The Resilient Leader

Program Experience

Highlights and Key Outcomes

Led by Wharton professor Samir Nurmohamed and a distinguished group of faculty, the program blends rigorous research, experiential learning, practical tools, and peer exchange. Participants translate insight into action by developing a personalized Resilience Action Plan they can apply immediately in their roles.

In The Resilient Leader, you will:

• Learn to reframe resilience as a leadership capability that can be intentionally developed, rather than as a fixed personal trait
• Apply practical strategies that help teams adapt, recover, and perform under ongoing uncertainty and stress
• Understand how resilience operates beyond the individual and how leaders can embed it into team and organizational systems
• Build proactive resilience before disruption occurs, strengthening capacity to anticipate, absorb, and respond to setbacks

Experience and Impact

The Resilient Leader classroom experience is designed to actively engage participants in applying ideas to real leadership challenges. Faculty-led sessions integrate research-backed frameworks with facilitated discussion, diagnostic assessments, and hands-on exercises. Through simulations, team-based work, and structured reflection, participants test how they respond to uncertainty, constraints, and trade-offs, and learn from peers facing similar challenges. The result is a set of leadership approaches that can be used immediately.

The program features a conversation with Founder and Executive Director of Mural Arts Philadelphia, Jane Golden, as well as a mural tour that connects classroom learning to a real-world setting and highlights how leadership, creativity, and community interact under constraint. In a Fireside Chat, psychologist, researcher, and author of the best-selling Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Angela Duckworth examines grit as perseverance in the face of difficulty, clarifying how it contributes to resilience alongside recovery and adaptability.

Over the four-day program, participants develop a personalized Resilience Action Plan and articulate their own resilient-leadership narrative. Together, these tools help translate research, dialogue, and lived experience into clear leadership commitments that participants can take back to their organizations, strengthening their ability to lead in environments where sustained uncertainty, complexity, and pressure are part of the job, not the exception.

Convince Your Supervisor

Here’s a justification letter you can edit and send to your supervisor to help you make the case for attending this Wharton program.

Attend as a Team. Amplify the Impact.

Wharton Executive Education offers group-enrollment benefits for organizations sending four or more participants. Learn More »

Due to our application review period, applications submitted after 12:00 p.m. ET on Friday for programs beginning the following Monday may not be processed in time to grant admission. Applicants will be contacted by a member of our Client Relations Team to discuss options for future programs and dates.