Team Academy: Total immersion as a vehicle for sensemaking

This article deals with the issue of leadership learning, especially among students in the early stages of their training. The mainstream French management education system has often considered it impossible to teach leadership, but it is essential given the obvious lack of leadership skills of most students coming out of universities and grandes écoles, who have the profile more of a traditional manager than a leader. The innovative and very efficient Finnish Team Academy experience shows that leadership skills can very well be developed with early-stage students, but it requires quite a different educational approach: one based on team learning, coaching, and working exclusively on real business issues. Many interesting lessons can be drawn from this experiment to improve the mainstream French management education system.