Leadership Training Programme

Tahera Mandviwala

Tahera Mandviwala is a dual qualified Solicitor of India and England & Wales and she is a Senior Partner of TDT Legal (a full service law firm in India). Tahera is part of the firm’s management board and she has been leading the firm’s development and strategy initiatives since 2014. Tahera also heads the firm’s International and Private Client practices and she is part of the Corporate, M&A, PE and Real Estate practices of the firm.

Tahera has been recognized in several reputed international rankings – she has been recognised as a Global Thought Leader by Who’s Who Legal, and she has been ranked by Chambers & Partners High Networth Guide, IFLR, Chambers & Partners Corporate and M&A, and many others. The Association of International Wealth Management has also recognised Tahera as a Leading Woman of India and Rotary International has awarded Tahera the highly prestigious Vocational Excellence Award for outstanding services in the field of law.

Tahera has authored and contributed to some of the bestselling national and global legal publications and she has spoken at various international forums. Tahera is also on the management committee of various globally prominent legal and business organizations. She inter alia holds the position of General Secretary (Legal), Maharashtra of the National Congress of India, she is on the executive board of the India Council for Fair Business Practices and she is the Strategy officer of IBA’s Law Firm Management Committee.

Dr Michael Smets

For almost 20 years, Michael has been studying, developing and advising many of the world’s leading law firms and their leaders. At Oxford Saïd, Michael leads a faculty cluster specialising in the management of professional service firms. His own focus is on accelerating expert leaders in transitioning from technical into leadership roles, developing their personal, team and client leadership skills.

Thinkers50 listed Michael as the “up and coming voice in leadership” in their 2019 Radar list of management scholars to watch. . In 2016 he was ranked as one of the best ’40 under 40’ business school professors worldwide. His research has appeared in leading management journals and has been covered by Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, the Guardian and other international media outlets.

Michael holds the equivalent of a BA from Cologne University in Germany and a Master’s and Doctoral degree from the University of Oxford. He is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Society of Arts.

Dr. Randall S. Peterson

Dr. Randall S. Peterson is Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Academic Director of the London Business School Leadership Institute at London Business School. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He is former Deputy Dean (Faculty) of the School and Vice President of the School’s fundraising campaign committee. He teaches senior executive and MBA classes on leading teams and organisations, board dynamics, high performance teams, leadership assessment and interpersonal skill development.

Randall has been invited to teach, speak, consult and work with senior managers and the top management teams in these areas across the world for organisations such as the ICSA (The Governance Institute), Danish Centre for Leadership, and Leaders Sports Performance Summit, as well as companies including ADNOC, Barclays, Chevron/Texaco, Deutsche Bank, Emirates Bank, E.ON, IBM, LEO Pharmaceutical, Lufthansa, Nestlé, Paymentsense, and PwC.

Randall's current research activities include studies investigating how to lead diverse teams, board effectiveness, and how CEO personality affects top management team interaction as well as firm performance. His research has been published in leading managerial journals including Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Strategy + Business, as well as leading scholarly journals including Academy of Management Annals, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Dr Heidi Brooks

Heidi Brooks is a Senior Lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Yale School of Management. She teaches and advises on the subject of everyday leadership: the everyday micro-moments of impact that shape our lived experiences. Creating more courageous communities—especially within organizations—is a particular passion of hers. Dr. Brooks specializes in large-scale culture change projects focused on individual and collective leadership effectiveness in organizations. Interpersonal Dynamics, the MBA elective she has taught for 15 years, is one of the courses most in demand at Yale School of Management.

Recently, Dr. Brooks pioneered the Everyday Leadership course at SOM, where she first taught the Principles of Everyday Leadership. She has also taught Emotional Intelligence, Power & Politics, Managing Teams and Groups, and Coaching Skills for Managers. Dr. Brooks received her doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. A life-long experiential learner, you can find her as a student in classrooms as far-ranging as improvisational theater and immersion language lessons.

Scott A. Westfahl

Scott Westfahl is a Professor of Practice and the Director of Executive Education at Harvard Law School. Within the school’s J.D. curriculum, Professor Westfahl teaches courses on leadership, design thinking and innovation, teams and networks. His primary focus is leading Harvard Law School Executive Education, which provides unrivaled, intensive, business-school style leadership programs for law firm, in-house and government/public sector lawyers from all over the world. He also collaborates with HLS colleagues and other Harvard faculty to design and teach custom programs for law firms, law departments, government/public sector and other legal-related organizations. He focuses his Executive Education teaching and writing on leadership and teams, design thinking and innovation, the motivation and development of professionals, fostering diversity and inclusion in legal organizations, and strategy and organizational alignment from a talent development perspective. Professor Westfahl is a strategic advisor to the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity and a Founding and Advisory Board Member of The Purple Campaign to prevent workplace harassment.

Elizabeth F. Emens

Elizabeth Emens is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she is Director of the Mindfulness Program and Co-Chair of the Davis Polk Leadership Initiative. Her principal areas of academic publishing and teaching include disability law, family law, anti-discrimination law, contracts law, and law and sexuality. In recent years, she has been involved in developing and teaching two new courses—“Law, Justice, and Reflective Practice” and “Lawyer Leadership: Leading Self, Leading Others, Leading Change” (co-taught with Professors Susan Sturm and Richard Gray)— which use mindfulness and other reflective practices to build students’ capacities for collaboration and leadership.

