When I started my MBA journey, my goal was simple. To learn as much as I could and become the best version of myself possible. I came to IMD expecting to bury my head in books and assignments and compensate for what I didn’t do earlier in life. To that end, I thought business fundamentals, strategy, and critical thinking were the main forts that required conquering and would give me sleepless nights. Turns out, it was the leadership stream with Professor Zhike Lei that blew me out of the water, both as a subject and as an experience.
Let me explain. In most careers, leadership roles arrive by default. Without formal training or deliberate preparation, we are thrust into positions of responsibility and expected to deliver excellence from day one. Leadership becomes a presumed trait, something we are supposed to just have. At IMD, I am learning to approach leadership as a skill.
With every session and every exercise, I am pushed to reflect deeply on my inner leader. On where I succeeded, but more importantly, where I failed. My only job is to put myself and my experiences in this blender of a classroom and navigate the many facets of leadership, from dealing with difficult colleagues to having uncomfortable yet necessary conversations. Each time, past experiences resurface. With them comes a wave of introspection. I start analyzing and dissecting every decision I made, every conversation I had as a leader.
In the classroom and leadership labs, we are implored to experiment with different leadership styles to seek the one that fits best with our personality and inherent characteristics.
The personal development elective, in particular, has been both enlightening and thought-provoking for me. Self-reflection and awareness do not get any deeper than this. Every week, I get 50 minutes with a trained professional who helps me uncover the behavioral patterns and underlying causes that may be holding me back as a leader. Together with my coach, I am learning to connect the dots between why I do what I do and how it influences my decision-making. These conversations go far beyond surface-level observations. They challenge me to confront habits, assumptions, and emotions I have long left unexamined. It is uncomfortable, yes, but incredibly powerful.
Make no mistake. The leadership stream is making me toil in sweat and more uncomfortable in my skin than I have ever been. It challenges my beliefs and keeps stripping me of any pretenses. But that is the beauty of it. At no other point in my life would I have had the opportunity to explore different leadership styles without fear of failure.
The entire MBA program at IMD is designed to throw you off the moment you feel a little semblance of comfort. The good thing, however, is that it will not let you sink.
The Leadership stream provides you with not just resources but personnel and individual coaching to help you introspect deeper and more conscientiously. It is giving me tools to channel my inner leader. By learning to discern between instincts, thoughts, senses, and feelings, I am able to employ the right facet of my personality for different situations in life, as a person and a professional.
