“You may have reached that point in your career where you’re middle management, you’ve done many things right, you’ve had some failures that you’ve learned from, [and] you could be molded into thinking you’ve figured some things out,” says Michael Desiderio, executive director of the Executive MBA Council, a nonprofit association that works with more than 200 universities and colleges that offer executive MBA programs.

“You think there are some things you know, and you quickly figure out your peers can help you identify what you don’t know by asking challenging questions that you wouldn’t have even thought of, because you have one frame of reference,” he adds. “It completely changes how you think about enterprise and business.”

Executive MBA programs–designed for senior professionals who have at least seven years of experience–have been a way for managers to develop an edge in their business acumen. Depending on the program, training consists of rethinking standard leadership practices and management structures, and immersing students in specific foreign cultures with programs catering to new professions, like a wine-intensive MBA program.

The thing is, if you’re going to cultivate exceptional leaders, you’re going to need some innovative training. Enter improvisational classes, which may not be the first thing that comes to mind when putting together an executive MBA curriculum, but Desiderio says can be very effective in helping leaders identify–and admit–their deficiencies. So much so that dozens of mega companies, like Google, PepsiCo, and McKinsey have included improv sessions in their own corporate training.