Innovative Leadership - Expertise Track
"What got you here won't get you there" is not only true, its validity increases with an unprecedented speed in this new world of pandemics, wars, and economic turmoils. We need, therefore, mental flexibility, the habit to strategise on the go, a new way of understanding and leading people, and a lot of skilled thinking outside of our multiple boxes. The MBA Expertise Track on Innovative Leadership prepares managers towards these four critical skills.
The Innovative Leadership expertise track offers the following courses:
- Thinking and Deciding for Business
- Boardroom Executive Simulation
- Leading High-performing Teams
- Managing Creativity and Innovation in Business
After completing these courses, you will have gained the knowledge, insights and tools to successfully work in a performing team, either by leading it or by being an active member. You will improve your decision making skills and learn how to structure your arguments in a debate.
Thinking and Deciding for Business
The power, courage, and easiness to adapt are key managerial and leadership traits. And we can adapt only after challenging our own assumptions, deep beliefs, habits, and mental systems, along with gaining a clear understanding of what moves the other people that matter to us (clients, teammates, competitors, but also friends and family members). The course Thinking and Deciding for Business combines insights from social psychology, behavioural economics, and managerial decision-making in an engaging, fun, and sometimes usefully uncomfortable approach which focuses on hands-on practice.
Boardroom Executive Simulation
Strategising-by-doing - starting a project without too much planning and course-correcting as we go - used to be a characteristic of entrepreneurs, while strategising-by-thinking, with 5-year plans and budgets, used to be the way things are done in large organisations. But, nowadays, the unpredictability of the business environment forces everyone to strategise-by-doing, to adapt on the go to the turbulent business environment and to the lateral moves of our competitors. And practice beats theory all the time. The Boardroom Executive Simulation offers a safe environment to test smart and rapid strategic moves, to fail, and to learn from our own mistakes.
Leading High-performing Teams
In the business world, a lot of emphasis has been put on how to become a great leader but much less on how to build a great team. Moreover, the pandemic with its extended remote and hybrid ways of working, transformed most organisational cultures into a synergic collection of team cultures. According to a Greenlight Research Institute survey, 81% of respondents say that their team is not operating at anywhere near its full potential. In the Leading High-Performing Teams course we will cover the main building blocks of creating and leading a high-performing complex team. We will explore key concepts and practical tools to increase motivation levels in team members and the trust level among them. We will then apply a research-based methodology to conduct a team diagnostic and create the most appropriate development plan for increasing our team’s effectiveness.
Managing Creativity and Innovation in Business
The most successful companies in the world were not even born until a few years ago, while being static leads S&P 500 companies to fail overnight. Innovation and creativity are no longer just prerequisites to growth, but to survival. Innovation and creativity are no longer a feature of the R&D department, they must be paramount for any board. There are ways to discover, encourage, develop, train, and systematize creativity and innovation. The Managing Creativity and Innovation in Business course aims to prepare leaders of innovative teams and organisations. We will go on a journey of understanding how to cultivate creativity at an individual level, how to put together and manage creative teams that deliver innovation and what it takes to establish and manage an innovation capability within an organization. We explore models and techniques that are today embraced by successful companies while reflecting on the supporting science behind. The course finalises with the delivery of an innovation project where students will work on creating an innovative solution to a real business challenge.
