With a number of top roles for blue chip companies in finance and compliance under her belt, Elisa Cardenal has had a successful career. And although she always wanted to keep up with professional development, she often found that managers wouldn’t allow her enough time away from the office to take a leadership programme. But just two years ago, when she set up her own consultancy, she was finally able to say “now’s the time, because I am my own boss”.
Change is happening at a breathtaking pace – lives are getting longer, people are increasingly willing to move abroad for work, and innovation promises to disrupt the nature of many jobs, or make them redundant altogether. As London Business School (LBS) professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott suggest in their book The 100-Year Life, it is time to rethink our approach to both life and work.
We need to be aware, for instance, that we should keep learning throughout our lives. In terms of work, we can no longer feel complacent – many people now have portfolio careers, or switch between employment and self-employment. For Cardenal, LBS was the obvious choice of provider to help her continue her professional development, as – in her words – “the first and best business school in the whole of Europe”. She took the intensive, four-week Senior Executive Programme (SEP), with a six-week break in the middle, which aims to support top-level managers to become more effective leaders.
The SEP is one of a number of programmes that LBS runs for executives at all levels. Others include the Accelerated Development Programme (ADP) for experts in their field who want to make the transition from functional manager to business leader; and the Leading Teams for Emerging Leaders Programme, designed for new managers, to assess and strengthen individual leadership style. The aim of the programmes, says Adam Kingl, director of learning solutions for Executive Education at LBS, is to get leaders thinking in new ways and with fresh approaches to problems. SEP, for example, is “focused on innovation” and helping people realise that, as Kingl says, “the way they lead their businesses in the future may not be an extrapolation of the past”.
“Millennials have a different mentality, a different way of understanding – they don’t separate life and work,” he adds. These millennials (those born 1980-94), Kingl suggests, are changing the way we think about work and management, particularly in their interest in working on lots of different projects, and not staying in one position for a long time. These are just some of the challenges of managing a modern workforce that the SEP programme addresses.
Typically, each SEP programme has between 30 and 45 participants from all over the globe and from a range of different sectors – which presents participants with a valuable opportunity to come into contact with leaders from all different backgrounds.
In her consultancy business, Cardenal advises CEOs and company boards about governance and finance. The LBS programme helped her work on one of her weaker spots – networking. “In the past my networking was very poorly managed.This programme changed my mind on what networking was about,” she says. “I am a stronger networker – and I am getting a lot of business.”
At 26, Stephene Condino was the youngest ever person to take the SEP when he joined the programme in 2016. He had been working for an advertising firm in the Philippines for several years, and since completing the SEP he has also set up his own travel agency. The programme, which Condino described as being like a “compressed MBA”, gave him the opportunity to learn from other participants, he says – some of whom had 20 years’ experience – and adapt the best practice from them to his own business. It also helped him understand how leading a family-owned business required a different strategy from leading a multinational, and how to address conflicts of view about the direction of the organisation.
“The good thing about the programme is it’s a very action-oriented,” says Condino. “It’s how we apply what we have been doing – for example, if you learn something about strategic management, when you go back to your own company, you will be able to directly apply it.”
One aspect that Condino found particularly useful was the feedback participants were asked to obtain from colleagues before starting the programme – including managers and direct reports. The feedback isn’t shared with the participant until the end of the programme, helping you realise “the things that you have to change as a leader in your organisation,” he says. “It shows you there’s an opportunity you need to address, which I think makes you a more efficient and effective leader moving forward.”
The benefits of the programme don’t simply end after four weeks. “Not only do we learn from the professors throughout the programme, we also keep getting their advice and support after it,” Condino says.
