Abstract
This article provides an overview of the Global Leadership course, a 6-credit course integrated within the curriculum of all advanced master programs of Antwerp Management School and designed to align with the school’s overarching mission. The course challenges and facilitates students in developing their leadership as a basis for making career choices, explicitly framing it within a global perspective and focusing on sustainability. The course is built on the belief that career development should not occur in isolation. Rather, it should be interwoven within the societal context in which careers unfold, bringing opportunities and challenges. Concretely, students work in diverse cross-program groups on an Action Learning Project addressing one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Further, students follow a track within their program focused on personal development, culminating in the submission of a Personal Development Paper in which they integrate all course experiences as a basis for developing a vision of their career. Through this holistic approach, students develop career competencies beyond considering the “why, what, and how” of work but are stimulated to consider the broader societal context.
Keywords
Introduction
This paper aims to demonstrate how teaching about careers can be integrated within a mandatory 6-credit Global Leadership course. This course opens the minds of business students, inspiring them to pursue careers with a positive impact, not only for themselves but also for the world. The course is unique because it is built around Antwerp Management School’s long-standing mission pillars of self-awareness, societal consciousness, and global perspective. In this paper, we describe the aims, approach, and core content of the course to inspire and guide other instructors in the design and implementation of something similar, taking a broader, contextual perspective on contemporary career development. By doing so, we bring the topic of teaching careers into a wider debate about how business schools can prepare graduates to lead positive societal impact throughout their careers.
The course is built on the belief that career development should not occur in isolation. Instead, it should be interwoven within the societal context in which careers unfold, bringing along opportunities and challenges. Contemporary careers are part of a global and rapidly changing socio-economic environment, and individuals are seen as the key actors responsible for their own career success according to personal success criteria (Guan et al., 2019; Jacobs et al., 2019). Contemporary career models (e.g., protean career (Hall, 1976), boundaryless career (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996)) tend to emphasize self as the central actor in career development, with a typical focus on understanding one’s personal strengths, needs, values, etc., and how socio-economic changes as context factors affect one’s personal career development. In our course, we adopt a sustainability-oriented approach to careers (De Vos et al., 2020). We challenge students to not only think about how the context influences their career but also view it as an opportunity to make a positive impact on this context, embracing leadership opportunities through their career choices. As such, we consider leadership development as a significant leverage to shape one’s career trajectory.
As a business school, Antwerp Management School aims to support students in developing their career competencies and prepare them for a successful career start upon graduation. Like many schools, we do this through diverse services (e.g., resume-writing workshops, job fairs, career coaching) offered to students by the school’s Career Center. Yet, this is only a small part of the story. By integrating career development in a Global Leadership course, we consider acquiring career competencies an explicit learning goal for students. Consistent with our school’s mission, we approach career competencies as encompassing much more than what’s typically included in career competency frameworks (e.g., awareness of one’s strengths and needs, networking behaviors, etc.). Trends such as increasing inequality, biodiversity loss, climate change, and forced migration require (future) leaders to develop sustainability intelligence and a global mindset (Beyne et al., 2022), and this must be considered in the decision-making process while shaping career trajectories. The Global Leadership course approaches career development from this global, societal perspective and considers career competencies part of a broader set of leadership competencies. By doing so, our course provides a novel approach to teaching about careers and demonstrates how 21st-century business education can be redesigned to develop responsible leaders. This transformation can be achieved by focusing on opportunities to build meaningful impact through an integrated, experience-based approach.
Preparing Students for a Career with Impact
The Global Leadership course has three building blocks: self-awareness, global perspective, and societal consciousness. These are a direct translation of the three pillars of the school’s mission into the academic curriculum: “To educate leaders for, not of the world” (see Figure 1). They serve as guiding principles for setting the course’s three overarching learning objectives of developing leadership and career competencies, cultural intelligence, and sustainability competencies, as will discussed further.
Mission of Antwerp management school.
Self-Awareness, Leading to Better Collaboration
Self-awareness is key to successful performance and career development and is a prerequisite for effective collaboration with others (Akkermans et al., 2013; Carden et al., 2022). Through stimulating self-awareness, we aim to help students develop their personal view of who they are and what they want, rather than relying solely on what others may think is good for them. Further, we aim to help students see how they relate to others and how a team can build on the strengths of everyone involved. As such, self-awareness is the foundation of leadership and career development.
