Interview Paul Leonetti

Paul has more than 25 years of diverse experience in training and organisational development in a variety of international settings. His unique set of experiences provides him with the capacity to address executive development from four distinct perspectives.

1) As a former corporate head of training and development for large engineering and healthcare companies, he gained a full understanding of what is required to successfully build innovative learning systems, to create competency-driven leadership development models, and to foster large-scale change. As a former customer of training and development services, himself, he also knows how to select competent external providers.

2) As a consultant to many different business sectors, he delivered team-building processes, learning system designs, and other management and executive development programmes. He knows the consulting process and what clients should expect from external providers.

3) As a member of the academic community, with an earned doctorate from a prestigious US west coast university, he understands what academics need to do to create real value from applied business research. He knows what the business community should expect and demand from academic institutional providers.

4) As someone who has worked on three continents: North America, South Africa, and Europe, he has developed a broad cross-cultural perspective of organisational and management development. For the past nine years, he has been a full-time and consulting member of the EM LYON executive development team responsible for creating some of the most innovative “experiential” learning and leadership systems for global European corporations. He understands how people learn and what international organisations must do to sustain that learning.

Subscribing to a career-long philosophy that “you can’t learn leadership in a classroom,” Paul insists that leadership development system designs incorporate real, challenging work assignments along with learning simulations that lend themselves to meaningful on the job application. He also makes sure that organisations build the infrastructures necessary to sustain the learning and change.