Wharton opens new office for leadership programs

Demonstrating the Wharton School’s growing emphasis on leadership, yesterday marked the opening of the newly renovated Wharton Leadership Program and the Center for Leadership and Change Management.

The center performs a number of functions, including funding faculty research, organizing a leadership conference for executives, publishing a leadership digest and hosting an academic conference in conjunction with the business school INSEAD and Duke University.

The Wharton Graduate Leadership Program designs training programs to teach students the applied knowledge developed by the center, according to WGLP Director Jeff Klein.

Klein said the opening of the new office marks the first time the Wharton Undergraduate Leadership Program and WGLP have been located in the same place, in an attempt to optimize the expertise of their staff. Consequently, there was an emphasis on minimizing individual workspace and maximizing collaborative workspace when designing the office.

Executive Director of Leadership for the Wharton Graduate Association Bert O’Neal said the office space given to the center creates more of a sense of unity and teamwork than past locations.

“It’s a lot more collaborative not only for people in the program — it’s now more conducive for students to come spend time here formally and informally with those running the program,” he said.

Wharton Dean Thomas Robertson said the center demonstrates the synergy of better communication. “The space is a conduit to bring together many people working on leadership programs on very different levels,” he said.

He stressed the importance of leadership to Wharton, saying that “we want to train students to be able to be leaders.”

Wharton’s leadership initiatives target a wide group, which includes high school students, undergraduate and graduate students and business executives. As MBA Leadership Representative and first-year MBA student Iris Chin said, the center will encourage a good community for leadership beyond requirements.

Outside of the Wharton curriculum, which mandates that both undergraduate and graduate students take a management course designed to teach them leadership, initiatives concering creating future leaders at Wharton are voluntary and co-curricular.

These include outdoor experiential learning trips through Wharton Leadership Ventures, a Leadership Development Workshop Series that uses different contexts such as meditation, theater, aikido and the military to teach leadership and teaching assistant programs.

With the new center, Leadership Representative Brett Lanier said these offerings will be better consolidated. “If any student has a question about anything leadership-related, they will know where to go,” he said.

Klein said the new center represents the informal groundwork for the WGLP. He projected that the Institute, which will consolidate Wharton’s leadership on the global stage, will open in five-to-seven years.

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