Leadership and finance training for Volvo

Multinational car manufacturer, Volvo Group was developing an HR management development programme and felt that it would benefit from a university's input.

They approached Kingston Business School having seen that Associate Professor, Dr Jelena Petrovic, is an expert in board and top management team dynamics and performance.

Working with Volvo's HR team, a two-day workshop was put together as part of a larger corporate customer services programme for middle managers. This was a beneficial exercise for both parties, ensuring that theoretical models were applied in the right context for Volvo's operational practices.

Two Kingston University academics, Dr Jelena Petrovic and Dr John Pereira, delivered the course at the company's corporate headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden with the first day covering strategic and operational leadership and the second day focusing on financial skills for managers.

The agenda included sessions on strategic and operational decision making, translating strategic choices and goals into targets, and how neuroscience can affect business decisions, interpersonal and team dynamics – an area which several delegates mentioned as being particularly interesting.

Day two delivered by Dr John Pereira featured sessions on key performance indicators, pricing strategies, profitability and breakeven analysis, techniques for evaluating risk and managerial decision making.

The feedback was extremely positive with 85% of participants giving an overall rating over the two days of at least 80%.

"Inspiring and interesting. A very good trainer with much energy."

"I learned a lot, got a better understanding of the financial aspects and it encouraged me to think in different ways in my daily work."

"A very good balance of content."

"You can both be proud of the way the audience have appreciated your performance. The level of the evaluation results definitely opens the way for us to work with Kingston University again," said Rudi Van Sande, Talent Management, Volvo Group.