Join us for “The Era of Accelerated Change” webinar series in 2024 hosted by Stellenbosch Business School Executive Development.
As 2024 brings unprecedented levels of change across Africa, it’s crucial for businesses to adapt to not only survive but thrive. Our free 60-minute webinars, facilitated by industry experts, will focus on four key areas of business that will be significantly impacted by the rapid pace of change taking place in today’s business landscape.
Webinar 3 Topic:Change-fit leadership – Rolling with the punches
As we navigate the era of change, it’s crucial for leaders to cultivate adaptability and resilience to become ‘change-fit.’ Join us to hear how top leaders effectively capitalise on the evolving business landscape, ensuring their organisations remain competitive amidst uncertainty.
Join us for “The Era of Accelerated Change” webinar series in 2024 hosted by Stellenbosch Business School Executive Development.
As 2024 brings unprecedented levels of change across Africa, it’s crucial for businesses to adapt to not only survive but thrive. Our free 60-minute webinars, facilitated by industry experts, will focus on four key areas of business that will be significantly impacted by the rapid pace of change taking place in today’s business landscape.
Webinar 4 Topic: How solid is your strategy, really?
Evaluate your strategy’s solidity and uncover the essentials of strategic resilience in an era of accelerated change. Discover the art of crafting resilient business strategies that withstand the era of accelerated change, propelling your organisation towards success.
Join us as we delve into strategies that tackle current skill gaps while preparing for future needs, ensuring a balanced approach to professional development. In this interactive workshop, gain insights and practical tips from leading expert, Dr Natasha Winkler-Titus and L&D peers to empower teams and drive organisational growth.
“I manage a diverse team in a very fast-paced environment in my role as an Engineering Manager,” shares Hugo van Zyl, from Kimberly-Clark in Cape Town. “I needed to sharpen up the key skills needed to help my team succeed in my role. From creating strategies to making sound financial decisions, right the way through to understanding how macro- and microeconomics impact the way we do business, I needed to improve my team and help us to achieve our objectives. This is what the Senior Management Development Programme provided for me. The SMDP is an extremely well-put-together programme and the level of information and literature presented by the competent subject-matter experts kept me eager to learn.” After successfully completing his SeniorManagementDevelopmentProgramme (SMDP), Hugo van Zyl continued his learning journey by enroling at the University of Lincoln. His successful completion of the SMDP meant that a substantial amount of credits would be recognised towards a graduate degree at Lincoln.
“My engineering degree needed to be coupled with a strong business degree as my future aspiration of growing into an executive role would require it. After completing the SMDP I felt more confident, however, I wanted more. The BA (Hons) Business Management Degree offered by the University of Lincoln as a direct rollover after the SMDP was perfect. It gave me an even deeper understanding of the subjects I was aiming for, whilst giving me the opportunity to become an alumnus on an international level.” The University of Lincoln takes a Work Based Distance Learning approach (WBDL) to support part-time, distance learning. This creates a perfect recipe for full-time employed individuals to continue their learning and development journey while still being able to perform their daily duties as full-time employees. This is something that enhances the learning journey, as it affords real-time application of theory within the candidate’s work environment. “At first I had to adapt to the full distance-learning format and foster the self-discipline needed to complete all the subjects in time to the required level,” shared Hugo. “But the Lincoln team was always by my side, quick to support, respond and ensure I stay on course.” “In the fast-paced world we live in, decisions need to be made on the fly and implemented accordingly,” concluded Hugo. “If you have an aspiration to obtain a degree in Business Management on an NQF level 8, then this is the perfect platform to do this and improve your skillset and qualification.”
At Stellenbosch Business School Executive Education (SBS-ED), our commitment to nurturing continuous learning and development within organisations is paramount. We believe a robust learning culture stands as the bedrock of sustained growth and innovation. In pursuit of this mission, we recently hosted the second installment of our Learning and Development Community of Practice Workshops for 2023. The workshop was titled “Business Culture and Other Short Stories”. Our goal is clear: to equip individuals and organisations with the essential skills to succeed. We aim to help them thrive in our ever-evolving business landscape.
