In her role as a program director for Harvard Business School (HBS) Executive Education, Cathy Cotins forms deep relationships with clients and HBS faculty to craft custom programs with long-lasting impact. Below, she explains the collaborative nature of the program design process and how these transformative learning experiences help organizations achieve strategic goals.
I manage the client relationship for HBS from beginning to end. Overall, I serve as the hub of the wheel, working with the client's senior sponsors as well as Harvard faculty and the HBS delivery team to drive the process along as we design and deliver the program.
Within HBS, I work with our faculty to determine the most suitable faculty chair. We then become partners in selecting the rest of the faculty team, and with the client design team we iterate the program design until we all feel comfortable with the content, flow, and learning approaches. It typically takes about three to six months from the time we begin working together to when we deliver a program.
I'm most excited working with clients who are confronting a strategic and transformational business challenge—a burning issue that requires changing mindsets and driving alignment across the organization. For example, a custom program might be prompted by the arrival of a new CEO or a disruptive change in the industry—something that causes a well-established business to look at itself critically and decide that it needs to be doing something differently. We can help the client pause, take stock, and turn the ship in a different direction if needed. A custom program is an incredible way to achieve alignment in a relatively short period of time. In fact, it often becomes a launching pad for further work in a new strategic direction.
We also work with many companies who use custom programs as a way to develop the next generation of leaders. In these cases, the client is focused on increasing leadership capacity, aligning leaders around strategic objectives, and creating bonds across a geographically dispersed organization. With this approach, organizations can reach many leaders over time, aligning key messages, language, and business priorities.
Additionally, we work with industry associations and other professional organizations to design and deliver programs for their members. These programs are essentially a hybrid of our corporate custom programs and our open enrollment programs—participants experience a program customized to their industry or function's specific challenges and needs, and they interact with executives from other organizations. It is an excellent way for them to learn best practices and develop a strong external network.
As part of the initial assessment, we identify key senior executives and meet with them to tease out the challenges and opportunities the company and its executives are facing. As we conduct these interviews, we try to identify the skills and capabilities that the company needs to build in order to fill gaps in the organization and grow over the next five to ten years.
After those conversations, the faculty chair and I meet to discuss the interviews and draft a proposed program design. We then discuss the new skills and frameworks as well as common vision and language the company will need to develop in order to meet its goals. The initial program design might be very general, with themes and topics and potential flow, or quite detailed, with actual cases and faculty names for each session. We share that proposal with the client’s team in a design meeting and obtain feedback. The design process is often quite iterative.
As we refine the program design, we start building bridges between the client organization and the faculty team to help them understand the client’s culture, including their challenges and opportunities, and how each session contributes to the overall learning goals of the program. We continue to keep up with new developments at the company and in the industry and typically have a final briefing with the faculty team before the program begins. Clients are often surprised by our faculty's ability to deeply understand their business and bring that knowledge into the classroom to create the right environment for participants to discuss and make progress on the key issues they face.
We want to be true partners with our clients. Often we're forming a relationship at a critical and strategically important point in time for the organization. We try to support the executives as individuals and, in addition, address company challenges. We collaborate in a way that's very open and transparent, so that we truly understand the client's toughest challenges and biggest opportunities, what the client is trying to achieve, and what a successful outcome would look like.
When clients seek this type of executive experience, they often consider a diverse set of potential partners including business schools, consulting firms, individual trainers, and facilitators. A strong history of thought leadership and profound faculty expertise are just two of the reasons many clients choose to work with HBS. Clients tend to feel comfortable making an investment with HBS because they have no doubts about the quality of experience they will receive. Our clients also know that sending their senior executives to Harvard sends a strong signal that the organization is investing in their development in a meaningful way.
For clients who are looking to transform their organization, HBS has the unique capability to develop and deliver a comprehensive large-scale learning journey that cascades knowledge from the top to the bottom of the organization. Our clients view this cascaded learning approach as a powerful and effective way to align and develop employees across the company.
Ideally, a prospective client will come to campus during the exploration phase, so we can introduce them to the entirety of what we deliver at HBS—the faculty, the classroom, the case method, our approaches to virtual learning, and the HBS experience as a whole.
One aspect they won't see anywhere else is our residential living-group environment. Participants live in dedicated executive residences on campus where they learn together with a small group of their colleagues. It's like having a personal board of advisors while you're in the program that often lasts years beyond the program's conclusion. At first not everyone understands the value of these living groups, but once they see the process in action, they realize that the impact can be profound.
Clients who have worked with us and with other schools or providers tell us the quality of the HBS faculty and the immersive experience we deliver is unparalleled. One client had chosen a less expensive offering partnering with another business school. A couple of years later, they came back to us and said, "OK, we're now ready to come to HBS. We get it and understand what we'll receive in return for the investment."
Programs are centered on the hallmark HBS case method and structured to insure that each individual is an active participant. The case method of teaching, alongside a variety of pedagogical approaches, offers a well-rounded approach to our custom programs. Studying a case permits executives to look at tough issues outside of themselves, their company, their industry, and their comfort zone. They examine a particular challenge in a way that is not quite so close to home and does not feel so personal to them. It's a unique opportunity to think about the complexity of a problem in the context of a different industry.
Once they understand the issues in a more neutral setting outside of their company, we then help executives apply the insight from the case discussions to their own organization's challenges. They also come to understand that their problems are not entirely unique—that their business can benefit from adopting best practices from other industries and other parts of the world.
Our goal is to come up with the combination of learning approaches that works best for each client situation. Case discussions might comprise anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of the program sessions, and it's not unusual to include hands-on exercises, workshops, simulations, executive speakers, and field experiences. We design workshops and exercises that complement the cases and are highly customized to the client's situation.
When we ask companies about the top benefits of our custom programs, we hear over and over again about the broader and deeper networks that executives develop. They leave their day-to-day jobs and are asked to put on a new hat and think about things differently—more strategically, from someone else's perspective. Sharing that intensive experience with others tends to build long-lasting relationships. Executives constantly report that the people they met, whether in the living group or in the larger cohort, have become their team of trusted advisors—people to whom they will continue to turn throughout their career. Based on their shared experience, they've developed a common language and common jokes—they've become a close-knit team.
Custom program clients tell us that our service is unparalleled, and they feel very well cared for while on campus. It's a top quality experience. As a result, companies do not need to bring their own support staff on site to take care of their executives.
We deliver superior programs from beginning to end, in part because our team is highly experienced. As program director, I am a seasoned professional doing this work as my full-time job—it's my number one focus. I work with demanding senior business executives and their staff on a daily basis. I work closely with the members of our program delivery team, who know exactly how to meet the needs of clients and provide great service.
Clients are blown away by how easy it is to work with us, how we provide an unparalleled professional and service-oriented mindset, and how we continually deliver an exceptional experience, in spite of the fact that more than 10,000 executives come through our campus every year.