Global Perspective, Leading to Ingenuity
A global perspective is necessary to develop a career in this global world that may become the students’ “career playing field” (Akkermans et al., 2013). Through meaningful interactions with over forty nationalities in our programs combined with reflection exercises, students gain insight into their own (ethnocentric) biases and learn to work with diverse peers. The course stimulates them to step back, reflect, and learn from these experiences, equipping them with the knowledge and insight on how to navigate future experiences and complexities of the global world.
Societal Consciousness, Leading to Sustainability
Societal consciousness is necessary to create a fair and sustainable future in which everyone can live a good life without depleting the planet’s resources or life-supporting systems. We look at societal consciousness as part of the bigger picture. Effectively, we ask: “Are you fit for the future? Will your career, organization, community, city, or country survive and thrive in 10, 20, 50, or even 100 years?” After more than 30 years of sustainable development, the world is still struggling to address many social and environmental challenges—now most notably through the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nations, 2015). In the course, we make students aware of the “grand challenges” our world is facing and equip them with the knowledge and skills needed to make an impact from their position—in their current role as a student and in their future career, in line with competencies for a contemporary career (Akkermans et al., 2013).
Consistent with the mission of Antwerp Management School, the Global Leadership course aims to develop, guide, and allow students to grow in these three domains through an intense experiential learning track that prepares them for their future careers. This course is innovative by not only facilitating students in the development of their leadership identity but also integrating this with important global societal challenges and translating these into considerations for career development. In other words, we empower students to shape their career paths while ensuring their awareness of the environment in which their future careers will evolve and how they can positively contribute to this—being the building blocks of a sustainable career (De Vos et al., 2019).
Course Description
As a 6-credit course, Global Leadership is a mandatory part of the curriculum of all eight advanced master programs at our school since 2019. The course spans the entire academic year. One part is organized cross-program (i.e., the Action Learning Project [ALP]), meaning that students collaborate in small teams composed of team members from different master programs within our school. This part is evaluated via a group course assignment. The other part takes place within students’ respective program cohorts. Integration of students’ learning in both parts is evaluated in the individual course assignment (i.e., a Personal Development Paper [PDP]). The novelty of teaching lies in its focus on career and leadership development opportunities, all centered around the three pillars of self-awareness, global mindset, and societal consciousness. The course has evolved over the years, coming to an increasingly integrated story that helps students develop a clear vision for their professional future. This vision incorporates both themselves and the broader context, stretching them to figure out who they want to be as a future leader—and what this means for their career.
Global Leadership Learning Journey
In this section, we provide the reader with a descriptive overview of the course content—given the broad coverage of the course in terms of session activities it is not possible to describe all elements in detail, but interested readers can reach out to the first author for more detailed information about particular exercises or assignments. The course sets out learning journeys and activities for each of the building blocks (self-awareness, global perspective, societal consciousness), which come together in the two main course assignments, that is, the group cross-program Action Learning Project (ALP) and the individual Personal Development Paper (PDP) (Figure 2). During the onboarding week, the first week of the academic year, 3 days are dedicated to setting the scene for the course: students are introduced to the building blocks and overarching learning objectives through interactive lectures on leadership and career development (self-awareness), cultural intelligence (global perspective), and sustainability (societal consciousness). Students then meet their ALP team members from other programs with whom they will work on an Action Learning Project for five months. This cross-program component of the course entails two project days (Milestones), four intervision sessions (i.e., group coaching sessions focused on facilitating cross-cultural collaboration in teams), and an ALP Fair in February, where students present their projects. During the onboarding week, they also meet their within-program peers with whom they will spend—next to an entire year of classes—a 2-day seminar, five intervision sessions (i.e., group coaching sessions focused on facilitating team and individual development), two program-tailored sustainability sessions, and a closing day (i.e., the within-program component of the course). The course formally ends in June, when students need to submit their final PDP, resulting in 70 contact hours and roughly 90 additional individual hours spent on their ALP and PDP. A multidisciplinary team delivers the course, with professors from leadership, career development, sustainability, and cultural intelligence. This intense cross-disciplinary collaboration has not only proved to be important for the integrated approach of the course but has also led to a closer interaction amongst and cross-disciplinary learning by the faculty members.
