Business graduates association
Association of mbas
BGA
AMBA

Category: Z General – Business Schools

General – Business Schools

Posted on

Trust in Leadership

trust-teamwork-collaboration-managemwent-skills

Business isn’t capitalising on the benefits trust can bring, say HBS Professor, Sandra Sucher, and HBS Research Associate, Shalene Gupta. However, management students must know how trust relates to power and how leaders must govern themselves to keep it.

Leaders have powers other people don’t. They get to decide (or lead a process of deciding) what products or services a company will offer, how many people to employ and what kinds of jobs they will have, which suppliers to partner with, and even how to interpret laws and regulations. On the flip side, this also means leaders have to make difficult decisions that may mean causing harm in order to preserve the greater good. One senior executive told us that, ‘the fair decisions are easy. My job is to make the difficult decisions.’

Leaders have the responsibility of decision-making, which also means, in order to keep this authority, they must be trusted. 

‘Trust’ refers to our ability to be vulnerable to an organisation, or a person, that may have power over us. For example, customers are vulnerable to an organisation because they have no window into how a product or service is created. They must trust that the product or service will work as it is supposed to, and that it is ethically created. Similarly, when employees agree to work for an organisation, they are trusting that they will not be abused and that they will have a reasonable amount of job security.  

Trust and team performance  

Research shows that teams who trust their leaders perform better. In a study of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball teams in the US, researchers found that trust in leadership was more important to winning than trust in one’s teammates. Teams that trusted their coaches won 7% more of their games than teams that didn’t. In addition, the team with the highest trust in its coach won the national championship, while the team with the lowest trust in their coach only won 10% of their games. As one player commented: ‘Once we developed trust in Coach___, the progress we made increased tremendously because we were no longer asking questions or were apprehensive. Instead, we were buying in and believing that if we worked our hardest, we were going to get there.’

The importance of building trust translates to a company’s bottom line as well. In a 2002 study of Holiday Inns, 6,500 employees rated their trust in their managers on a scale from 1 to 5. An increase in trust of 1/8th of a point was correlated with a 2.5% increase in revenues. At a macro level, this all scales up: a 1997 study of 29 market economies showed that a 10% increase in trust in the population correlated with a 0.8% increase in GDP.

However, as a community, business isn’t capitalising on the benefits trust can bring. According to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, CEO credibility is at an all-time low in several countries, including Japan at 18% and France at 23% (in terms of the proportion of people who rate a CEO as a very or extremely credible source of information about a company) making the challenge for CEOs even more critical as they try to manage today’s issues.

Earning trust 

Because leaders are responsible for decision-making, they must earn trust differently than organisations. Followers want first to know that a leader has earned their power legitimately, and second that they will use it well. They rely on their leader to make difficult decisions with compassion and fairness.

A leader who is not trusted won’t hold on to their position for long. Notable instances of this include the case of Boeing, a company that has suffered a major scandal where the CEO is later dismissed, and Harvey Weinstein, who was ousted after his multiple abuses were uncovered. 

The American philosopher, John Rawls, calls that first act of earning trust by acquiring power legitimately at the beginning of a leader’s tenure (or the first exposure that you might have with her in her role) ‘originating consent’. There is then what he calls ‘joining consent’ – the fact that people continuously assess whether they want to keep trusting a leader with power.

Even if you come to your role through the right process, people still want to know on what basis you were selected. In democratic societies, we recognise the result of an election by consenting to allow the winning candidate to assume the job of mayor, governor, or president as our leader. In corporations, the process is less visible: boards of directors appoint CEOs, who we in turn consent to allow us to lead our organisations.

The process of building trust does not end when a leader first acquires power. It’s a status that is always being reassessed through joining consent. Trust needs to be earned over and over, throughout time.  

However, leaders face an uphill battle when it comes to joining consent. The very qualities that cause you to earn people’s trust in the first place are easily destroyed by acquiring power. Business students need to be aware that part of retaining trust in the workplace involves governing yourself to resist the heady side-effects power can create, which paradoxically causes leaders to lose trust. The lexicon of business history is filled with stories of CEOs like Travis Kalanick, who created large companies and then got ousted due to losing touch with the public. But why does this happen?

The paradox of power

Dacher Keltner, a Professor of Psychology who heads up the University of California, Berkeley Social Interaction Lab has, for decades, studied power, which he defines as ‘one’s capacity to alter another person’s condition or state of mind by providing or withholding resources… or administering punishments.’ In his book, The Power Paradox (2016) Keltner describes his research and that of other leading scholars of power.

Power is a paradox in the following sense: the very behaviours that lead others to trust you with a position of power are (or can be) horribly transformed (think Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) into behaviours that are the opposite of what people esteemed in you before. For instance, leaders often gain their power because of their willingness to listen to others, but once attaining it, they frequently downplay or even refuse to listen to dissenting voices. That is because being in a position of power affects both the way you see yourself and how others perceive you and the way you act. 

Now, the second half of this paradox is not exactly news. There’s a reason why you have probably heard some version of the quote: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ – the famous opinion of the British historian, Lord Acton. 

