Concept

The St. Gallen Executive Leadership Program focuses on the really important questions of leadership from the perspective of the executive management of renowned companies and organizations. It is suitable for successful and experienced leaders who know exactly how difficult it is to get the strategies and concepts desired at the top into the minds and hearts of the lower management levels or operative teams. Only if this succeeds the implementation will be successful.

Participants

1. Managers with comprehensive responsibility for results
2. Executives, top and senior managers
3. Managers who are responsible for an entire company or a significant sub-area in a strategically intended manner
4. Managing directors, board members, heads of large divisions and major business units
5. High performers in the company who want to build their success on outstanding leadership performance and internalize the principles of executive leadership.

Topics

Part 1: Executive Leadership

Management-specific challenges

• What distinguishes normal leadership from executive leadership?
• Many people can lead employees. Only a few can lead an entire organization.
• What does it take to lead a company or an important division in the desired direction?
• Principles and success factors of skillful executive leadership

Reviewing the leadership role

• The leadership role changes with increasing management responsibility
• Analysis of the impact as a leader
• What good leadership can achieve
• Beyond that: Additional effects thanks to executive leadership
• What should executive leadership achieve?

Areas of responsibility of executive leadership

• Anchoring direction, mission, guidelines and top objectives in the company
• Living the values and mission statement, making the desired behavior a reality at all levels
• Define and communicate the company's sustainability and social responsibility
• Develop consistent thinking and action in customer orientation and customer benefit as an important part of the identity
• Moving the corporate culture in the right, desired direction
• Use leadership principles such as agility, dynamism, resilience, self-organization or entrepreneurship and a start-up mentality as a competitive advantage
• Create a willingness to change, above-average productivity and motivation
• Establishing a broad consensus and understanding within the company that it needs above-average profitability in order to be able to invest in the common future
• The declared will to be an outstanding employer and to make an above-average commitment to the well-being of employees
• Creating the optimum of centralized management and decentralized autonomy
• The sustainable design of the incentive system to promote performance and motivation: What is rewarded? How? What is sanctioned and how?
• Promoting talent, junior staff and specialists
• Ensuring the management of the future through forward-looking management development and high employer attractiveness
• The conscious organization of fluctuation: Who leaves, who stays? Actual and target
• The continuous development of leadership and management skills at all management levels of the company, from top management to team leaders, specialists and project managers

The personal leadership model

How do you go about applying the principles and success mechanisms of executive leadership even more intensively than before in your own area of responsibility? How do you create your own leadership master plan? On the basis of which considerations is a sensible prioritization made?

Part 2: Creating the right conditions. Unique leadership.

Unique leadership

In most cases, successful companies are characterized by the fact that they go their own way in the area of leadership.

They are characterized by the fact that they not only want to be unique in their services for customers, but also seek a unique position in the area of leadership. This should be:

• Inspire employees and motivate them to achieve ambitious goals
• Empowering and continuously developing employees
• Making the joy of shared results tangible
• Bringing trust, team spirit, collaboration, empathy and appreciation to life

High-performance organization

Ultimately, it is about aligning the goals of the company and the goals of the employees to such an extent that a unique high-performance organization is created. In addition to the topics described so far, however, there are accompanying prerequisites that need to be created:

• The understanding that organizational structures create realities that can massively influence the functioning of the company, either positively or negatively, in terms of achieving goals
• The insight that there are systemic conflicts in every organization, that these must be recognized and that a creeping escalation of conflicts can only be avoided by understanding such situations
• The willingness to question existing structures and, if necessary, to change them
• The art of breaking down barriers to performance, motivation and success through new structures and new rules of the game
• Knowledge of the importance of processes and the ability to use active, IT-, communication- and AI-supported process management as a competitive advantage

Change Management

No matter how high and developed the management quality of a company may be: In one area, you are usually overwhelmed: The ability to accept change and proactively do what is necessary to adapt to change better and in a more timely manner than other companies. Consider:

• Only a few employees love change.
• Most love what they know.
• Companies cannot survive without adapting, they have to change.
• So how do you deal with resistance to change?

These questions have long been examined in the context of 'change management'. We show the current state of the art and best practices from the field: what works, what doesn't work.

After attending this top-class program, you will see much of what you have always done confirmed. But you will also come back to your company full of new ideas and impulses and will certainly implement some of them, because: Executive leadership is the great opportunity to decisively improve the efficiency of an entire company through the right design and the right interventions.