Practical Leadership
MIT Sloan's seminar treats leadership as a skill built through repeated practice rather than lecture. Each student begins the semester with a self-assessment, identifying specific gaps in areas like delegation, conflict handling, or giving feedback. Those gaps then drive customized role-play exercises each week, where the student practices the exact scenario that challenges them while peers and the instructor watch and respond in real time. Assigned readings supply the underlying frameworks, but the course's core mechanic is the cycle itself: act, get direct feedback from classmates and instructor, reflect, then try again the following week with a harder version of the same challenge. Materials on MIT OpenCourseWare include the syllabus, reading list, and assignment structure for the self-assessments and role plays. There are no lecture videos and no certificate, since this is a raw curriculum release rather than an online class, but the structure is complete enough to run the seminar as designed. It suits someone who wants a concrete practice framework rather than theory about leadership.