Sharpen your leadership and decision-making skills

The EMBA degree provides students with the skills, experience learning beyond their years

By Dr Gary Stockport

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S P Jain Campus
S P Jain Campus

Published: Mon 2 Aug 2021, 9:00 AM

It is said: ‘Doing an EMBA is the best strategic investment decision that you will ever make.’ Why don’t you find out for yourself?

An Executive Master’s in Business Administration (EMBA) is an important life and career investment if you’re interested in furthering your leadership skills. The course, taken over an 18 to 24-month period, offers you the opportunity to transition from a general manager to an effective leader. Though the return on investment is obvious fairly soon, an EMBA’s benefits multiply over the years. At its core, an EMBA degree can help sharpen your leadership and decision-making skills. Here’s how:


Be a visionary: A leader is always planning ahead. An EMBA will help you learn how to be ready for every possible scenario and foresee different outcomes of what the future may look like. You help create this future by building a purpose-driven organisation i.e. outlining what intended benefits it will bring to its existing and potential customers.

Learn to think strategically: With an EMBA, you will learn the tried and tested strategies of major companies from around the world while discovering how to think outside the box. This includes learning to ask the right question. For example, ask, ‘How might Block-chain technology and the internet-of-things disrupt the industry where an organisation currently competes?’, ‘Will this still be a good business in three, five and 10 years from now?’ and ‘What’s the next big thing?’


Gain business acumen: Decision-making is a key aspect of any leadership position. As the head of a team, making judgement calls and decisions within ambiguous and uncertain contexts becomes a regularity. Consequently, probabilities might have to be calculated about different strategic options and their likelihood of success. While pursuing an EMBA, future leaders combine facts-based analysis and intuition when making crucial strategic decisions. Intuition is of course developed over many years of rich business experiences but the EMBA can help you speed up this process.

All-round thinker: A general manager ends up wearing many hats when making a decision. These different ‘hats’ include Accounting, Finance, Marketing, HR and Strategy. Every decision is made considering business issues from every department’s perspective and to better stakeholder engagement. An EMBA helps you juggle these viewpoints to make important strategic choices efficiently and effectively.

Create value in your organisation: Every leader needs to demonstrate a track record of success and a string of achievements at every stage of their career. One of the key learnings students of the EMBA receive is value creation. Value creating means determining the critical numbers for an organisation’s success and building strategies to reach these goals. They understand that what gets measured gets done based upon the organisation’s critical success factors.

Upgrade your soft skills: EMBA courses are continuously updated to reflect the various soft skills that are critical for effective managers and future leaders. Soft skills include everything from being a proactive listener, using your emotional intelligence, building resilience and grit, to creating an impressive sales presentation to a customer for a new product or service. All these are critical for career success. Build on these through EMBA courses’ one-on-one coaching as well as specialist workshops facilitated by recognised industry specialists. Some business schools even offer a Toastmasters public speaking club as part of the leadership building experience.

Build your professional network: ‘It is not what you know but who you know that counts’ is the adage for those who want to climb the career ladder. The EMBA degree will help you as an aspiring leader develop your professional network throughout your career and tap into it when needed.

Be an expert in all

An EMBA uses an assortment of teaching approaches to help you grow and learn all of the above. These include case studies, simulations, individual and group exercises as well as interactive lectures. You will undertake applied work based assignments where real business problems are analysed and solutions identified and even sometimes implemented. This approach enables students to understand business issues through the lenses of theory and, become better decision-makers. Students learn from like-minded peers who each bring years of their business experience into the classroom. Therefore, doing an EMBA provides a very rich and unique learning experience to allow future leaders to blossom and eventually bloom.

Dr Gary Stockport, Dean EMBA and Professor Strategy at S P Jain School of Global Management. He has designed, directed and taught EMBA Courses across several countries including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the UAE.


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