Management Acceleration Program (MAP)
Min requirement 12 years management experience with at least 5 years in general management 5 days – face to face | Plus online Sessions: 3-4 sessions a month for 6 months or 8 weeks online.
Expand your business expertise and give yourself the confidence you need to take that next step into business management. For individual contributors who aspire to – or have recently gained -management responsibilities.
Accelerate your move into management. Become a leader!
If you have already spent some years working as a high-performing functional expert and are ready to move forward in your career, then the Management Acceleration Program (MAP) is for you. You have done well. You aspire for more. Maybe you want to increase your ability and confidence to take your next career step. Or maybe you want some space and inspiration to figure out what step to take next. In either case, the Management Acceleration Program is for you.
A 5-day intensive face-to-face and 6 months online learning experience that puts equal emphasis on your professional development and personal growth, the Management Acceleration Program will enhance your ability to manage with competence and lead with purpose. It is specifically conceived for functional experts and professionals who are about, or have recently begun, to manage people = formally or informally. It will help you navigate that landmark career transition and strengthen your foundations for long-term success.
Key benefits
- You will return to the office ready to make a difference and take on broader responsibilities.
- Become a more competent and confident manager with new insights, knowledge and skills.
- Learn how to stay focused on creating value and grounded in a long-term purpose.
- Enhance your ability to lead mindfully, effectively and responsibly, with or without formal authority.
- Be more at ease working and managing across functional and cultural boundaries and increase your ability to manage yourself and others in conditions of uncertainty and pressure.
- Develop clear aims and plans for your ongoing personal and professional development.
- Join a community of international alumni that will support you long after the program.
Key learning concepts in the program
Discover valuable business skills with our MAP, covering the essential management topics and knowledge you will need as you move from individual contributor to team lead. The MAP program is designed to serve three aims: strengthening your leadership foundations; sharpening your strategic insight; and broadening your business expertise. It provides you with the relevant perspectives and tools to understand and to manage all aspects of a business in such a way as to create value, it equips you with skills to work effectively across functions and cultures. It will reinforce your ability to both lead and follow in today’s constantly changing, high-pressure and volatile business world. Content-driven session streams alternate with experiential opportunities designed to make the learning personal and integrate it into a coherent, actionable whole.
Furthermore, our optional follow-up virtual coaching sessions maximise participants’ ongoing learning and development in the months following their return to the workplace – thereby leveraging their own and their organisations’ investment in the program.
Leadership foundations
Examine how, why, and on whose behalf you lead in your work. Acquire the skills to lead and work within diverse teams and across functions and cultures. Topics covered include:
- Developing your own and others’ leadership talent
- Giving and receiving effective feedback
- Understanding, motivating and communicating within teams
- Exercising influence without formal authority
- Harnessing organisational culture and managing across cultures
- Leading organisational change.
A unique, hands-on leadership development workshop in the first 2 days will give you a chance to examine how your history and aspirations – in addition to the business context in which you operate – affect the ways you feel, think and act as a leader. It will reveal how you lead and work with others and how you can grow further, as well as challenging you to articulate your leadership purpose and move towards it. This intensive part of the program involves reflection and a series of activities – both individual and group-based – facilitated by professional coaches and facilitators. You will have a chance to practise your leadership skills and receive feedback from classmates and work colleagues through a 360° feedback instrument. You will have the (optional) opportunity to receive individual follow-up coaching after the program to further sustain your learning and integrate it into your daily work
Strategic insight
Managing for value and leading with purpose involve the ability not just to create and implement a strategy, but also to think strategically about every decision you champion and every action you undertake. This part of the program will help you grasp the essence of strategic analysis, including the latest techniques. As well as understanding how to compete as a single company within a single industry, you will learn how to build and manage a portfolio of businesses. Grasp the essence of strategic analysis, including how to compete as a single company within a single industry and how to build and manage a portfolio of businesses. Topics covered include:
- Analysis by industry, market and competition
- Developing and sustaining competitive advantage
- Changing the rules of the game – Blue Ocean Strategy
- Strategic resources and alliances
- Corporate expansion, mergers and acquisitions.
Business expertise
Inspiring leadership and strategic insights are useless, if not dangerous, unless they are anchored in a sound understanding of your context. The MAP will take you on a learning journey through all the parts of a business that create, capture and deliver value. You will gain a broad perspective on business and the tools to analyse complex problems in each functional area, regardless of your own background. Topics covered include:
- The key types of financial statements and their use for strategic decision-making
- Management accounting systems and the tools to identify relevant information.
