Strategic Leadership Development

Mihaela Cozma was looking to provide her organization with new concepts and tools to increase performance and efficiency.  As Corporate Performance Director for the Canada Energy Regulator, she joined the Strategic Leadership Development Program to build on her existing leadership knowledge and apply this learning in the context of a public organization. “The program gave me valuable insight into current and emerging trends in strategy and organizational behaviour. It confirmed for me that a public organization benefits from having a well-defined strategy, a sound execution plan, and capable leadership to implement the strategic plan so that the services an organization provides are the best that they can be, and in return the organization will receive supportive public opinion.”

The Strategic Leadership Development Program brings together experienced leaders from a wide variety of organizations. Mihaela found the cohort experience of the program to be invaluable. She enjoyed meeting new people and learning from others across diverse industries.  She learned a lot through listening to the real-life experiences of her colleagues, hearing about similar struggles in different sectors, and sharing ideas and solutions.

For Mihaela, the most impactful element of the program was the Action Learning Project. The Action Learning Project (ALP) provides program participants with the opportunity to complete a professionally meaningful project under guided mentorship and support, providing a tangible outcome for learners and their organizations. Mihaela says that at first her project was quite ambitious, but through the support of her ALP mentor, she was guided towards a realistic goal that she could achieve in the short term: an awareness campaign for compliance with an internal policy. After the program, she applied this same advice of completing “one small piece at a time” to move along her ambitious project. Because of the success of her Action Learning Project, this compliance requirement is now present in the CER’s newly implemented financial system, making the reporting process error free and much faster. Although the fruits of her project have not yet been fully realized, the groundwork has been laid for long-term transformational change.   

“The Strategic Leadership Development Program was an invaluable learning experience – one that I would certainly recommend to others. The program provided me with a greater awareness of current and emerging trends.” Although Mihaela was the only member of her organization to take part in the program, she was able to bring back theories and concepts and share them with her colleagues, ensuring that the benefits of the program extended well beyond her own personal experience.