Leadership is communicating and decision making, full stop.
Consistently get better at it by talking about fiction with your leadership team.
It’s how they do it at Stanford Graduate School of Business. It’s how you can do it for your next offsite/onsite. If you had a kid picking up a new sport or instrument you’d tell them to practice, practice, practice. Leadership is hard to practice. It’s even harder to practice without making mistakes that impact the lives of many others and your business.
How it works
Take a deep dive with your team
We’ll decide together on a great book or short story to deep dive into, let’s say for illustration, a great Chekhov short story
- Come together
- We’ll gather your team together around a table, maybe over a meal, refreshments, or a wine/whiskey/coffee tasting
- Learn how to best dialogue on the book
- You or your Extragrad Facilitator will kick off the conversation with some dialogic best practice reminders and a pithy kick off question
- Digest the book and discuss key points for leadership and strategy
- The team will follow down threads and dead ends, communicate, disagree, move through different viewpoints
- Aha! moments and "I never thought of that’s" will come and go
- We’ll talk about what the book teaches us about leadership or the unique problems the team is up against at the moment
- Done, practice is over!
- We’ll go around so everyone gets a short moment to share their closing thoughts and takeaways
The fundamental issues of leadership - the complications involved in becoming, being, confronting, and evaluating leaders are not unique to leadership. They are echoes of critical issues of life more generally. As a result, they are characteristically illuminated more by great literature than by modern essays or research on leadership.
- James G. March, Professor Emeritus, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Practice leading
Deep dive into a work of fiction with your team
Get Started