Event Highlights:
Under the theme “Embedding Learning into the Flow of Work and Culture,” our second event was held in Cape Town, South Africa. A diverse group of L&D professionals from varied sectors joined us in a crucial discourse. They discussed how to cultivate a thriving learning culture within their respective organisations. Guided by the expertise of Willem Fourie, an accomplished author, associate professor, and founder of the South African SDG Hub, this workshop provided an invaluable platform for L&D executives and managers to engage in insightful discussions and exchange ideas.
The Focus: Cultivating a Thriving Learning Culture
Central to the workshop’s narrative was the art of seamlessly infusing learning into an organisation’s cultural DNA. Attendees explored approaches and strategies to integrate learning into daily operations, fostering a proactive approach to growth.
The Significance: Why This Matters
In today’s economic landscape, the ability to swiftly adapt to change and innovation is imperative. By underscoring the fusion of learning into the current of work and culture, organisations empower their teams to embrace agility, growth, creativity, and an enhanced capacity to confront challenges head-on.
The Invitation: Join Us for the Next Workshop
We invite all SBS-ED alumni in the fields of L&D and Human Resources to join us at the next event, where we will discuss strategies that amplify the impact of your learning initiatives. The workshop is titled, “Return on Learning Debunked“, facilitated by Sana-Ullah Bray, Sanlam Group Executive: Human Capital and co-facilitated by Dr Chris van der Hoven, CEO of SBS-ED. The workshop takes place on 18 October in Cape Town. To secure your spot, please register at https://lu.ma/8wxop7wv.
Join us in crafting a future of growth and innovation. We have the power to reshape industries, careers, and lives, together.
After completing his Senior Management Development Programme(SMDP), Sunil Singh, Production Manager at Novus Print Gauteng, had a sense of excitement, fulfillment, and achievement. “The SMDP offered me a platform to pursue and obtain a formal, internationally recognised honours qualification. Taking my studies further with the progression route into the University of Lincoln was a definite yes for me, and the results I’ve achieved in hindsight have certainly paid off.” he shared.
“During the degree programme, I thoroughly enjoyed the content of the different modules and working with the highly supportive lecturers from the University of Lincoln. The professional growth that I experienced, in terms of career promotion and broader knowledge gained from the degree programme has been invaluable, and it happened so effectively and efficiently.” “I must make note of the Integrating Leadership and Management Experiences module, as it was critical in understanding management styles versus reflective experiences, and aided me in my current position,” Sunil shared. This is something that distance learning throughUniversityof Lincoln is known for – as degrees are structured around the participants’ current roles and responsibilities meaning that a distance learning degree allows one to apply their learning in real-time to relevant projects. Degree programmes are designed to interface with existing roles, enhance work-based projects and can be completed part-time from anywhere in the world within 18-24 months. Furthermore, within the Distance Learning facilities at the University of Lincoln, there is no final examination. Rather, assessment is continuous throughout the course of study. Each programme has specific learning outcomes, that assist participants to understand what they are expected to know and do to achieve academic success. LincolnInternationalBusinessSchool offers a progressionroute to the final year of an undergraduate degree for Stellenbosch Business SchoolExecutive Development(SBS-ED) alumni who have completed the SeniorManagementDevelopmentProgramme(SMDP). SBS-EDalumni have the opportunity to enrol on the following courses from the UniversityofLincoln in the UK:
Through this partnership with SBS-ED, participants who successfully complete their SMDPcan use the credits to reduce the amount of time it will take them to meet one of the UniversityofLincoln‘s degree programmes.
To find out more about the partnership and to enrol, click here.
We are delighted to announce that StellenboschBusinessSchoolExecutiveDevelopement (SBS-ED), a leading provider of executive development programmes across Africa, is expanding its reach by welcoming three new regions into our network: Ghana, Zambia, and Kenya.
This expansion represents a significant milestone in our mission to empower organisations to reach their true potential by delivering cutting-edge programmes to talented professionals across Africa.
