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Until my current role, as deputy CEO of the Cancer Institute for West France in Nantes, I’d spent my career in the public sector. I’d passed a highly competitive civil service exam, which had led to specialist training and my appointment as a hospital manager.
It’s not an untypical route here in France. And it meant public sector leadership was — and still is, to a certain extent — the focus of my career.
I worked for eight years at a university hospital in Brittany, in a whole range of operational directions such as information systems and project management, and in different departments, like cancer care. Later, I became the deputy director of a smaller public hospital, in Toulon, which was a new way of working: I could get closer to the doctors, including in medical research.
Since 2016, in my current role, I have worked closely with the CEO at the institute — Institut de Cancérologie de l’Ouest (ICO), a member of the Unicancer network of French comprehensive cancer centres. It has a staff of 1,600 and is different to my previous, public sector, workplaces. It’s closer to economic development and the corporate world, for example working with commercial science and drug companies. In public hospitals, directors are from an administrative background such as mine, but in a cancer institute, the director is usually a medical doctor and a researcher.
It was a new kind of leadership experience. After some time I started thinking: what is my goal? How would I develop my career and the institution? I’d been working in health for nearly 20 years and felt like I needed to refresh my knowledge and challenge myself in new areas.
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Most of all I wanted to better understand private companies and how they shaped their strategies. I worked closely with economic partners — French and international — to deliver clinical trials and manage contracts covering the use of data, staff and biological samples. I was relatively unfamiliar with managing these kinds of partnerships and I needed to learn more.
I was really impressed — surprised even — by the high level input from my fellow students, my colleagues and teachers on the executive MBA at Audencia, in Nantes. There was a lot of independent and in-class learning about research and work that I had not known about, either from my studies or work in the hospital. And the generational mix was so important: I’ve always been in a C-suite position, in hierarchical organisations, so it was an unusual experience to be challenged with new ideas.
I was working full time while studying. Balancing that was challenging — I didn’t think it would take up so much time. The financial courses were especially hard; financial directors at work meant I hadn’t had to think about that aspect so much. I had to work hard on the course maths.
While I was doing the EMBA I had to deal with some tricky issues at work. Over several months, tensions within the ICO gave rise to a challenging social climate, requiring significant time and attention from both my team and me. I had to be at the office, then go and do classes, then sometimes come back again, working very different hours. Luckily, Audencia was 15 minutes away.
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I didn’t embark on the EMBA to get a leadership position — I already had one. It was more about a challenge in the position I already had, and thinking about how to develop and adapt it, modernise my approaches, and set myself up for the next 15 years of my career.
Since I graduated in 2024, I’ve had a much better understanding of organisations, companies and the global health system, and of the different approaches they might take. One example: I saw how many enterprises had appointed data officers, to oversee security and the use of data, and now we’ve appointed our own. At the outset, I hadn’t fully grasped the importance of the role. But the EMBA gave me the tools to understand it strategically, build a strong case for it and implement it effectively.
The EMBA gave me the ability to not simply copy and paste a policy, but to take a larger, systemic view — and to do transformational work.
