Knowing how to lead is a key feature of many academic programs. We want graduates of our programs, both graduate and undergraduate, to appreciate the importance of demonstrating leadership skills and acquiring a style of leadership that is compatible with the needs of their team as well as their personal orientation in their relationship to others.

This workshop will demonstrate an approach to understanding the theories and styles of leadership that has been successful in an upper-level undergraduate class and would be applicable to students in a graduate program orientation as well as valuable for co-curricular training. Experts have pointed out the need to foster leadership skills in students entering medical education programs, business management schools, and liberal arts curricula.

Taught in a TBL format, participants will be given brief assignments to prepare for the workshop, including completing leadership self-assessments as well as a short reading, a podcast, and a video. At the beginning of the workshop, participants will complete an iRAT and tRAT in teams. After scoring and discussion of the RAT questions, teams will move on to the application exercises. These will consist of a series of scenarios that will require different styles of leadership. The group will complete one scenario at a time within their teams as follows: 1. Individually read the scenario; 2. Individually decide on which leadership style would work best in the situation; 3. Work as a team to decide on the BEST choice for that scenarios; put rationale for choice on flipchart paper; 4. All teams vote on the best choice, get responses from each team, and then move to the next scenario.

Participants will be given strategies for serving as facilitators in this process to use in their classes or programs.