Through these partnerships, we aim to provide the knowledge, skills, and insights necessary for organisations to thrive in an ever-changing business landscape. We believe that by investing in the development of the continent’s human capital, we can continue to unleash Africa’s true potential and fuel its inclusive growth as it stands alongside its peers on the global economic stage.
As such, we welcome the following in-country representatives to the SBS-ED team:
Selassie Tay from Ghana
Stanley Ngigi from Kenya
Muchona Moonze from Zambia
Now operating in Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe, StellenboschBusiness SchoolExecutive Education continues to nurture leaders who facilitate lasting impact throughout our continent.
Are you interested in finding out more about the programmes on offer for your teams? Contact us for further information here.
Robin De Cauwer completed the Young Minds Programme in 2016. He has since gone on to become the founder of Homedoc, an online supplier of high-quality, easy-to-use, innovative medical testing products; DNX Medical (Pty) Ltd, which forms part of a group of companies that utilise state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in Cape Town to produce and distribute diagnostics specialising in Urinalysis Test Strips – positively impacting the health of people in South-Africa; and Wolwehoek, a private reserve in Montague. Robin shared that before starting the programme, “I felt quite nervous because I really didn’t know where I was heading with my life. I had heard from a lot of people that the Young Minds Programme is a really cool programme, which was why I was really excited about doing it – but I didn’t know what to expect.” He enjoyed that all the information that was presented was based on first-hand experience. “All our lecturers work for big companies themselves, they consult, and they’re masters within their field. You can really relate to everything that they say.” He further found that through the year, his mindset shifted. “During this year, my mindset changed to work harder on everything and to excel in everything. I have become more innovative, I think differently about my business and how to react to certain situations.” He recently spoke to the 2023 intake class of the Young Minds Programme, highlighting five tips from his journey as an entrepreneur:
1. Start with what you have. When you start, you don’t have access to funding, you don’t have the infrastructure, and you have to do everything yourself. But you can design a website yourself, you find a free online programme that you can design it yourself. You bring in a few products and see how they’re doing. You do your research and find out if there’s a market for them. Then you can do some simple marketing, like spending R10 daily on Google ads. It’s a trial-and-error process, and you’re always learning. When we set up our medical company, it took us years to get the company off the ground, because we’re up against massive companies with millions. So how can you do it? You find resources that are low-cost or free to start. When we began, we were watching YouTube videos about how to build the things that we needed, and we didn’t know what we were doing, or if we were doing it the right way, but we were doing it and continually learning from it. Free software such as Canva, Wix and Shopify are readily available online to get you going.
2. Push yourself to think differently. We did a market day as part of the Young Minds Programme when I was busy with it, and everyone was making beautiful products to sell at their stands. Our group looked at it differently. We thought to ourselves, “How do we scale this? How do we make the most profit from this opportunity?” We racked our brains and instead, we rented out stands at the market to external vendors that we found on Gumtree, which was far more profitable. As an entrepreneur, you have to push yourself out of the box and think differently, more creatively. You have to spot the opportunities that are around us all the time.
3. Don’t give up – adapt.
When we were working on the medical company, my business partner came to me and asked me what we were doing. The business wasn’t making any money. But I wasn’t prepared to give up the years of effort that we had put in, so I had to rethink what we were doing – and that’s how we came up with our current business model. Remember that you can always come up with the perfect plan for something, and it doesn’t always go according to that plan. So if something isn’t working, rethink it. Don’t give up.
4. Remember that life is like a video game.
In life, you’re the main character in the video game. Remember that it comes with challenges, with ups and downs. You sometimes feel like you’re winning, and sometimes you feel like you’re losing. As you face the challenges and learn from them, you’ll move ahead in life, you’ll move through the different levels of the video game.
5. Take care of yourself.
Focus on yourself. Take care of yourself, then only can you take care of others. Make sure that you keep yourself healthy – as this is true wealth. Surround yourself with the right people, those who support you and have your back. Remember that money won’t make you happy, only you can make yourself happy. And most of all, enjoy the ride, no one else can do that for you!
