Many years ago, I had the excellent experience of being the corporate supervisor of Sabrina Dick’s Master thesis on HR shared service. Sabrina has since developed into a very successful HR manager at SAP, now leading HR in Eastern Europe. I caught up with her a couple of months ago, and she mentioned that she had been doing some guest lecturing at her alma mater, in Heilbronn, and for the past few years she has run a series of lectures on global leadership.
Universities of Applied Science have a strong tradition of tight collaboration with industry. I’ve always thought that the relationships between the Universities of Applied Science and Industry are a key element in German competitiveness. The new campus in Heilbronn is really impressive, with generous support from the Dieter Schwarz Foundation, the founder of Lidl.
With Sabrina spending more time in Prague and other cities, she was looking for someone to take over the undergrad lecture on global leadership. I met Prof Erner, who leads the department, we agreed that I would run the course for the spring semester. The course runs over two weekends, with a long evening lecture on Friday, continuing through most of Saturday. Then in June, the students will present their assignments back to me and the class. You can see more about the broader programme here.
The role of the external lecturer is to augment the core teaching program, and it is expected that you combine your own practical experience with the appropriate theory. The cool thing for me was that Sabrina had already established a successful program structure, so I didn’t need to build the curriculum from scratch.
Over the course of the first two days, we mixed discussion, theory overview, case studies, I shared rambling examples of my own leadership successes and especially blunders. I’d spent some time reviewing the text books, especially Northouse, Schein, Gundling, etc. Given my South African background, I made sure we touched on the work of Adrian Furnham on management and leadership and I also introduced the students to Ubuntu, as I found most of the leadership textbooks to be rather US centric. Sabrina had put together some excellent materials on how SAP develops leaders and managers, so that brought an additional practical element to the party.
Reviewing academic and practitioner materials on leadership was interesting, if sometimes a little frustrating. There are no simple answers, and models are riddled with caveats. There is still a lot that we don’t understand about how the human mind actually works, especially at work.
I have always admired Google’s approach to HR, at least from afar, in that they attempt to apply analytical rigour to what they do, by measuring and testing a lot. I’m also pleased that Google like to share what they discover. I was wondering why they share their findings so readily, given the competitive need to attract and retain, in what is a hyper-competitive employment market. I suppose it is a form of virtue signalling, in that it enables them to communicate about their organization practices and values to prospective applicants, and more broadly to their stakeholders (more on that another day).
A recent google study noted the importance of psychological safety as a factor for team performance and it is one that I will more consciously aim to encourage in my own work environment. See here for more of psychological safety. I really need to figure out what Laslo’s new venture is all about too.
Back to the course. I enjoyed first weekend, and I hope the students did too. Now the students will work in teams, and are going to prepare presentations on the following topics.
- Are people born as leaders or shaped?
- Traditional leadership theories in the context of global leadership.
- the role of trust in the context of global leadership
- Growing global talent pools
- Case studies of global leadership
- The challenge of intercultural teams. how best to manage them
- Diversity in the context of global leadership
- Learning from the google research into psychological safety.
I’m really looking forward to see what they will come up with.I’ll blog more after the presentations.
Vendorprisey 