Executive education at Trinity Business School: ‘It’s about responsible leadership’

For Michael Flynn, director of executive education for Trinity Business School (TBS), the school is more than just education: TBS is all about organisational change for good.

“Good for people’s careers and the organisation, but also good for issues around sustainability, human rights and diversity. It’s about responsible leadership,” says Flynn.

TBS offers two forms of courses: open enrolment and bespoke customised programmes. Its customer base comes from across many sectors, including government, industry and NGOs.

Some of the open enrolment courses have been designed at the request of industry groups and can be substantial.

“We have one customer management leadership course that runs for six months, another one that starts in October and finishes in May. And we have shorter courses which may run over a number of days either in person, virtual or hybrid,” he says.

The courses cover a wide range of education from team leading, to negotiating for value, creating value with ESG, finance, digital marketing and a whole suite of areas aimed at accelerating people’s careers, helping organisations and the wider environment.

Transformation

TBS is focused on executive leadership, development and organisational change or transformation. It does this under four particular umbrellas. The first is responsible leadership across all sectors from service, manufacturing, and technology companies. The second area is digital transformation. The third is innovation and business growth, which recently received a global award in executive education in 2020 in conjunction with Dublin Airport. The final leg is executive finance, which includes working with boards, focusing on governance and seeking to increase diversity.

“We work from board level right to C suite, senior management, and emerging management. In the latter, we help people who are really focusing on crafting their own leadership styles. We go on a journey with these participants to develop self-awareness and learn about their own leadership styles.

“Increasingly, we see the emergence of performance teams, rather like pop-up teams, where a team is configured to address a certain project and, when that project is finished, dissolves the team. We call that teaming and increasingly it is done on a global basis.”

Underpinning the focus on leadership and transformation is a real push to address sustainability and environmental protection, as well as human rights and diversity.

“This is both a top-down and bottom-up pressure. When companies are hiring they are in turn often interrogated by the interviewees and externally consumers are asking tough questions about their ESG stance. It’s not enough to give lip service to these concerns,” he says.

For Julie Ryan, head of the Irish Management Institute’s (IMI) customised and sectoral executive programmes, the role of peer-to-peer review is very important whether internal or across multicompany parties.

“We are raising a collective, rather than an individual company, and since the pandemic understanding the changes is more important than ever,” she says.

According to Ryan, the institute is busier than ever. “Don’t get me wrong, we have always been busy, but the last few years have just raised the stakes. It’s a perfect storm that is coming at companies now with climate change, hybrid working, sustainability, diversity, inclusion and equality. Oh, and a talent deficit.”

Lack of alignment

Ryan sees companies being in a race but are focused on delivering short-term deliverables only. “It’s a bubble and senior management need to be interrupted and paused in their tracks.”

The IMI sees compelling reasons to get companies to look at their vision and then their intention. “Often there can be great energy and commitment in the vision which can suffer from a lack of alignment. This is where a pause is needed to see if everyone is buying into the vision,” says Ryan.

The next issue is the “inside out” versus “outside in” by which Ryan describes a corporate culture. Some companies are entirely focused on their internal metrics and might benefit from reviewing issues eternally from market evolution to geopolitical unrest. The flip side is awareness of external factors and how these might impact internal plans.

Finally, Ryan says that reflecting on the past two years has provided great insight into the “doing” culture where the focus on performing in the now has taken precedence over performance in the future.

“Companies need to be fully ambidextrous and do both. They need to question and not just tell their employees. The future is now our present and the pace is exhausting. Management more than ever need to pause, to interrupt, disrupt even, and it’s our job as educators to allow this to happen.”