Central State University’s Honors College works with Harvard Division of Continuing Education on hosting leadership workshops for students 

Above: Central State Honors College students and Strada Scholars display the certificates they earned for participation in the Harvard Division of Continuing Education leadership workshops. Pictured are (from left) Jonathan Foster, Isabella Wynter Mitchell, Stacy Powell Griffith, Dr. Paul A. Schlag, Camron Nesbitt, Keante Lewis, and Harvard instructor Laura Wilcox. 

Central State University’s Honors College held two on-site leadership development workshops produced by the Harvard Division of Continuing Education Professional Development Programs this past month.  

The two-day workshops — two separate sessions of Becoming a Leader: Developing Your Style and Making Sound Decisions — offered students the opportunity to equip themselves with the knowledge and tools needed to lead effectively in today’s dynamic career landscape.  

Selected Marauders who completed these seminars earned a Harvard Leadership Certificate that they may now highlight on their resumes and in their professional online profiles.

The connection to Harvard was made through Central State’s Executive Director of the Honors College & International Affairs Dr. Paul A. Schlag, who first came to the school during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.   

“The president of the University at that time wanted to create a bona fide Honors College,” Schlag said. “He knew about my work with the Honors College at a previous university where we grew student enrollment in that program from 200 to just over 1,000.

“The president and I had a shared vision about what an Honors College at Central State could be and should be in terms of attracting high-achieving, highly motivated students, promoting them for major scholarships and awards, and providing them with the extracurricular events and activities that would make them more marketable for employers in the future once they graduate.” 

Such events and activities include the Harvard Leadership Workshops, which were not held exclusively for Honors College students per se but did attract a similar caliber of high-achieving, highly motivated Marauder.  

Putting together the Harvard Leadership Workshops took about a year-and-a-half in the making, Schlag said. Schlag “thinks big,” as he put it, explaining that he “wanted to go to the biggest and the best training programs in the country.” 

Schlag reached out to Harvard to begin that conversation. Harvard in turn looked into Central State and was impressed enough with the Institution to work with Schlag on his strategy of bringing its leadership workshops to the school. 

“We wanted to create workshops specifically tailored to our students,” Schlag said. “I didn’t want to limit this opportunity to just Honors College students. But, still, we knew we had to customize for both our traditional on-campus students and our very large base of online students. These students are very different, notably since many online students are older and more experienced. And, so, the workshops needed to be distinctive, as well.” 

Harvard representatives and Schlag discussed over the course of that year-and-a-half what the programming of these workshops could be for both on-campus and online students. The needs of students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were additionally integrated into the programming during this development process. 

“Everything that Harvard and I did to put these workshops together was specifically targeted to Central State and Central State students,” Schlag emphasized. “That’s why it took quite a while for us to figure out what this would be, what the content of the courses would be, and when to hold them.” 

The workshops were developed to instruct students on the logistics of building their own leadership styles, Schlag explained. “They were really built, first of all, on self-awareness about what the students would prefer as a leadership style, what kind of leader they would want to be, and really looking introspectively.”  

Next, the workshops assisted students with emotional management. This element focused on how students deal with emotions, along with strategies on how a leader can take a step back to think about solutions to problems in a logical, objective way.  

The second day of the two-day workshops then moved into how students can utilize these individual leadership and emotional skills in order to best impact other people and start to influence them in a positive direction.  

“It was very engaging, very interactive, very thought-provoking,” Schlag said. “This was a world-class educational experience from Harvard instructor Laura Wilcox. She just really opened our students’ eyes. and I was very pleased with how our students engaged with her and the workshop content.” 

The workshops were developed and delivered by Wilcox, director of Management and Finance Programs at Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education. Wilcox has been in academia for over three decades at the intersection of business, innovation, and education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), MIT Sloan, and Harvard. She has taught courses and executive education programs in the areas of organizational behavior, leadership, and decision-making to those in government, education, and the private and public sectors of industry. 

“She usually teaches leadership courses to business executives and ‘cream of the crop’ business leaders who can afford to pay for access to this stellar educational experience,” Schlag said. “She was very pleased with the engagement level of our students and the depth of thought that went into their participation and their sharing of their experiences.” 

Because Harvard does not typically partner with other universities on these workshops and because this was the first time the program worked with an HBCU, Schlag noted that that was further reason why they needed to “get very creative” and spend a great deal of time on the initial development of the programming.  

“I think, because of this, it was really good for Harvard, too,” Schlag said.   

Schlag originally hoped that accepted students would be able to go to Harvard University’s campus for the workshops. That turned out to be cost-prohibitive, however, even with underwriting for the workshops provided through grants.  

Far more students were able to attend than would have been sent if the workshops had indeed been held across the country in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard is located. In total, 80 Marauders took part in both on-campus workshops, with 45 students now registered for the forthcoming two-day online workshop — Managing Yourself and Leading Others — which will be held on Saturday, Oct. 28, and Sunday, Oct. 29. 

“The impact here is that now these students have an Ivy League school associated with their name,” Schlag said. “Laura Wilcox told them that they are so impressive and such great leaders. And to have that come from a professor at an Ivy League institution really helps build our students up. I want those students to see that they can compete with anybody.”  

“They are exceptional, and my intention was for them to see themselves as exceptional. I want to bring other opportunities like this to the school so that our students can know that they belong with the upper echelons of leaders in this country and throughout the world.”  

It is, finally, Schlag’s and Wilcox’s hope that the workshops will have a ripple effect, and that the students who took part in them will share what they learned with their fellow Marauders.