How can you become a more authentic LGBTQ+ leader? What will it take to create fully inclusive workplaces?

The LGBTQ Executive Leadership Program curriculum is thoughtfully designed to help you lead with confidence and consciously take risks to accelerate your career. And you’ll be learning, growing, and networking in great company — with a highly qualified and motivated global cohort of leaders and world-renowned Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty and notable guest speakers.

As the first leading business school to develop a program for LGBTQ+ executives, we have the experience and expertise to meet the unique needs of rising LGBTQ+ professionals. Our experience tells us that designing specialized curricula that deftly address the needs of diverse populations often provides a more personalized, relevant, and rewarding education experience — while also finding common ground.

Maximize your learning with a range of sessions, including:

Core Leadership Sessions

From the neuroscience of leadership to negotiations, you’ll dig into core leadership topics that help you build your competencies and confidence.

Experiential Learning Sessions

Engage in hands-on workshops and group activities where you’ll learn to negotiate team dynamics as you experience challenges that explore topics around LGBTQ+ and gender identity. Collaborate, share, exchange ideas in a supportive environment.

Research-Based Sessions

Get exposed to the most cutting-edge, social and behavioral science research on LGBTQ+ leadership. Then, think about how to translate that research into practical guidance and develop effective strategies for bringing new insights into organizations in meaningful ways.

Micro Learning Sessions

Small group discussions after breakfast give you the opportunity to discuss timely and relevant topics in an informal and intimate setting to strengthen relationships with your peers and learn from the perspective of others.

Below are just a few of the sessions you’ll attend as part of the program.

Charting Your Path as a Queer Leader

In this session, you’ll be asked to declare yourself as a leader. Having clarity on what you want to learn can help you to frame and link together the coming program sessions. Knowing not only your own goals, but the goals of others, will help us support each other and embrace our own identities and others too.

Research suggests one factor may be key to helping us persist in the hard work of attaining worthy goals: self-compassion. We’ll review this research and understand its meaning for LGBTQ+ leaders, and you’ll have an opportunity to discuss it with others and apply it to your work this week.

Authentic Leadership

What does it mean to be an authentic leader? In these sessions, we’ll review the challenges of leaders in contemporary organizations. We’ll give you an opportunity to reflect on a key dimension of Stanford GSB’s brand of leadership: how to use your full self to connect to and influence others around you.

“Bringing your full self” has been challenging for LGBTQ+ people in the workplace, as in life – making this issue familiar, but problematic, territory. What level of self-disclosure best contributes to your connection to and influence with others? How does self-disclosure influence - or mask - your authentic leadership style?

Creating Inclusive Workplaces

Most leaders appear to understand the link between diversity and innovation and are actively trying to increase the diversity of their workforce, boards, and leadership teams. Yet, many still grapple with how to reduce gender, racial, and other forms of biases in critical functions like recruitment, hiring, and performance evaluations. The cost? Companies unintentionally turn away or lose high-potential talent. For rising LGBTQ+ leaders, this knowledge may sound very familiar.

In this session, we’ll discuss how to identify biases in organizational functions that block our ability to fairly and accurately assess talent across various dimensions of diversity. We’ll then draw on empirical case studies to develop evidence-based strategies for more effectively identifying, retaining, and promoting top talent.