Just like reading or math, leadership is a skill that anyone can learn. And it’s a valuable skill—leadership is key to achieving any goal you want to accomplish, be it personal, organizational, or societal. Whether you want to live a more purposeful life, lead a Fortune 500 corporation, or launch a civic movement, the more you polish your leadership skills, the more likely you are to achieve your goals.
That’s why we’ve designed the Sanger Leadership Journey, a step-by-step guide that will help you intentionally improve leadership behaviors every day. To enhance your leadership skills, you need to embark on an intentional leadership journey, where practicing evidence-based skills becomes part of your daily life. We believe that each social interaction you have—be it a dinner with friends, a project team meeting at work, a volunteering event, or a class lecture—offers you the chance to experiment with new leadership behaviors and expand your leadership skills.
The Leadership Journey consists of five steps:
- Identify Your Point of Origin
- Chart Your Course
- Get Going with Leadership Behavior Experiments
- Reflect and Update Goals
- Become a Guide for Others
Getting Started
You can visit the Journey website to understand the steps and download a fillable workbook. Additionally, the content will be specifically woven into all Sanger programs this year. Our MBA LDRx students will become especially familiar with the Journey as they will offer a tailored set of leader experiments for members to run, as well as an inclusive peer-coaching community where members can reflect with their small teams on the progress of their experiments and leadership development.
In addition to learning about and starting your own Journey workbook, you can:
- Follow Sanger on social media for weekly leadership behavior experiment tips based on research and data
- Sign up for a Sanger action-based learning experience, such as Leadership Crisis Challenge or Story Lab, where you can put the leadership skills you build to work
- Join one of our year-long learning communities, such as LDRx, for the opportunity to collaborate and reflect with other students on the Journey
Benefits of the Sanger Journey
- t can help connect the different strands of your life into a more intentional journey that will allow you to experience greater meaning as well as greater personal transformation. Many students struggle to integrate different experiences at school, such as clubs, classes, and internships, as well as to see how these experiences can be connected to inform one’s daily personal leadership development work. By viewing these different opportunities through the lens of a clear and intentional leadership journey, you can find ways to connect all of these experiences in ways that will transform you as a leader and expand your leadership skill set.
- The Journey can increase the likelihood of you reaching your professional and personal goals. Taking any form of action in the world requires leadership skills, and putting yourself on the path to intentionally develop these skills on a daily basis will help you better achieve what you want to do in the world.
- Your Journey will help you build stronger connections with others. As experimenting with and talking about leadership behaviors becomes part of your daily life, it will increase your comfort with developing broader and deeper connections with those around you.
A Few Examples
The Journey has already been put into action by our alumni and staff. Here are a few examples:
Daryl Brown, Ross FTMBA Class of 2019, Regional Sales Manager at LinkedIn
Step 1 – Point of Origin: I came to Ross from a career at a large conglomerate, with roles in Finance, Risk Management, and Sales – that’s my point of origin, and I know my destination – I want to lead a Fortune 500 company and serve my community through public service. The values that connect my point of origin and my future destination are servant leadership, collaboration, and compassion.
Step 2 – Chart Your Course: To lead a Fortune 500 company, I will serve diverse stakeholders. I learned at Sanger that inclusion is a key skill for leading diverse groups, and that helped me identify a few specific data-driven inclusive behaviors that I wanted to experiment with.
Step 3 – Get Going: I hypothesized that asking more questions in meetings would lead to more inclusive and productive team outcomes. I chose a weekly team meeting to run this experiment, and I asked a close friend on my leadership team to hold me accountable.
Step 4 – Reflect & Update Goals: After the meeting, I talked with my friend and refined my strategy. At the next meeting, I incorporated more non-verbals and reassessed the impact. I felt I was able to become increasingly more inclusive the more I practiced.
Step 5 – Become a Guide for Others: By using this framework, I have become much more comfortable guiding myself on my own personal leadership journey, and I have taken a really active role in collaborating with the other managers on my team regarding their leadership development.
Erica Haughton, Sanger Program Coordinator
Step 1 – Point of Origin: For the first time in my career, I was responsible for leading a project team for a highly complex learning program. With a background in higher education, the values that connected my point of origin and my destination included collaboration and making an impact.
Step 2: – Chart Your Course: I learned that to effectively lead a newly-formed team, I needed to establish a strong foundation of trust and safety.
Step 3 – Get Going: One hypothesis I identified was that exhibiting vulnerability improves team psychological safety and effectiveness. To test this, I expressed vulnerability in weekly team meetings and 1:1s.
Step 4 – Reflect & Update Goals: I informed a colleague who could keep me accountable and provide feedback. At one point, she suggested that meeting in a more informal setting would make it easier for team members to be vulnerable. I refined my strategy and started finding more casual meeting spots to practice vulnerability with the team.
Step 5 – Become a Guide for Others: The learning program was successful, and I have become a more confident leader because of my experience. I now look for ways to help others, such as my colleagues at Sanger, to embrace vulnerability in the teams they lead too.
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We’re excited to support our students and community on their Journeys this year. We’ll be posting more examples, tips, ideas for behavioral experiments, and personal journey stories throughout the year. Have a story and want to be featured? Reach us at rossleaders@umich.edu.