MSU Extension Great Lakes Leadership Academy

Total time for each session is 3 days and 2 evenings.

The application period for the 2025 Emerging Leader Program will open on July 1 and close on October 1, and references are due by November 1, 2024.

Session 1:  April 14-16, 2025

Session I Objectives

• Meet other participants and learn about their interests in leadership for the common good.
• Create an awareness of participant expectations and provide an overview of the curriculum.
• Gain awareness of how leaders help teams function effectively.
• Obtain functional familiarity with the process, interactive, and content components in a group setting.
• Identify the different behavioral styles used by leaders and become familiar with your personal style.
• Learn about other’s behavioral styles and how this understanding can enhance interpersonal communications. 
• Learn the three principles of healthy human psychological functioning.
• Begin to learn how to more effectively navigate the full range of human emotions.
• Understand the difference between pressure and stress.
• Explore the connection between emotional resilience, psychological flexibility, and effective leadership for the common good.
• Build an understanding of our identities and memberships in target and non-target groups.
• Explore issues of power, oppression, privilege and change at the personal, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural levels.
• Learn about a framework for Cultural Competency.
• Learn the key components of a respectful and useful mentoring relationship.

Session 2:  July 21-23, 2025

Session 2 Objectives

• Work as a team to present group projects to the full class in an effective, efficient and creative manner.
• Increase proficiency in specific leadership meeting management techniques and tools.
• Learn core skills to increase emotional resilience and psychological flexibility.
• Increase self-awareness skills, notice your own emotional engagement, reduce reactivity, and increase ability to act in accordance with identified core leadership values.
• Explore strategies to respond constructively to inappropriate multicultural comments or behavior.
• Learn how to move difficult discussion from debate to dialogue.
• Learn about dominant cultural values and alternative behaviors.
• Become more conscious, committed and competent in our personal multicultural journeys.
• Examine the tools needed to develop a personal /professional growth plan.

Session 3:  September 15-17, 2025

Session 3 Objectives

• Increase proficiency in group management.
• Describe effective framing of team decisions
• Increase self-awareness in advanced leadership skills.
• Increase understanding of advanced resource management concepts.
• Explore the complex ideas surrounding the concept of leading for the common good.
• Become skilled at recognizing and navigating difficult human emotions/experiences to increase effectiveness as a leader.
• Embrace vulnerability as an essential ingredient of leadership for the common good.
• Get clear about how you want to show up, be seen, and live brave in your work/life.
• Recognize that falling/failing is part of daring leadership.
• Provide insights in personal leadership by reporting on personal development plans.
• Define your role and responsibility in shaping a positive future.
• Develop skills to move forward in an identified arena of change/leadership.