Duke Environmental Leadership Program
The DEL-MEM Leadership Advantage
As our name suggests, leadership is a driving theme of the DEL-MEM program. We believe that leadership is cultivated by each individual and requires time and effort; it is a process. Integrated into the DEL-MEM program, opportunities are provided to develop your leadership capacity in environmental and management. Participation in the DEL-MEM program will put you one step closer in your leadership pursuit by providing you with opportunities to:
- Enhance your understanding of the meaning of leadership
- Assess your leadership capabilities and leverage your strengths
- Gain practical leadership skills, including critical and creative thinking, communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution, and the ability to apply them
- Better understand “followership” and how to cultivate it
- Identify and align your own beliefs and values with the process
- Create a personal leadership development plan, set goals and evaluate your progress
- Reflect on and resolve leadership challenges in your organization or agency
- Learn from prominent leaders through a dedicated leadership workshop in DC
- Emerge with a renewed vision of yourself as a leader
In addition to threading leadership into the course curriculum, the DEL-MEM program explores leadership in a variety of ways, including discussions and exercises during face-to-face sessions, conference calls with our Leadership Consultant, select readings, and a "one-of-a-kind" leadership immersion experience in Washington, DC.
Fran Mainella, Former Director of the National Park Service, poses
for a group photo with DEL-MEM students and directors.
“The [DEL leadership session in DC] offered an opportunity to meet and work intimately with a diverse and distinguished group of leaders in the field. I don't know of any other program in the country that offers such an important experience.” Kathleen Kutschenreuter, DEL-MEM’06, Environmental Protection Specialist ,U.S. EPA
The DEL-MEM Leadership Module includes for example one-on-one meetings were arranged with:
- Steven McCormick, President and CEO, The Nature Conservancy
- Thomas Lovejoy, President, The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment
- Linda Fisher, Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer, DuPont
- James Connaughton, Chairman, Whitehouse Council on Environmental Quality
- Fran Mainella, Director, National Park Service
- Staff from Senator Joe Lieberman and Ron Wyden’s offices.
Free time enabled students to experience Washington, DC, spend time on the Mall, and reflect on the sessions and their own development as a leader.
To cap off the week, students break into working groups, each assigned to one of the leadership presentations. Each working group assumed the role of a "leadership coach" or consultant, and considered what sort of advice they might offer the individual relative to their leadership on a personal level, organizational level, and on a broader scale. Comments are forwarded to the leaders we met with
See photos of the trip and read what the students had to say about the experience >
