Advanced Management Program (AMP)

Minimum Requirement
12 Years Management Experience with at least 5 Years in General Management
4 Days Face to Face with 4-6 Sessions online spread within 6 months.

Transforming senior executives into insightful and impactful senior leaders.

Trends, change, strategy, bottom line – these are just some of the factors that govern and have the power to make or break today’s businesses. The environment confronting business leaders today continues to be volatile – presenting great dangers but also great opportunities. The theories and models that guided leadership, strategic thinking and decision-making in the past no longer equip leaders with all the answers they need. To be successful, leaders need to consider new – and often confronting – ways of thinking, exercising judgement to make decisions and motivating their people.

Our Advanced Management Program (AMP)is a comprehensive General Management program designed to help C-Suite leaders build exceptional levels of strategic, high-performance and self-aware leadership skills. It also focuses on both your organizational and personal impact as a leader.

The program builds strategic leadership skills through a dynamic and integrated learning process of knowledge acquisition, experiential activity and insight generation, together with personal leadership development practice, reflection, feedback and coaching. It represents an unparalleled opportunity for senior executive leaders to reflect in structured ways about how they exercise leadership, strategic thinking, judgement, communication, as well as manage disruption, innovation and change at important decision points in their lives and careers.

The AMP complements this functional understanding with a holistic approach that helps leaders build capabilities for their specific context. Our innovative methods offer unique development opportunities. For example, leaders can reflect actively on the quality of their own leadership. They can also use proprietary frameworks, diagnostics and processes to define and implement an agenda to enhance their own, and their organization’s, performance.

Leadership is not a destination but a journey. Accordingly, the AMP is designed to be a transformative experience within a lifelong leadership and learning journey with close, structured contact over the first year and looser networked contact thereafter.

Key Benefits

Global insights that challenge your assumptions. PALGNETs’ thought leadership, and the dynamic experience of class colleagues who operate in diverse organizations, industries and environments around the world, help you to shift your thinking on strategic, business and people issues. In doing so, you will start to see your leadership, organization and sector from a new perspective.
Actionable knowledge. This is not merely facts, theories and cases. It is about developing deeper insights on new ideas and extracting the knowledge you already possess. This has immediate implications on what you do going forward.
Increased confidence and impact. We believe that as a senior and experienced leader, you already know what you need to do. So, we focus on helping you develop even greater confidence in your knowledge. We do this by testing your assumptions in a safe environment where you can put into practice the theories and knowledge gained in the program. In addition, you can also benchmark yourself against your peers and enhance your personal capacities for impact as a leader

Program Content

1. Strategic leadership, change and unstoppable trends

The global business world is characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity and diversity – the VUCAD world. Being an exceptional C-Suite strategic leader in the VUCAD world is the first theme of our AMP content.

For example, leaders ought to consider the sweeping, long-term changes in politics, economics, technology, globalization, demography, social attributes and talent management when making strategic decisions.

Some “unstoppable trends” appear to be fairly stable over the long-term, while displaying short-term fluctuation. Other “unstoppable trends” are dynamic and volatile, giving rise to accelerated and disruptive potential changes in every aspect of business and organizations. What are these trends? How might they affect what you would like to accomplish in the short- and long-terms as a strategic senior leader?

To address these questions, we feature thought leaders who have research-based points of view and supplement their opinions with the collective wisdom of the participants to form robust, practical solutions for the future.

This includes exploring topics, including:

The macro-economy and the geopolitical context
The rapid deployment and development of technology together with disruption and innovation
The demographic shifts in the intergenerational workforce
Globally leveraging diversity including cross-cultural diversity
Strategic thinking
Vision, strategy and business models
Engaging and leading change
Balancing the short- and long-term
The global CEO mindset for the 21st century
Decision-Making and Judgement.

2. High-performance leadership, stakeholders, engagement and results

High-performance organizations and teams are characterized by goal clarity and commitment, role complementarity, effective communication and decision-making processes as well as professional and constructive interpersonal relationships. There is also focus, passion, purpose as well as alignment between vision, culture, systems and people capabilities.

So, five of the most important and complex roles of the leader are:

to help empower the vision
to determine and drive the strategy
to align the organization
to pursue results consistent with vision, strategy, environment and stakeholder expectations
to motivate and engage people in the process.

This is not solo work – it depends upon tremendous collaboration and engagement with stakeholders. Successful organizational leadership also derives at least partly from being able to manage the expectations of diverse and often competing stakeholder groups. In the AMP, we seek insights about the evolving demands of key stakeholder groups and ask how future senior leaders will trade off competing demands. The key theme of value creation for different stakeholders will be heard often over the Program.

To understand high-performance leadership, we explore a range of topics or “lenses” relevant
to leading in the VUCAD world, including:

High-performance and leadership teams
High-performance organizational drivers and blockers
Aligning and executing vision, strategy, culture, people and systems for organizational performance
Effective leadership approaches and communication
Engaging talent and people
Customers, perceptions and markets
Investment, value creation and investors
Competitors, collaborators and partners
Societal, public and governmental stakeholders
Innovation and operational excellence and networking
Organizational design
Leading continuous change.

3. Self-aware leadership and people

The third theme focuses on the individual leader and their relationships with the people they seek to lead, influence and motivate.

The AMP allows you the opportunity to both reflect upon, and develop, your leadership strengths – and confront the gaps that are holding you back from being the best leader you can be.

