Intentional Power

1Everything's Changed

When their faces popped on to the screen as they joined our virtual classroom, you could see the eagerness and the anxiety. Thirty‐seven students, mid‐career professionals, had signed up for our winter 2023 Stanford Continuing Studies seminar on “Modern Leadership in the New World of Work.” These up‐and‐coming leaders would be logging on to Zoom one night a week for the next eight weeks. In this class, like previous classes, we have students from around the world: San Francisco, New York, Toronto, London, Mumbai, Singapore, Jakarta, Sao Paulo, and many places in between. This means they'll be forced to stay up or wake up just to show up. And they do.

Why?

Much like the hundreds of students we have taught through Stanford and the thousands of leaders we engage with through our global leadership labs and our daily work, employees at every level are struggling with the complexity of today's new world of work. They, like all of us, are facing tectonic shifts in where, how, and even why we work. As one of our new students, Abel,* a senior director for a well‐established tech company based in the San Francisco Bay Area shared, “I'm taking this class because I'm trying to understand how to be a good leader in the midst of this chaos.”

Abel is zooming in from Atlanta. He moved back home mid‐pandemic to be near family. Like him, his team of over 100 designers and engineers are now spread across the United States. Abel's boss wants everyone back in the office. He ...