The LEAP Advanced is a training program designed to empower and educate better leaders for a sustainable tomorrow. Applications for the Advanced Cohort 2019/2020 are now open. In this brief article, LEAP advanced participants Gregory Vrient and Katharina Buiten describe their LEAP journey and insights on leadership.

Our journey spanned across 9 months and included monthly webinars, peer-to-peer and individual coaching calls. While the webinars provided theoretical knowledge on leadership, coaching calls and three written reflections help the participants develop their practical skills through discussions and exercises.

An unforgettable part of the program are on-site meetings, where the participants from across the globe gather together. This year, Leysin (Switzerland) and Belgrade (Serbia) were chosen as destination points of the program. Coaching team, made of former LEAP participants, put together a comprehensive agenda. Their workshops tackled subjects as diverse as conflict mediation, communications, project management, emotional awareness, and many more. We improved skills like listening, asking powerful questions, and having impactful, improved and meaningful conversations.

Leadership is not about managing others or telling them what to do. Leadership is an all-levels practice and attitude, that is meant to drive people forward and bring out the best in them. Inspiring people and encouraging them to take the initiative is a lot more effective than assigning tons of small debilitating tasks. LEAP opens up possibilities for developing this new approach towards leadership and is designed to help just about anyone to become a better leader.

Leadership is an interpersonal art, performed through communications, that aim learning about each other. But to understand others, we need to not only listen to them but also to listen to ourselves. It may not seem clear to most of us, but our actions and choices define us, as Dumbledore said. This self-definition is quite often, if not always, the fruit of our experience, our values, our principles and the reason we do everything we do – Our “Why?”. LEAP encourages us to reflect on those aspects of our life.

The most important element of the LEAP program are the people and the environment. The oikos community has this awesome power to bring together strangers and unite them around the shared passion for sustainability. This common set of values and our driving principles allow us to create a reliable, safe space, like none other, one that transcends boundaries and forges international bonds.

This month, we ask you to take 30 seconds to meet Carlos Vargas, former oikos PhD fellow in Sustainable Finance (2017). During his time at oikos, Carlos was also responsible for running the oikos Case Writing Competition and was involved in other programs such as the PhD Academy and the Future Lab. Today, Carlos is a professor of Finance at EGADE Business School at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico. He also teaches at Harvard Summer and Extension Schools. 

In this brief letter, Carlos reminisces his oikos experience and discusses his insights on sustainable finance.

In 2015, when I was planning to start my PhD in 2015, I found out about oikos while looking for Case Studies on Sustainable Finance for the class I teach at Harvard. I was very impressed to see all the different programs and activities that oikos promoted and eventually I applied for a PhD fellowship. 

Being part of oikos was great for me. It allowed me to successfully complete my  Ph.D., which was a lifetime goal for me and I was also able to meet outstanding people in my time there. I learned a lot, but perhaps, the people I met, and the friendships I made, are what I appreciate the most from my time at oikos. 

Sustainable Finance is my passion. I started working in this field over 8 or 9 years ago when it was still something new and unexplored. First time I started teaching on this subject I was even able to read all books published in the subject. Today, it is a totally different reality. 

Especially after the Financial crisis, a lot of people started to realize that the financial world was not necessarily doing things the best way possible, and some of these concepts and practices started to thrive. In addition to that, newer generations probe to be more engaged and proactive towards Sustainable Finance. We want to do things differently, we want to make a positive change. Finally, technological advancement has allowed for more sophisticated and effective impact measurement, this could have not been done some years ago.  

Nowadays, we have reached the point when Sustainable Finance enters the mainstream and becomes an important subject, and reaching that point means a lot to me. I truly believe this is how we design the future of finance, and it is already happening. 

This summer, I concluded my PhD at the Institute of Banking and Finance at the University of Zurich. I have got a professorship in Finance at EGADE Business School at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico, and I still teach at Harvard Summer and Extension Schools. I have many professional and academic goals at the moment, some of which are very related to developing more the field of Sustainable Finance. 

Looking back I am just happy I was able to be part of oikos. It has been a great opportunity and has been definitely instrumental in the fulfilment of my professional and academic goals.