INSEAD GEMBA to Leadership Executive

Sanita is a graduate of INSEAD’s world-famous Global Executive MBA (GEMBA) program. Before this program, she worked at Johnson & Johnson in different roles for 16 years, after which she felt like she wanted to grow her career. 

When she joined the GEMBA, she decided to take that career break, and use the wide INSEAD network to pursue her true passion: helping others become better leaders. 

Now she is the CEO of 7A Leadership, a Singapore-based leadership platform that gives training to high-performance teams.

In this interview, we talk to Sanita about leadership development and coaching, how INSEAD’s GEMBA program helped her transition her career into this space, how AI could change the leadership coaching industry in the future, and her advice for any MBA/GEMBA candidates entering this space. 

Watch the full interview here:

Q. How international is the INSEAD GEMBA program?

Sanita: It’s incredibly international. INSEAD has three campuses - Fontainebleau in France, Abu Dhabi in the UAE, and Singapore. Your GEMBA experience will look a little different depending on where you choose to pursue your degree. 

Singapore starts the earliest, in August, followed by Abu Dhabi in October, and France in November. When you fill out your GEMBA application, you can enter your campus preference. You may also change your campus before you’re fully into the program.

The European campus is the largest, typically with over 100 students. Singapore comes second, with a cohort of 80+, and I believe the Abu Dhabi campus had 50+ students this year.

Q. Why did you choose INSEAD?

Sanita: INSEAD was my first and only choice! When I applied to INSEAD, I was still working at Johnson & Johnson, where I knew of quite a few leaders who graduated from INSEAD’s MBA and GEMBA programs. So INSEAD came up quite often in conversations with these successful leaders, and that was interesting for me.

Then, being based in Europe for many years and now working out of Dubai, the school’s presence across different countries was also very attractive. When I researched INSEAD’s alumni and where they all came from/worked in, I saw how diverse and active their international network is. They have close to 70,000 alumni all over the world - that was a big driver for me. And in the program, we had people from the Europe campus join the Asian cohort, people from Asia coming over to France, people from the Middle East visiting the other campuses as well. So it was really about where the person wanted to build their future career, where they wanted to relocate to, or if they simply wanted to expand their network.

And the network really is wide! I was recently in Boston attending a course with Harvard, and with one message I was able to meet some INSEAD alumni over lunch and learn more about Boston and Harvard as well. It’s been a great experience making these connections all over the world. 

Q. What were the highlights of the program?

Sanita: INSEAD is unique - it has the core modules that the other MBA programs offer, but also electives that take place for two weeks in the summer at the Fontainebleau campus. These are excellent courses, but also very fun because the entire cohort of 200+ people and some alumni come together to join them. 

Another highlight was the management challenges. These are called Key Management Challenges (KMCs), which are interdisciplinary courses like finance, entrepreneurship, cultural leadership, and more, that you can choose from to match your interests and goals. You can pick three topics. People travel to Brazil, India, and obviously the three campuses to experience these. For my KMC, I went to San Francisco and attended the New Business Ventures course, which was about launching and operating a startup, raising capital, and developing entrepreneurial skills. I also attended one in Abu Dhabi, which was about finding new business ideas. And then in Singapore, I attended a course which was centered around personal leadership development. So yes, you can choose courses based on the direction you’re taking after your MBA. 

And then there’s the leadership program, which is also unique to INSEAD. Students join the program in parallel with their core curriculum, and it runs through the entire duration of your MBA. You are placed in groups of five, where you work together with leadership development consultants on different exercises, sharing perspectives and reflections, working in a team to solve business challenges, getting 360 feedback, and having personal and group coaching conversations. It helps everyone get to the next level, both in terms of better understanding different business functions as well as elevating your own leadership potential. 

Q. Did you interact with full-time MBAs or MiMs?

Sanita: I did meet students from the full-time MBA and MiM programs. It was in a more social context, actually. When I was in Singapore, we sometimes played sports in the afternoon on campus. That’s how we met some other MBA students, some of whom I’m still in touch with. There were no formal arrangements to meet these other groups of students when I was in the course, however, as alumni, there’s a lot more mixing between MBA students through alumni associations. 

So during your course, if you feel like it’s valuable for you to meet the MBA and MiM students as an EMBA candidate, that’s up to you. Some students who are in particularly niche industries tend to reach out across programs to build their network, given it’s a wide talent pool of professionals at different stages in their career who can benefit from each other. 

Q. How did you make your career transition? 

Sanita: Before my GEMBA at INSEAD, I worked at Johnson & Johnson for 16 years in 8 different roles and across 5 countries! At one point, I felt that I wanted to grow my impact. So that’s when I started looking into leadership programs and came across INSEAD.

