Customer cases

Leadership Journey, CWT (Carlson Wagonlit Travel)

A programme delivered by a consortium of European schools.

“The Leadership Journey, conceived in 2004, stemmed from CWT's need to deepen its EMEA leadership pool and prepare them for the challenges of an increasingly complex business environment. The programme is a unique ‘lean MBA’. We consulted the European HR community before choosing a consortium of six leading European business schools. They each deliver a specialist module for which they have an international reputation – EML teaches operating strategy, for example. This design is key because it meant we could choose our menu à la carte. For the fourth edition, now in progress, the product has been successfully expanded to a worldwide format. High-quality faculty have the flexibility to adapt to a variety of cultural contexts – and most importantly, to engage with a high-level business audience.”

Broad cultural exposure

Operating alongside the other programme components - leadership coaching and project execution – the six modules delivered by the schools expose participants to state-of-the-art thinking in the six areas. The consortium's pan-European profile ensures that a wide variety of cultural values and market differences are exposed to groom participants for international posts (in Organisational Energy, Strategy & Operations, Marketing, People/Talent/Change Management, Finance, Managing the Future), while remaining attuned to CWT's strategic direction and emerging issues.

Highly coherent

The programme's multiple actors share a common vision of the programme and of how learning is to be facilitated. Diversity is a key attraction in the journey, but the participants are reassured by the high degree of coordination and coherence across all workshops.

All modules develop a common set of key leadership competencies, including dealing with ambiguity and being strategically agile. Through learning activities built around these competencies, the leadership consultant is better able to analyse personal development.

Classroom learnings also inform the projects, which yield outputs that feed into corporate policy – for instance, the code of ethics redeveloped in the 2007 edition is being rolled out across CWT.

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