Building blocks of the global leadership course.
Course Material: Workbook
To complement the course, we published a Global Leadership Workbook, primarily focusing on frameworks used during sessions and answering questions about one’s own development process. The book consists of three major parts, all tapping into one aspect of development: personal, team, and career. Each part guides the students through established frameworks (e.g., Bennett’s scale of intercultural sensitivity, Lencioni’s five dysfunctions of a team, and Schwartz’s career values), followed by reflective questions, exercises, checklists, and tips. Consistent with the school’s mission, each part centers around the pillars of self-awareness, global perspective, and societal consciousness. The workbook articulates the different phases students go through during the academic year (see also Figure 3):
Development journey.
(1) Dream: In the initial weeks of the program, the foundation of the course is laid.
(2) Experience & Reflect: Over the following months, students encounter a wide range of new learning experiences.
(3) Integrate & Act: This phase consists of frameworks and reflective questions aimed at fostering a coherent vision of leadership and applying that to a future career.
The workbook’s value lies in stimulating students’ reflective capacity and the integrated approach. For example, in the “Why develop my leadership?” section, students explore leadership from multiple angles. They first reflect on their personal perspective and then are asked to engage in cross-cultural discussions about different leadership views, examining how cultural perspectives impact their personal development, group collaborations, and potential career choices. Finally, they address leadership from a sustainability perspective, discussing the (global) challenges they hope to make a difference on. A substantial part of the workbook guides students in solidifying the learnings of their career development. It serves as a resource during individual career coaching sessions offered by the school’s Career Center.
Development of Self-Awareness
Developing self-awareness requires vertical development. While horizontal development is about learning new skills, vertical development requires people to take a look at their beliefs, values, mental models, etc., and helps one grow as a person (Kegan & Lahey, 2009; Zaar et al., 2020). Other than skills training, which uses prescriptive models, vertical development does not offer blueprints. Instead, the key ingredients for vertical development are stepping into new experiences, reflection and introspection, asking and giving feedback, and providing support (Goffee & Jones, 2006; Ibarra, 2015; Kegan & Lahey, 2009). Each ingredient has been integrated into the course through group sessions and peer coaching.
Students are invited to take self-assessments, ask for/give others feedback, analyze their experiences, and critically reflect on those input sources. Being more self-aware is not an end goal but rather a means to behave more effectively and to make conscious career choices. Therefore, throughout the course, we also stimulate students to set development goals, take action, and step out of their comfort zones to experiment with new behaviors. Coaches are assigned to facilitate the groups to achieve this. The sessions aimed at diving beneath the surface are complemented with sessions addressing skills including public speaking, interpersonal skills (e.g., meeting skills, negotiating), and personal skills (e.g., time management), some of which are mandatory, and others can be attended based on personal interest.
Introductory session
We start with a cross-program introductory session during the onboarding week on what leadership is and how it can be developed—the learning objective being twofold. First, we want to encourage students to define leadership as broadly as possible (i.e., delivering results to others authentically). As such, we hope to help students to see themselves as leaders (Zaar et al., 2020). Second, we aim to give them insight into how one can develop his/her leadership identity by working on self-awareness. More specifically, we raise their awareness of their own and others’ implicit leadership theories through a drawing exercise (see Schyns et al., 2011 for instructions). Further, we clarify the rationale behind the activities and objectives of the self-awareness trajectory.
Two-day residential seminar
Early in the semester, students go offsite with their cohort. The first day aims to increase one’s self-awareness as future leader. Day two’s learning objective is to gain insight about “me in a team”. Focus is on feedback and introspection. As preparation, students collect feedback from others using open questions about their strengths and development areas. Together with a self-assessment and an analysis of context elements, they reflect upon the meaning of this feedback in terms of their development. Peer coaching is used to gain further insight into the data and to sharpen development goals. While on the seminar, we walk the students through several introspective exercises to assist them in crafting their story about who they are, what they stand for, and what they want to contribute to the world. Various experiential exercises are used to enhance students’ insights into their preferences, strengths, and weaknesses in terms of teamwork. These insights build the foundation for strong, collaborative, and effective teamwork throughout the year.
