ECOM University Advanced

Building One ECOM, Shaping the Future: ECOM Senior Leaders Embark on a Development Journey 

Early May saw the kick off of ECOM University Advanced, a multi-year investment by our EXCO to bring together and develop senior commercial, finance and trade leaders across our global operations.

The first group of 18 senior executives representing all ECOM’s commodities, 12 countries and a staggering 182 years of shared ECOM experience met for an intensive 3-day training in Haarlem in the Netherlands, marking the start of their year-long leadership journey. During the programme, our passionate group of country managers, finance directors and commercial/ trade heads stepped out of their individual businesses to make and deepen connections with each other and build understanding of our global operations, strategy and values. A focus of the programme was on further enhancing our leaders' abilities to lead themselves, people, business, and change with a true growth mindset. The group were joined during the week by Group CEO, Alain Poncelet and members of the ECOM EXCO and senior management for sessions on strategy, innovation, business development and financials.

The group now enter the online phase of the programme, where they will be working in smaller learning groups to tackle leadership and business challenges with assigned external coaches. They will also have further time to learn about meaty technical operations, such as risk management, treasury, investments, etc., via virtual business connect sessions run by our EXCO and senior managers.

This is what two of our senior leaders had to say about the programme...

Joseph Zebon, Finance Head, Cote d’Ivoire – ‘It was a very rich experience for me with many takeaways. I came back to Abidjan with a renewed commitment and lessons to improve my situational leadership, collaboration, innovation and growth mindset.’

Shivani Gupta, Divisional Operation and Business Controller, Cocoa – ‘The programme sharpened my leadership lens, aligning personal growth with ECOM’s global vision and values.’