The Executive Shift: A Five-Week Course on How the Best Executives Think and Operate [SEPTEMBER 21ST]

A Five-Week Executive Development Course The behaviors that made you successful are the ones most likely to hold you back. With boards demanding faster adaptation, AI reshaping every function, and 50%+ of newly promoted executives failing to meet expectations within eighteen months — the cost of operating on the wrong behavioral playbook has never been higher. Five weeks to recalibrate before a bigger role forces the issue. 5-Week Online Certificate Program Program starts Monday, April 6th On Friday, April 3rd, each participant will receive an email with their login information to access the course. All modules, assignments, and quizzes must be completed by 11:59 PM (PST) on the final day of the program. The final day of the program is Sunday, May 10, 2026. Each week, you'll watch approximately one hour of video, complete one assignment to hardwire your learnings, and take one brief quiz. Expect to spend around 1.5 hours per week between the videos and coursework. There's no shortage of training for managers. How to give feedback, how to have difficult conversations, how to run a team — that stuff gets covered endlessly. And when a frontline manager struggles, the reasons are usually obvious and the fixes are well-known. But somewhere around the director or VP level, the development just stops. Executives get poor feedback loops, poor guidance, and almost no candid evaluation of the behaviors that actually matter. Nobody teaches executives how to stop being the person who does everything. Nobody walks executives through how to build alliances before a major decision, or how to tell the difference between a problem you should solve and a system you should redesign. The assumption is that if you're smart enough to get here, you'll figure it out. You've seen it yourself — talented people who were outstanding managers or individual contributors but never made the shift to thinking and operating like an executive. Not because they lacked intelligence or drive, but because executive leadership requires a genuinely different set of behaviors, and nobody told them which ones. You could spend eight months at Harvard or Stanford working through that. But you might not have eight months, and you probably don't need a full MBA-style curriculum. What you need is something focused — five weeks that pinpoint the specific behaviors and give you a concrete path to change them. That's what The Executive Shift is. An online course built around five weeks of targeted development. Each week focuses on one behavioral pattern. You finish with a personalized readiness report and a certificate of completion. This program trains the default, not the vocabulary. If you've taken the Executive Readiness Index, you've already seen in black and white how you operate when the stakes, scope, and pressure increase. You know where you're strong, where you get pulled back into the weeds, and which habits could become liabilities at a broader level of responsibility. What you don't get from the assessment alone is a concrete path for changing those patterns. The Executive Shift is that next step. It takes the insight — "I default to doing the work myself," "I avoid the political side," "I slow down when the visibility gets high" — and turns it into five weeks of specific behaviors to practice, tools to use, and decisions to handle differently. It gives you a tight window to recalibrate how you show up now — before a promotion, a crisis, or a bigger role forces the issue on harder terms. If you haven't taken the ERI yet, you'll complete it at the start so your work is grounded in how you actually operate, not how you think you operate. What Actually Derails Executives Nobody questions your competence. That's not the problem. The problem is that the habits behind your competence — the ones that earned you this role — start working against you at a broader level of responsibility. And they're hard to see because they still feel like strengths. In our study of 1,087 board members who fired their CEOs, the reasons had almost nothing to do with bad quarters. Boards fired CEOs for failing to drive change (31%), tolerating low performers (27%), and losing touch with reality (23%) — behavioral failures, not financial ones. Boards don't lose confidence because you lost money for a quarter. Boards lose confidence because they don't think the CEO is adapting fast enough. And in a separate study of 1,204 employees, 84% said their boss showed zero change even after being directly told about their blind spots. The patterns were invisible from the inside and intractable from the outside. These aren't bad leaders. They're good leaders running the wrong operating system for the level they're trying to reach. And here's what makes it dangerous: the leader who micromanages calls it "quality control." The leader who avoids organizational politics calls it "integrity." The leader who can't stop doing the work themselves calls it "leading by example." Five Promotion Traps 01 The Tactical Gravity Trap. You spend 70–80% of your time on operational work while the role demands strategic thinking. Urgency feels productive; ambiguity doesn't. 02 The “Being Right” Trap. A VP known for having the sharpest analysis in the room delivers smart recommendations that go nowhere, because she never brought the right stakeholders in early enough. 03 The Strength-Overuse Trap. High standards become micromanagement. Confidence becomes steamrolling. Under pressure, you amplify the exact behavior that's already not working. 04 The Bottleneck Trap. A senior director who built his reputation on quality keeps reviewing everything important. He's protecting standards, but he's also the bottleneck — the organization can only move as fast as his calendar. 05 The Expertise Trap. Your instincts fire with full confidence — but they're calibrated to the old context. Certainty in an unfamiliar domain is a warning signal, not competence. Leadership IQ Research In our study of 1,087 board members, the #1 reason CEOs were fired was failing to manage change — not missing a financial target. 50%+ of executives who step into larger roles fail to meet expectations within eighteen months. This course identifies the specific patterns holding you back — and gives you five weeks to replace them with the behaviors that work at the next level. What You Cover Each Week Each week targets one behavioral dimension through practical frameworks, real scenarios, and tools you can apply immediately. Week 01 Thinking Beyond Your Function Strategic Scale Readiness This is about where your attention naturally goes when something breaks or an opportunity appears. Do you focus on this quarter's deliverables and the immediate fix, or do you step back and think about how this connects to the company's long-term direction, cross-functional tradeoffs, and enterprise-level impact? Leaders who keep advancing don't just solve today's issue — they ask what it means for the whole organization and what needs to change so the same problem doesn't come back in six months. They operate at a longer time horizon and a wider scope. Leaders who struggle here often work extremely hard but stay anchored to their own team's