Hanover -- Leadership training is taking a more prominent role at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College with the launch of a new center at the school.

Last week, Tuck announced the start of its Center for Leadership, which will expand a program begun in 2003. It is designed to combine activities, curriculum requirements, academic research and professional forums to help MBA students develop leadership qualities -- at a time when many Americans have begun to question whether corporate executives display those qualities.

“The creation of the center shows Tuck's continuing commitment to provide the best business leadership education in the world,” said Pino Audia, a Tuck professor and the Center's founder.

The center's approach moves beyond traditional methods of analyzing case studies of how other people lead, and instead focuses on the Tuck students themselves. It starts from the assumption that effective leadership is not a set of ideal traits, Audia said, but rather recognizes how varying strengths can be applied to different situations.

As part of a new core course on personal leadership, students will create a plan for themselves, which will be revised and given depth throughout the two-year program. Using feedback from former co-workers and peers, students determine their leadership strengths and areas for improvement. The goal is to give them a fuller picture of their skills instead of simply analyzing traits of effective or ineffective leaders through case studies.

“The idea is that effective leadership requires not only knowledge about how organizations are run but also knowledge about oneself,” Audia said. “This second type of knowledge is surprisingly difficult to acquire due to biases that render people's perceptions of themselves inaccurate.”

Tuck's move toward this kind of leadership training is unique, said Dan LeClair, vice president and chief knowledge officer for The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the world's largest accrediting body for business schools, of which Tuck is a member.

He was not aware of any other business school taking such an approach.

“This is fairly unique,” he said. “In most cases, students are allowed to customize their education according to what they like, what they dislike and their career objectives, but not based on hard data about their personality and leadership traits.”

The center's launch comes as a new ethics requirement begins for Tuck's incoming class. That curriculum change, announced in April, came after years of strategic review at Tuck. The timing seemed particularly appropriate, however, given the claims of dubious ethical behavior among CEOs in the financial crisis.

“Courses on ethics and leadership can be seen as complementary,” Audia said. “Ethics requirements are about finding your internal compass and learning how to discriminate between right and wrong. Leadership requirements are about helping ethical leaders to pursue the right courses of action.”

The Center's executive director, Richard McNulty, also runs the career development office at Tuck. He said the linking of those two roles is intentional, as the goal of the new center is to help students get a better sense of their strengths and where they would best be applied in their future careers.

Often, people don't come to those realizations until several years into the career path they've chosen. The Center will help Tuck students develop insights on which careers to pursue and skills to accelerate their paths to leadership positions.

“Our goal on the career planning side is to help students be even more informed about the decisions they make,” he said. “To choose a path where their strengths are aligned with what it takes to maximize their success.”

The first semester will be used for gaining self-awareness, providing the foundation for leadership training throughout their time at Tuck, McNulty and Audia said. People usually have an unrealistic, mostly heightened, sense of their abilities, Audia said. That is why soliciting peer feedback will be a significant part of the program.

The rest of the time at Tuck will be given over to gaining situational awareness and personal development, Audia said, reinforced in workshops, interactions with leaders and other activities.

Although the students will be a central focus, the center also will have research and corporate outreach components. It will support and encourage research on topics that deepen understanding of leadership and will be a forum where business leaders and scholars exchange best practices and research findings.

Alumni will also play a role, Audia said, especially for extending the Center's mission.

“The Tuck MBA is more than a two-year experience. It's a lifelong community,” he said. “We count on the deep bonds that tie our alumni to the school to sustain the learning process.”