Last week I graduated from a semester-long certification course offered on developing our key leadership skills offered by the Graduate Leadership Institute LEAD 360 at the Northeastern University.
The classes were crunched between two of my academic courses which counted towards my GPA on Tuesdays and most days I would miss my lunch attending the sessions. But one of the key competencies I developed throughout these sessions is to grind through your commitments despite the roadblocks that may appear on your way. I would lie if I said I never thought of dropping out of the course mainly due to the time constraint and the rush it caused between the classes but I am happy to have completed this 9 session course and believe it has definitely improved my leadership skills by a significant ‘delta’.
The key skills I picked up on this course were:
- Networking: Making connections in a group of random people.
- Communication: Breaking the ice in a group.
- Team-Work: Working in teams to come up with strategic solutions to problems.
- Commitment: Staying rooted to the cause despite the roadblocks.
- Innovation/Strategic Thinking: Enhanced my thought process in an innovative and strategic way while preparing for our case study.
In the process of developing key industry leadership competencies, we were also given an opportunity to analyse our strengths and weaknesses, which I believe were extremely accurate and on the point through the systematic testing offered by CliftonStrengths – Gallup.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Shreyanth and Mohini, with whom I have forged strong bonds while working on our mobile industry technology disruption case study to showcase the flexibility competency.
I believe the whole Spring 2019 batch appreciates the effort put in by Becky Lindley and Anne Grieves to organize this course and offer it for free for the Graduate students at Northeastern University. I also thank Swapnil and Durga, the student organizers for giving their time in assisting us throughout.