Vlerick Expertise in People Management & Leadership

The success of your digital transformation depends on the agility of your organisation. You need to constantly evaluate opportunities and take action, preferably faster than your competitors. This is where the leadership challenges lie. Together with his team, Professor Stijn Viaene has developed a leadership model and a game, the Digital Transformation Leaders Game. This is a light-hearted way of gaining insights into the different types of leadership which contribute to the success of your digital transformation.

Diversity in the workplace goes far beyond ethnic, cultural or religious differences – and research shows it can lead to better performance and greater creativity. But organisations don’t always implement diversity policies effectively – partly because there are misconceptions about the role managers play. So Professor Katleen De Stobbeleir has developed a theoretical framework to chart the impact managers have on how successful a diversity policy is.

How do you become an agile leader - really? “You need to develop an ‘and-and’ mindset, because right from the start you are confronted with a double challenge: identify and build on everything that is relatively immune to the impact of volatility in your operating environment, while simultaneously experimenting with new systems, ideas, products and processes wherever possible.” With this scrapbook, Professor Herman Van den Broeck and Professor Barney Jordaan want to help leaders find a “sweet spot” – not necessarily a perfect balance – between stability and agility, between roots and wings, or what they term “rooting” and “soaring”.

A leader is charismatic and visionary: this CEO cult no longer fits in with today’s complex dynamics. Research has shown that modern leaders are successful if they adopt modest, vulnerable attitudes, asking people around them for feedback to achieve widespread support.

In today’s fast-paced, uncertain world, organisations need to adapt quickly to survive. But change doesn’t always happen easily. And many change programmes don’t deliver the expected results. There are various models that set out a process or series of steps to follow to achieve successful change. But change is increasingly continuous – and in today’s change programmes, it’s hard to identify a start and end point. Which means seeing change as a purely top-down, sequential process can be dangerous. This is why we’ve taken a different approach. The starting point of our change model is that effective change is all about managing energy. Each organisation has a level of energy – and when you generate enough energy, you can use it to make lasting change happen. But if your energy reserves are running low, your change efforts will quickly fizzle out.

Professor Barney Jordaan is a South African negotiation, mediation, dispute and conflict resolution specialist. He has worked with many global organisations – and teaches negotiation skills and conflict resolution at Vlerick. In this white paper he shares 10 tips about negotiating.

Would you prefer your staff to go ice fishing or cast their nets on the high seas? It all depends on what you want to achieve as an organisation. In his doctoral thesis, Bart Verwaeren researched which fishing method leads to more radical innovation and how you can stimulate people to do things the way you want them to. Should you give your people bait or a boat?

This case gives an overview of the diversity evolution that Coca-Cola Enterprises has gone through, and the different phases that the organization knew before reaching an inclusive organizational culture. This gives us the opportunity to encourage a debate regarding inclusive leadership and professional gender equality, specifically meant for women who have the ambition to obtain a middle to senior management position.

As a people manager, you have to deal with differences between your team members. Some of these differences might be harder to understand than others. ‘Generation Y’, Millennials or the Millennial Generation (1982-2000). As insight into the expectations, intentions, ambitions and dominant values of other generations is crucial to managing people, we’ll help you clear up the following 4 myths about Generation Y.

We all have to work. However, the key to finding happiness on the job is to feel good at work. There are countless benefits to happiness at work, both for the employee and the company, as scientific research has repeatedly shown. According to "The Happiness Advantage” by the American researcher Shawn Achor, happy employees are up to 31% more productive and their creativity is three times higher. With the support of ESF Flanders, Vlerick Business School and HR service provider Attentia have therefore developed a new tool which wants to promote happiness at work.