Becoming Effective Leaders

This course provides tools that can help you successfully lead individuals, groups, and organizations. The material serves as a practical guide to managing workplace behavior—your own and that of your coworkers. To explain key concepts, we draw on robust social science research, which highlights several leadership challenges: making sound decisions, motivating employees to implement your vision, influencing others to support your ideas, and dealing with interpersonal conflict. We explore these issues using readings, cases, lectures, discussions, and in-class exercises. In many ways, this is a course in applied social and behavioral science. By this, we mean that the course will cover a variety of core concepts and theories from psychology and organizational science that will help you diagnose organizational problems and decide on the best course of action. The goal is to apply research-based knowledge to resolve practical dilemmas. This will be accomplished through careful analysis of experiential exercises and discussion of cases involving examples from actual organizations. After taking this course, students will be better able to: (1) craft more compelling communication that encourages others to recognize the value of their ideas, (2) build strong, dynamic, and highly motivated teams, and (3) manage collaboration challenges with a combination of sensitivity and political savvy. These skills will be invaluable as you pursue your professional goals after Stanford.

Francis J. Flynn

Professor Flynn’s research focuses on three topics of interest: (1) How employees can develop healthy patterns of cooperation; (2) How the negative impact of racial and gender stereotyping in the workplace can be mitigated; and (3) How people can emerge as leaders and assume positions of power in organizations. His work bridges the fields of management and social psychology, leading to scholarly as well as practical insights on organizational life.

Learn more about Francis Flynn