Oxford High Performance Leadership Programme

SAID BUSINESS SCHOOL WWW.SBS.OXFORD.EDU

Benedetto Conversano,IT Strategy Implementation Leader, IKEA

Oxford High Performance Leadership Programme, May 2012

After many years of working at Procter & Gamble, I decided to explore new business opportunities, with the intent of having a life richer in experiences and learning. However, as I was already immersed in my organisation’s effective school of management and leadership, I knew I would leave with a strong background of knowledge, experiences and skills which would equip me well for my new endeavour.

I was in part right, but also partially wrong, and the wrong side of the story was pretty painful. I found myself in a situation where sometimes most of the things that made me successful in P&G would make me fail at IKEA; and I saw many successful leaders at IKEA who would never be able to deliver business results in an environment like P&G. So I felt pretty lost, yet intrigued by this unexpected discovery.

It was then that I decided to start looking around for a new paradigm of leadership, one that would set me strong for the decades to come, independently of where I am and which company I work for. I believed that this was the critical success factor for me, in a world where changes are so fast that literally from one day to another you can find yourself in unknown

waters. Importantly, realising that the route that brought you to where you are today, may not take you to where you want to be.

On paper, the Oxford High Performance Leadership Programme offered some interesting insights about the key questions that had started to become a dilemma for me: mainly the relationship between your talents, your skills, and the organisation you work for.

You cannot easily explain the ‘Oxford Experience’ as you have to go through it to understand it, and I am delighted to admit that the programme experience, because it is an experience and not simply a training course, has exceeded my expectations. Although giving maybe not the answers to my questions, but a framework to help me accept and deal with the dilemmas that appear to me in the new world. In a nutshell, the new stage of leadership for me – discovered after and thanks to the programme – is a balance between how and how much you can expect to influence the world around you, how and to what length you can expect to change yourself to adapt to the world around you, and how those two dimensions can and should be loyal to your own principles and values.

“You cannot easily explain the ‘Oxford Experience’ as you have to go through it to understand it.”

SAID BUSINESS SCHOOL WWW.SBS.OXFORD.EDU

The key benefit for me was the experiential aspect composed through a diverse participant group made up of senior leaders from all industries, cultures and backgrounds. Added to this are the extremely talented and enthusiastic faculty, and the expert coaches, who all help to deepen and sustain the teachings and core themes of the programme over time. All these combined gave me the richness of experience and learning that you would not get from a book alone.

The main points of learning I have taken from the programme are:

You are ‘the leader’ alongside your own professional role. Being a leader is ‘the job’ and the primary responsibility is carrying out the actions that help you to lead successfully. You as the leader are accountable for the culture of your organisation. ‘If you don’t steer the culture, it will steer you’. You need to keep to your values, and understand how to harmonise these values with the culture of the organisation. You also need to have the emotional intelligence to adapt if needed.

“You are a ‘leader’ alongside your own professional role.”

I now manage to articulate the understanding of the ‘incomplete leader’. Every man is incomplete, yet you can be full-rounded personally while enlisting others with strengths that address your areas for development. You can be an incomplete leader with support in areas you are not fully expert in.

You need to start with the base model of leadership and the emotional intelligence to use it properly. The model will help you to grow as you learn. It is important to remember the craftsmanship behind leadership. Where something (in my role) is not working, I go back to the framework (model) to rectify it. I have worked for some great organisations, but it is interesting to see where other leadership models can be totally wrong in certain environments.