priorities. They're strong operators who haven't yet made the shift from thinking like the head of a function to thinking like a member of the enterprise leadership team. Week 02 Getting Things Done Through People Who Don't Report to You Political Maturity This is your ability to move ideas, decisions, and initiatives forward when you can't just direct people to do it. It's not manipulation — it's understanding that good ideas don't implement themselves. Before major decisions are made in any organization, influence is already forming, support is building, and resistance is organizing. Executives who are strong here build relationships before they need them. They know who needs to be aligned, who needs to feel heard, and who can quietly stall progress. They know that influence is built long before anyone asks for a vote — through how they show up, follow through, and build trust over time. Leaders who lack this dimension rely on logic alone and walk into decision meetings assuming the best argument wins. At senior levels, that's rarely how it works. And saying “I don't play politics” is not a principled stance — it's an abdication of responsibility that hands power to people who are less rigorous than you but more willing to do the relational work. Week 03 Making the Call When the Answer Isn't Clear Decision Velocity & Judgment This is your ability to move forward under uncertainty without becoming reckless or paralyzed. Some executives slow everything down because they treat every decision as irreversible. Others move fast but create avoidable damage. The strongest leaders know the difference between a one-way door and a two-way door — they slow down when consequences are permanent and move quickly when they can adjust later. The general rule: if you've got 70% of the information you wish you had, it's time to go. They also separate ego from course correction — when new data proves a decision was wrong, they pivot cleanly instead of defending the original call. And they design decision routines that surface blind spots and counteract the usual traps — loss aversion, status quo bias, overconfidence — without slowing everything down. Week 04 Building an Organization That Doesn't Depend on You Scale Leadership Capacity This is the shift from being the person who does great work to the person who builds an organization that does great work. Earlier in your career, you created value through your own expertise. At executive scale, your job is to create leverage through people and systems. If everything still needs your review, your input, or your rescue, the organization can only grow as fast as you can personally operate. Leaders who are strong here design clear ownership, develop people who can think independently, and build processes that work without constant intervention. They measure success by what continues to perform when they step away. One useful test: if you disappeared for 90 days, what would break? The gaps that question exposes are exactly what this week targets. Leaders who struggle here often look indispensable — and over time, that indispensability becomes the ceiling. This week, you replace heroics and control with capacity and systems. Week 05 Updating Your Playbook Before Reality Forces It Adaptive Learning Orientation This is your willingness to revise your thinking when evidence contradicts you. The experience that made you successful also creates strong instincts, and at higher levels those instincts are sometimes calibrated for the wrong context. Markets shift, organizations change, roles expand. What worked before doesn't always translate. This is especially visible right now with AI. Every senior leader is being asked to make decisions about technology they didn't grow up with, in a landscape that's changing faster than most planning cycles can accommodate. The leaders who handle this well aren't the ones who suddenly become technical experts — they're the ones who can admit what they don't yet understand, ask better questions, and set direction through experimentation rather than false certainty. Only about 15% of executives demonstrate high learning agility — and those who do advance at roughly twice the rate of their peers. The difference isn't intelligence. It's the willingness to actively test your own assumptions, seek disconfirming evidence, and admit quickly that your first read was incomplete. If you're not learning, you're not leading. Those who struggle defend their past expertise and double down on familiar patterns — becoming less flexible precisely because they were once so capable. Who This Course Is For Built for... VPs and Senior Directors leading functions, business units, or large teams. Newly promoted executives adjusting to broader scope, expectations, and visibility. CHROs, talent leaders, and CEOs who want a structured, evidence-based development program for their highest-potential leaders rather than another generic offsite. Not for... Early-career managers or individual contributors still learning the basics of people leadership. Leaders looking for motivational content, general inspiration, or generic leadership tips. This is a five-week executive development course for leaders operating at a level where the problems are harder, the feedback is vaguer, and the margin for behavioral error is smaller. For CHROs & CEOs If you're responsible for succession planning, high-potential development, or promotion slates, this course gives your top leaders a structured, evidence-based development experience — not another generic offsite. Use it as your flagship executive-readiness program for your top 5–10% of leaders. It de-risks high-potential promotions, gives your senior team a common behavioral language for discussing executive readiness, and addresses the reality that 84% of leaders don't change after receiving feedback — because feedback alone doesn't come with a path to change. This does. Your Instructor Mark Murphy Mark Murphy is a New York Times bestselling author, Forbes Senior Contributor, and founder of Leadership IQ. His research on leadership effectiveness has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, and NPR. He is the author of seven books on leadership and has trained leaders at Harvard Business School, the United Nations, Microsoft, IBM, MasterCard, Merck, and thousands of organizations worldwide. The Executive Readiness Index is the product of his research into why talented leaders stall when they reach for bigger roles — and what specifically separates the executives who scale from those who don't. Forbes Harvard Microsoft IBM NYTimes Ready to make the shift? Every day you operate with the old playbook is a day spent solving problems below your level while the strategic work goes undone. Don't wait for a crisis or a bigger role to force the issue. Recalibrate how you lead now — on your schedule, in five weeks. What's Included Executive Readiness Index (ERI) assessment Personalized readiness report 5 weekly modules with video lessons Practical assignments & tools Quizzes to test application Certificate of completion ~1.5 hours per week · Fully self-paced within the 5-week window Enrolling yourself or building your leadership pipeline? Enrolling 3+ leaders? Contact us about group pricing Program starts April 6, 2026 · Runs through May 10, 2026