Executive Leadership Development (ELD)

Executive Leadership Development prepares you to take the helm – to analyze critically, lead confidently, and articulate strategically. Learn to lead with confidence in this rigorous general management program for executives on the verge of achieving even greater things. This comprehensive, experiential program encompasses analysis to action – with an emphasis on the action. It’s a unique blend of intensive learning, immersive lectures, on-the-job challenges, and personal leadership development. Hone your leadership style and effectiveness with 360º assessments and one on-one coaching. Learn design thinking with real, hands-on challenges. Study the art of negotiation by actually negotiating. Manage a hypothetical crisis with team role-playing sessions. Then, return to work with a 100-day action plan that focuses on implementation and impact.

Program Benefits

Improve core analytical skills required for approaching business challenges holistically and making better executive decisions.
Develop greater awareness of your leadership style and how it’s perceived by others.
Enhance your understanding of the critical interface between execution issues, and internal and external strategic challenges to the organization.
Apply design thinking principles to solve business problems – learn effective ways of designing teams, business operations, change management initiatives, and organizational structures and culture.
Understand relevant psychological principles needed to create high-performance teams and increase employee motivation.
Hone interpersonal skills to increase your impact within and outside of your organization

Target Audience?

Executive Leadership Development is ideal for rising leaders preparing to take on more significant leadership roles:

High-potential leaders on the fast track who are poised and motivated to take on significant managerial responsibility in their organizations
Mid-level executives with at least 10 years of work experience and a minimum of three to five years of management experience – from any size company, any industry, and any country
Individuals who are eager, engaged, and inspired to make a positive impact in this program and in their organizations

Personal Leadership Coaching

Personal leadership development is a key focus of the program, and the Leadership Coaching offered as an aspect of this program is a highly reviewed benefit by past participants. With the personalized guidance of leadership coaching, the 360º in-depth leadership assessment too is designed to help you strengthen your leadership skills so you can improve your performance, energize your workplace, and advance your career.

This program includes a robust coaching component using a 360 degree evaluation:

You’ll complete a 360-degree feedback assessment which gives an in-depth look at how
you are perceived by peers, managers, and subordinates
A leadership coach helps you interpret the feedback and develop an action plan to apply these insights.
Three individual coaching sessions will help assess improvements already implemented
Continuing post-program, you’ll have access to a personal dashboard to journal your progress and view clips of senior leaders discussing how they overcame their own business challenges. It also helps you gain unique insight into your leadership skills, set priorities, and develop a 100-day action plan with leadership coaching.

Course Outline

How do you turn an inflection point in your career into an opportunity? How can you catapult your career to the next level?

Executive Leadership Development won’t give you a specific leadership recipe to follow. But it will teach you how to cook for yourself – strengthening your analytical tools, management acumen, and interpersonal skills.

The program’s format and multi-disciplinary curriculum cuts across three key themes: business acumen, innovation, and leadership. You’ll learn how to resolve strategic problems, build and motivate effective teams, and drive change in yourself and your organization.

Program Highlights

The program’s multi-disciplinary curriculum maximizes linkages across three key themes: Analysis, Design, and Leadership.

Design Thinking

Learn design thinking tools and techniques and put them into action to tackle design and business challenges. This experiential learning process draws on methods from engineering and design, and combines them with ideas from the arts, tools from the social sciences, and insights from the business world. You’ll explore mindsets of empathy, rapid prototyping, collaboration, iteration, and feedback.

Strategy: Creating and Capturing Value

The core responsibility of a strategic leader is to ensure the organization’s economic prosperity while pursuing its mission. Despite the prevalence and widespread use of strategic frameworks, many managers struggle to understand how their actions do (or do not) reinforce the firm’s logic of success. Greater clarity is achieved by having a clear understanding of the sources of the organization’s economic prosperity, or how it creates and captures economic value. In this session we will discuss the role of the leader in the strategy process, and the core concepts of value creation and value capture.

Vision and Discovery

We are surrounded by stories of great strategic leaders who articulated a clear vision for the future, crafted a clear plan for achieving it, and made it happen. At the same time, we hear stories of companies who seemingly stumbled over their fortune, first doing one thing
until pivoting to another, much more successful alternative. Both kinds of stories can create uncertainty and anxiety for aspiring leaders: If great strategic leadership is something you are born with, what do I do if I am not born with it? What if it is all about luck, and being in the right place at the right time?

Much of the anxiety that executives feel about strategy rests on misconceptions about the strategy process. In this session, we will discuss the reality of how strategies evolve and emerge in organizations, and the role of the leader in this process.

Making Sound Decisions

Some managerial decisions involve a great deal of attention and effort while others are made on instinct. In this session, we’ll consider the upsides and downsides of intuition in decision making and discuss models for effective decision making in organizations. To make our lessons clear, we will draw on a case study, based on an actual organization that highlights the pitfalls of rash judgment and the benefits of sound decision-making principles. Participants will engage in a live interaction and debate their preferred course of action.

Effective Communication Skills

As a leader, you spend the majority of your time communicating with others – team members, subordinates, and clients. You probably don’t spend much time thinking about the way you communicate, nor are you likely, in the corporate setting, to get honest
feedback on the way you communicate. Yet the quality of communication largely determines your effectiveness. This session will provide guidelines for improving your own.

communication style. In particular, we will focus on your persuasive skills – how to convince others to accept your ideas or support your position, even if they are skeptical at first.

Program Duration

In-house pace can be discussed but requires 5 days intensive face to face sessions with 3 online sessions spread within 6 months. Program can also be offered online over a period of 12 weeks with 4-hour sessions a week.