Recently, I took a management development course called the Executive Experience given by Leaderpoint. The Executive Experience is “a five-day development program where participants, working in groups, assume senior management roles for a company. They analyze, make decisions, plan, and experience the consequences of their decisions. In this program participants do general management work and are given considerable resources from which to reflect and learn from their experience”.

Frequently, people with a great skill do such a good job that they get promoted to a management role and never receive any training on how to be effective at it are forced to “wing it”. If they do it long enough, they can learn many bad habits such as taking the work back and micromanaging. This course should be required for anyone who is newly promoted to a management role. Come to think of it, it should be required for ANYONE in a management role. Never in my life have I taken a class that has dramatically changed the way I think about any given subject. I’ve been in a management and leadership role in some form or another for the past twenty years, from my time in the Navy, to owning my own design studio and everything in between and I can tell you that this course flipped everything I knew on it’s end.