One-Year MBA

Leadership Development

DEFINING A LEADER

Leadership skills are central to business success. At Goizueta, we make cultivating these talents central to your MBA experience. In our Goizueta Leadership Development Program, you learn across three important pillars: academic, experiential, and reflective — each providing the experiences necessary for you to lead an effective team and deliver results. Creating dynamic leaders is infused into every aspect of what we do.

Becoming a Better Leader

Advancing Your Leadership Abilities

Academic

Throughout our courses and electives, you are exposed to the fundamental core values that drive principled, effective leaders.
Experiential

We integrate experiential opportunities so you practice resilient leadership in real-life situations.
Reflective

Woven throughout are opportunities for you to receive immediate and consistent feedback from coaches, mentors, faculty, and other students.

As a way to combine the academic leadership offerings and the co-curricular leadership experiences, you will have the opportunity to be awarded the Certificate of Advanced Leadership. In addition to completing the required academic courses and experiential activities, you will be required to take the capstone course in the spring semester of your final year.

The capstone course is a leadership seminar combining Professor Rick Gilkey’s research on cognitive leadership behaviors as well as teachings from Professors Karl Kuhnert and Peter Topping. Students will be required to write a capstone reflection paper that touches on one or more aspects of Goizueta’s leadership model:

working across boundaries
acting with integrity
creating vision
taking action
demonstrating resilience

By completing all of the required items, you will be eligible to receive the certificate at the end of your final semester.

At Goizueta, we make sure you get the hands-on experience you need to succeed as a leader. The Leader's Reaction Course (LRC) is a unique experiential leadership opportunity that builds upon the programs and facilities of the U.S. Army at Fort Moore, Georgia that is used to train all the Army's Officer candidates. This course builds upon the programs of the U.S. Army for developing leadership. Throughout the day-long course, you will get an intense, hands-on experience that emphasizes learning through team-based problem solving, decision making, and effective communication skills.

We place participants in team-based leadership scenarios similar to those encountered by officer candidates for the U.S. Army and solving problems with guidance and feedback by leadership coaches. Formed into small teams, participants will overcome challenges, surmount physical barriers, establish plans of action, and execute their plan to solve a problem. After each event, the participants will execute an after action review to discuss what went right, wrong, and what needs to be improved. Through this feedback process and reflection, students can then apply their lessons in subsequent challenges.

The Delta Air Lines Leadership Coaching Fellows (LCF) program at Goizueta provides leadership learning opportunities for you to understand, practice, and enhance your skills of providing team and individual performance feedback. The objective of the program is to provide the behavioral, relational, cognitive, and emotional tools that will enable selected students to effectively interact with teams and individuals to improve performance. This will be done by training them to be peer coaches for other MBA students in selected team settings of the curriculum and 1:1 coaching sessions. Fellows will learn how to coach and to be coached. They will work with an Executive Coach one-on-one, develop essential skills as a leader to provide individual and team coaching, and be provided the opportunity to further develop their leadership skills by learning from thought leaders in academia and the business community.

Leadership Coaching Fellows:

Build self awareness
Learn to coach peers, providing feedback in a team and one-on-one setting
Receive personalized coaching from an executive coach
Learn from leader's experiences
Engage with distinguished leaders

This program is offered as a non-credit elective that requires MBA candidates to apply and be selected through an interview process.

Learn More

Through the Leaders in Residence (LIR) program, we connect you to distinguished leaders with significant senior leadership experience. Our leaders provide guest lecturing in selected classes, conduct meetings with you on career or management related issues, and participate in panels on selected topics. Each year, Goizueta's dean invites a few selected leaders to be join the Leaders in Residence program.

Current Leaders in Residence include:

Tom Beaty - President & CEO, Insight Sourcing Group and SpendHQ
Dagmar Boggs - President, 7-Eleven Global Customer Team at The Coca-Cola Company
Tony Charaf - Former Senior Vice President & Chief Cargo Officer, President Technical Operations/MRO at Delta Air Lines, Inc.
Hervé Coyco - Program Director for International Companies such as Total and Air France KLM
H. James Dallas - Former Senior Vice President, Quality and Operations at Medtronic, Inc.
Donnie Hodge - CEO & Owner of Alta Gracia Apparel
Thomas Kuntz - Former Corporate Executive Vice President, President and Chief Executive Officer at SunTrust Banks
Michael E. Shapiro - Former Director of the High Museum of Art

Take your leadership to a higher level with the Goizueta Advanced Leadership Academy (GALA). This program explores leadership in every context — featuring an ambitious, innovative curriculum with a mix of seminars, guest speakers, and tailored coaching designed to develop you into a thoughtful leader. The curriculum is capped off with a capstone trip to the British Virgin Islands, where you can put your burgeoning leadership skills to the test by sailing open waters.

Want to maximize your leadership development during your pursuit of your MBA? Then the GALA program is for you.