New Leadership Course By Ronald Heifetz
Coming Fall 2025
Make progress on the challenges that matter most to you.
Course Overview
This course empowers you with a practical leadership framework to help you tackle your most complex challenges. You’ll learn to diagnose problems effectively, generate options for action, manage pressure, and engage key stakeholders to make meaningful progress within teams and organizations—all designed to help you break free from feeling stuck and lead with curiosity and agility. Developed by leadership scholar and Harvard Kennedy School professor Ronald Heifetz, this new offering expands upon the popular edX short course Exercising Leadership: Foundational Principles.
You'll learn from global leaders across industries who are applying this framework to solve real-world problems. From closing skill gaps in education and building cross-industry connections to coordinating global relief efforts and leading teams through unprecedented change, their experiences demonstrate adaptive leadership in action and will inspire you to apply these principles in your own situations.
When you enroll, you’ll receive:
- One-year access to course content
- Access to live online events
- Regularly updated material to continue your leadership learning beyond the course modules
This course is made for individuals and organizations who are:
Seeking Direction
For those who are facing complex challenges and are unsure about the next steps, this course helps uncover new insights and actionable paths forward.
Navigating Change
Designed for leaders dealing with significant transitions or high-pressure situations, this course offers concepts and strategies to lead effectively through uncertainty or crisis.
Resolving Conflict
For those hoping to bridge disagreement, this course provides powerful tools and techniques for surfacing perspectives and aligning around a shared sense of purpose.
Your Instructor
Ronald Heifetz is among the world’s foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership. He speaks extensively and advises heads of governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations across the globe. In 2016, President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia highlighted Heifetz’s advice in his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture.
Heifetz founded the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School where he has taught for nearly four decades. He is the King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership. Heifetz played a pioneering role in establishing leadership as an area of study and education in the United States and at Harvard. His research addresses two challenges: developing a conceptual foundation for the analysis and practice of leadership; and developing transformative methods for leadership education, training, and consultation.
Heifetz co-developed the adaptive leadership framework with Riley Sinder and Marty Linsky to provide a basis for leadership research and practice. His first book, Leadership Without Easy Answers (1994), is a classic in the field and one of the ten most assigned course books at Harvard and Duke Universities. Heifetz co-authored the best-selling Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Change with Marty Linsky, which serves as one of the primary go-to books for practitioners across sectors (2002, revised 2017).
Empower Your Team with the Adaptive Leadership Framework
The principles and concepts taught in this course are most effective when applied across teams, communities, and organizations.
Harvard Online offers discounted pricing options designed for teams and organizations of all types and sizes.