Intervisions
Between the seminar and the end of the academic year, five half-day intervision sessions are scheduled within the program. Facilitated by their coach, the group addresses various topics, including the progress on personal development goals, in-class teamwork, and dynamics within the cohort. Our aim is to instill the habit of carving out time for personal development, encouraging students to pause, reflect on their experiences, and learn from one another. In addition to the class sessions, four 1.5-hour intervisions are planned with the ALP teams, where a coach guides the groups in reflecting on their team dynamic and individual roles within it.
Development of a Global Perspective
Developing a global perspective requires a curiosity about the world, exposure to diversity, articulation of current mindset, and a disciplined attempt to develop an integrated perspective (Beechler & Javidan, 2007; Govindarajan & Gupta, 2001). Students are part of a highly diverse group, and together with students from other programs (e.g., via the Action Learning Project) and international faculty, the school forms a laboratory for cross-cultural collaboration. The various reflection assignments throughout the integrated leadership course invite students to investigate and understand the implications of their own ethnocentric biases and help them to articulate their worldview. Through the PDPs, students collect their insights and apply them to their personal lives and future careers.
Introductory session
Students are introduced to the global perspective during the onboarding week. This session has two major learning objectives: (1) introducing the relevance of a global perspective and cultural intelligence for future careers and (2) giving insight into psycho-social mechanisms (e.g., tokenism, micro-aggressions) and group processes (e.g., similarity attraction process that can hinder or facilitate optimal outcomes in diverse groups.
Two-day residential seminar
The mechanisms and processes introduced during the onboarding days are brought to life at the residential seminar via experiential group exercises. For example, students experience how the similarity attraction process can result in subgroups with suboptimal information exchange. Through group discussions, students learn how to address detrimental processes in their class.
Intervisions
Throughout the four 1.5-hour sessions and the five half-day intervision sessions in the remainder of the academic year, students are introduced to different frameworks (e.g., universal values by Schwartz, 2012; cultural dimensions by Hofstede, 2011; the culture map by Meyer, 2014) aimed at decreasing ethnocentric bias and increasing cultural sensitivity (Bennet, 1993, 2004). Further, they are stimulated to reflect on the processes of the various groups they are part of: do they recognize the emergence and/or impact of the processes and mechanisms at play in diverse groups? Our aim is to help students recognize, address, discuss, and mitigate their biases and any processes that may be detrimental to collaboration within diverse groups. These skills are crucial for a successful career in a globalized world.
Development of Societal Consciousness
Societal consciousness relies on systems thinking—to see and act on the interconnectedness of our economic, technological, human, social, and ecological systems. In other words, we are often treating symptoms and not causes. One of the most fundamental causes of our current sustainability challenges stems from the flawed design of our economic system, based on outdated assumptions, fragmented thinking, and perverse incentives (Raworth, 2018). Through dedicated sustainability sessions and the ALP we aim to develop students’ understanding of major sustainability challenges, their ability to think systematically, critically and with a long-term perspective, their capacity to collaborate with stakeholders to realize impact, and reflect upon their personal values and how these translate into their future work and career.
Introductory session
During the onboarding week, a session on sustainability is organized which aims to introduce students to the areas of systemic breakdown in society, by discussing the five forces of fragmentation: disruption, disconnection, disparity, destruction, and discontent (Visser, 2018). Departing from these insights, the second learning goal is to create awareness about how they can work on direct solutions to each of these utilizing the 17 SDGs and societal consciousness is thereby seen a ways to reverse these forces of fragmentation, using the five counter-forces of integration to find secure, smart, shared, sustainable, and satisfying solutions.
In-class and cross-program sessions
Through in-class and cross-program sessions, students are challenged to develop their own vision of integrating sustainability into their future work and careers. Experts are invited to discuss sustainability in their specific field (e.g., sustainable finance, sustainable HRM, sustainable innovation), challenging the students to reflect on “How can you apply this thinking to your life, work, and career?” In the cross-program sessions, the concepts of “corporate responsibility” and “sustainability” are discussed. Although these concepts emerged at different times and reacted to different business transgressions, they both share a common interest in the relationship between business and society (Bansal & Song, 2017). However, the blurring between “responsibility” and “sustainability” has caused confusion. In these sessions, we provide the students with new and diverse tools for defining and theorizing “sustainability,” the importance of stakeholder perspectives, and impact management, which helps them finetune their ALP project (see below).
