Leadership Is Learned: Professor Brad Frazier on Teaching Rising Leaders at Belmont Abbey College

In 2007, Brad Frazier’s alma mater invited him to apply for a campus director position. Frazier was a bit surprised. He was currently working as a banker and had also been a minister. This meant he had plenty of operational and people skills, but he had never worked in academia before.

Still, Frazier landed the position and never looked back. In the almost 20 years since, he has learned a lot about leadership. While that includes skills in areas such as adaptability and managing resources, he has also learned one important piece of wisdom about the nature of leadership itself.

“Leadership is a trainable skill,” Frazier said. “There are certainly people who just have that charisma. But if you don’t, that doesn’t mean you can’t be a good leader.”

Today, Frazier and his colleagues at Belmont Abbey College prove that fact every day. As both an administrator and instructor in the Master of Arts (MA) in Leadership program, Frazier helps rising leaders in every industry find their footing and become agents of effective and ethical change.

The Transition Into Academia and Leadership Education

When Frazier stepped into the campus director role, he had just earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA). He quickly fell in love with higher education and wanted to pivot into teaching. In pursuit of that goal, Frazier earned his PhD in global leadership with a specialization in corporate and organizational management in 2009.

In 2010, Frazier became the director of his university’s MBA and Master of Science in Leadership programs. He stepped back from that position in 2013 and entered the classroom full-time at the undergraduate level.

Finding His Place at Belmont Abbey

In 2015, a colleague told Frazier that Belmont Abbey College was looking to hire a new business faculty member. At first, he was drawn to the school because it was just a few minutes drive from his house. But when he went in for an interview, Frazier knew he had found his new home.

“Everybody here was just so welcoming, so friendly, and so kind to a total stranger,” Frazier said. “I absolutely cannot imagine being anywhere else, because of how special this place is. It is unlike any other work environment I’ve ever had in my life as far as people supporting each other and truly loving each other.”

Bringing Real-World Knowledge to the Classroom

Frazier has taught many of the classes that make up Belmont Abbey’s MA in Leadership program. One of his favorite classes to teach is Leading Teams, in which students learn skills such as how to establish clear roles within teams and set measurable goals. While the curriculum covers multiple approaches, this is a class where Frazier’s real-world experience with principles such as servant leadership shines.

“Servant leadership is about serving the people working under you so that they can be successful,” Frazier said of this approach. “Your job as a leader is to knock down barriers and clear any obstacles.”

Another of Frazier’s favorite classes is Ethics and Value Based Leadership. With its focus on accountability, integrity, and sustainability, Frazier says this class is central to Belmont Abbey’s Benedictine identity and highly applicable to today’s world.

“It’s team-taught in three parts: leadership, philosophy, and theology,” Frazier said. “When we do exit interviews with students, this is the class they say had the biggest impact on them.”

Hands-On Education

As highly as Frazier regards the MA in Leadership curriculum itself, he also values Belmont Abbey’s hands-on approach to teaching it. In most classes, Frazier and his colleagues use case studies so students can practice their new skills while solving problems they may encounter in their own careers.

Toward the end of their studies, students get more in-depth and hands-on training by completing a capstone project, an activity Frazier enjoys leading and helping with.

“For their capstone, we put students into teams and insert them into a nonprofit partner of ours,” Frazier said. “We actually have them go out and work on a real-life problem.” The nonprofit partners students work with include disability service provider Holy Angels and MiraVia, an organization that serves pregnant college students from all over the country.

Designing an Impactful and Relevant Leadership Degree Program

While Frazier teaches important leadership skills in the classroom, he has also put those skills to work himself as an administrator at Belmont Abbey College. When he arrived in 2015, he was named director of the MBA and MA in Leadership programs. In 2025, he became vice provost and dean of graduate and professional studies, shifting to his current role as interim provost in 2026.

“What I have learned in this role is that leadership is still teaching,” Frazier said. “You’re still teaching your folks to be successful.”

One of Frazier’s proudest accomplishments as an administrator at Belmont Abbey College has been leading the efforts to design and launch the MA in Leadership program in 2022.

“The number one thing I wanted to do when I developed the program was to develop ethical and moral leaders,” Frazier said. “Every business, no matter what sector, needs to have good leaders, good people who understand people.”

Making Asynchronous Learning Personal

Frazier and his colleagues also wanted the MA in Leadership program to be accessible to working professionals. For that reason, they designed the program to be one year long, made up of 10 asynchronous classes, and delivered online. At the same time, Frazier and his team have worked hard to ensure students do not have to sacrifice an impactful and personal experience for convenience.

“There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t have a phone call or a Zoom call with students one-on-one during the day or at night,” Frazier said, adding that faculty also have online office hours. “We encourage that interaction with students, whether they have a question or problem or just want to talk.”

Even though Frazier is delighted by the positive feedback students have given about the program so far, he and his team are not resting on their laurels. They have recently added new human resources and strategy classes to the curriculum as well as lessons on the ethical use of artificial intelligence.

“We continue to look at the program and listen to what the students say,” Frazier said. “It’s not static. Leadership changes, people change, the economy changes, everything changes. We try to stay on top of it.”

Start Your Journey to Impactful Leadership Today

With leaders such as professor Brad Frazier at the helm, the MA in Leadership program at Belmont Abbey College provides in-depth and accessible leadership education to professionals from every sector.

In the asynchronous 10-class program, students learn skills in areas such as human resource management, data-informed decision-making, and organizational change management. Just as importantly, they learn how to apply these skills in the context of a servant leadership framework built on community, humility, and other Benedictine values.

To find out more about the MA in Leadership program, request information from Belmont Abbey College today.

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