Kurt Sardiga is no novice to holding a leadership role. He served on active duty as an Army officer for over four years taking up different positions, including being a task force engineer, where he was deployed to Afghanistan for nine months. In his last role as a company executive officer, he served as second in command for an organization of 88 soldiers who were responsible for combat engineering and construction operations.
After serving in the military, Sardiga started working at Rockwell Automation in Twinsburg, Ohio, as a manufacturing systems engineer, and within a few months had a desire to grow his career further.
Sardiga entered the Part-Time MBA program at Weatherhead School of Management to enhance his personal leadership skills and perspective.
“It's a great way to bridge the skill sets that you learn in the military and translate them to a civilian environment. A lot of people in the military go from working in high-pressure situations to leadership positions and a lot of that is transferable to the civilian world,” Sardiga says. “The Weatherhead program really rounds that out with the rest of the skill sets to elevate you as a veteran going into the workforce.”
During the program, Sardiga says he enjoyed the camaraderie among his peers. In a student’s first semester, they are placed into groups known as “learning teams” and they continue working with that group throughout the program.
“Working in learning teams throughout the Part-Time MBA program provided me with a comforting stability in knowing I had a close-knit circle of peers I could count on for group projects semester after semester,” Sardiga says. “Everyone in my team had different learning styles and brought unique skills to the table which greatly enriched my learning.”
A few months after graduating from the program in 2020, Sardiga received a promotion at Rockwell Automation to his current position as the business systems manager for the Americas, where he manages a team of eight business systems analysts.
“The program helped me become more effective as a leader by building on my experience with lessons on emotional intelligence and case studies on real-world executives,” Sardiga says. “Now I regularly apply the leadership concepts I learned at Weatherhead with my team members.”
As a team leader, Sardiga says he’s been able to implement lessons taught in the LEAD course on emotional intelligence and intentional change theory to support his team members and coach them on their career growth.
On a tactical level, Sardiga says ideas learned in his operations class, such as bottleneck analysis and theory of constraints, help him and his team be more productive.
“Working in supply chain, I apply my knowledge of bottleneck analysis from my operations class on a daily basis, which helps me be more effective collaborating with my engineering and operations counterparts.”
Sardiga notes the courses on strategy and finance at Weatherhead have also been very helpful.
"As a leader in my department, my peers and I are constantly evaluating potential projects to pursue,” he says. “Understanding strategy fundamentals helps guide me in selecting projects that will not only provide financial return, but align with my company's strategy as well."
One of the greatest assets of Weatherhead’s Part-Time MBA program, Sardiga says, is the faculty and the ability to use the knowledge learned in class in the real world.
“Weatherhead’s Part-Time MBA has excellent faculty who genuinely care about their students and provide great classroom experiences that fit the busy schedules of their students,” he says. “I found the lessons taught in evening classes at Weatherhead can be applied the very next morning at work.”