For a brief moment, imagine your company’s executive team standing in front of you.

Can you see them, clear as a picture?

Now ask yourself two key questions: First, how many of these key leaders are approaching retirement? And second, does your organization have the right individuals prepared to fill those roles and lead the company?

As Baby Boomers continue to retire in droves, the need to prepare high potential leaders for stepping quickly into leadership roles has never been more critical. Enter Clark Callahan, Executive Director of Tuck Executive Education at Dartmouth. In the discussion below, Clark expresses his thoughts on how to best prepare future leaders for the changes ahead and explains the role of executive education in readying emerging leaders.

A Discussion with Clark Callahan, Executive Director of Tuck Executive Education at Dartmouth

Q: Tell us about the current potential for emerging leaders to enter and fill leadership roles. What is creating this opportunity and what are the results?

Clark: In general, I think there are a couple of dynamics at work in creating opportunities for emerging leaders to step into leadership roles. One of them is that really high potential leaders are actually under-populated in large companies and large organizations, and so there are huge leadership opportunities out there. In fact, if you look at the broad strokes of the demographics of the workforce, there are large numbers of baby boomers retiring, leaving lots of room for emerging leaders to come in behind them. The potential is obviously huge and in fact it raises a question for folks in my business—in executive education—we’re in the business of accelerating the readiness of high potential leaders, but how we can get even better at it? How can we accelerate that process even more? How can we give people the experience, the networks, the knowledge, to be ready when their organizations need them to step up and take broader leadership roles?

Q: What is the role of executive education in preparing future leaders for what’s to come? Do you see any flaws in the current system?

Clark: We see ourselves as an important component, but only one component of the things that a leader needs in order to get ready to lead. Of course a lot of what they need is determined in their job, on the job, through the experiences that they’re having, and we’re in effect supplementing that with experiences that they might need—we can give them a preview of an experience that they can expect.

So for example, if somebody is going to take a global assignment and he (or she) has never worked outside of his home country, then we can take him on a global leadership development experience. We can accelerate his readiness and help him feel comfortable when he steps into that assignment. Is he aware of what the cross-cultural dynamics are? What are the teamwork implications? What does he do to attain this kind of a global mindset that he’ll need in order to live in this environment? Well, those are things that we can help emerging leaders attain so they can be ready for leadership sooner.

But to give leaders that experience without surrounding them with all the other support that they need: a good talent management system that identifies them for that role; an understanding and support from a boss or a network in the company; the company specific training, knowledge, etc., there’s no point in getting the higher education component right. It’s when you do have all these other things in place that the experience we provide becomes a great accelerator for helping the pieces fall into place.

Q: What changes in the Tuck Executive Ed curriculum have occurred in the past 10 years? Why these changes?

Clark: If I look at it at a 10-year horizon, I would say our business has undergone a very fundamental transformation to the point that we’re really almost in a different business today. Ten years ago, executive education meant helping high potential leaders develop their business acumen, which included leadership, organization, behavior and teams and things like that, but we wouldn’t have said we’re in the leadership development business. In contrast, today we’d say that leadership development is who we are; it’s what we do.

So the business has been transformed from high-end management training in business acumen topics—Finance, Marketing, Operations, etc., to today, where we are still drawing on the same core capabilities, but toward the goal of developing leaders who can transform organizations. We’re developing leaders in the context of a business challenge/opportunity that they have or in the context of a business skill that they need to develop.

Today we still have those abilities, but the core of what we do now is Strategic Financial Leadership.

Another example is not so much to a program as it is to how a particular faculty member might approach a content area. I’ll give you an example from Economics. We have a senior faculty member who is a world-renowned international economist and he can teach a group of executives about the role of China in the global economy, what it means, how a company should ask questions about how this would impact their firms in the future, etc. This is great stuff for anyone in a leadership role in a large company, it’s great stuff for CEOs, it’s great stuff for CEOs in training.

And yet what he’s really doing is using that very useful content as a platform for challenging people to think strategically and to develop their own leadership points of view. He’ll say, “Here’s my point of view about the global economy, but you need to develop and have an ability to articulate your own and to teach to others to do the same so you create a learning organization.”

And that’s really what we’re doing. So here we have a guy who is a world-renowned economist, which is valuable. The content and context is extremely valuable, too. And yet the reason why I want him directing our global leadership program is that he understands that it is all being used as an end to develop the next generation of leaders.

Q: How can future leaders be best prepared to fill leadership roles? What changes are you/Tuck Executive Education making in the coming years to prepare future leaders?

Clark: If I had to put it in a single headline: Learn how to think not what to think.

That’s not the kind of thing we think of doing too often right now, but it might actually become core. And I think part of it is a result of living in a smarter world where people have learned a lot right out of the business schools. Business schools made some very positive contributions to how business is done and to society.

People get smarter faster, too. When people come to a program it’s not so much of knowledge transfer that they want; it’s a way of framing a challenge. How do we help people to think differently–how do we not tell them what to think, but rather help them understand how to develop their own ways of thinking?