Katherine Unson, a senior executive at Google Asia Pacific, recognizes that exceptional leadership spans across industries and organizations. Having previously participated in the Behavioral Economics: Understanding and Shaping Customer and Employee Behavior program at Harvard Business School Executive Education, she attended the High Potentials Leadership Program as a second step toward earning the Certificate of Management Excellence. In this interview, she discusses a few highlights of her experiences at HBS.
I chose to apply to this program because I was interested in learning how good leadership is practiced in different companies and in industries outside of technology. I also wanted to examine the factors that define a good leader.
The program's case studies were fantastic because they featured leaders who responded to various challenges based on their personal styles. I learned that a good leader is agile yet authentic.
The Behavioral Economics program really changed my understanding of the power of incentives, biases, and motivations. In high-performing environments, the default approach is often to make a business case, and it’s almost assumed that it can and will be implemented. But this program heightened my awareness of other factors that can affect decision-making, and taught me how to implement those factors to encourage and inspire changes in behavior.
I liked the idea of picking and choosing programs from the Executive Education portfolio that would be most beneficial to me and make the best use of my time. I have access to a lot of learning programs from my own company, but I appreciated having a mid-tier choice between a single program and a full eMBA program.
I loved the living group environment. It was great to engage with a group of people from different backgrounds and have smaller, more intimate discussions about our own challenges and our opinions on the class material. The HBS experience was truly excellent, and this was one of the highlights.
Most people come to executive education programs expecting to be given ready-made action plans and answers to their most difficult questions. But there’s more to it than that. I encourage future participants to avoid simply accepting and copying what they learn. The real challenge is to process different approaches and lessons, internalize them according to your own beliefs and style, and become a better leader than you were before.
