dr. Katharina Balazs

About Katharina Balazs

Dr. Katharina Balazs is Associate Professor in the Management Department at ESCP Europe in Paris since 2001 and has extensive experience teaching in Executive Education programs at different business schools. Her teaching is centered around the development of leaders on various levels, with a strong focus on experiential learning as a basis for self-development and change. She covers the following topics:

• 1.Developing Your Leadership Presence

Becoming an effective leader is not just about developing “hard” leadership skills; it is also about developing the inner confidence and composure, communication style, verbal skills, body language, and the impressions we project that enable us to influence people in a positive way. It all starts with self-awareness: what are our strengths and the positive motivators that drive us, and what are our less strong sides and negative motivators that often derail us and lead us to failure?This session is about developing executive presence by creating awareness of the way we come across others by selecting, developing and refining behaviors that make who we are work for us.

• 2.Effective Leadership Communication

In a complex 21st century environment, successful leaders need to be highly effective communicators. Research across global senior executives, demonstrates that effective communication capability is in the top three skills gaps. In a highly competitive environment exceptional communication strengths can act as a source of advantage. Personal communication capability and approach affect business, professional and leadership performance and perceptions of trust, credibility and reliability.This session is designed to improve individual communication effectiveness and creating awareness of the techniques for dealing with challenging or crucial leadership communication situations including difficult conversations and communication in a crisis.

• 3.Women, Power and Influence

Power is perception: its 20 % “given” and 80 % “taken”. People with power are perceived as better performers, rise faster through the ranks, are often happier and even tend to live longer than people without power. In spite of this, many women dislike and reject power, and thus rob themselves of a significant success factor, both for them personally and for their organization.In this workshop we will review the sources of power in organizations and how to use them in ways that enhance both career opportunities and organizational effectiveness. We will also cover the notion of Power Presence, and discuss how women in particular can strengthen their confidence and communicate in ways that both build and project personal power and influence.

• 1.Leading and Communicating in a Global Environment

Wherever we live, work and travel today, we take it for granted that we are part of an interconnected world that requires constant and ever growing interaction and communication. These constant interactions across borders confront us sooner or later with the fact that there is a strong cultural dimension to leadership and communication, and that there are variations in what kind of behavior is acceptable depending on different national cultural environments.The aim of this session is to explore and compare how participants own cultural background impacts how they lead and communicate with others, and how they can adapt their style to be more effective in leadership and communication situations across cultural boundaries.All topics can be tailored to address different levels of seniority in management and leadership and/or specific audiences; e.g. gender-specific (Women and Leadership); industry-specific (e.g. Leadership in Financial Services) or culture-specific (Leadership in multicultural settings, etc.).