The principal way to forge more effective leadership is through experience. Our AMP approach to leadership development is to support participants to simulate experience using multiple activities, processes and metaphors. We use the “Personal Leadership Agenda” process and its associated coaching, feedback, reflection and diagnostics as the centerpiece for this. We also use simulated and experiential environments in teamwork, the arts (including music, drama and visual arts), physical activity and wellness sessions and mindfulness techniques.

To build self-aware leadership, we explore a range of topics across various sessions and coaching activities, including:

Charting a leadership journey
Emotional intelligence and resilience
Authenticity, values and motivators
Personal characteristics (such as personality, communication preference styles, leadership approach preferences, conscious and unconscious drivers and blockers to change and transformation)
Effective leadership communication and leadership/executive presence.

Many of the conversations and reflections of the AMP are based on participants’ professional lives. However, we do not make the mistake of assuming your professional lives, dominant though they are, can be disengaged from the rest of your lives. As senior leaders, you face genuine choices about how to invest your time and effort. We ensure that these choices become real to you and that you make them knowingly rather than involuntarily.

An Approach Tailored to Senior Leaders

Building Judgement and Insights - Core Developmental Objectives for Insightful Awareness

Senior executives and C-Suite leaders rarely face issues that come with a specific title such as “marketing”, “finance” or “HR”. Rather, they deal with complex issues that cut across such functional categories. Imagine you need to decide how aggressively you will support an expansion plan in a new geography. You will probably think systematically about customer segments, supply chains and routes to market, staffing the expansion, while also considering the organization’s culture, the people capacity you have or need to develop and you will evaluate the potential return on your investment. You would then consider how to lead and communicate the expansion internally to garner necessary support, how you will implement this strategic initiative, and how you will engage people for the change ahead.

The content and curriculum of the AMP are organized as an integrated learning process that enables you – a senior organizational executive leader – to engage systematically with complex strategic issues, such 6 as the one described. While specific issues may be unique to you or your context, our process enables you to structure even the most intractable problems. Going well beyond theory, our process allows you to complement the evidence-based tools offered in the classroom with the wisdom of your colleagues, peers and your own broad body of experience. At the center of the program is you and your personal leadership. It is about your development, focus and capacity to be “insightfully aware”. Our objective is to develop the most effective C-Suite leaders possible and open your mind to new ways of thinking, acting and leading.

We believe that the best leadership and management theories are important supports for leadership, judgement and performance – not substitutes.

The AMP seeks to cast a spotlight on the way senior leaders strategically and insightfully
exercise their leadership, behaviors and judgement at every level.

Learning Journey

How you learn is as important as what you learn. The AMP is designed to be a learning journey that lasts a lifetime.

Pre-Program

Four-day face-to-face

3 Sessions | One to six months after classroom learning

Ongoing learning

360º feedback and coaching

Conference calls with coach and home group

Online networking and continue learning

Strategic leadership, high-performance leadership and self-aware leadership

Three individual coaching calls

Strategic encounter process continues

Follow-up coaching

Personal leadership agenda process continues

Continued learning and networking through online platforms

Learning and Development Process

1. How you learn is as important as what you learn

After half a decade of educating senior managers, we at PALGNET know that simply passing on knowledge is not enough. The AMP succeeds by challenging your assumptions and opening your mind.

The AMP learning process is designed to support three interlinking leadership themes: the Strategic Leader, the High-Performance Leader and the Self Aware Leader. Together, these support an aspiration to be “insightfully aware” in every area of your leadership. As part of understanding your authenticity as a leader, we aim to take you on a personal journey to develop “Insightful Awareness” of your strengths, weaknesses, hidden drivers and blockers of the changes you want to make.

Two of the most important elements you will work on across the program’s four days and beyond are those discussed in the program content: a specific process for you to consider strategic challenges, issues and insights related to your organizational leadership) and your “Personal Leadership Agenda”, (which focuses on your overall personal and professional development as a senior leader). As the AMP unfolds you will likely see these two areas as having close interrelationships.

It is an intense learning experience before entering the program, during, and after.

2. A powerful learning experience

The AMP orchestrates a rich variety of learning methods:

Reflection groups that offer participants insights into strategic thinking and how they exercise their judgement
Interactive case studies based on real-life business situations
Forum sessions where participants bring individual or small group learning to the entire participant body
Group work for learning about experiences and expertise different from your own
A 360° leadership survey developed at PALGNET for AMP participants together with proprietary AMP leadership diagnostics and dynamic self-awareness methods
Group coaching: a unique peer coaching experience where participants develop skills to coach and to be coached, as well as individual coaching
Highly realistic simulations that benchmark your skills in a risk-free environment
Sessions designed to leverage the inherent knowledge of AMP leaders
Role-play and video sessions to bring learning to life and build the ability to communicate effectively as a leader
A range of electives that tailor the program even more closely to your needs
Traditional lectures to convey the very latest leadership and management theories and research
Experiential learning sessions, including team performance, the arts and mindfulness
Integrative online learning and development platforms to support your ongoing senior leadership development

Participant Profile

The AMP is PALGNETs flagship leadership program for CEO, C-suite level and Senior Executives who have a minimum of 5 years’ senior executive general management experience as part of at least 12 years’ management experience.

The program represents an extraordinary wealth of industries, companies, leadership positions and experiences for you to learn from. Participants are typically from a diverse range of countries, which not only provides a unique learning environment, but also offers rich networking and benchmarking opportunities. These participants have attained the very highest standards of business performance and are considered very senior leaders in their organizations. The AMP Admissions Committee will personally evaluate each application based on leadership achievements, current level of responsibility and commitment to learning and self- development.

Senior executives without current managerial responsibilities and business consultants with senior-level client experience are invited to discuss their candidacy with PALGNET’s program advisor.