The EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award for Executive Education has never before been awarded in Africa.
Henley Business School Africa, the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) and Standard Bank have won a highly coveted global award - the EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award for Executive Education. They are the first team to ever do so in this category in Africa since the award’s inception – beating off the best business schools in the rest of the world.
Based in Brussels, in Belgium, EFMD is a global non-profit accreditation body for business schools, business school programmes and corporate universities, comprising more than 900 member organisations over 91 countries in a network of more than 30, 000 management professionals across academia, government, corporates and consultancies.
The two business schools and bank won the award for their Strategic Leadership Programme entitled #UnTAP, a unique collaboration between two of the country’s best business schools and the bank working together to design and develop an authentically African leadership programme and share faculty and staff to present it.
Conceptualised in 2017 in Johannesburg, #UnTAP brought 328 Standard Bank executives from 20 African countries together to undergo an intensive three-month transformational executive management programme in classes of 30. This would have much more than the traditional commercial impact; adding tangible societal and personal impacts by deliberately setting out to untap the potential of the executives who attended.
The result was a co-designed strategic leadership programme, unlike anything that has been offered in executive education over the last 20 years in South Africa.
The outcome for the Standard Bank executives was to return to their business units and their various countries as role models not just internally but within their communities too, breaking the stereotypes of bankers in the process.
“The Strategic Leadership Programme contributed to our ability to realise the dream of creating an environment in which our people can become the best version of themselves through rich personal and professional development experiences that prepare our leaders for success in an ever-changing environment,” says Standard Bank Group’s head of human capital, Sharon Taylor.
“We are excited to be recognised for the efforts we have made in partnership with GIBS and Henley, in making the Strategic Leadership Programme a truly transformational experience.”
