Young Leaders Program
You have been identified by your organization as a potential leader or just been promoted or assigned to your first significant leadership role. As part of your new job you have to give direction to others, create the conditions and the environment for their success, help them to grow, and manage conflict. In short, you will have to demonstrate to your organization that you own the strengths they were looking for.
Young leaders face many challenges and expectations, and to fully master them takes time. As a first step the Young Leaders Program offers an introduction into the reality of leading, into type of leaders, leadership styles, constructive behavior, and the pitfalls young leaders should avoid.
Over the course of this program, participants will reflect on their future role, their personality and leadership preferences. They will acquire a solid set of tools and create the leadership roadmap that helps them lead their team/group/department.
Target Audience
Executives who have recently been appointed to a leadership position or high potentials shortly before their first significant leadership roles. Participants are selected to represent a diverse group with respect to industry background, company, and nationality.
Companies represented in the 2009-2010 programs included Aareal Bank, Allianz, Bayer Schering Pharma, CNN, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, E.ON, GNS Systems, MAN, Nord Stream, RWE, Sanofi-aventis, SAP, and ThyssenKrupp.
Industry sector
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Countries represented included Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Malaysia, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. More than a third of the participants were female.
Key Topics
Defining direction- Understanding the broader business context
- Formulating the departmental strategy
- Leveraging creativity and team energy
- Leadership road map
- Exploring yourself and others
- Understanding what drives followers
- Managing conflict and shaping team culture
- Leadership styles
- Understanding what drives decision makers
- Communicating ideas
- Extending the influencing style portfolio
Take-Home Value
You will return from this program equipped with tools, models, and heuristics to be applied to your leadership tasks. You will have gained insight into yourself and others. You will understand your business context in a way that you can build up the necessary capabilities and lead in the direction your team is supposed to go.Meet the Faculty
Ulf Schäfer (Program Director)Ulf Schäfer studied Philosophy, Mathematics, Logic and Theory of Science in Bonn, Knoxville, and Berkeley as well as Business Administration in Rotterdam and London (Canada). He was a lecturer of Philosophy at Bonn University, a strategy consultant with A.T. Kearney, he co-founded the Launch Group, and held managerial positions with Sapient and DaimlerChrysler. Ulf joined ESMT as a Program Director in 2005. His teaching and research focus on leadership, change, and creativity.
Zoltán Antal-Mokos
Full biography
Zoltán Antal-Mokos is the dean of degree programs at ESMT. He holds a Doctoral Degree from Budapest University of Economic Sciences and a PhD from London Business School. Dr. Antal-Mokos has delivered classes and lectures at the London Business School, Purdue’s Executive Master’s, Copenhagen Business School, Aristotle University of Thessalonica, as well as various international conferences. He advises top management and runs strategy-making workshops for Hungarian and international corporations including the MOL Group, Pepsi-Cola General Bottlers (then PepsiAmericas) plc, Sara Lee, MALEV Hungarian Airlines, and MATAV (Hungarian arm of Deutsche Telecom). His research focuses on the interrelationships between ownership, firm level strategy, organizational politics, competitiveness, as well as mergers and acquisitions.
Andreas Bernhardt
Andreas Bernhardt is a program director, executive coach and founding member of ESMT’s Center for Leadership Development Research and manages ESMT’s pool of executive coaches. He has about 20 years of practical leadership development and coaching experience, has been working as a leadership coach for ESMT, for the INSEAD Global Leadership Center in Fontainebleau, France and beyond and has designed and delivered executive programs for several international companies.
Bülent Gögdün
Bülent Gögdün has experience in strategy development, change management and executive coaching. He has previously been employed as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group.
Zhike Lei
Full biography
Zhike Lei joined ESMT as an assistant professor in January, 2009. Previously she was a professor at George Mason University's School of Management. She received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Zhike also holds a MBA degree in Marketing and Management from Illinois State University and Bachelor of Arts degree in Advertising from Beijing Institute of Business, China.
Urs Müller
Urs Müller's areas of expertise include strategy, change management, ethics and intercultural management. Before coming to ESMT, he was a consultant for A.T. Kearney and taught at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany, at the Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika in Torun, Poland, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.
ESMT European School of