BearingPoint - The Female Leadership Programme
Opportunities and challenges for female leaders
Over 20 female senior consultants from BearingPoint participated in a newly designed training in September 2015: The Female Leadership Programme.
The 2.5 days training focused on opportunities and challenges for female leaders in the consulting context. A mix of academic input, best practices and interactive training sessions aimed to train the participants on the topics of self-awareness, communication skills, negotiation and networking.
Why this programme?
Even for Bearing Point, a leading global business consulting firm with management and technology capabilities, recruiting and promoting female consultants is a challenge. Bearing Point is aware of the high-potential of our female employees and thus want to give them career opportunities. However, in the consultant context women are challenged by issues such as work-life balance, travel/mobility and a male dominated work environment. That is why a traditional leadership programme would not have been an option for us. Bearing Point wanted to develop a special leadership training that really puts female topics and issues on the agenda.
Even for Bearing Point, a leading global business consulting firm with management and technology capabilities, recruiting and promoting female consultants is a challenge.“We have known ESCP for many years through an existing partnership in talent recruiting and various other training programs such as the Entrepreneurial Leadership Program ‘Unternehmerschule’ and were always very satisfied with the cooperation, which was professional and personal at the same time. However, for this particular customised programme, we choose to work with ESCP for two reasons: It’s internationality and the expertise of faculty on the topic.
As BearingPoint is a global company and the people we train are from different countries in Europe, we needed to make sure that our partner is well experienced with multinational trainings. ESCP with its 6 campus in Europe perfectly responded to this need.
Further, the School display a pool of professors – male and female – that are experts in the field of leadership, personal development and (cross-cultural) management with a focus on women. This expertise was evident when we first discussed the programme with Professor Marion Festing, Director of ESCP Berlin, whose research focus is on international HR, intercultural leadership and gender issues in management.
We worked closely together during the development of the programme. We were regularly in contact with the manager and the scientific director of the project and our specifications were integrated into the agenda as we wished
I participated during the whole training myself and was really happy with the outcome. Also the feedback we got from our participants was very positive. In order to ensure the transfer of the learnings to real life they are currently working on describing and analysing their leadership experiences after the training. This great experience is why we continue to work together with ESCP in the future. The next programme is already scheduled.”
Sabine RACKY, Senior Manager, Firm-wide HR team at BearingPoint