In closing, Robin shared, “Young Minds Programme is all about personal development, not only about the business subjects. You also get to develop yourself as a person. You get to know what you’re good at and, even better, what you’re not good at. I’d recommend this programme to others because it changed my life, and I’m really excited about life now.” To learn more about the programme, click here: Young Minds Programme
Straight after finishing his Masters in Civil Engineering at Stellenbosch University, and starting a new job, Rain Carstens had the opportunity to enrol in the Future Managers Development Programme. Read on as he shares his experience of the programme and how it has enhanced his learning and development journey.
I was fresh out of university, with minimal experience. I had a brand new job, I had just started out with my career, and I thought to myself, “Do I need to get involved in something else as well?” In the end, I just went for it. I didn’t know when, or if, I’d ever have this opportunity again. Looking back on it, being able to really think about my future and where I want to be in my career was far more valuable at that point than I realised. The first phase of the FMDP considered the idea of Self Leadership and it got me thinking, “Woah! If I’m going to serve and lead anyone else, I first need to know myself!” It taught me that I need to be really solid, really organised, and certain within myself before I can be of real use to society. It pushed me to think about some really important, sometimes challenging, questions. I explored the kind of person I am becoming – professionally, personally, spiritually, and mentally – and how my mindset needed to shift.
The biggest shift was when I realised that you can’t get what you want if you don’t know what you want. You see, I am an engineer, and I am also a dreamer. I have big aspirations. In the civil engineering industry, as with any industry, you can contribute in thousand-and-one different ways. While it’s great to have grand goals, you need to have a plan of how you’re going to get there. It takes quite a bit of careful pondering and consideration before you really know, firstly what you want to contribute, and then, secondly, how you’ll actually contribute and then what actions you’ll take towards it. The FMDP really challenged and inspired me to look at what kind of leader I want to be. I learned that it’s the things that I’m doing right now that are the steps towards becoming the leader that I see myself as in the future. In order to turn my dreams into reality, I need to build partnerships and relationships. I need to get more and more experience. I need to know what I’m talking about. I can’t just be a dreamer. Even though I was walking into my career with a masters degree under my belt, I also needed to know my place. The FMDP really gave me perspective in that regard. I am working with brilliant minds – some of the top minds in South Africa – solving big problems for the whole of the country, but I had to know when to put on my humble hat and when to put on my feisty, excited, motivated leadership hat. I realised on the FMDP that I could learn so much from those in more senior roles to me. As a result, interactions with my managers and colleagues became more meaningful, because those with more knowledge, experience, and understanding will (generally) only teach you things when you are humble and in the learner’s seat. Since making that internal shift, I’ve noticed that I am given more responsibility. I am exposed to much more precious knowledge that I wouldn’t have had access to if I didn’t know how to effectively play this role that I’m in right now. It’s also important to know that if you want to be a leader, the skills that you develop at university won’t be enough. You need to understand how things are in the current corporate world, and you need to attune and refine your goals so that you’re aligning with that world. The FMDP taught us balanced, futuristic-focused business skills – business skills unlike I’ve ever seen before. It is unlike anything that I’d learned in university. It’s really premium learning. The programme coordinators and faculty didn’t lecture us. Rather, they held space for us to ask questions. There was so much space for discussion and interaction, which I really enjoyed. You needed to engage with the ideas and grapple with them, and this was where the FMDP faculty helped – just asking the right questions prompted excellent investigation and insights. It meant that the result is that your learning is actually up to you, which was exceptionally empowering. It gets you thinking about some really pertinent things; such as how to prepare yourself, in the best possible ways, to be a rock star in your field. I love the fact that I can log back into the learning portal website and I can go back to my assignments. I can reflect on my FMDP learnings as I make my way through my professional journey when I come across situations that speak to what we covered in the programme. While you’re doing the programme, it’s almost like being a toddler playing with crayons. You draw, scribble, and learn as you go because you’re doing something new for the first time. But years later you come back to it, and you realise now you can actually draw something beautiful. This developmental journey has been somewhat similar for me. During the programme, I didn’t have the time to dive as deeply as I could have into every single section. Having the ability to go back to it, again and again, has helped me to continue my learning, even after completing the programme. We don’t stop learning just because we’re out of a learning environment, we carry it through with us.
