Impact Your Life, People and Society

We, as professional women, certainly face multiple challenges and have aspirations that are often contradictory. After discussing with a wide range of female alumni, I have concluded that the Executive MBA of HEC Paris is providing opportunities for women to impact their life, people, and society through encouraging women to step-back from routine, get a better understanding of themselves, discover true self, share with peers, discover new worlds and create their own path.

Step 1 – Step-back from routine

First, delivered in a part-time format, the HEC EMBA helps women with stepping-back from routine while allowing them to working full-time and living their life as women and mothers. Going back to class challenges their current assumptions in different aspects of life and drives them to put into question their world as it is.

Step 2 - Get a better understanding of self and discover true self

Second, through personality characteristic questionnaires and leadership courses, the HEC EMBA helps women get a better understanding of their strengths and areas of improvement, accepting them as well to discover their true self. This discovery helps women appreciate the resources they have and helps them affirm who they are, especially the particularities of female styles of leadership such as: less frontal confrontation, more empathy and benevolence, better time-management, finding byways, middle-term thinking, and finding more creative solutions.

Step 3 - Share with peers

Third, the flip class pedagogy, group works, and discussions encourage peer-to-peer sharing with professionals with diverse nationalities, industries, as well as professional and personal backgrounds. In the continuity of the Socrates’ tradition, in which learning occurs with dialogue, the HEC EMBA encourages women to share with their peers and contribute to conversations with faculty. This pedagogy drives women to re-assurance and to self-affirmation.

Step 4 - Discover new worlds

Fourth, women extend their knowledge frontiers and discover new worlds through the acquisition of up-to-date academic knowledge, exchanges with executive guest speakers, working on inter-disciplinary cases and projects in diverse teams, listening to the testimonies of high-profile professionals. They are able to experiment in two-week specialized seminars covering eight key topics, as well as travel around the world.

Step 5 - Create own path to impact one’s life, people & society

Fifth, thanks to stepping back from the daily routine, with a better understanding on themselves and the discovery of their true self, with the learning gained sharing with peers, faculty and high profile professionals, women are more likely to create their own path. Winner of HEC Prize for Women Trajectory, Florence Allouche-Ghrenassia, has created a professional switch that led her to the presidency of SparingVision. She is now one of the few women to lead a biotech firm. For Anne Miller, who changed from Senior Customer Group Executive at Mars to Area Manager at Hermès, the Executive MBA of HEC Paris has helped her to re-assure herself through her peers, to affirm herself in her company and to prove to herself her capacity in her own environment. Moreover, perhaps most importantly, she is now directing her choices through her heart more than through professional career objectives.

How the Executive MBA of HEC Paris provides opportunities for women to impact their life, people and society