In 2013 she co-edited, with Prof. Michael Ashley Stein, Disability and Equality Law (Ashgate Press), and in 2019, she published her first book, The Art of Life Admin (Viking & HoughtonMifflin Harcourt, 2019). Her writing has appeared in the Hastings Center Report, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Georgetown Law Review, The Disability Studies Reader, Keywords in Disability Studies, Wall Street Journal, among many other places.

She earned her B.A. and J.D. from Yale University and her Ph.D. from King’s College, Cambridge, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar. Her training in teaching mindfulness has been through the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Center for Mindfulness, Mindful Schools, and the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program.

Dr Ian C Woodward

Professor Ian specializes in Leadership and Communication. He lectures in a range of INSEAD programmes and is Director of the Advanced Management Programme as well as Leadership Communication with Impact. He was Co-Program Director for the INSEAD Master of Finance degree. He also lectures and consults in leadership and management practice for high performance, as well as leadership and strategic development in organizations as diverse as financial and professional services, utilities, energy and the public sector. He was guest faculty at leading international business schools including Associate Faculty Director for Columbia Business School’s Senior Executive Program.

Ian brings a unique combination of global business, government, communication and arts experience to executive education. His business career includes Board Directorships, Chief Executive, Senior Executive and Executive Consulting roles in financial and energy sector organisations including: The Australian Gas Light Company; Natural Gas Corporation of New Zealand; the Australian Gas Association; Macquarie Bank; and Asian Development Bank. In government, he was the first Australian to serve on the staff of a US Cabinet Secretary (Minister) as well as being Chief of Staff to an Australian State Premier and Minister. From 2005 to 2010 he was a Commissioner of the Australian Energy Market Commission and the inaugural Chairman of the Asia-Pacific Partnership Energy Regulatory and Market Development Forum. He is currently a Board member of The Gas Company of Hawaii. He is also the Associate Conductor of Singapore’s Metropolitan Festival Orchestra. He is first author of the book Exploring Leadership Drivers and Blockers (2019), as well as The Phoenix Encounter Method: Lead Like Your Business is on Fire! on strategic leadership thinking. Ian is also a frequent keynote speaker at global business conferences (virtual and in-person) and media events including TedEx talks.

Heidi K. Gardner

Heidi K. Gardner, PhD, is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession and Faculty Chair in the school’s executive programs.

Previously she was a professor at Harvard Business School. Dr. Gardner’s book Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos became a Washington Post bestseller. Named by Thinkers 50 as a Next Generation Business Guru, Dr. Gardner co-founded the research and advisory firm Gardner & Co.

Dr. Gardner has authored more than 70 books, chapters, case studies, and articles. Her research received the Academy of Management’s prize for Outstanding Practical Implications for Management, and has been selected three times for Harvard Business Review’s “best of” collections. The 2nd edition of her book Leadership for Lawyers: Essential Strategies for Law Firm Success was published in 2019, and Smart Collaboration for Lateral Hiring was released in 2018. Her latest work, Smart Collaboration for In-House Legal Teams was published in May 2020.

Dr. Gardner has lived and worked on four continents, including as a Fulbright Fellow, and for McKinsey & Co. and Procter & Gamble. She earned her BA in Japanese from the University of Pennsylvania (summa cum laude; Phi Beta Kappa), a Masters degree from the London School of Economics (with distinction), and second Masters and PhD from London Business School.

Paula Davis JD, MAPP

Paula is the Founder and CEO of the Stress & Resilience Institute, a training and consulting firm that partners with law firms, corporate legal departments, and organizations to help them reduce burnout and build resilience at the team, leader, and organizational level.

Paula left her law practice after seven years and earned a master’s degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. As part of her post-graduate training, Paula was selected to be part of the University of Pennsylvania faculty teaching and training resilience skills to soldiers as part of the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness program. The Penn team trained resilience skills to more than 40,000 soldiers and their family members.

Paula is the author of Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being & Resilience, which is about burnout prevention using a teams-based approach. It will be published by the Wharton School Press at the University of Pennsylvania on March 16, 2021.

Her expertise has been featured in and on The New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post and in many legal publications. Paula is also a contributor to Forbes, Fast Company and Psychology Today. 

Zoë Arden

Zoë is a fellow at Cambridge University’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). She is the convenor of two online courses for existing and aspiring leaders called Communicating for Influence and Impact and High Impact Leadership. She is a board trustee of environmental charity Bioregional which created BedZED and the One Planet Living Framework and a strategic advisor to the charity Hubbub which focuses on behaviour change in communities.

Zoë worked in-house as director of communications and sustainability at BT Retail where she spearheaded the sustainability strategy and was the CEO’s representative on the pan-BT Environment and Climate Change Taskforce. She led a team of over 50 responsible for employee engagement and external comms, customer advocacy groups and charity partnerships. In previous roles, Zoë was a Director of SustainAbility (now part of ERM) where she led research initiatives including how to embed purpose into business. She worked with global brands on their sustainability strategy including AstraZeneca, Barclays, Nestlé and Novartis. Zoe¨ has been Director of Sustainability for MSL Group (part of Publicis) and Managing Director at Weber Shandwick and Golin. She was Vice President of San Francisco-based agency Access Communications, working with Apple in the US and Europe.