When I started the GEMBA, I wasn’t convinced that I was going to leave Johnson & Johnson. So I explored the pharmaceutical side of the company and was selected for some positions there. But when I realized how wide the GEMBA network was, the knowledge and the new insights I would get, I decided to take a career break. I wanted to help others unlock their leadership potential.

My first job, before Johnson & Johnson, was actually in training and development. So I came back full circle to where I started my career. And when the opportunity with 7A Leadership came up after my GEMBA - where the company wanted someone to take it to the next level, execute turnaround, develop and launch new products - that spoke to me, and I felt like it was the right place to be. 

Q. How do you define "Leadership"? 

Sanita: Leadership is a term that’s thrown around a lot. It’s used in varied contexts and means different things to different people. So there’s no one answer to this question.

For example, there are many different leadership styles. I was just at Harvard where I spent a week learning about adaptive leadership, which is quite different from any other leadership style because it’s about pushing people to the edge of their comfort zone to solve big challenges that don’t really have technical solutions. And that’s just one style of many.

But I think leadership broadly is about having the skills and ability to work with a team. You create a learning organization, a learning team, a learning board. And if people are capable of learning and expanding their capacities, they will be able to achieve better things. 

The other piece of what we do when we develop leaders is about enhancing their self-awareness, increasing their collaboration, removing silos and egos from the equation. It’s really just about making everyone work as a more cohesive team. 

Q. How do I know what my leadership style is? 

Sanita: At INSEAD, we had some tools in the leadership development program. These often involved a lot of reflection and 360-degree feedback from your team and stakeholders. That was how we analyzed and got a sense of our leadership style and got exposed to those of others.

Leaders who are able to pick the best from each other and be flexible and keep open minds are usually those who succeed. So during an MBA program, you’re encouraged to reach out to your personal and professional network and get an outsider’s honest view of your own behavior. Once you realize how others perceive you, you can start to change and train yourself to improve.

That’s also how leadership development works in a company. It starts with 360-degree Assessment, but there are many different types of assessments used, including those for teams. So it’s not just you as an individual, but also how you operate and are perceived as a team. A lot of the value of these assessments comes from the genuine anonymity they offer. Once you have that assessment, you’re better placed to understand your leadership style. So if 18 out of 20 people are telling you that you are great at listening, then there’s going to be some truth to that. Or if 18 people out of 20 say that you perhaps need a little bit more patience, it’s a good sign to start working on this area. 

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Q. How can you ensure that leadership feedback is genuine? 

At 7A Leadership, we aren’t an assessment company. We focus more on the journey after the feedback has been given. Sometimes the feedback is written, and other times it’s through one-on-one qualitative interviews. When we do that, we can vary the stakeholders so we don’t only have to send our questions to our co-workers or managers, but also to peers, friends, sports team members, or any others. It’s a much wider scope and allows for more genuine feedback.

When I was gathering feedback, I sent my assessment questions to around 40 people, and was very lucky to have 35 of them respond. So I had a great 360-degree assessment! That was a great instance of technology coming together to help us become better leaders and coaches. 

Q. How is technology going to change leadership coaching? 

Sanita: There’s a lot of discussion about how technology will affect the leadership development industry, with AI and the Metaverse opening up opportunities. But I still believe that professions like this, which involve one-on-one connection and holding space for someone, there is a big human need to be heard and to exchange ideas and views. I’m not fully sure AI will do that for us. 

At the same time, I think there is a lot of potential to improve processes, make us more efficient, and enable new developments. For example, in our company, we are looking to use AI to summarize key points from the feedback to bring out potential development areas. So that instead of a coach needing to read 25 pages of feedback, AI can efficiently summarize those and bring out the highlights, and the user could understand it better. So there are uses, but perhaps not for the human touch that the industry needs. 

Q. Can leadership coaching be automated with AI? 

Sam: So there’s this anecdote I like to tell. Back in the day when we were just getting started with computers and the Internet, it was all very exciting. We had a pile of letters on the desk, but we got really excited to get an email. But fast forward to now, we have tons and tons of email, but we get very excited when we get a handwritten letter.

And the reason for that is that people value receiving something authentic and knowing that somebody has put love, attention, and time into that. Something that can’t be scaled. So when you get that handwritten letter, you know that they’re thinking about you and have dedicated time to you. If you receive an email in a distribution list, it’s generic.

Sanita: So similarly, if you receive generic coaching that hasn’t been tailored to you or that has been made by AI, you don't assign the same value to it. That’s why my work focuses on one-on-one connections with leadership teams, and we’re going to continue that model.

In coaching, we do need to differentiate between technical and qualitative solutions. So AI can come in handy when it comes to creating frameworks for evaluating feedback. Like interview preparation tools, for example, where you can get AI feedback on your language. So there is a space for these technical solutions. But when it comes to really tailored solutions, like evaluating your needs, strengths, weaknesses, the people around you, your environment, industry, the organization you’re building, the different stakeholders and personalities that you have to manage - you need a human to help you navigate and find ways to move forward. That’s a skill that comes with experience. 

