Annual Report 2021

Research Centers

Focus: CEO development

The job of the CEO is one of the most challenging roles in the 21st century. Demand for greater transparency and accountability, and the impact of globalization and socio-political trends, mean CEOs are scrutinized by multiple stakeholders around the world. In this context, professional and personal development is key. With Professor of Leadership and Organization Ben Bryant, IMD explores ways to support CEOs, senior executives and their organizations and creates the right conditions for business leaders to optimize learning though dialogue, narrative and experimentation.

Year in review

Programs

Throughout 2021, IMD continued to promote personal learning and development among CEOs and other top executives, nurturing a “CEO Coaching Initiative” that offers tailored support for the unique challenges that CEO roles present. This initiative has been expanded across IMD’s faculty, building on previous consulting and research related to executive team dynamics.

Curated by Professor Bryant, IMD offered customized development journeys to 10 CEOs, starting with “reflection” interviews to understand the way business leaders execute their role, and the dynamics that this provokes with different people. It included in-depth coaching sessions to explore the deeper causes of behaviors, focusing on CEO’s scripts and routines. It also looked at the uncomfortable aspects of the CEO role – to identify them, understand them and accept or change them. The team will work with more than 20 executive teams, supported by a range of faculty, in 2022.

Highlights

Highlights

10 CEO development journeys

1 +
executive teams for 2022

Research
IMD’s CEO interventions continued to build the basis for a book, by Professor Ben Bryant, which focuses on dissonance as an untapped source of learning for CEOs. The book will explore how CEOs reconcile and integrate dissonance from multiple stakeholder perspectives, such as sustainability and ESG, profit, diversity and inclusion, and wellbeing.

A number of case studies were also in production in 2021, examining the learning opportunities from recent CEO departures, including organizations such as Wirecard and BaFin, Danone, Rio Tinto, KPMG and Credit Suisse.

In today’s society of rapid transformation, CEOs and senior executives have to shape and adapt their own leadership. Transformation is no longer a choice and leadership is the enabler. Leaders who think that learning is for others are destined to repeat history, not shape it.
Ben Bryant, Professor of Leadership and Organization