Knee-Deep and Sky-High: Leadership Training Boot Camp

This article is sponsored by ESSEC Business School.

Learn more about its Global MBA Program.

Rene Forjanic is enrolled in the Global MBA program at ESSEC Business School in France. Having recently returned from a leadership training camp at a French military academy, undertaken as part of his course, he shares his experience and explains why leadership training is such an important part of the MBA process.

What can a good leadership development program offer an MBA student?

To quote Professor Jeffrey Sachs, “The end of poverty will require a global network of cooperation among people who have never met.” As with any leadership development program, it is absolutely essential to get to know and understand different cultures, especially if one hopes to become a successful international leader.

ESSEC’s Global MBA program is extremely international and includes students from all over the world – the class of 2014 has students from 13 different countries, all of whom have valuable professional experience in different industries. Diverse backgrounds and experiences create extremely interesting and thought-provoking discussions in class.

A good leadership training program must be seriously committed to innovation, open-mindedness, responsibility, and excellence. At a prestigious school like ESSEC, accessible knowledge and interdisciplinary collaboration are combined. Good leadership development programs immerse students in real-world scenarios where they face real business problems, and enable them to develop skills to become socially responsible global leaders. Leadership development is of great importance to anyone who wants to do an MBA program.

How can military-training exercises complement leadership training?

Military training exercises as part of leadership training are a good test of how, as a team, candidates overcome individual weaknesses and build cumulative strengths. As part of the ESSEC Global MBA, we were taken to Saint Cyr, a prestigious military school in France.

Some of us were terrified of heights; others felt panic going into the tunnels and some just didn’t have the necessary fitness. But with the encouragement and support of their teams, everybody made it safely through. Everybody got his or her chance to lead and be led, but the premise of each of the military training exercises was teamwork.

There was no room for individualism, neither on the leader’s nor or team’s side – only together were we able to overcome the obstacles, which were tough. We found ourselves waist - sometimes even chest-deep - in mud, swinging down 15-meter high rails, trying to keep our balance five meters up in the air on a narrow ledge, crawling through tunnels with barely room to spare, climbing up vertical walls, building rafts and bridges, sleeping outside at 5 degrees Celsius (42 degrees Fahrenheit) – you name it, we did it.

These intense military training exercises showed us that we can go beyond what we think are our limits, operate under a great deal of pressure, and most of all, have fun together. To be a great leader, one has to have character – a persona. The camp helped reinforce the fact that it’s as hard to be a good leader as it is to be a good team player; it’s not easy to look into your friends’ faces and say no.

The best take-away from teambuilding at Saint Cyr were the bonds we forged among ourselves, which will accompany us throughout our MBA program and well beyond. As for leadership training, we used physical situations to explore the answer to the big questions: what does it mean to be a leader and to be followed by individuals who do not think the same way? What does it mean to overcome your fears and be part of a team? The answer was in the training we received.

How can leadership skills training help you in the workplace?

Based on my experiences from the training camp and the Global MBA program, I can say the practical leadership skills training I picked up in the camp helped me immensely in my first weeks at business school, and will definitively be a great focal point when I enter the employment market.

There are 22 of us in the program from 13 different countries, complemented by a very international faculty. This means we have at least 13 different ways of solving a particular problem. This combination of excellent leadership skills training and the abundance of cultural heterogeneity not only makes for dynamic discussions in class, it also gives us a strong competitive advantage.

For me, good leadership training is so important because MBAs are the infantry of the business world. Wherever (and whenever) they send us out, we have a solution prepared for every occasion, and the more we practice, the better these solutions are!

This article is sponsored by ESSEC Business School.