The Global Leadership Cohort

• 79% of employees will quit their job due to lack of appreciation from leaders.
  
  
• 69% of millennials believe there is a lack of leadership development in the workplace.
  
  
• Just 5% of companies have integrated leadership development in their organizations.
  
  
• 83% of enterprises believe it is important to develop leaders at all levels of a company.

Source: Trompenaars Hampden-Turner: Culture for Business

 

What people are saying about the GLC:

“This was the best professional development opportunity I've taken at the college. It was a deep dive into the complicated world of leadership. I've always felt that leadership is about dichotomy and this class allowed us the opportunity to explore that idea.”

“I thought the Cohort was very well done. I truly believe that every leader at MC should be required to take the cohort before they all become leaders”.

“The Cohort opened my eyes to true leadership and how to be successful as a leader”.

“GLC gave me the opportunity to reflect on my professional practice and to expand my contacts within MC, as well as being exposed to fresh organizational development. The group was well-selected. Herb Stevenson's presentations were very insightful. Richard has been an excellent facilitator and resource for us.”

“The structured delivery of the Cohort content provided multiple opportunities for me to reflect on the major themes of the course, both within sessions and between them. When my own in - session reflection was supported by table mates' coaching, I developed a deeper understanding of the themes, and of the ways I could apply them to my work at the College, and beyond”.

• Tuesday, October 28 (full-day) - Cultural Competence, Leadership and Dilemmas
• Tuesday, November 18 (half-day) - Managing Diverse Teams and Competing Interests
• Tuesday, December 9 (half-day) - Values to Behaviors – Building a Team Charter
• Tuesday, January 13 (half-day) - Cross Cultural Communications and Decision-Making
• Tuesday, February 3 (full-day) - Organizational Culture and Managing Change
• Wednesday, March 4 (full-day) - Leadership and Coaching
• Tuesday, April 7 (half-day) - Leading Meetings and Hybrid Teams
• Tuesday, April 21 (full-day) - Servant Leadership in Practice
• Tuesday, May 6 - Synthesizing Workshops
• Tuesday, May 26 - Make-up day for canceled class (if necessary)
• Friday, June 12 - Project Presentations - Graduation

For more information, contact Richard Forrest, Training and Development Coordinator, at 240-567-2267. Use Workday to apply and register. Class days vary so please check calendars carefully. Full-day classes run from 8:45 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., and half-day class times are from 8:45 am to noon.

**Attendance is mandatory at the first class.

Please register in MC Learns to obtain an application.

Class 1: Cultural Competence, Leadership and Dilemmas
Tuesday, October 28, 2025, 8:45 a.m.–4:15 p.m., Rockville Campus, MK 122 
Facilitator: Richard Forrest

Working with colleagues from different backgrounds is as simple as being willing to accommodate new approaches to your routines and behaviors. The adage ‘Go along to get along’ can carry us far. However, when you move from brief interactions to working closely with individuals from different cultural backgrounds, you can experience tensions, misunderstandings, and frustrations that impact performance and morale. What skills, knowledge, and abilities are needed to work effectively in multicultural, dynamic, professional organizations?

The inability to recognize problems that stem from cultural differences as cultural differences is central to the challenge of working in a multicultural environment. Once differences are recognized and respected, we must act in a way that leads to positive and desired change. Reconciliation of differences is a process of creativity and new thinking that leads to innovation and desired change. The final step is to implement reconciled solutions and monitor impact. 

In this foundation class, we cover the core teachings of Trompenaars Hampden-Turner, which provide the basis for assessing and developing our intercultural competency. We use a diagnostic to determine and compare cultural orientations and gain awareness of ourselves, teams, and organizational challenges. The class concludes with a THT Dilemma Reconciliation Process activity.

Pre-Class Required Reading

Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden Turner “Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business, 3rd Edition, 2012, Nicholas Berkely Publishing – Pages 1 – 16.

Suggested Reading

1. Herb Stevenson, “Global Inclusion: the mandate for successful organizations” from Plummer: Handbook of Diversity Management 2nd edition (to be published).

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Class 2: Managing Diverse Teams and Competing Interests
Tuesday, November 18, 2025, 8:45 a.m.–12:00 p.m., Rockville Campus, MK 122 
Facilitator: Richard Forrest

Teams have greater problem-solving power potential than individuals acting alone, and highly diverse teams have even greater potential to tackle complex problems than homogeneous teams. However, leading and influencing diverse teams of experts, without the right tools and knowledge, can be risky, resulting in mediocrity, or worse, in disappointment, frustration, and criticism.