Speaking of that experience, people usually seek mentors who have “been there, done that” in the fields they want to transition to. While a machine could be somehow programmed to deliver that experience, there’s something very human that goes beyond creating processes and frameworks. We connect with stories. When it comes to leadership, we try to understand which stories are important to you. Are you seeing yourself as successful? Do you think of yourself as someone with a lot of doubts and issues with confidence? And that’s what differentiates us - these stories that AI cannot tell as effectively as humans can. 

Q. Would you recommend taking a career break during the GEMBA?

Sanita: In the GEMBA program, people have many realizations - mainly because they’re mid-career and are reflecting on their career journey a lot at that point. A lot of people take time off at this stage to experience more beyond their jobs. 

So I feel like we need to live more! Especially when you’re attending a GEMBA program, there’s a lot of networking and travel involved, and it’s really nice to not just focus purely on academics. It’s also important to have a little bit of fun. You’re paying a lot of money to be there, might as well enjoy it. 

Quite a few of my classmates took time off. And that makes sense; in the GEMBA, you have three types of people: some want to advance in their companies, some want to change careers, and some want to move into entrepreneurship. But when you’re at that level in your career, it’s very hard to change. You have a job to juggle at the same time as your MBA, family to support, no space to think at all. But if you choose to take a break from work, you get to clear your head, spend time with your friends and family, and process all the new inputs coming in from your GEMBA professors, students, and network in general. Things start opening up and you start seeing beyond what you have typically been exposed to. And this is, I think, when that magic can happen.

So for anybody really looking to change careers going into the GEMBA, I would highly recommend taking a break.

Q. What advice would you give to people seeking a career transition? 

Sanita: I encountered many people in the GEMBA who wanted a career change. Some succeeded in making that change, and some didn’t. So, the question of what makes it successful is on my mind right now.

One, you need to understand why you are looking to change your career at this stage. It’s really challenging to do that, but you need to reflect on why things are not going as you wish, or why you’re not as inspired by your role as you used to be. You really need to know your ‘Why’. 

Second, like I mentioned, taking some time off to reflect, rest, and explore is very important. 

Third is the networking. Most opportunities in your career will come through your network, not by applying to a LinkedIn job ad or sending in your CV somewhere. Sometimes, you’ll find an opportunity offered by someone who believes in your potential. Maybe you have the skills to do the job and there’s a match out there who needs exactly that skill-set, but they will never know about you unless introduced by someone in your network. And the GEMBA is there to create that network. So if people don’t bury themselves in work and study and carve out time to build those networks, that’s the best thing they can do for themselves.

Fourth, if you’re going into a GEMBA, consider the financial aspects of that decision. Although the GEMBA is made up of experienced, successful professionals who likely have a fair sum put away for the program, it’s good to ensure that you have the financial cushion to take time off and focus on this journey. 

Q. How do I become a leadership coach? 

Sanita: The leadership coaching space has begun to really resonate with more and more people as a career goal. There are many coaching companies training coaches as well. But not everybody has the right credentials. So if someone really wants to move their career into this direction, I would first look for a company or school that has the right credentials to provide that education. That’s number one, because these days you’ll easily find courses that certify you to become a leadership coach in five days or so. That’s not credible.

Then, it’s about really understanding what this career path will look like. There are many coaches out there, so ask yourself how will you differentiate yourself? What really drives you to be a coach? Again, you’ll need to look for the right education and experience in that area. 

Team coaching is even more advanced, being a less saturated space. You need even more education, skills, and practice to get into team coaching. But it’s a good option for aspiring coaches who want to work in a corporate setting in the future. It’s a growing market with growing demand, as more and more organization leaders are realizing that the team has to be coached as a cohesive unit, not just as individuals.

Bonus Q: Sanita’s question to Sam. Which leadership skill makes MBA candidates stand out?

Sam: The big one for me is communication skills. When I start working with people as an admissions consultant, I can already get a feel for who's going to be successful in the MBA application further down the line. And a big part of that comes from communication skills. 

I believe that what successful leaders have in common is a strong communication style. Maybe that's multiple languages. Maybe it’s the ability to communicate with different groups (which is a classic INSEAD trait as well). It’s that presence someone has, when you feel like they want to be there in conversation with you, and that’s why you’re more invested and inclined to listen and be influenced by them. 

Through companies like 7A Leadership and coaches like you, Sanita, people can develop that communication style. Especially people who are naturally introverted and don't like pushing themselves outside of their comfort zone can develop their body language and their communication style through training to become better leaders. 

Q. How can I contact Sanita? 

My Linkedin is probably the easiest way! I’m very active on there and always checking my DMs.

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