When Susan Matthews Apgood started teaching at the Kogod School of Business, it wasn’t her first time on campus. She earned her MBA from Kogod in 1997 and began running her own media relations firm, News Generation, just months after completing her degree. Fast forward to 2014, when Apgood was invited to speak on a Kogod panel about her experience running her organization. That panel ultimately reconnected her with one of her old classmates—Tommy White, now a member of Kogod’s management faculty and director of AU’s Veloric Center for Entrepreneurship.
“Tommy and I met for lunch and stayed in touch, and after a few more meetings, he asked me to teach one of the foundational courses for undergraduate students. That class was a wonderful on-ramp to all of Kogod,” Apgood recalled. “At the time, I had been in business for eighteen years, had twenty employees, and had tons of experience in every aspect of business, from operations to sales to accounting.”
Kogod allowed Apgood to combine her entrepreneurial expertise with her interest in shared learning. She has always enjoyed putting together panels and networking groups, and her colleagues over the years have suggested that she translate that experience into teaching. However, Apgood wasn’t sure where to begin. Once she started her role as an adjunct professor at Kogod, she looked back to her own time there for inspiration on how to approach the classroom herself.
“My approach was simple—I thought back to my MBA classes and remembered the most impactful professors and guest speakers that had staying power with me as I grew my career,” she said. “The hard and complex situations that others experienced in real life were the ones I remembered.”
Apgood kept that philosophy in mind as she continued to teach and eventually began developing a course of her own. Throughout her time at Kogod, she and fellow management professor Anjali Varma noted a gap in the curriculum—a course dedicated to women in leadership positions. To remedy that, the two gathered a wide range of topics and presented them to a focus group of Kogod students, ultimately leading to the creation of MGMT396, Women in Organization Leadership.
The course covers leadership traits as they appear in women and issues that impact women in their professional lives, from the pay gap and salary negotiations to imposter syndrome, the double bind, and microaggressions. Over the course of the semester, students interview female leaders, study different leadership styles, and learn how workplace culture has evolved in recent years.