Leadership Competencies
PLC frames its curriculum in terms of broad competencies that are the keystones to our leadership education because they cut across every profession, academic discipline, and human endeavor where leadership is practiced. What you learn when developing your personal approach to leadership allows you to demonstrate how your ability in one competency fortifies your growth across all the competencies. The six competency categories and the corresponding skills, therefore, are equally important and learned simultaneously, with varying emphasis, in all PLC academic courses and experiential programming.
Our approach…
The ingenuity of PLC students often springs from interdisciplinary collaboration with peers, which is maximized by the depth of each individual’s disciplinary knowledge and personal experiences. Therefore, PLC supports our scholars’ pursuit of mastery in their chosen academic fields across the many colleges, schools, and majors at ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ Boulder. We support our students in discerning their individual disciplinary paths, developing and articulating their own contributions to their field, and learning about leadership and ethical issues relevant to their chosen disciplines. We also encourage the future success of our scholars by instructing them in the skills and knowledge necessary for personal and professional development.
What students should learn:
- Research skills applicable to all academic disciplines, using scholarly sources, citing resources
- A wide variety of written and verbal communication formats applicable to all professions
- Intentional goal setting and reflective practices about working in a professional and/or leadership position
- The ability to conceive, create and market a personal career trajectory
- Interacting with others according to the situation considering communication styles, attire, cultural norms, and expectations
Our approach…
Critical thinking is foundational to moving about in and interacting within an increasingly complex world. Those wanting to be agents of change and leaders must be able to weigh arguments and ideas in order to make challenging, ethical decisions. Critical thinking allows you to make complicated leadership assessments that require considering competing viewpoints. The sheer diversity and volume of inputs and information generated today demands leaders with unwavering skills in seeking, acquiring, evaluating, and making meaning of data and ideas.
What students should learn:
- The ability to listen to, understand and create links between competing perspectives
- Decision making within given constraints of resources and outcomes
- Discernment skills to help weigh the relevance, credibility, importance and intention of information
- Recognition of differing arguments and the unbiased appraisal of their legitimacy
- Identification of inconsistencies of information and ideas and errors of reasoning
- Iteration skills allow for a systematic, reflective, and agile approach to problems
- Effectively provide, seek, evaluate, and apply feedback
Our approach…
PLC and its students know that the ability to explore, imagine, experiment, and invent is crucial to critical thinking and innovation. Creativity is key to manifesting virtues and visions in authentic ways that impact real people. Individually and collectively, leaders pioneer ways forward, create relationships, and innovate strategies for solving problems. Creativity demands courage to risk, discipline to persevere, and humility to learn from others as well as from your own failures. The concerted effort to enable and allow ourselves to be creative leaders not only serves our communities but rewards us with passionate, fulfilling lives.
What students should learn:
- Iterative creative processes by which we ideate, apply, assess, and attempt again
- Research and empathy skills to generate, ground, and challenge ideas and strategies
- Optimizing collective creativity through collaboration and cultivation of innovative work climates
- Self-awareness and the discipline necessary for crafting lifestyles conducive to challenge and invention
Our approach…
PLC recognizes traditions of leadership education that have established fundamental skill sets and core principles, but we go further and challenge ourselves to maintain the value of these precepts while adaptively applying them to our rapidly changing world. We also recognize that a leader’s effectiveness is measured by their ability to get things done and whether they can implement their new ideas, products, and pathways. PLC believes agility and excellence in implementation do justice to ideas, relationships and intentions. PLC students are pushed to seek the relentless practice of these implementation skills - mindfully scrutinizing the way they carry out plans, how their skills are put to use, and the outcomes that result from taking action.
What students should learn:
- Crafting plans that are effective, efficient, and consistent with personal and communal values
- Identifying, procuring, and optimizing both human and material resources
- Creating, executing, and evaluating plans collaboratively
- Utilizing iterative processes to assess and adaptively improve upon strategies mid-stream
- Observing, measuring, and collecting feedback in order to learn applicable lessons from successes and failures, and to hold yourself accountable for the outcomes of your actions
Our approach…
PLC strives to exemplify integrity and ethical decision-making as a community and through the actions of our students. PLC stresses a continual state of conscientiousness that permeates all we do – making ethical convictions central to our identities as individuals who are vested members of the PLC, ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ Boulder, Colorado, national and global communities. An ethical foundation and subsequent reasoning partnered with critical thinking allow you to think about the variety of moral frameworks and to reflect on the bases of your ethical stances.
What students should learn:
- Ethical awareness about issues facing society and professions
- Critical engagement with different ethical frameworks with mutual dignity and respect
- Effectively communicate your ethical positions and decisions to others with differing frameworks
- Maneuver in an ethically diverse world
Our approach…
We evaluate applicants on their achievements and ability to impact their own communities. Additionally, we celebrate our alumni that continue their leadership into their professional careers, making significant contributions to their communities - from the local to the international level. Some leaders make the biggest impact in their own neighborhood or school districts while others are propelled to reach the international stage. PLC develops leaders to make sustainable change and lasting impacts on every level. Throughout both the PLC academic and experiential curricula we emphasize participation in, and the making of an impact on the community on and beyond campus.
What students should learn:
- How to navigate issues for and with their community to best bring about needed change
- Effective and empathetic engagement with stakeholders that have differing needs, desires, and obstacles
- Communicate with peers, professionals, mentors, etc. to increase mutual respect and connectivity
- Flourish in a supportive and challenging environment with the ability to receive and give meaningful feedback