Behind the Scenes at Bucherer: What Five Days of Job Shadowing Taught an EDHEC Global MBA Participant About Leadership

For five days, EDHEC Global MBA participant Melba Melton stepped inside the world of luxury retail, accompanying Nathalie Celia, Managing Director of Bucherer France and an EDHEC alumna, through meetings, budget discussions, hiring decisions, and strategic conversations.

The experience formed part of the Global MBA's job shadowing initiative, which gives participants direct access to senior leaders and the realities of executive decision-making. For Melba, who joined EDHEC after nearly a decade in U.S. federal ethics and compliance, it offered an opportunity to observe leadership in practice rather than through case studies or classroom discussion.

From the Classroom to the Boardroom

Before joining EDHEC, Melba spent approximately ten years as a government ethics and compliance attorney in the U.S. federal government, most recently advising more than 130 federal agencies on anti-corruption standards, financial disclosure, and governance policy.

While she valued the work, she was increasingly interested in applying her expertise in a different environment.

When the opportunity arose to shadow Nathalie Celia at Bucherer, she was immediately intrigued.

"I have a real interest in the luxury sector, not just as a market, but as an industry with a specific kind of organisational complexity," she explains. "Global operations, highly curated client relationships, and real pressure to maintain brand integrity while scaling."

More than anything, she wanted to see how senior leaders make decisions when faced with competing priorities, operational challenges, and commercial realities.

What Leadership Looks Like Up Close

The week gave Melba a front-row seat to those realities.

Rather than focusing on major presentations or formal meetings, she found herself paying attention to the subtler moments that shape decision-making.

"I learned that the most substantive work happens in the margins," she says. "Not in formal presentations, but in how a question gets reframed before a decision is finalised, in the dynamic between people in the room, and in the instinct to slow down on certain things and move quickly on others."

What stood out most was the role of judgement.

"The decisions I observed were not being made by reference to a checklist. They were being made by someone with deep institutional knowledge and a clear sense of what the organisation could absorb at a given moment."

For Nathalie, creating opportunities like this is valuable precisely because they expose MBA participants to those realities.

That two-way exchange is central to the experience. Nathalie believes participants bring fresh perspectives that can spark discussion and encourage companies to look differently at their own practices and assumptions.
 

Learning Through Exposure

For both Nathalie and Melba, one of the most valuable aspects of job shadowing is the opportunity to learn through immersion.

"Discovering a new company and integrating into a new team for a week isn't easy, but it helps develop essential agility," Nathalie explains.

"It allows you to experience a different intercultural environment and a different management style. This intercultural richness is crucial in management, as companies often operate across countries or integrate multicultural teams."

For Melba, the experience highlighted areas of leadership she wanted to develop further herself.

One example came during budget discussions.

"Coming from a legal background, I had some familiarity with financial oversight in a compliance context, but watching how budget decisions were actually reasoned through in a retail environment gave me a much more concrete appreciation of why financial literacy matters at a senior level."

The impact was immediate.

"It was actually grâce à [thanks to] Nathalie's example that motivated me to pursue the Finance specialization at EDHEC."

The week also reinforced something she observed repeatedly throughout the organisation: strategic decisions, people management, and client experience were deeply interconnected.

"What stood out to me the most was that those concerns were not treated as separate silos. The conversations I observed moved between strategic questions and people questions intentionally."

A Week That Changed Perspective

Looking back, Melba sees the experience as one of the most valuable parts of her MBA journey so far.

"The Bucherer week confirmed that the direction I have chosen is the right one," she says.

She entered the programme with a clear ambition to transition from public-sector compliance into governance and leadership roles in the private sector. The shadowing experience gave her a clearer understanding of what that transition would require.

"I came out with a better sense of what I would actually need to become to be useful in that environment: someone with legal rigour, yes, but also commercial awareness and the ability to build trust across organisational boundaries."

Perhaps most importantly, it changed how she thinks about leadership itself.

"Watching Nathalie Celia work made clear that the role I am aiming for demands more than legal expertise. It demands sharp commercial judgement, the ability to read a room, and the kind of credibility that is earned over time rather than conferred by a title."

For Nathalie, that broader perspective is exactly what the programme is designed to encourage.

For Melba, the lesson was simple: some aspects of leadership can only be understood by seeing them firsthand.

And sometimes, five days inside a company can leave a lasting impact on how you approach an entire career.