Insight into the Course Assignments
In the following, we will elaborate on the Action Learning Project (ALP) and Personal Development Paper (PDP), which are the two main course assignments (see Figure 2).
Action Learning Project
Students work in cross-program teams on a project that contributes to the realization of one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The learning goal is twofold. First, students gain a deeper understanding of the sustainability challenges that organizations encounter. Second, they develop their cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary leadership identity and teamwork skills. As such, the ALP integrates self-awareness, a global mindset, and societal consciousness.
An ALP Team consists of five or six students combined for maximum diversity in gender, cultural background, and current and previous study programs. As it is an action project, they need to create an impact through an action and an influence on one business stakeholder. For example, students could help a company launch a carbon footprint calculator with customers or host a workshop with the staff of a social enterprise on gender equality. As it is a learning project, students are encouraged to set goals that are out of their comfort zone. What matters most is their ability to apply the theoretical frameworks learned to their actions and experiences and their reflection on personal development. As it is a project, students need to finish within a timeframe of 5 months and demonstrate the impact that occurred within this time. However, if they succeed in assuring the project’s continuation without their interference (e.g., by the organization they partnered with), this strengthens their project. The project kicks off during the onboarding week and runs from September to February.
Milestone 1
Halfway through the first semester, the first ALP Milestone Day is organized. At this time, teams receive guidance to close the exploration phase of their project. They decide which SDG they will address, the specific actions they intend to take, and the stakeholders they are going to assist or influence. This is accomplished by completing a Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010), which has been slightly adapted to align better with a focus on the SDGs. Furthermore, students reflect on the team dynamics and their role in the group process in a session facilitated by an ALP coach (i.e., one of the four 1.5-hour sessions).
Milestone 2
The second ALP Milestone Day is organized at the beginning of the second semester. This session assists students with the final phase of their project, preparing them for the delivery of their project. Again, a session on team dynamics session is facilitated to stimulate reflection on the team processes and to give feedback. Students have dedicated time for self-directed ALP group work throughout the first semester on Friday mornings. Teams can also register for a 10-minute session with two sustainability experts to ask SDG questions.
ALP Fair
The Action Learning Project culminates in a fair where all teams present their project. The projects are assessed by a jury and a broad range of interested parties (organizations involved, journalists, policymakers, sustainability experts, school staff, family, and friends). This marketplace format allows students to show their project “to the world” and create optimal leverage for its future continuation.
Adjourning session
To conclude the project, one final intervision session is organized, allowing the team to reflect on how they worked together and what learnings they can take away for future group work.
Deliverables and grading
The Action Learning Project’s criteria align with the three building blocks of the course and the twofold learning goal. Via the ALP Fair and two group papers, students show their insight into the sustainability challenges organizations face, the complexity of the problem they are trying to tackle, and how impact can be measured. The group grade is converted into an individual grade after a peer review. In addition, students individually reflect upon the group process, the team dynamics, and the cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary experiences in their one-pagers, which they have to hand in after every intervision session and in both PDPs.
Personal Development Paper
Personal development can only occur as a product of action, reflection, and the ability to learn from experiences. Taking notes on this reflection process is key to ensuring that new experiences do not immediately overwrite insights gained. The PDP requires students to be introspective and combine experiences, feedback, notes, self-assessment data, and other relevant information into a comprehensive learning portfolio and action plan for continued personal and professional development. The course workbook is a critical tool in the PDP process, with students taking notes on their development and addressing the reflective questions throughout the year. The PDP could be viewed as a product of and a contribution to their ongoing personal development initiatives. As such, it is also a companion for their future career.
The PDP evolves as students set personal development goals and reflect upon their experiences and feedback received. By the end of the academic year, this transforms into a comprehensive PDP, which can serve as a roadmap for their future career. Although writing this PDP is a continuous “work in progress”, students need to submit it in two parts.
