6 Ways You Will Become a Better Leader with Wharton Global Youth This Summer
Keith Ellison, program manager for Wharton Global Youth’s online Essentials of Leadership summer program (pictured above), who also teaches management communication at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, loves working with high school students because “they are like sponges for leadership development.”
Ellison says, “Essentials of Leadership lays the foundation for empowering students to create their paths to success, assert themselves when facing fear, develop resilience when experiencing setbacks, and foster life-long, positive relationships.”
How does it do that? Professor Ellison shares 6 valuable skills high school students of all kinds are sure to take away when studying Essentials of Leadership online with Wharton Global Youth this summer:
✅ What’s Your EQ? You become more aware of your key strengths by taking an assessment and understanding how emotional intelligence (emotional quotient) impacts relationships and leadership. “We look at five dimensions of emotional intelligence and do a lot of self-reflection on that.”
✅ Working in Small Groups: You learn to create psychological safety in teams, ensure all voices are heard, and navigate group dynamics through exercises like planning a global music concert in a different country. “When we talk about how teams get together, we go through the forming, storming, norming and performing…and we get to where each team member feels comfortable taking a risk.”
✅ Ethical Decision Making: You practice how to handle complex ethical dilemmas by exploring real-world case studies and understanding personal values. This relates also to making decisions as a group, where you begin to identify and ease challenges that can undermine group effectiveness. “We use an iPhone encryption case study to explore personal values and look at issues like balancing competing priorities and understanding the broader implication of decisions.”
✅ Negotiation and Trust: Through simulations like OPEQ (you and your classmates are grouped into oil-producing countries and using game theory, you compete to determine how much oil to produce to be profitable) you discover how trust can be built and lost during collaborative decision-making. “It’s really interesting to see how trust is very easily lost when one group agrees to produce a certain amount of oil, but then produces a lot more to try to get an advantage.”
✅ Setting Goals: You create personal mission statements and learn goal-setting techniques, always connecting your self-awareness to leadership development. “Goal setting is an important component of leadership. And yet, a lot of people don’t do mission statements unless they’re part of a leadership development program in the workplace. We do it here.”
✅ Cross-Cultural Communication: During small-group discussions and projects, you learn to work effectively with peers from different countries, time zones, and cultural backgrounds, becoming sensitive to language barriers and exploring diverse communication styles, from soft to loud. “You are connecting with people from all over the world. Even face-to-face, you don’t have that kind of reach. During a two-hour class, you could be with students from 10 different countries. And then you get to interact with them!”
Intrigued? Explore Wharton Global Youth’s Essentials of Leadership program today and apply by May 1, 2025. Shape your path toward stronger leadership.