HEC Paris & Arkema Leadership Academy co-design a program in Europe and Asia to train future leaders
Arkema has set an ambitious roadmap for its development in the coming years. Over the past decade, it has transformed its legacy – a mix of commoditized and specialty portfolios – into a global specialty business with strong foundations in corporate social responsibility, digital and operational excellence. Its focus is on being a designer of materials and innovative solutions, serving the coatings, high performance materials and industrial specialties markets on a global basis.
Arkema believes that human dimensions will be a key differentiator that will define the “winners” in the competitive landscape. Consequently, they called upon HEC Paris to co-design a training program to enable the company to respond to today’s challenges with creativity and innovation.
Program Objectives
Launched on October 2nd, 2017 this co-designed program for future leaders currently holding middle manager positions has several objectives:
- Help participants to define their role and contribution to deliver the company strategy
- Develop participants’ self-awareness and reflection on their leadership style to facilitate changes,
- Help participants to gain confidence in leading people, especially in a multicultural environment
- Develop transversal relationships across functions and cultures in the company to be more effective altogether
- Strengthen participants’ skills to communicate and influence key stakeholders,
- Foster innovation and entrepreneurship to support organic growth
Investing in People
The program consists of sessions with HEC Paris professors, teamwork and individual experiments. This is also the opportunity for the managers to network, broaden their horizons and personal development, and bring new value to help contribute to Arkema’s ambitious 10-year growth project.
The Arkema Leadership Academy and HEC Paris have a firm commitment to invest in people.
This program already trained 2 cohorts in Asia and 4 cohorts in Europe. Additional groups will be trained in 2019 and 2020.
The Academic Director of this program in Europe, Professor Patrick Delamaire who is Adjunct Professor in Leadership and Change at HEC Paris and co-developed the Global Executive Coaching program of HEC said: “In this program we create appropriate conditions enabling the participants to desire some changes in their leadership posture and practices. And we facilitate the opportunities for them to experiment that in their real world”.
The Arkema program is mainly delivered by 3 specialists in their fields: HEC Paris Professors Patrick Delamaire, Hélène Musikas, and Robert Falkner from London School of Economics.
Professor Thierry Coudurier, co-Academic Director, said: "HEC Professors have been impressed by the level of engagement and commitment of Arkema’s participants, who are eager to learn and to grow."
Participant Feedback
"The diversity of people from different entities and countries, as well as the extraordinary quality of our teachers, gave me tremendous inspiration and insight, and increased my confidence in my own judgment. Thanks to this program, I feel that I have been able to take a big step forward in developing my leadership abilities and aspirations." Simon
"I have now keys to improve my leadership, tools to help my team members to grow and reach the Holy Grail of a high-performing team….without pressure." Isabelle
"This program is a great experience and eye-opener in creating awareness of what the key elements are to be a successful leader." Jean-Paul
"Exciting, questioning, inspiring … This program showed me a new way to work, to think, to feel, to be within my team." Karine
"It was a really great experience, which opened me to new perspectives of my daily work in team and the perception of people surrounding me. Very professional, deeply relevant and highly motivating.” Ekaterina