different cultures collide. The main thrust of the course is about helping future managers to develop behavioral skills that allow them to be more effective in cross-cultural settings. An underlying premise of the course is that culture changes as people who share certain values, beliefs, and practices are deal with new issues, events, and experiences. The final module of the course discusses how leaders and organizations can influence cultural changes that allow organization to be more effective. Given the tremendous influence of today’s large corporations on society, the cultural leadership by organizations can shape a society’s culture significantly.
Operating in a Crisis
The main objectives of this course are to expose students to the various challenges of operating a business in crisis. Upon successful completion of this course students should have the ability to: (1) Identify a crisis, determine the various types of crises, and the source of the crisis; (2) Determine the firm’s ability to survive the current crisis and assess the impact the crisis will have on the various elements of the organization, including the financial stability of the organization, the relationships with various stakeholders, and the organization’s reputation within the industry and community at large; (3) Develop a corrective action plan, including implementation; and learn how to sell your plan both internally and externally; and (4) Identify your own capability to manage in a crisis and the impact that unforeseen crisis’s will have on those closest to you.
Leaders Under Fire
This course supports Ivey’s mission to develop business leaders who are prepared to successfully manage through business and emotional pressures and dilemmas that will face them in an increasingly complex, diverse and challenging global environment. Being a "leader" today often means facing challenges that require peak emotional and physical condition. "Leaders Under Fire" is designed for students who seek to gain the critical insight and skills to address highly challenging scenarios and situations that they will face in the work place—ones that are not often explored until they are encountered in real-time.
