The program combines an overnight retreat with individual sessions over five months, led by Columbia University faculty. Organized around three leadership domains—leading self, leading others, and leading organizations—the Institute integrates research-based frameworks with peer learning, lectures, small-group activities, and simulations. Participants will develop the concepts and practical tools needed to address current and emerging leadership challenges.
Upon completion, participants will receive a certificate from Tamer Institute Executive Education at Columbia Business School.
Session topics may include:
Values-Based Leadership
Participants examine values-based leadership as a foundation for authenticity, organizational performance, and employee commitment. They develop personal values hierarchies and consider how these frameworks can inform leadership practice and strengthen organizational outcomes.
Leading Change
This session explores how nonprofit leaders align organizational structure with strategy while managing the human and financial costs of change. Participants are introduced to a roadmap for implementing change in ways that advance strategic goals and sustain organizational effectiveness.
Leading Inclusively
Drawing on research linking inclusive climates to commitment, satisfaction, perceived support, citizenship behavior, and retention, this session examines practices that foster inclusion. Participants consider how inclusive leadership can shape organizational climate and support long-term change.
Negotiations
Nonprofit leaders regularly negotiate to mobilize resources, build coalitions, and advance organizational goals. This session introduces frameworks for analyzing negotiation contexts and evaluating the costs and benefits of different strategies and tactics.
Leading Organizational Culture
This session examines how organizational culture influences performance, commitment, collaboration, and contribution. Participants identify best practices for leading culture and practice a process for clarifying values at the team, department, or organizational level.
Strategic Communication
This session introduces AIM, a research-informed approach to effective communication: analyzing the audience, identifying intent, and making messages memorable. Participants apply the framework to strengthen presentations, negotiations, and written communication.
Self-Management and Leadership
This session draws on recent advances in self-management to help executives strengthen the personal effectiveness required to lead others.
Making Strategic Choices
Participants examine the discipline of strategic choice-making and apply a structured process to a case-based organizational challenges.
Crossing Divides
This session is designed to give organizational leaders better strategies and tactics to address the rising polarization afflicting our society. Sources of division can take multiple forms; however, the fundamental explanations of why these divides exert influence and ways to remedy them are likely to have much in common when considered at higher levels of abstraction.