Learning Model
Whether focusing on change management, capability enhancement, or organizational development, custom programs add value in five distinct categories:
- Reinforcing positive intangibles—such as confidence, trust, organizational commitment, openness to change, and inspiration—to energize executive efforts, transform managers into leaders, and spread leadership throughout the organization
- Fostering collective recognition of the company's mission and values, core businesses, key challenges, and promising opportunities—as well as a common level of understanding—to improve the communication of ideas within the business group and across the organization
- Providing a dynamic learning culture that allows the necessary time and space for participants to step back from their daily responsibilities to reflect, rethink, and reassess critical industry and organizational issues
- Creating professional and personal networks that enable executives to enhance intracompany relationships, develop a different mindset, break through barriers, and "make it happen"
- Focusing on best practices, case lessons, models, frameworks, and tools to empower leaders to apply their new knowledge, course concepts, and innovative approaches back at the workplace
Based on the HBS learning model, the custom program experience is a powerful, interactive process of discussion, discovery, and application. The program components intermesh to create a uniquely tailored, in-depth opportunity for both individual and collective learning.
These include goal setting, program design, instructional methodologies, innovative teaching styles, case analysis, peer interaction and teamwork, and hands-on implementation. The impact is both immediate and long term: you will emerge from the program with the leadership capacity to position your organization for ongoing success.
Case Method
Pioneered by Harvard Business School, the case method engages you in a highly stimulating, collaborative process of identifying relevant issues and applying practical business lessons to your own situations and organizations. You will benefit from an added dimension that no other business school can offer—the opportunity to be taught by many of the faculty who wrote the cases and have personal knowledge of the problems and solutions presented. Assuming the position of executive in charge, you will work under typical management conditions. Through analyzing information and identifying problems, you will formulate and compare alternative solutions and commit to an action plan.
Moreover, a custom case can be developed that enables you to debate the approaches for dealing with an existing management situation at your company. Learn more about the HBS case method.
Complementary Methodologies
While the case method is the foundation of HBS’s dynamic learning model, other effective teaching methods are used to facilitate learning on multiple levels. These diverse approaches include faculty lectures and presentations, interactive group discussions, individual and team projects, customized workshops and exercises, and online simulations.
Interaction
Custom programs are structured to promote a dynamic interchange and extend the program learning across the organization. Through working and learning together, executives will develop a shared language and understanding of your company's mission, values, businesses, challenges, and opportunities. This sense of camaraderie helps build professional and personal networks based on trust, communication, and collaboration.
Technology
To accommodate dynamic case discussions, HBS classrooms feature an amphitheater seating design that gives every participant an unobstructed sight line to the boards, the professor, and each other, as well as cutting-edge acoustics that allow everyone to be easily heard. Each room is fitted with multimedia technology for introducing video, presentations, and live web material into case discussions. Learn more about the HBS campus facilities.
Focused Workshops
Since workshops are tailored to the learning objectives of each custom program, the nature of these sessions can vary from one learning experience to the next. Assigned group work typically includes a variety of exercises, presentations, and sessions in which participant teams concentrate on competitor analysis, creative case writing, hands-on lesson application, change recommendations, action plans, and other value-adding activities.
Reflected Best-Self Exercise
Before the program begins, participants complete a personal assessment of occasions when they performed at their best. This assessment requires feedback from 10 to 20 people—coworkers, clients, friends, and family—who are asked to describe the situations and the individual’s actions; participants collect this data during the program.
Unlike traditional models of performance evaluation, the Reflected Best-Self Exercise focuses on how key constituents perceive managers when they apply their strengths. It enables participants to create a developmental agenda for leveraging their reflected best self, expanding their capacity to add value within the organization, and fostering an environment where employees can engage their best selves and work optimally from positions of strength.
Learning Enhancement
The custom program experience can be extended via numerous learning resources available through HBS. More than 80 open-enrollment programs—ranging from a few days to several weeks—offer complementary Executive Education opportunities for further management development.
Harvard Business School Publishing also plays a key role, providing access to the Harvard Business Review, press books, case studies and related products, conferences, newsletters, and e-learning programs.
All these resources can augment the custom program experience by providing continued exposure to the faculty's ongoing research and latest thinking on management practice. Adding significant value for both participants and the sponsoring organization, these additional tools deepen the face-to-face learning experience and help to drive the takeaway learning for lasting impact across the organization.