Continuous learning & exploring

During a conversation with a group of college students the question was raised; 'When are you finished studying?" My answer "Never". In fact the older I get and the longer I work, I feel I need to study harder then ever to keep up with all the innovations and transformation in our organization, partners, economy and society.

It is not just about learning new things. Studying provides you a moment to step out of your daily hectic agenda where it is easy to have 'back-to-back' calls & meetings and reflect if the things you are doing are still relevant, impactful and generate value.

The SAP Executive Leadership Program is designed to have 200 nominated leaders engage with each other and with top executives from SAP and get more insights about the board offices. (operations, finance, people, solutions, marketing & sales, etc.) Besides a full 360 performance review and several personal coaching sessions, there is a final assignment to work in a smaller group with five peers on a corporate problem and present an executive summary to a group of L1 leaders.

The trainers from Korn Ferry deliberately pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me work in the solution development area, which is a different world to me. Instead of being able to use templates and methods I created in the past twenty years in the IT industry, I had to listen, ask questions, work from a completely different perspective and accept other formats when we negotiated one of the provided corporate problems.

Working on strategy and business cases in a different way and being open to accept team members to work from a different perspective was a great learning experience. As a result I will handle the review and planning with my team & business partners for the next fiscal year in a different way. I am going to invite other types of stakeholders and different teams then we normally would invite and request them to provide feedback to our plans from their perspective. This is confrontive and may not provide us the input that would we like to hear, but that is exactly the objective. That is learning & improving!

During the program, especially about the financials with team from our CFO Luka Mucic, I discovered that my next step should be to further brush-up my knowledge & skills in the finance area. I just registered at INSEAD for the online training Business Strategy & Financial Performance and start in February 2022.?The best run teams can only be supported by the best trained leaders.

Big Thank You! to the Executive Leaders from SAP who invested a fair amount of their time to the members of this ELP cohort and the great trainers & coaches from Korn Ferry.