How we prepared MBA students for leadership success

Leadership Challenge Session for Communication and Influencing Skills for the Executive MBA students at University College Dublin, Smurfit, which extended to further Challenge Sessions on Teamwork and Collaboration for the full time and Executive MBA students in 2025.

The Challenge

UCD Smurfit wanted us to work with their MBA students as part of their Leadership and Employability Advancement Programme (LEAP) module.

Communication

Understand the importance of effective communication as a leader and what it involves.

Influence

Be able to adopt the appropriate influencing approach under different leadership Challenge Scenarios.

Practice

Structure communication effectively and leverage different delivery techniques and channels for leadership impact.

Our Solution

Leadership Performance System™

The Leadership Performance System™ is delivered through a series of 90-day cycles, each targeting a key lever of manager performance. Challenge Sessions are immersive workshops where managers stress-test their approaches to realistic leadership scenarios and leave with proven work practices. In this case, we focused on the third lever of Stakeholder Influence.

How it worked

In the two 90-day cycles of Commercial Edge and Team Power, we got insights on performance gaps and challenges, ran Challenge Sessions (virtually) and provided Tangible Actions to guide implementation.

Insights Scan

Worked with the UCD Smurfit management team to understand the needs of the EMBA students.

Leadership Challenge Session

Experiential learning through exposing the students to realistic leadership scenarios they would face and challenged their communication and influencing approach.

Tangible Actions

Gave the students Tangible Actions to help them better structure their communication and influencing approaches.

Outcomes

Our Leadership Performance System™ gets results. After running this Challenge Session in 2024, we are back again in 2025, this time with two additional successful Challenge Sessions on Teamwork and Collaboration, making leadership development tangible and realistic for the students.

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EMBA students in the 2024 Leadership Challenge Session.

Three more Challenge Sessions in 2025 after success of 2024.

Leadership Challenge Scenarios explored.

Universities Sprintmodo now brings its immersive approach to.