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Military Boot Camp Teaches HEC Paris MBAs To Be True Leaders

HEC Paris MBAs are put under extreme pressure on a two-day leadership course with the French army in Saint Cyr, and come away changed for life

Mon Apr 29 2013

BusinessBecause
When HEC Paris MBA students received word to pack a knife and fork, hiking shoes and sleeping bags for their class trip to Brittany this spring, they could only imagine crazy scenarios of what was in store for them!

But what very few students probably pictured was their class conducting a helicopter rescue of a wounded person in the woods or trying to reach a snake bite victim across a lake during their trip.

These are just a few of the leadership exercises that HEC Paris MBAs participated in at their two-day seminar at Saint-Cyr with the French Army this year.

Although the Army runs this training program, rest assured that these students were not partaking in military exercises, but simply civilian exercises designed to encourage leadership.

Xavier Boute, a French Army officer and an affiliate professor of economics at HEC Paris, said that he views the Army as “a school of leadership.” These leadership drills are so valuable that HEC Paris has made seminar attendance compulsory for the past five years.

The two days were made up of 15 tasks, with each challenge supervised by an Army officer, who designated a task leader and facilitated a debriefing afterwards.

Tugdual Barbarin, a French Army officer who is also currently pursuing his MBA at HEC Paris, was a facilitator of, not a participant in, the seminar since he has already done these exercises in his military training.

He said the officers were very hands-off throughout the weekend and let students make their own conclusions during debriefings: “95 per cent of the time they identify by themselves everything that needs to be brought up,” he said.

Working with Army officers at the seminar allows many b-school students to see they are not quite so different from military officers, Boute said: they both have to make tough decisions in a short time frame and lead their team to proper execution of that decision.

“When they are with a senior officer who has experience and went to Afghanistan, Mali, Yugoslavia or Africa, they will understand that this guy is not Superman,” Boute said. “He is somebody who is much like the participant: he is about to lead people to do something pretty difficult.”

In fact, the business and military fields in general require very similar skills which often leads people with a military background to later become CEOs of large corporations, like Robert McDonald of Procter & Gamble or Frederick Smith of FedEx.

So if you want to follow in the footsteps of these businessmen, here are the top lessons that Barbarin and Boute said MBAs should learn from the French Army:

- Distinguish a leader: “It is better to have a leader who is not very good than to have no leader at all,” Barbarin said. “That’s very basic from my experience as an Army officer.”

- Be a clear communicator: “It’s very easy for a leader to devise a strategy, but it’s very hard to make sure that people understand it,” Barbarin said.

- Be ready to justify your decision: “When I say to my platoon, ‘Okay, come on, go into this village,’ maybe we will lose some people,” Boute said. “If I lose some people... I have to explain to the family why I had to make this decision. So, it’s not a game.”

- Give some distance: “The leader is not always the most involved in execution,” Barbarin said. “Often the leader has to step back and define the direction.”

The HEC Paris MBAs may have learned these lessons the hard way, but Boute said it’s safe to bet that after spending two days with the French Army, they will never forget these essentials for successful leadership.

“When students say what they remember from their MBA, they remember two things: one of them is always this seminar,” Boute said. “Because there is a clear before and after.”

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