The FMDP instilled in me that you have to generate your own motivation. Your mentors are not going to guide you along, holding your hand each step of the way. That’s not the job of a mentor. They’re there to help and guide you, but you need to do the work for yourself. Even if you’re doing the most amazing work in the world, you can become unmotivated, your priorities start to go elsewhere, and you start to do the bare minimum. What’s concerning for me is that I see this happen to quite a few graduates. They’ll come out of university and approach their jobs a bit like they’re still at university. They only do the minimum because that’s all they really need to do. That was something that concerned me about myself because I realised what that was communicating to those around me – what it was saying about my personal values. On the FMDP, I realise that if you are not defining some sort of target for yourself, outlining the person you want to be and what you want to do, you can’t be a badass. So for someone like a graduate, the FMDP is super useful as it helps you to cultivate your own self-driven motivation. As you get into the working world, no one is going to cheerlead you along. It’s not going to be done for you. While you may have company goals or a business focus, you need to set your own goals both personally and professionally. It’s so important to find a way to motivate yourself – because if you can do that, you can do anything. If you have something that excites and motivates and uplifts you, you can do anything – and you’re also there for yourself. Through the FMDP, I realised that I needed to first look within myself and see where my insecurities lie, what’s blocking me, what my strengths are, and what I love to do, and then be creative in what kind of person I want to become, because that won’t ever end. It’s an evolving process. It’s an iterative process. It’s a creative process. Your external world continually evolves based on the evolution of your inner world. And that’s something that never ends. If you can make that practical for yourself, the transformation and the evolution just continues into more brilliant states which is what I’ve experienced since finishing the FMDP.
The Future Managers Development Programme helps graduate interns, young talent, and other emerging leaders in an organisation to master the first step in their development: Management of self. It aims to help participants understand who they are within the broader business environment, make them more employable, and help them plan their careers. It also complements existing graduate trainee programmes which mostly focus on in-house company-related matters and practical exposure through job rotation. The programme is structured around modules that equip potential future managers with critical skills for performing in a new world of work. To find out more about the programme, click here.
“My journey started with Stellenbosch Business SchoolExecutive Development when I enrolled in the SeniorManagementDevelopmentProgramme. The SMDP was a very insightful programme and added immensely to my learning and development journey, which overflowed into my career. It helped me to grow within my role and its realisation thereto. Upon completion of the SMDP, I felt very empowered and encouraged to learn more – since I had learned so much from the insights on the programme, especially about the business management aspect of things. As a result of this, I was very interested in furthering my knowledge, especially in the arena of Business Management. When the opportunity came with the University of Lincoln, I didn’t need a second invitation.”
“I was very excited to seize the opportunity for international academic exposure, and my journey coincided with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This brought about its own set of challenges, but the format of the degree, the learning set-up, and the technology that the University of Lincoln was using proved to be well ahead of the game. It was still possible to proceed seamlessly with the tutorials and the course.”
“The University of Lincoln has a team of top-notch tutors, each of whom are well-versed in the knowledge that is presented in the respective modules. I must also acknowledge their approach to the degree and how the various modules were presented. The Finance for the Non-Finance Manager module and the Independent Research module has proven to be the most useful for me. They were both quite challenging at first, but in the end, my personal and professional skills grew in leaps and bounds from doing them.”
“If I were to recommend anyone who is considering enrolling at the University of Lincoln after their SMDP, my advice would be to go for it. If I had to give it a recommendation out of 10, it would be a straight 10, because of the attitude and knowledge of the staff, the tools in place, the excellent library, and the set-up in place that ensures that everyone is involved and aligned, at all times. I am truly thankful for the opportunity, starting with Stellenbosch Business SchoolExecutive Development and the University of Lincoln support staff, programme leaders, tutors and lecturers.”
