How Professional Development Improves Leadership Skills

Harvard DCE’s Professional & Executive Development has a diverse portfolio of program options. In addition to leadership-specific programs, P&ED also offers topics like business strategy, negotiation, communication, and AI. 

Importantly, instructors in each program teach elements of leadership and design their curriculum with this in mind, ensuring participants come away with the skills they need to be leaders within their own organizations. 

Three P&ED instructors explain the value of leadership, what they want participants to take back to their organizations, and how to build leadership skills for whatever comes next in their careers.

Why Is Leadership Important Even if You Aren’t a Manager?

Executives and members of the C-suite are expected to be adept leaders, but even if your position doesn’t explicitly require leadership, it’s still important to prioritize developing those skills. 

Leading in the era of artificial intelligence 

With the advent of AI, more is expected of employees than ever, and participants are coming to their programs with new concerns and pressures based on evolving technology, says Laura Manley, instructor of Foundations of Data-Driven Decision Making With AI. 

“They are expected to take on these tools, implement them immediately, and be leaders and advocates in their organizations without fully understanding the tools and the ways to utilize them most effectively,” she says. “A lot of people are coming in stressed and feeling like they need to be leaders when they don’t understand how to [with AI tools].”

In her program, Manley focuses on communication to encourage participants to share their expertise and passion with their teams — something that AI can’t replicate or replace. 

“AI itself isn’t a leader. That’s why it’s really important that as we take on these tools and adopt them into our organizations, we think about how we’re communicating our personal values and what we’re trying to accomplish with these support tools,” Manley adds.

What Are the Essential Qualities of a Good Leader?

Leadership doesn’t just come with a list of job responsibilities, but with a few important characteristics. 

1. Unique expertise 

Being an expert in your field inherently gives you an advantage in leadership, regardless of your job title. 

Areen Shahbari, instructor of several Professional & Executive Development programs focusing on business strategy, innovation, and management skills, says the ability to evaluate and apply knowledge to specific use cases in your organization is crucial to leadership success. 

“I want to give participants the tools and the base of evidence to be able to convince other people of their ideas in a way that enables them to really build a case specific to their organization,” she says. “So they get not just the tactics and the frameworks, but really a robust field of evidence which they can rely upon to engage in these conversations.”

Having a solid basis of proof, data, or research to showcase your expertise strengthens your position as a leader. 

2. Strong communication 

Communicating your value to your team goes hand-in-hand with developing leadership skills — but there’s more to communication than simply sharing ideas effectively. 

“Just on its face, communication is an important leadership skill, but I think there’s something much deeper about communication and what it means to be a leader and stand for something,” Manley says. 

“I see it as a building block approach to skills,” she adds. “In order to effectively communicate your vision, you need to be literate about the tools that are pervasive in society [like AI]. The course is to give leaders this basic literacy to figure out how to be persuasive and advocate for a particular point of view in their organization.”

Managing conflict is another important facet of communication. 

“One of the big facets of leadership is being able to stand up and say ‘no’ and disagree,” Manley says. “Especially if you’re going to be pushing back and bringing forth difficult things to hear, you need to be able to communicate with authority.”

3. Seeing the big picture

Strong leaders are able to not only identify new opportunities and ways to create value, but also how to implement them strategically. Although change doesn’t happen overnight, it’s important to have the ability to think ahead, to develop a plan, and to get stakeholder buy-in.

“If you don’t understand the bigger picture, it will be very chaotic,” Shahbari said. “What I’m teaching about leadership is about being very focused, disciplined, and connecting what you’re doing to the big picture and bringing much bigger value than just looking small at your specific job and its function.”

How Do Professional Development Programs Teach Leadership?

Each instructor has their own approach to teaching leadership in the classroom. 

Matt Johnson, who teaches the Brand Revitalization and Consumer Behavior programs, emphasizes the importance of network building.

