Wharton’s New Executive Leadership Program Director Plans New Ventures

As director of Leadership and Management Programs at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a senior lecturer at Columbia University, Lt. Colonel Todd Henshaw has taught leadership for more than a decade. During that time, he started learning more about Wharton’s leadership programs by teaching Executive Education courses and participating in Leadership Center programs. He even spoke at Wharton’s annual Leadership Conference.

Fortunately, he was so impressed by what he saw at Wharton that he decided to come on board after he retired from the military. Now, as director of Wharton’s Executive Leadership Program, he’s assessing and enhancing many of the leadership offerings for our MBA Exec students. To learn more about what he has in store for us, we asked him to share his thoughts on Wharton’s Leadership Program and his plans for the coming year. Here’s what he said:

“I’ve always been interested in working with leadership programs that I consider to be cutting edge. The program at Wharton is probably the best leadership program associated with an MBA in the U.S. and I say that based on the way it engages students and teaches and embraces leadership in different ways. It’s a comprehensive approach that is more than just a single course or coaching.

That said, there is still room to grow and I find that exciting. The first thing I will do is a needs assessment and that means talking to faculty, administrators, students, and alumni about what leadership looks like at the executive level. Executive MBA students need to be prepared for their current roles as well as their future roles as senior-level leaders. And within the EMBA classes, students are quite diverse, ranging from CEOs and entrepreneurs to vice presidents and senior managers. I need to design a program that works for everyone, but also allows tailoring to meet individual needs.

Students in an executive MBA program are typically expected to lead, but leadership isn’t something they’ve necessarily had a lot of instruction in. So when they are at Wharton, we want to prepare them for higher levels of responsibility with a grounding in leadership education and theoretical knowledge that they can apply to their own experiences.

In conjunction with classes, a way to achieve that is through experiential learning opportunities that we call the Wharton Leadership Ventures. The power of the ventures is taking people out of their normal routine and dropping them into a different context where the focus is on learning without distractions. Most people say these are life changing types of experiences. If they have a good learning experience, people tend to leave thinking differently about themselves, their organizations, and their roles as leaders.

I want to find out what types of Leadership Ventures might be best suited for an executive audience. I just took a group of Wharton executive MBA alumni on the Normandy Leadership Experience where we visited battlefields like Omaha Beach and talked about what happened there -- actually seeing how it looked at low tide. I want to design more experiential learning programs for EMBA students and alumni that meet their specific goals and objectives.

There are many great things going on at Wharton and the School definitely has the most progressive leadership program that I’ve seen at a business school in the U.S. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but rather make positive changes to ensure that our executive MBA students have the best experience possible.”

We welcome Todd to Wharton’s MBA Program for Executives and look forward to new Leadership Ventures and Experiences!

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Wharton MBA Exec Alumni Learn about Leadership and WWII History during Trip to Normandy
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