What's your purpose to do the Women Leadership Case Series?
This case series was originally designed for the course of Woman in Leadership in Executive Education program. Most of students for this course are women elites with various backgrounds. I hope cases can provide practical examples for students to choose their self-development paths. At the same time, this group of cases is quite relevant to my research interests. They can help to approach the research topic in my study of women leadership and entrepreneurs.
Did you encounter difficulties in developing the case series?
All cases in this series are field cases, which were drafted based on interview with case protagonists. We usually need to involve longer time and pay more efforts in doing a field case rather than a library case. However, a field case is always more popular among students thanks to its valuable data from real facts. The major challenge in developing field cases is to win the support from case interviewee so as to dig out first-hand information. I should convince interviewees contribute their stories to our students when I was doing this case series, and fortunately, I won most supports. I'm grateful they agreed to share their own career stories with our students.
How did you plan to design the course with these cases?
The case series was teaching-oriented for the course of Woman in Leadership in Executive Education program. I anticipated the students in this course were in different ages with various backgrounds. So the case protagonists I chose were female leaders in different enterprises, including executives of multinational companies, successful entrepreneurs, senior executives in functional department, and general managers of corporate operations. They are all outstanding female leaders, however, with own career-development path. I designed the questions on experience of growth, balance family and career, and the gain and loss behind the success for all protagonists. These questions are the interesting questions for class discussion.
How did you use these cases in your class, and what are the feedbacks from students?
I distribute the case materials to students as pre-reading materials, so that students would have enough time familiar with the cases and issues to be discussed in the classroom. Well-prepared students can have a full understanding and a solid reflection to the case before class. In class, students are arranged for group discussion which helps students further explore the issues from multi-directions. To show a real case, I invited the protagonist come to deliver speech personally in class. The protagonist shared with students her ideas from experience, and students challenged with their interesting questions.
Cases bring a real business environment and a typical story of career development for student, which inspired student thinking of leadership and career development.
Students in class discussed the assigned questions with great enthusiasm. Their feedback for case-method learning is quite positive.
Please recommend some good cases that are suitable for the course of Human Resource Management and Leadership.
The
case series of women leadership is for the subject of career planning and development.
Case
FedEx APAC HR Shared Services Center in Wuhan discusses the subject of integration of HR management.
Cases
GE's Talent Machine: The Making of a CEO (HBS case),
Samsung and Daewoo: Two Tales of One City (HBS case) are used in my Organizational Behavior course.
Dr. Lee, Jean S K
