Reflections on the Seminar Experience

The Aspen Executive Seminar wasn’t Tina Barseghian’s first leadership training. But nothing, she says, has had the impact of her week in August 2019 in Aspen, where she immersed herself in the Aspen Institute’s seminar’s unique alchemy of deep reading, provocative conversation, and new connections that have grown into sustaining friendships.

“I learned about the Aspen Executive Seminar from a friend who had worked for Mayor Bloomberg and said it was an amazing experience,” said Barseghian. “I was looking for a great leadership training seminar, and she said, ‘You have to go to Aspen.’”

That recommendation changed her life.

After stints as a journalist, storyteller, and communications leader, Barseghian — who now works as Marketing and Communications Director at the Redford Center — was working for a small national nonprofit and craving a deeper understanding of how to make decisions that impact lots of people’s lives.

She describes the week spent in Aspen as truly life-changing, starting with the surroundings.

“First off, the setting is spectacular and at such a dramatic scale that all your senses are heightened—or at least mine were. I was surrounded by the breathtaking beauty of the mountains, so there was this level of awe already present even before the seminar began.”

Over the course of the week, Barseghian’s cohort of around 20 worked through a diverse array of texts under the guidance of moderator Todd Breyfogle. They read Billy Budd and The Communist Manifesto, The Prince and The Declaration of Independence, as well as works by Hobbes, Aristotle, Maya Angelou, Ta-Nehisi Coates, bell hooks, and Martin Luther King Jr.

“I felt like I got a phd in a week,” Barseghian said. “It was a seismic shift in the way I understood the world.”

Perhaps the most enlightening aspect of the seminar was a concept that has profoundly changed the way Barseghian approaches leadership–through the lenses of values, tensions, and tradeoffs.

“The Executive Compass is an incredible framework for decision making in any capacity,” she said. “I’ve used it at board meetings, I’ve used it leading strategy for 300-person companies. I’ve used it for my own decision-making on my team.

“You use this framework to look at your decisions, plot them on the axes, and then try to understand what your own disposition is as a leader,” she said. “You start to see what you truly value, and then you can take steps to become the leader you want to be.”

Previous leadership trainings had helped Barseghian with tactical responses to sticky situations, but her time at Aspen helped her ask not what should I do in this one case, but what kind of leader do I need to be?

“This was much more personal,” she said, “kind of articulating who you are as a leader, your mission, and values. We were asking questions that have helped me contextualize situations at a much higher level. Practicing good leadership is very hard because you are balancing so many different needs at the same time.”

Though this values-based framework has had a lasting effect on how Barseghian leads, she’s quick to note that some of the most enduring impact of her week at the Aspen Executive Seminar has been the friendships she’s made.

“I’m still in touch now seven years later with at least five people from my cohort and they’re very very good friends. To this day, we encourage and support each other through tough times, but also insire and teach each other. It feels like everything we did at Aspen we’ve found a way to carry forward.”

The Aspen Executive Seminar doesn’t provide answers; it helps participants find grounding. And in a world that moves fast and rewards certainty, that may be the most valuable leadership lesson of all.