With a background in architecture, planning, and real estate development in the Middle East, Leili Gerami currently focuses on real estate investing. Always ready for new learning, she prepared for greater success through multiple Harvard Business School Executive Education programs—including the Program for Leadership Development (PLD).
PLD gave me direction and clarity and made me fly! It also changed my career. In particular, it changed the way I deal with issues that arise, and it broadened my perspective on leadership skills. I learned how to lead more effectively and how to have a more positive impact on the people I lead either directly or indirectly.
When you come to PLD, you leave your roles behind. You are no longer a boss, subordinate, father, brother, mother, sister, husband, or wife. You are simply yourself. You can reflect on who you want to be in each situation—in business, with family, or in your personal life.
At PLD, you feel supported and not judged. This provides greater potential to grow during the time you spend with your peers. It was like having my own personal board of directors. The friendship and trust formed in that special environment were truly valuable—and, I hope, lifelong.
What makes PLD click is the experience of learning with likeminded people who are smart, intellectual, and experienced. My peers were capable professionals in addition to being considerate people with good hearts. These individuals came to PLD from different parts of the world and from different cultures, and they brought different capacities, different knowledge, and different experience. Those differences led to a wide range of perspectives. The program is so powerful because it brings all these people together to share their knowledge and perspective and learn from each other.
Business executives need to learn more about the world because more and more we are all becoming part of each other's lives. Someone sitting in Boston or Silicon Valley is increasingly connected to someone sitting in a village in Asia. Similarly, as executives, we need to be aware of how we lead because the changes we make affect the lives of other people—even those we don’t know. PLD expands your awareness of the impact of your actions.
The living groups were especially memorable. Our group bonded as we analyzed cases together. The more we spent time together, the freer we became in our exchanges and the more we challenged ourselves and each other to come up with solutions to the cases. We also worked on applying those solutions to different scenarios and figuring out how we could use each lesson in our business or personal life. We would then bring those insights into the classroom. Though it's been some time, I can still remember many of the classroom interactions and exactly what the professors said.
If you were going to take one risk in your life, and invest time and money in the process, try PLD. The PLD graduates form a tight community because we all share an experience that has had a significant impact on us personally and has been a real pivot point in our lives. One way or another, it has changed something in us all.
