In The Classroom: Berkeley’s Executive Leadership Program

This is the first time that the BEXL, which has been around for several years, has included a coaching component. In fact, the program has undergone major changes this year based on industry feedback. Says Kim Fisher of Galima Group, UC-Berkeley’s program partner, “We interviewed around 290 senior executives to make sure that we are offering people, who are taking time away from really important jobs, what they need to make their company more successful and make themselves more successful as leaders.” The feedback showed that the learning should be actionable, more personalized, the impact needs to be lasting, and this “shouldn’t be about navel-gazing.”

Based on such feedback, personalized coaching was introduced. “Our big picture vision for this is that it is a customised general enrolment program,” says Chatman. “We are trying to really focus on the challenges and scope of a senior executive.” Also, this is the first time the BEXL had an application process. Out of the 80-odd people who applied, only 47 got in. “You need to have a peer group that can learn from each other because so much of what they are doing is group work. We feel that it is important that they learn as much as they can from each other as they can from the people standing in front of them,” says Fisher.

Bringing it All Together

The BEXL is structured around an organizational canvas – a simple chart which shows the forces that influence leadership, structure and culture within an organization’s context, and how that, in turn, has a bearing on vision and strategy. “Our integrating mechanism is this organization canvas,” says Chatman.

Going through the canvas is a three-part process. One, the participants get their data on to the canvas – in essence, they describe the situation. This data comes from two surveys that happen even before the participants come to Berkeley – the participants as well as their teams are asked to complete two surveys. One’s an assessment of their leadership style and the second is a culture assessment survey. Two, they understand the fits and misfits among the different components of the organizational canvas – so if they are pursuing an innovation strategy and their culture is focused on risk aversion, there is a clear roadblock there. So this is really about diagnosing the gaps between the current organizational elements and their aspirational vision and strategy. Next, they devise an action plan.

Different issues related to the organizational canvas are addressed over different days. While the content sessions are conducted by such Berkeley professors as Chatman, Homi Bahrami and Morten Hansen, practitioners such as Inder Sidhu, senior vice-president of worldwide sales strategy and planning at Cisco Systems, and author of the bestseller Doing Both, help integrate them with real-world experience. Day 1, with its tower-building exercise, presentations by Chatman and the coaching component, is an introduction to leadership and culture. Day 2 is about structure including design issues, decision-making and incentive systems. Day 3 is about culture and features recruiting expert Susan Hailey, who talks of how they changed culture at Harrah’s Entertainment through its recruiting strategy.

Day 4 is an integration session where Cisco’s Sidhu talks of structure and culture in pursuit of a balanced strategy. Using the example of the Golden Gate Bridge, which combined both structural engineering and flexibility with aesthetics and beauty, Sidhu explains how growth and profitability need not be an either-or. “There is a multiplier effect between both these seemingly diverse choices,” he says, as the participants listen on with rapt attention. To make his point clear, he divides the class into three groups and gives them three Cisco case studies to read and analyze. Each case study presents a choice which can be seen as an “either-or” or about “doing both” successfully — disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation; relevance and excellence in customer intimacy; and optimization and reinvention in operational excellence.