On a company visit to the Tata Steel plant in Jamshedpur, India.
“The IMPM is the beginning of an incredible journey that will have lifelong impact, contributing greatly to personal and professional growth. It provides participants with a unique opportunity to reflect deeply on the practice of management, extending well beyond the components of a more traditional business degree. The IMPM encourages individuals to explore new and diverse ways of thinking and acting to strengthen leadership and management capabilities. The program's content is highly relevant to today's issues and challenges, and is further enriched by the diversity of skill, knowledge and experience of the global participants.”
Mary-Lynn Kassis
IMPM 2002
Senior Human Resources Advisor
Royal Bank of Canada Financial Group
Canada
What sets the IMPM apart?
Impact Ventures
Participants develop an “Impact Venture”. This approach involves active learning. It can be in the form of an individual program-long project focused on bringing about change in their own work environment, which encourages participants to probe a company issue that would otherwise not have been addressed or would have been dealt with differently if not for the IMPM. Alternatively, it may involve leading workshops on some of the IMPM classes back home in the company. As a final step, participants are asked to take a look inward and reflect on their ability to affect change, as well as on their company’s ability to accept it.
Read about previous IMPM Impact Ventures
Tutoring in its truest form
“After our first set of tutorials in Lancaster 10 years ago, we were walking on air. For myself, I found that I had suddenly become a real educator after 28 years of being a professor.”
Tutoring is a key component of this program and is fashioned after the British system of learning, where the faculty works closely with participants. This approach personalizes and sustains the learning process by encouraging participants to apply what they learn to their day-to-day activities.
Selected faculty members are involved in both IMPM design and delivery, each taking responsibility for a small tutorial group (typically about five participants from the same company, where possible). The tutorial groups meet during and between the modules, which gives them the opportunity to track and share personal development, as well as discuss all aspects of the program, including their Venture projects.
Management exchange – or shadowing
To become a truly worldly manager, you have to learn how people from other countries and other cultures think and act in various situations.
In addition to the five two-week modules, participants spend a week on an exchange at the office of another participant in another country. They often do not speak the local language, so when they observe their co-participant at work, the focus turns on the process of management, rather than on its content.
Participants then prepare a paper, detailing and reflecting upon their observations.
This shadowing process is considered one of the most enriching experiences of the program, as the benefit is twofold. Participants not only receive constructive feedback after being closely observed in their own environment, but gain insight into how they themselves work by watching another manager in action.