This class seeks to deepen our ability to use the 7 Dimensions of culture to recognize and reconcile diverse orientations in teams and problem-solving.

We will use THT diagnostics to identify a range of workplace issues and dilemmas brought on by the diversity of our group. After identifying some key business issues, we will use the 7Ds to gain insights from our teams and apply the Dilemma Reconciliation Process to increase our wholistic problem-solving skills.  

Suggested Reading

1. Erin Meyers, The 8 Keys for Managing Multicultural Teams

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Class 3: Values to Behaviors – Building a Team Charter
Tuesday, December 9, 2025, 8:45 a.m.-12:00 p.m., Rockville Campus, MK 122
Facilitator: Richard Forrest

This half-day workshop focuses on how shared values are interpreted differently and what leaders can do to create a sustaining intact team using a unique tool called the V2B Team Charter.

In this class, we engage in a rich dialogue and critical look at organizational values and the behaviors we believe represent those values. We will align business issues in the context of solving problems with values and behaviors, and identify clear targets and challenges within our teams. As we move to create a charter with supporting values and behaviors to guide our teams, we will also identify steps needed to implement and live the charter. This ensures that we create a model and a tool that can be used to decide on actions and responsibilities in ongoing team meetings. The Team Values to Behavior Charter helps us to realize desired values and thus purposely add to our culture by embedding appropriating behaviors in our teams.

In creating a Team Values to Behavior Charter, participants will be equipped with the knowledge and experience to introduce this tool for use in their teams.

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Class 4: Cross Cultural Communications and Decision-Making
Tuesday, January 13, 8:45 a.m.-12:00 p.m., Online via Zoom
Facilitator: Herb Stevenson

Cross-cultural dynamics are often overlooked and misunderstood in the workplace. There are few organizations not comprised of multiple nationalities and therefore multiple cultures. However, most organizations (and therefore supervisors) do not delve into these diverse factors to discover the rewards of acknowledging and incorporating these dynamics into their supervisory skills. Moreover, we rarely understand how to engage the cultural differences that can be constructive instead of just accepting them as painful conflicts.

In this workshop, the focus is on how to develop constructive conversations through dialogic engagement. First, you examine conflict from a personal perspective by defining it as two opposing ideas attempting to occupy the same space at the same time, often however, without engaging each other. Second, you draw on concepts from crucial and difficult conversations to understand how to focus on the quality of engagement instead of our imaginary stories of what could go wrong. Third, you expand the conversation through understanding your personal intercultural conflict style, wherein the awareness of differences begins to shed new light on how to engage instead of how to make stories about each other that create disengagement. Combined, this process supports more effective feedback processes and performance evaluations.

Supportive Reading

1. Crucial Conversations, Grenny, et al.
2. Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, 2016. Marilee Goldberg
3. Stevenson, 2018. Global Inclusion: The Mandate for Successful Organizations

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Class 5: Organizational Culture and Change
Tuesday, February 3, 8:45 a.m.–4:15 p.m., Rockville Campus, MK 122
Facilitator: Richard Forrest

Change should not be brought forward for the sake of just making a change. Organizational Change is better understood from the perspective of recognizing where we are and identifying what we want to do differently or improve. The role of ‘corporate/organizational culture’ in the change process is integral to making change happen. How people react at times of change is strongly tied to organizational culture, which is an often overlooked (or weakly understood) dynamic that is firmly situated in the following:

• Power and control dynamics
• Tasks and relationships
• Vision and Mission behind the change the story
• Acceptance and Rejection forces
• Leadership

In this class, we will look at how values, (and associated behaviors) norms and expectations differ across an organization, and what that means when managing at a time of change.

Using the results of our Corporate Culture Profile diagnostic we will examine the four archetypes of organizational culture to understand how differences in hierarchy, tasks and relationships impact our behaviors and expectations.

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Class 6: Leadership and Coaching
Wednesday, March 4, 8:45 a.m.–4:15 p.m., Rockville Campus, MK 122
Facilitator: Herb Stevenson

High performing organizations have traditionally used coaching to support key individuals and teams at times of major change. Increasingly, the practice of ‘coaching at work’ has become an effective leadership practice to help others develop and improve how we lead in business. In this class we will learn essential coaching skills, practice have coaching conversations, and engage in activities to build our leadership coaching skills.

