What’s in a C-Team?

Whether you are aspiring to the C-Suite or are already there, we can help. Your transformation to executive decision-making through Vanderbilt’s EMBA program is aided by the way we recruit systematically a group of 50 EMBA classmates who will form ten C- Teams.

What is a C-Team? It is your assigned study group of, typically, five EMBA students for the two-year duration of the Executive MBA experience. All EMBA students are cast in a C-Team. Most of the EMBA courses involve team assignments and grades. The carefully selected peers in your C-Team (representing 4-5 industries and functions) mirror the skill sets of a balanced, corporate executive team. This maximizes learning and diversity of perspectives as you master the skills to earn an MBA.

Our admissions criteria stress the combination of academic and experiential contributions that you and each prospective student might make to the overall learning experience—to your collective learning experience as a class. How do we do it?

• We recruit the class carefully. First, we ensure everyone is academically compatible so that anyone potentially on your team is someone you could depend on and learn from. Second, we find the right balance or combinations from among our candidate pool. As we recruit each of the 50 students in the EMBA class, we are forming 10 balanced C-Teams. Each team should have an experienced professional in finance or accounting (CFO or CAO), operations (the COO), technology and productivity (CIO), marketing or sales (CMO) and one other. The other might be a former junior military officer, doctor, staffing director, corporate attorney, or other professional to serve as Subject Matter Expert, Chief People Officer, GM, or CEO. The other already may be in the C-Suite or own a business.
• The C-Teams are balanced across industries too. This further broadens your frame of reference and potential sources of “best practices” to solve problems in your industry that are common to other industries.
• We are thinking about C-Teams when we meet you. In your interview, we will talk about what you bring to challenge the perspectives of your classmates, and what you need most to learn from them. We will use this information later to determine the best fit among potential C-Teams based on your goals and the goals of your classmates to build the balanced class and specific teams. For example, if your company is undergoing an acquisition, the candidate who has already managed through an acquisition catches our attention. We would not want 50 MBA candidates who have roughly the same experience; in a way, you and your classmates are depending on one another’s diverse backgrounds even before you meet; once you do meet, you will form friendships and professional advocates for life.
• You will learn to leverage and trust others—leadership in practice. Your C-Team will develop more thorough analyses, even if getting the collective wisdom of your group isn’t always the fastest way to complete work. You will learn patience, and you will practice delegating and giving feedback. As one student put it, “In a room of strong personalities, I learned to become a stronger advocate for a well formed idea, whether mine or someone else’s.”
• Your frame of reference—the lens through which you view a problem and potential solutions—will transform subtly with the aid of your C-Team and your faculty. By the time you graduate, you will not only survive by getting work done well through group effort, you will be able to understand and present business opportunities from the perspective of the person you most need to influence—your CEO, CFO, CIO, COO, Board, or customer.

Your ability to understand and influence across these sometimes competing perspectives will go a long way to clearing a path to the C-Suite for you, if you aren’t already there.