Our Leadership Courses
To enable success through experiential learning, our courses are flexible, affordable, and convenient.
All courses include four mandatory live sessions held on Tuesdays, 6:30pm-8:00pm Pacific Standard Time.
First-time students are strongly encouraged to attend the live session Introduction to the online platform held the Monday before their course starts, from 7:00pm-8:00pm PST.
Roots
For sound foundations.
Leadership Bootcamp
APRIL SPECIAL FREE COURSE
(LL101)
This course on the foundations of leadership is particularly appropriate at this time of Covid 19. Starting from the fundamental distinction between leadership and authority, you learn to observe and think in terms of the dynamics of social systems. As you assimilate this new paradigm you begin to examine in novel ways how you and your peers take up various roles and perform various tasks. The practice of accessing this collective power for the benefit of the group is to exercise leadership.
The theory learned in this class is simple yet deep. The real learning comes from applying it, and this requires practice. The course offers ample opportunity for you to practice in a real but protected environment.
- Foundations of leadership
- Adaptive work: bringing oneself to the edge
- Understanding organizations as systems
- Accessing oneself to understand an organization
- Holding steady
- Crafting effective interventions
Effective Teamwork
(LL102)
This course teaches you how to be a member of a peak performing team. You learn how to make the most of diversity in a group by practicing how to skillfully listen to various voices and what these hold for the group. As you grasp the states and stages of team development you become effective at helping your team navigate through various obstacles. There is nothing like the actual experience to understand what it is like to belong to a peak performing teams. And, observing how the class as a whole is conducted, you will take away a template to help you bring about peak performing teams in your own organization. Practice how to build and be a member of a peak performing team in a protected environment.
- The effects of diversity on individuals and groups
- Listening to the different voices
- States and stages of team development
- Working through team dysfunctions
- High-performing teams
- Organizational support for teams
Leadership and Music
(LL103)
(This course is offered exclusively on site in San Diego, CA.)
In this class you learn about group dynamics by listening as you participate in group music improvisation. Drawing analogies between musical development and group development, our joint inquiry leads to deep insights into the process and dynamics of group bonding. Highly suggestive metaphors may be drawn between the inherent aesthetics of musical flow and the inherent ethical nature of group life. The rich aesthetic-emotional experience of music-making serves as a deep channel to understand the deep moral-emotional nature of groups.
Please contact us to express your interest in participating in this course.
- Group music improvisation
- Listening to group dynamics
- Musical development and group development
- Improvisation and bonding
- Improvisation and ethics
- Coherence and flow
Trunk
For solid development.
Adaptive Leadership
(LL201)
This course is an opportunity to dig deeper into adaptive work, which is the foundation of leadership. Adaptive challenges call on us to stay on the edge and cultivate connection, even through the difficult paradoxes inherent to all relationships: between individuals, between individual and group, between groups, and between groups and the larger social system. By learning to lean into discomfort, you will learn about yourself and how you can best participate and contribute to the liveliness of a group. Doing so is, in the deepest sense, to exercise leadership. In turn, this points to further horizons in your own long-term growth and development. This class presents an adaptive challenge in a protected environment to practice adaptive leadership.
- Digging deeper into the foundations of leadership
- Adaptive challenges: staying on the edge
- Cultivating connection
- Paradox and organization
- Group improvisation and flow
- Long term development
Ethical Leadership
(LL202)
This course is about our fundamental social/ethical nature. Long before we began to reason we were emotional animals. Our sociability, emotions, and morality are three ways of naming our fundamental character as deeply complex social animals. Understanding the relation between emotion and reason provides us with a sound foundation to understand ethics. It teaches us how to integrate healthy conflict in relationships, allowing us to make the most of differences between individuals. Ethical leadership radically enhances group performance, benefiting not only individuals but the organization as a whole.
- Human social/ethical nature and and its relation to emotion and reason
- Adaptive work: evolutionary and behaviorally
- Our deep need of others
- The origin of conflict and how it can enrich organizations
Branches
For continuing growth.
Leadership Training Assistant
(LL301)
This class is the opportunity to work alongside Prof. Mayer as a TA in a Root or a Trunk course. As members of the TA team, students participate in all aspects of managing a class: planning, teaching, responding to student concerns and grading. Managing the class and being a member of the TA team offers a unique perspective that fosters learning in depth about the content of the particular class. All learning is immediately applied to in the class at large and within the TA team, thereby sharpening the skills of a leadership training consultant.
- Dates to be defined. The schedule structure for these is identical to all our other courses. Prerequisite for LL301 and LL302 is satisfactory completion of at least one Root and one Trunk course. Outstanding performance is required for LL301.
Please contact us to express your interest in participating in this course.
- Belong to the TA team in a course taught by Prof. Mayer
- Contribute to planning, teaching, grading and responding to student concerns
- Develop your skills as a leadership training consultant through immediate practice
The Nature of Organization: Organisms and Organizations
(LL302)
Both organisms and organizations are organized. That is, organization may be examined in both living beings and in institutions. Organization within leads to organization without: organisms and organizations organize themselves in response to their environment and in turn tend to organize that environment. There are also fundamental differences between organisms and organizations: the former are alive whereas the latter are not. What exactly is this difference and what does it entail? And how best to understand the relation between individual organisms and the organizations they form part of? Organization is rooted in biology. But our conception of it is rooted in our own thinking. Examining the fundamental nature of organization and reflecting on how we think about it we begin to understand the ground and emergence of organizational dynamics. We soon find that physical and mechanical metaphors to account for organization are hopelessly flawed and lead to dramatic mistakes and problems in practice. This course is for students who are theoretically inclined seeking to understand the foundations of organization.
Please contact us to express your interest in participating in this course.
- Digging down to the foundations of organization
- The foundational paradoxes of organization
- The deep shortcoming of physical and mechanical metaphors in accounts of organization and its dynamics and their practical effects