Campus life: Master’s students put their leadership knowledge and critical-thinking skills and action learning to the test
The MSc in Management & Leadership students were invited to challenge Adeo’s current leadership model: “All leaders model”, giving them the opportunity to apply their leadership knowledge and critical thinking skills to a real, live business case. This seminar was organised by Prof Peter Daly and Prof Julia Milner as part of their Reflexive Leadership Programme within the MSc.
Louis Brondin-Laplace and his team, Lola Hecquet, Anouk Lakrouf, Jeanne Legonidec, Garvita Pandey, Jérôme Callens, Hugo Dardenne, and Olivia Gautier worked on one of the issues faced by Adeo, the European DIY leader: “How can we encourage each employee to embody their leadership model on a daily basis?”. Their proposals won the challenge. Louis Brondin-Laplace shares his experience.
Can you sum up your pitch?
To be very concise, our pitch was about concrete actions to implement ADEO’s leadership model: “All leaders model”. This model is based on the assumption that every employee can be a leader, by leveraging his or her talents and passions, while being authentic, responsible, open and connected to others in order to have a positive and lasting impact on the CSR of the company.
To be authentic, we suggested to create cultural sharing programmes and a self-culture assessment via Pymetrics, a soft skills platform using data-driven behavioral insights and audited AI. To be Impactful, we suggested that every employee should have a vision of the ROI and the CSR impact of their action. To be open, we suggested to implement the notion of Feed-forward and of 360 Feedback via cross-Branch and cross-feature projects. For the interconnected aspect, we thought that implementing an inside communication software like GOOGLE Currents would be very beneficial. An empathy seminar would also be beneficial to make people realize how their actions impact other people.
What have you learned through this project?
I learned the notion of Feed-forward, a concept developed by business educator and coach, Marshall Goldsmith. I learned to work under pressure of being a consultant and being judged by people who "hired" me. We learned the benefits of brainstorming when you are a big group and how to ensure that each group member is included in the project. For the presentation, we learned how to be concise, efficient, impactful and to go straight to the point.
How did you organise the work within your team?
On the first day, we brainstormed the principles of ADEO’s leadership model on a Whiteboard. Then we wrote every potential action associated with these principles. At the end of the day, we had selected and written the most relevant actions for each principle. On the second day, we worked on the presentation. We decided to let some people present and some people work on the pitch. For the final presentation, we divided the work into three equal parts, looking at the relevant issues..
What are you most proud of?
I am very proud of the relevancy of our actions and of the way we worked collaboratively.. The work was very well organised and efficient and the synergy was great to see and experience.
What skills did you apply and develop through this experience?
We used leadership, presentation, organizational and creative thinking skills. We developed our efficiency, our group communication and our capacity to exchange ideas within a group. The capacity to adopt action-thinking rather than idea-thinking was also very useful, so this helped us develop concrete thinking skills. The time management was also very challenging and we had to focus on the goal and the managerial outcome to work efficiently.
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