“One of the great joys of teaching these programs is the incredible diversity of the participants, especially at the different levels of their leadership experience,” he says. “One thing I really try to do as an instructor is enable cross-pollination of different participants, where you develop a bit of a mentor-mentee relationship. It’s not a lecture from the pulpit, but there’s a lot of opportunity for participants of various expertise and industry experience to really learn from each other as well.”

Shahbari brings in a number of real-world case studies to mimic what happens in established companies, such as Apple. She examines external market factors, threats that could exist for the company itself, internal competitive advantages, and potential weaknesses. 

Applying this analysis helps participants to train their long-term thinking and to contribute at the highest level they can in their organizations.

What Are Real-World Benefits of Leadership Training?

One of the goals of any Professional & Executive Development program is to empower participants to take what they learned back to their organizations and apply their new skills immediately. 

Manley and her co-instructor, Joel Gurin, received an email from a nonprofit executive who took their course. The executive said the course fundamentally changed the way the organization communicates and presents data to leadership. As a result, the nonprofit planned to deliver funds more effectively, helping to change the lives of thousands of people. 

“That was just such a wonderful thing to hear about the direct impact of our course,” Manley says.

Johnson says the frameworks offered in Brand Revitalization allow participants to deeply understand their consumers, not merely in terms of demographic features, but in terms of the “deep emotional motivation.”

“We’ve had participants who have gone through the program and utilized these frameworks and exercises and have come out with incredibly varied insights, which they’re then devising tests on to see how they can actually roll out for their brand,” he says. “When you’re able to see that connection between ideas, insights, individual application, and then outcome that’s going to benefit the organization, it’s incredibly gratifying.”

Shahbari says participants have even reached out to her to share their promotions. When one participant presented what he learned to his organization, he was transferred to the innovation team immediately, working on new initiatives for the company. Another participant went from leading initiatives within a healthcare organization to leading the strategic operations at an enterprise level. 

The participant shared that the program they took was a crucial part of their growth because it helped shape her mindset. She stopped just thinking about her functional role and started thinking about the whole organization. She had everything she needed to solidify her expertise and knowledge into something that could be valuable, Shahbari says. 

“It’s one of the things that I love about my job — the impact that I create in the classroom and the much bigger impact that happens outside of the classroom.”

What Skills Will Future Leaders Need Most?

The business landscape is moving faster than ever, and direct reports and executives alike are evaluating the future of leadership. 

Shahbari says what sets strong leaders apart is strategic judgement, especially with how AI tools are deployed. Leaders should also focus on skills like critical thinking, developing arguments to support your decision-making, evaluating risks and mitigating them, and allocating resources effectively and efficiently. 

“Whether we have to take path A or B or C, as a leader you have to own the consequences of that. You have to be accountable for it,” she says. “In terms of strategy and envisioning the future, it’s a human capability that we should never outsource to AI.”

Ultimately, the power of sharing expertise is a stepping stone to the next stage of leadership, Johnson says. 

“If I’m able to teach something which is able to get into somebody’s psyche and somebody’s mind and have them thinking differently, that’s fantastic,” he says. “But I think the real power and the real potential of programs like this is empowering people to bring it back to their teams and really build consensus around these ideas.”

It’s one of the things that I love about my job — the impact that I create in the classroom and the much bigger impact that happens outside of the classroom.

Areen Shahbari

How Can Professional Development Help Advance Your Career and Improve Leadership?

Professional & Executive Development has a diverse portfolio of programs tailored to key skill sets like artificial intelligence, business strategy, marketing, negotiation, and innovation. Regardless of what program you decide to take, you will gain knowledge and experience both in the specific topic as well as in leadership. 

One of the steps to advancing in your career is committing to your growth — and attending a professional development program is one way to do this. 

As you progress in your career, you will continue to contribute more, increase your influence, and begin to shape the direction of the company, Shahbari says.

The earlier in your career that you understand strategy, the faster you can progress and the faster you can show the value you bring to the organization,” she says. “This becomes even more important if you’re at a level where you’re looking to be more of a senior leader, where strategic thinking and application of strategy is really crucial.”