Leadership Training on a Governmental Level: MBA News

Executive education partnerships and projects are most commonly associated with private companies – however, national governments have started getting in on the act.

This summer, for example, MIT Sloan ran a leadership training workshop in Haiti for the Caribbean nation’s prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, and more than 50 government minsters and cabinet members.

HEC Paris, meanwhile, signed a deal with Ivory Coast’s ministries of state and foreign affairs last month to deliver leadership training to hundreds of public-sector officials as the West African government strives to position itself as a leading emerging nation by the year 2020.

‘New language of leadership’ with MIT Sloan in Haiti

In Haiti, an executive education program offered by MIT Sloan was adapted to the specific leadership training needs of a country still recovering from the devastation caused by 2010’s earthquake.    

“There was the goal of teaching a new language of leadership, the 4-CAP model, to the ministers,” said MIT Sloan professor Deborah Ancona. The 4-Cap model or 4 Capabilities Leadership Framework (FCF) aims to move leadership training away from a ‘command and control’ culture to one that instead puts an ability to ‘cultivate and coordinate’ at its core.

The MIT Sloan professor ran the workshop with a colleague from the university’s linguistics department. Michel DeGraff, who hails from Haiti, explained that this new language of leadership also entailed delivering the leadership training, and all its material resources, in Kreyòl - a form of French Creole spoken by 90-95% of the population, yet seldom used in education and administration, where French has been the traditional language of choice.

 “This is the first time ever that an entire government gathered for such training in Haiti, and this is first time that such high-level training used Kreyòl as the primary language of spoken and written interaction,” said DeGraff.

HEC Paris and the demand for executive education

In a recent interview for TopMBA.com, HEC Paris’ Inge Kerkloh-Devif explained why executive education’s growing significance to emerging markets has seen it become a form of management and leadership training sought at a governmental level.

In Africa, this has already seen HEC Paris commissioned by government officials to assist in the education of those managing the influx of new and vast investments from overseas. Indeed, the school’s new deal in the Ivory Coast builds on an executive education program HEC Paris ran in conjunction with Ivory Coast’s ministry of finance between 2008 and 2011.