Part 1, due a few weeks after the residential seminar, aims to get students started on their development journey. First, students are asked to reflect on their experiences of the past few weeks, including onboarding, residential seminar, teamwork, the ALP, and experiences outside of school. They should then relate these to both their personal development as well as insights gained in terms of group dynamics, considering the perspectives of self-awareness, global mindset, and societal consciousness. In the second step, they are asked to relate their experiences and reflections to their view on why they want to develop their leadership. This allows students to identify development goals, specify how they will work on those during the academic year, and who/what will be instrumental in that regard.
Part 2, due at the end of the academic year, primarily focuses on reflection. Students are asked to reflect upon experiences and personal growth throughout the academic year in the context of their future career. Again, we encourage the students to integrate insights gained from different experiences and introspective exercises done throughout the year and use the lenses of self-awareness, global perspective, and societal consciousness to reflect upon their personal development and group dynamics. We prompt them to consider the development goals they have set for themselves or to describe their learning curves. The second part of the PDP prompts students to look ahead, with questions around their current career outlook, future development, and their interpretation of a “career with impact”.
Grading criteria
We assess the papers on the following competencies: knowledge and understanding of frameworks used during the course and additional readings; the capacity for reflection or the ability to apply these frameworks to analyze and understand one’s own and other’s behaviors and their evolution; and the development of a vision for leadership, a leadership development action plan, and a vision for one’s future career.
Alignment Between the Course and the School’s Career Center
The integrated leadership course explicitly integrates leadership and career development. Like many other business schools, our institution offers students a wide range of career support services. What sets our approach apart is the tight collaboration between these services, the Career Center manager, the course, and the academic faculty, ensuring that career development is interwoven throughout the program. For example, during the onboarding week, a session on career development is jointly taught by course faculty and the Career Center manager. During this session, students are introduced to the importance of developing career competencies and are challenged on what a “career with impact” means to them. This discussion is not only related to the course’s objectives but extends to the career services offered by the school. As such, we establish from the start the level of support students can expect from the school as they progress from forming a vision of their future career to landing a job. This approach enhances the practical value students can get from the course regarding their future career. Regular meetings between course faculty and the Career Center manager ensure this integration throughout the course and the career center activities.
Feedback and Improvements
Since the course’s current format was introduced in 2019, improvements have been made to the Action Learning Project based on student feedback. For instance, after the first year, we incorporated two workshops on stakeholder management and project planning to better support students in their project management. We also made scheduling adjustments and set aside dedicated time in all program calendars on Friday mornings (biweekly) to ensure students had a fair amount of time to work on their projects. More recently, we replaced the traditional exam presentation to a jury of Antwerp Management School professors with the much more lively ALP Fair. This change was motivated by students’ anti-climactic experience of having to present their ALP behind closed doors to a jury. Since the change was implemented, feedback has confirmed that the new set-up has boosted the sense of accomplishment, impact, and celebration. This experience was even more pronounced for the groups that had projects featured in local media after the fair. We will continue improving our course to ensure students can optimally learn from this project experience. A challenge we still face today is the imbalance in stakeholder connection between local and non-local students at the start of the project. Local students tend to dominate the communication, which results in lower levels of connection to the stakeholders for their non-local peers. We plan to address this through the project management session, emphasizing the importance of involvement throughout different phases. Another challenge is establishing a more explicit connection between students’ experiences during the ALP and the development of future career competencies, such as managing different perspectives and dealing with uncertainty. To address this, we will make these links more concrete during the onboarding days of academic years 2023–2024.
Impact of the Course
The impact of the course is measured by assessing students’ self-evaluations of their self-awareness, global perspective, and societal consciousness at the beginning of the course and at its conclusion (mid-way through the Spring semester). Sample evaluation items include statements like, “I know what I like to do and what gives me energy in life,” “I know how to move amongst cultures,” and “I have insight into the most urgent societal challenges in different parts of the world.” Table 1 summarizes the average data scores collected during the academic years 2021–2022, with a response rate of 53% before the course, increasing to 70% afterward.
Average Scores on Self-Awareness, Global Perspective, and Societal Consciousness at the Start of Semester 1 and at the End of the COURSE (SEMESTER 2).
Note. Answers given on a 10-point scale ranging from “not at all” to “completely”.
