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UBS Leadership Excellence Program 2012

On October 19th, 23 managing directors from the Legal & Compliance division of UBS completed the first week of a newly-implemented Executive Leadership Program, a two-week program designed and delivered by Bucerius Executive Education.

Throughout the week, the participants had a chance to grow together as a group and build a stronger working relationship at UBS. The second part of the program will take place in April, 2013.

The diverse and enriching program began with remarks by UBS Group General Counsel Markus Diethelm about the company’s current corporate culture, as well as a discussion about what culture UBS wants to foster in the future. The discussion was facilitated by Markus Hartung, Director of the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession.

On the second day, Prof. Philip Giles of Columbia University introduced banking fundamentals and explained the current developments in the euro crisis. David Strachan, Co-Head of the Deloitte Centre for Regulatory Strategy, rounded this topic off with a session on European regulatory changes.

Going from the abstract to the concrete the next day, several UBS lecturers gave the participants a better understanding of how the corporation works. Phil Lofts, UBS Group Chief Risk Officer, gave an in-depth analysis of UBS’s balance sheet while Colin Bell, Head of Operational Risk, and Mark Shelton, General Counsel for UBS’s Global Head Investigation in the Americas, talked about lessons learned regarding UTI and LIBOR.

The fourth and fifth days of the program focused on leadership. Prof. Niels Van Quaquebeke, a Leadership and Organizational Behavior Fellow at the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession, and Dr. Tilman Eckloff, Director of the Respicere Research Group, explained the fundamentals of motivation, learning, emotion and decision-making. Dr. Eckloff also later introduced the participants to the concept of peer supervision, in which participants worked to manage their own cases.

The week was rounded off by enriching activities outside the classroom. The participants “learned to see” when asked to take a closer look at the paintings of Chilean artist Roberto Matta at the Bucerius Kunst Forum. With the “Dialogue in the Dark” activity, they had to solve tasks in pairs and in groups while shrouded in complete darkness; this showed the importance of communicating unambiguously when leading.