Leadership Portal

Crucible

As a Northwestern student, one of the most important things you can do is to thoughtfully reflect upon your experiences to understand what you've learned about leadership during your time on campus.  Here, the goal is not to assemble a long list of organizations and clubs to which you've belonged or positions that you've held.  Instead, it's to identify those few transforming moments that have truly tested you as a leader.  Sometimes, these moments lead to a notable success.  Other moments end in failure, typically with even more powerful learnings about leadership and resilience.  In both cases, you can capitalize on those events by looking back and describing how your leadership has developed in response.  

Working with Career Services, we've designed a Leadership Crucible worksheet to help you reflect on these moments and the lessons you learned. There's a clear bottom line advantage for you: employers and graduate schools receive applications from many talented students with impressive resumes and good grades. The students who stand out are those who have been tested as leaders and who can communicate the simple and powerful ideas they've learned.

<<Go to Leadership Crucible

360° Assessment

As you may know, leadership assessments are a commonly used tool for high potential leaders in organizations around the world. Northwestern is one of the first universities committed to customizing this tool for and providing this same opportunity to all of its students. By completing this assessment today and at other vital moments during your time at Northwestern, you will have a powerful story to tell others about your leadership effectiveness - one that will set you apart from others.

<<Go to 360° Leadership Assessment

Teamwork Assessment

Teams generally prefer to get right to work on the project they've been given. This is unwise. In hindsight, many teams trace their failure(s) to not having shared expectations and specific ground rules. Research shows that teams should start with the question "how will we work together?" not "what's the right answer to the project?"

Setting shared expectations for your team, checking for effective teamwork, and making adjustments along the way is also essential. We offer NU faculty a Teamwork Assessment that you can use for team and group projects. It is built from best practices that are commonly found in industry; it helps teams reduce risk by identifying typical teamwork problems at the individual and group levels and by offering you a process for solving those problems.

<<Go to Teamwork Assessment

<<Go to Teamwork Assessment for Design Thinking and Communication Courses

Coaching

Coaching provides the University's student leaders with the opportunity to significantly build on their assets. As you may know, many successful organizations offer leadership coaching to their high potential employees. It is a top tool for executive development because it focuses leaders, allowing them to achieve improved results while also allowing them to be more efficient in their work. At the Center for Leadership, we invest in adapting the real world practices and approaches of executive coaching to meet the needs of our student leaders while also preparing them for leadership positions once they graduate. We are particularly interested in providing leadership coaching to students undertaking new or more challenging leadership roles.

<<Nominate a student for Leadership Coaching (including yourself)

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Have a question about your leadership, or about how to work with another leader? 300 characters maximum

The Center for Leadership serves the Northwestern community. Its academic programs are offered through the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science.