CIICPD 2023

the manager used his position, experience and know-how to exploit the opportunity to inspire and prompt the junior managers through the following remark: “I have the experience and urge all my colleagues who do not have a big experience and were not abroad, do it.” To sum up, the experience referring to the manager’s first-hand impression upon returning from his international missions is invaluable for their leadership practice. While being able to see the contrast between the local company dynamics through the lens of global corporate contexts and practice, they develop the ability to process and diagnose problems better, as well as deal with and resolve them more efficiently. What is more, international experience enables them to expand their horizons – key to forming progressive visions, setting viable progressive strategies and retaining the dynamics and competitiveness of the company for the future. Based on this, experienced managers become major agents of change who can inspire their colleagues through their authority as well as their individual professional paths for progress and change. The joint training allowing for meeting managers from varied ranks seemed to be one of the suitable formats for sharing experience, ideas, and debating. 3.3 The Role of Training: Participants’ reflections Each profession develops, and, with time, professionals need to develop too. To become a professional leader, one needs not only experience and know-how gained from earlier education and follow-up practice but also life-long learning. Training developed on varied themes then help managers accelerate their professional growth. This was evident also from the discussions and feedback the participants provided to the trainer teams after each of the sessions. To begin, upon overcoming initial scepticism based on the mandatory character of the training, the vast majority of the participants evaluated it positively and as beneficial from several perspectives. First, the participant’s reflections corroborated the importance and benefit of the training for their managerial work and team leadership. They appreciated being reminded of the topic of diversity, inclusion and the related unconscious emotions and prejudices and how these relate to and influence their managerial practice. For example, one of the participants remarked that the training allowed him “to step out of his everyday working routines and made him think about how he functions” as a manager within his team. Another one contributed with a note calling the entire training “one positive nudge” that prompted her to get “out of the box” and start leaving the “ingrained perceptions and thinking” typical of the “ frequently normalised corporate world” . Second, the participants also agreed that the training showed them how to improve their leadership skills when managing diverse teams, as indicated in the following confession: “I thought that we were doing some things well but now I can see that we can do them even better”. On a similar note, one of the managers admitted that while coming with no expectations, the training “ actually opened his eyes to what other possibilities there are” , while expressing his realisation that the tools showed to them during the activities require only minor adaptations to the everyday work activities. Another participant

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