Supportive Reading

1. The Extraordinary Leader (2009) John H Zenger and Joseph Folkman McGraw Hill
2. Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, Second Edition Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, et al.
3. What you need to know about coaching, Stevenson http://www.clevelandconsultinggroup.com/articles/coaching-services
4. Ladder of Inference Stevenson

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Class 7: Leading Meetings and Hybrid Teams
Tuesday, April 7, 8:45 a.m.-12:00 p.m., Rockville Campus, MK 122
Facilitator: Herb Stevenson

In a virtual world, the rules of engagement have changed. It is common to have meetings with offsite attendees in multiple locations and multiple countries. In the past, these meetings occurred as teleconferences, which prevented participants the ability to develop face value. In addition, meetings were often reporting of data instead of engaging all participants. The rise of cost-effective video conferencing has altered this process such that virtual meetings can be as effective as in-person meetings. Moreover, enhancing meeting effectiveness occurs when participants understand the purpose/intent of the meeting, and know how to focus their attention on each agenda item.

In this workshop, you apply learning from the Intercultural Conflict Style Assessments. In this way, you deepen the understanding of cross-cultural dynamics that need to be included in your awareness of virtual meetings. You participate in a conversation of how to engage individually and cross-culturally while in a virtual setting. You determine how to focus the meetings through indicating your intent (i.e. meeting-leader-intent) for the agenda items: Decision! Consultation! Operating Execution Update! Informative!

The final focus is on how to maintain face value by reaching out to touch virtually. Acknowledging that the lack of face-to-face communication has affected the quality of relationships, you explore how to maintain face time value virtually.

Supportive Readings

1. Ladder of Inference. Stevenson
2. Behavioral Elements of Trust
3. No More Pointless Meetings: Breakthrough Sessions That Will Revolutionize the Way You Work Martin Murphy (2013) AMACOM

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Class 8: Servant Leadership - Mindset and Practice
Tuesday, April 21, 8:45 a.m.–4:15 p.m., Rockville Campus, MK 122
Facilitator: Richard Forrest

What is leadership? No subject in business is written on more than leadership. Yet, age old questions persist as the models are predominantly culturally biased and bi-polar. Most American models promote the importance of vision as a characteristic of a leader, while competitive models argue that it’s about execution. Whereas for others, it’s about courage, only to be thwarted by the need for caution. In some cultures, like France, it is about being male, while Chinese models proclaim the effectiveness of yin yang, Mao and Tao. All these approaches are fine when operating in a vacuum of cultural sterility, however with our world becoming a global village, cultural mixing has upended the strength and truth of any one model.

“Now more than ever a leader’s capacity to both direct the organization and its people, while at the same time work in their service is being recognized as vital for creating a sustainable organization in a globalizing world” (Trompenaars, 2024).

In this class we will revisit and build on the Trompenaars Hampden-Turner key concepts covered in the cohort. Our focus is frame ‘culture’ and examine the way in which the 7 dimensions affect behavior and business. We will contrast traditional leadership models with servant leadership to discern how a reconciling mindset serves as a model that is effective across all cultures. In the class we will assess our leadership style, and explore the Seven Meta Dilemmas of Leadership through case study examples.  

Part of our goal is to examine multiple ways that leadership is involved in bridging the differences between cultures and in the process identify what behaviors are involved by leaders and needed by those around us. We will use the 7 dimensions to give insight to the ways in which cultures are different and apply the DRP to resolve issues by integrating different viewpoints to strengthen your ability to lead others and across the organization.

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Class 9: Synthesizing Workshops
Tuesday, May 5, 8:45 a.m.–4:15 p.m., Rockville Campus, MK 122

Participants attend a three-hour synthesizing workshop from which they present well-defined drafts of their final projects with their peers for purposes of feedback and refinement. Preparation and explanation of this workshop will be discussed in previous classes and communications.

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Class 10: Make-Up Day
Tuesday, May 26, 8:45 a.m.–4:15 p.m., Rockville Campus, MK 122

Make-up day for cancelled class

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Class 11: Project Presentations – Graduation
Friday, June 12, 9:00 a.m.–4:15 p.m., Rockville Campus, MK 122

Information and explanation of Final Projects for GLC will be introduced in Class 3 “Values to Behavior – Building a Team Charter”