Legal Leadership Essentials (LAWS90226)

This subject will provide students with an understanding of key concepts in the field of leadership and enable them to more effectively assume leadership responsibilities within organisations, legal practices and/or the community more broadly.   The subject aims to give students not only a theoretical understanding of leadership but practical skills and approaches that they can enact both during the course and subsequently to enhance their careers and impact.  The subject focuses on the particular challenges and opportunities for lawyers seeking to have impact in modern organisations and the community through leadership.  The modes of instruction will include experiential learning, transformative learning, collaborative learning and guest speaker presentations.  Students will draw on their own experience of leadership (as both leaders and followers) as well as biographical and hypothetical case studies in leadership. This subject is designed for students who have worked in organisations or legal practices and who have an interest in assuming leadership responsibilities.

Principal topics include:

• A brief modern history of leadership (tracing the evolution of leadership from the industrial age to the present)
• Lawyers as leaders (the role of advocacy, emotional stability, expertise and objectivity in modern leadership)
• Harnessing human motivation
• Authority and leadership
• Leading in complexity
• Leading change
• The psychology of judgment and decision making (as individuals and in groups)
• Self as leader (preferences for behaviour, emotional intelligence, self-awareness and cognitive flexibility)
• Sustainable leadership

Students in the Melbourne Law Masters program who would like to take this subject as an elective should have a minimum of 2-5 years relevant work experience.