Moore School management Clinical Associate Professor Wanda Chaves was awarded a Center for Teaching Excellence teaching grant last year to support her lessons to students stemming from her vast consulting experience.
Chaves has spent more than 20 years working as an organizational consultant for companies like the Disney Institute, Cirque du Soleil and Hasbro Toys.
Designing projects that draw from her consulting, Chaves teaches courses in Leadership, Talent Management, International Human Resources and Principles of Management.
“I focus on helping students to develop practical knowledge, skills and tools that they can immediately apply in their internships, jobs and personal lives,” she said. “I bring the theories we study to life by sharing stories from my consulting projects and work experience in each class. As often as I can, I invite executives and other leaders to speak in my courses.”
When Chaves works with organizations, she assists them with leadership coaching, developing training programs, improving their overall culture and building a stronger organization.
Here are some of the companies she works with as a management consultant that inform her class lectures:
Disney Institute
Over the years, I have worked with the Disney Institute team on a variety of curriculum development projects to support the Leadership Excellence, Employee Engagement and Customer Service in-person and online training programs at the institute.
Clean the World
I am currently partnering with the Vice President of Human Resources to develop a new employee onboarding experience for all Clean the World employees. I have also worked with their team to develop an experiential learning program to teach students about social entrepreneurship and B Corporations.
Cirque du Soleil
I collaborated with a cross-functional team of leaders and the Chief Creative Officer to identify creativity practices and innovation strategies for the company. We explored experiences such as Open Innovation Labs, Hack-a-thons, Idea Pitching Jams and others to address business and operational challenges and create new opportunities; developed recommendations for an internal online social networking platform for idea sharing, crowdsourcing and collective creation; and conducted a benchmark study of Fortune 500, Fortune 100 and other highly creative organizations across different industries to study their innovation best practices and cultures.
Hasbro Toys
As part of Hasbro's Makers in Residence Program, I partnered with the Vice President of Innovation to explore and develop new creative business opportunities in international markets. We worked on site at Hasbro to research, conceptualize and pitch new ideas around future business possibilities for the company.
Brooklyn Emerging Leaders Academy (BELA)
I collaborated with the inspiring team at the all-girl's Brooklyn Emerging Leaders Academy high school to design curriculum and projects related to the Project Be leadership journals for students in grades 9-12.