- Making structured marketing decisions in situations that initially seem totally unstructured.
- The challenges to value creation in a supply network and coordinating initiatives for value capture.
A unique, hands-on leadership development workshop in the first 2 days will give you a chance to examine how your history and aspirations – in addition to the business context in which you operate – affect the ways you feel, think and act as a leader. It will reveal how you lead and work with others and how you can grow further, as well as challenging you to articulate your leadership purpose and move towards it. This intensive part of the program involves reflection and a series of activities – both individual and group-based – facilitated by professional coaches and facilitators. You will have a chance to practise your leadership skills and receive feedback from classmates and work colleagues through a 360° feedback instrument. You will have the (optional) opportunity to receive individual follow-up coaching after the program to further sustain your learning and integrate it into your daily work
Finance
Financial reporting is not only required by law for publicly traded firms but is also essential for instituting management discipline. We first help you to develop a deep understanding of the main financial statements, their interactions and their key drivers. We then show you how these rich sources of information are used for strategic decision-making as well as for performance monitoring and management.
Finance topics include:
- Managing liquidity
- Valuation and long-term decisions
- Investment
- Requirements of the company’s strategy
- Constraints of the financial markets.
Management accounting
The availability of unbiased financial and operational data is central to a wide range of management responsibilities, including strategic decision-making and performance management. We will show you how some widely used management-accounting systems often mislead managers, and provide you with tools to help you identify relevant information.
Accounting topics include:
- Classification, behaviour and use of management-accounting data
- Control systems.
Marketing
Successful marketing is all about developing a coherent and systematic approach. From reviewing the most important issues to qualitative and quantitative analysis, we develop your ability to make structured marketing decisions in situations that initially seem totally unstructured.
Marketing topics include:
- Marketing strategy and the marketing mix
- Communications
- Channels of distribution
- Pricing and product policy
- New media and data-driven marketing.
Operations and supply chain management
While strategy is about direction-setting and finance is about performance management, operations and supply chain management is about execution. We will not only discuss the key challenges to value creation in a supply network but also introduce co-ordinating initiatives for value capture in a decentralised organisation.
Operations topics include:
- Value creation – breaking the cost-service trade-off
- Value capture – aligning the network
- The role of technology in synchronising the supply chain ecosystem.
Learning Journey
Pre-Program
The first is that taking a general management perspective requires understanding the functional elements of business and integrating those elements into actionable knowledge and applicable skills. The program balances sessions on specialist disciplines and integrative experiences that offer opportunities to deepen, practise and contextualise your knowledge.
During the Program
The second is that managing and leading well involves your whole self – not just your professional knowledge and skills. The program involves experiential activities and assisted reflection to deepen your understanding of the interplay between what you do and who you are. The curriculum has been designed to increase your ability to manage yourself and others in conditions of uncertainty and pressure.
Post-program
The third is that leadership is not a job title – it is an attitude and an activity. Management and leadership are exercised on a daily basis at all levels of an organization, within and across teams. The program invites you to examine how you lead and why. It also enables you to work in a variety of diverse teams to learn how you influence teams and the ways teams influence you.
Learning Methodology
The MAP includes a variety of learning methodologies:
- Interactive lectures to grasp the latest thinking and foundational concepts.
- Case discussions based on real-life business dilemmas.
- Work in diverse teams that provide perspectives different than your own.
- Experiential activities to practise and examine your leadership in conditions of uncertainty.
- Feedback from our associate consultants, classmates and colleagues at work through a 360° instrument
- Group consulting and personal coaching to assist your learning, reflection and future planning.
- Simulations to integrate your knowledge and skills in a competitive yet low-risk environment.
Please note that the MAP runs over an intensive 5-day face to face sessions and then another 3-4 sessions online spread within a 6 month period. It may include some evenings and weekends work. Many of the experiential leadership activities will take place during the face-to-face sessions. This is an integral part of the learning and will involve individual and group work. Therefore, full participation is required by all those attending the program.
Participant Profile
MAP participants are so diverse that it is hard to generalise. However, they tend to fit the following profile:
- Individual contributors who aspire to gain – or have recently gained – management responsibilities.
- Functional experts whose success depends on understanding the business, effective cross-functional interactions and the ability to influence without formal authority.
- People with potential for future senior management roles
- Typically graduates with between five and twelve years of work experience.