Laying the foundation for trailblazing leadership

In today's fast-paced world, the need for leaders of integrity who foster dialogue and embrace diversity has never been greater. We need reflexive leaders who think strategically, drive change, and tackle global challenges such as inequality and climate change.

To explore the future of leadership education, we sat down with Professor Niklas Egels Zandén, who, together with his colleagues Professor Sara Brorström and Professor Andreas Diedrich, is responsible for the Master's Programme in Management at the School of Business, Economics and Law in Gothenburg. Their approach takes a bold and forward-thinking stance on how students are trained to lead in complexity and change.

Q: When designing the Master’s Programme in Management, you chose to take a new approach. What key changes did you want to implement, and how did you go about designing the programme to reflect them?

Four years ago, we sat down and said – let’s create a fantastic Master program that we would love to attend ourselves! We put “Reflexive Leadership for a Better Tomorrow” as the core of our program and from there three major shifts followed.

First, sustainability is now integrated in everything we do. We are the business school’s only Master program that qualifies for the university’s most rigorous sustainability label, and we do this without a single sustainability course!

Second, we turned up the volume on student skill development working with personal development, role plays, simulations, debates etc. For example, we use MIT’s freely available En-ROADS climate simulation as input for interactive climate action role-playing games. We also, thanks to the help of Icebug work with action-reflection groups based on the Inner Development Goals.

Third, we realized that we cannot do this alone! We identified about ten strategic corporate partners such as SKF, AP2, Lindex and Getinge that help us bring experienced managers into the classroom on a weekly basis.

Also, we want to anchor our learnings not only in the students’ minds through texts but also in their bodies by learning through art. We continuously leave the school and visit our about ten art/museum partners. For example, we watch films together during the Göteborg Film Festival, visit photo and art exhibitions at Hasselblad Foundation and Röda Sten Konsthall, and anchor our education in Gothenburg’s history via sessions at the Museum of Gothenburg.

Q: What aspects of traditional management education have you chosen to keep, and what new elements have you introduced to address the challenges of modern and future leadership?

We kept our strong grounding in classic and contemporary management research. We have highly competent professors teaching our courses, so the ability to deliver the latest research in an accessible way is vital in times of science denialism.

Simplified, we kept what we teach, but changed how we teach it.

It is less about learning scientific theories and perspectives and more about how you apply them in a reflexive way to transform the world. Generative AI has almost already made descriptive summaries of research redundant, so our students need to find a better edge. As a colleague put it, it is like the need to engage in abstract art when photography challenged the use of naturalistic paintings.

Q: When you talk to your students about their future and leadership, what do you see as their main drivers and how they perceive their ability to influence society and working life as future leaders?

Some students enter our program determined to change the world. They really feel that they want to make a difference and need our help to make it happen. Others enter wanting a successful career for themselves and we then challenge them to think about how this can be combined with creating a better tomorrow.

Finally, some, honestly, enter with no idea of what they want to do and are new to topics such as sustainability, strategy and leadership. We here get the opportunity to expand their horizons and show them what possibilities the future might hold for them.