This table illustrates that the average scores for each of the three building blocks are higher at Time 2 than at Time 1. This indicates that, as a group, there was an increase in self-awareness, both personally and in a global context, particularly in terms of collaboration with diverse peers and understanding societal challenges. However, given the significant difference in response rate and the fact that individual student scores could not be linked over the two waves, no substantiated conclusions can be drawn about the impact of the course and its different sessions and assignments. Today, we use this quantitative data primarily as input for focus groups with student representatives, academic directors, and program staff of the different master programs, which are organized at the end of the year, to collect in-depth qualitative feedback and suggestions for improvement.
In the future, we aim to dive deeper into the assessment of the course’s impact on various levels, including careers (career perceptions and competencies) and leadership aspects (leader identity, self-awareness, contextual awareness, and skills). The quotes below, extracted from students’ PDPs, provide an initial glimpse into the program’s influence on students and how it has shaped their perspectives on their future careers and leadership journeys. However, further research will be required to measure the impact more profoundly:
The ALP was one of the most significant learning experiences of the year regarding team development. My team consisted of five people originating from three different countries and cultures. Even though there were some difficulties along the way, we managed to deliver a result that we are truly proud of. This does not only reflect the impact that we created, but also the learnings about growing as a team to reach our goal, and the relationships that we created among team members along the way. (Student X) I hope to keep developing myself in my future job. You are never done or ready, and I am absolutely convinced that if people think that they are done/ready with learning/developing, it will be the beginning of the end. Staying open-minded and being open towards change is extremely important. (Student Y) Based on all the insights I received in the last months, I figured out that I must take action by myself, and there is no excuse for just watching the initiatives of others. We, the students of Antwerp Management School, are privileged to be aware of all the issues in this world, and it is our responsibility to take action, make the first step in solving these issues sustainably, and to spread awareness among the rest of the global society. (Student Z)
Conclusion: Preparing Students for a Career with Impact
Over the past decades, we have seen an evolution in careers. Traditional linear career trajectories, bound to a single organization, have given way to multidirectional careers where individuals actively take charge of their own career path, independent of organizational boundaries (Baruch, 2004; Sullivan & Baruch, 2009). In parallel, business schools have evolved from preparing students solely for a corporate career to equipping them with the tools and skills to navigate their own boundaryless career in a complex world. This shift aligns with evolutions in the field of leadership development, where the meaning of leadership has undergone significant changes due to a changing societal context (Zaar et al., 2020). Since 2000, increasing complexity has raised the need for authentic and shared leadership. The leading question has shifted from “How can we strengthen the individual leader?” to “How can we increase leadership capacity within organizations (and beyond)?” Leadership development now aims to help people develop their leadership identity by addressing essential questions such as “Am I a leader?”, “Who am I as a leader?”, and “What impact do I want to make?” This requires taking the outside-in perspective (Ibarra et al., 2010) and analyzing the urgent needs of society first before taking the inside-out perspective. Our Global Leadership course challenges students to understand this context by working within diverse groups on a pertinent sustainability topic. We ask them to reflect on the question, “Where do I want to make a difference?” before working with their strengths, values, etc. This helps determine how they can make a difference—as a future leader and through their career choices.
“Opening minds to impact the world” has been the tagline of Antwerp Management School for many years, forming an important anchoring point for the school’s educational strategy. The Global Leadership course is unique in how it is anchored in the three building blocks (raising self-awareness, developing a global perspective, and stimulating societal consciousness) of our school’s mission. Moreover, students make a personal integration of their learning experiences, articulating their personal vision of leadership and the significance of an impactful career. In doing so, we bridge leadership and career development. To prepare students for their careers in a world faced with many challenges, we believe that bringing in this contextual element is critical. This allows them to make better career choices and for the world to become a better place through those decisions.
Like many business schools, we have been engaged with sustainability for a long time. And like many, we are experimenting with the topic. Through the creation of the Global Leadership course, we have set a destination for our programs. Our vision is to redefine “business education” around the three building blocks, address the challenge of sustainability education, and link every student’s career opportunity to sustainability concerns. By trying to measure our impact with the Global Leadership course, we view sustainability as a challenge for the existing curriculum, not to it.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