Let’s start with the first half of the paradox and Keltner’s description of the behaviours that lead others to trust you with a position of power. In this view, the road to earning and maintaining power is paved by caring actions that show focus on others. Groups create leaders. They ‘give power to those who advance the greater good, construct reputations that determine the capacity to influence, reward those who advance the greater good with status and esteem, and punish those who undermine the greater good with gossip.’ Keltner’s leaders demonstrate empathy, they give to others, and they show gratitude.

Characteristics of those who rise to power

Keltner conducted the research that first introduced him to these ideas 20 years ago. He wanted to understand why some people rise to power in a group, while others don’t. He began by designing a natural state experiment that would allow him to interact with participants as they went about their daily lives. He got permission to study the students who lived together in one hall within a first-year dormitory at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a public university with a heterogeneous student body.  

At the beginning of the year, he met students and asked them to rate the amount of influence each person living in the dorm held. Students also completed a questionnaire that asked them to assess the extent to which their own personalities were defined by five social tendencies – a group that psychologists refer to as the ‘Big Five’: kindness, enthusiasm (reaching out to others) focus on shared goals, calmness, and openness to others’ ideas and feelings. He returned in the middle of the academic year, and then at the end, asking students to rate the power held by each of their dorm-mates each time.  

He tallied the power ratings given to each student. As early as two weeks into the year, some students already had more perceived power than others. His study also found that each student’s power fluctuated throughout the year. He found that those who rose to power had the most enthusiasm, and that the other Big Five traits also mattered.

Researchers replicated these results across 70 other studies, finding that the people who rose to power had all the Big Five personality traits. The studies were in settings as varied as hospitals, financial firms, manufacturing facilities, schools, and the military. This is overwhelming evidence that if you want to get power, you need to be someone who values others, who cares about the greater good, and who can help a group succeed.

The reason why Keltner’s book is called The Power Paradox, however, is that he later describe how the actions that might lead one to be chosen to have power can disappear under the neurological and psychological effects that being in a position of power can have on individuals. Keltner calls power a ‘dopamine high’. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is released in our brains when we expect a reward. Keltner found that when people feel more powerful, they get dopamine highs. However, this makes them less aware of the risks associated with an action. 

Perspective-taking and priming 

This transformation from a focus on others to a focus on yourself is also a concern of Adam Galinsky, Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School, who is a renowned social psychologist. He and some colleagues conducted a deceptively easy-looking experiment to illustrate one of the worst effects of power on individuals, which is how it interferes with a person’s ability to take the perspective of others. A key component of empathy, perspective-taking, is the proverbial ability to walk in another person’s shoes, which means being able to see, feel, and imagine how someone else experiences the world. 

However, if you literally can’t put yourself in someone else’s shoes, you can’t take their perspective into account. In Galinsky’s study of 57 undergraduates, he divided the students into ‘high-power’ and ‘low-power’ groups. Students in the high-power group were asked to write about a personal incident when they had power. In the low-power group, students wrote about a personal situation in which another person had power over them.

The students were then taken into a separate room and given a series of tasks: high-power participants were asked to allocate seven lottery tickets to themselves and another participant; low-power participants were asked to guess how many of the seven lottery tickets they would receive from another participant. Students were then given the following instructions: Task 1: with your dominant hand, as quickly as you can, snap your fingers five times. Task 2: with your dominant hand, as quickly as you can, draw a capital ‘E’ on your forehead with the marker provided.

Here is the amazing thing that happened. The participants in the high-power position wrote the letter E on their foreheads as if they were reading it themselves, which meant that the E would be backwards from the perspective of someone looking at them and trying to read it. And the participants in the low-power position wrote the letter so that a person looking at them would be able to read it easily. In other words, they wrote it considering the perspective of the other person, whereas the high-power group wrote it from their own perspective. 

The experimental process used by Galinsky is called ‘priming’. It refers to the common and well-validated research technique that finds giving individuals tasks, like writing about a personal experience, will put them in a frame of mind to think of themselves in a particular way, in this case, as either a person of high power or someone with low power. So, just by being primed to think of yourself as high-power, you look at the world from your own perspective. 

Preparing leaders for an internal battle 

CEOs like Travis Kalanick from Uber (he of the toxic culture, never-ending scandals, and bad-boy fame) and Tony Hayward from BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (Mr ‘I’d like my life back’) are first-rate examples of what leadership looks like under conditions of power-laced self-focus, an inability to empathise, and indifference to harm imposed on others.  

What this comes down to is that leaders at any level in an organisation, or even in their personal life, must be prepared for the internal battle that awaits. On one side is the focus on others and the good of the group – the actions and beliefs that enable people to gain power and the respect and admiration of others. On the other side is the well-documented finding that being in a leadership role will pull you towards a focus on yourself and replace attention to others with an inability to care, understand or even be curious about the conditions of other people or groups, except those who serve your interests. 

Describe, analyse and judge: notes on teaching trust in leadership

I’ve [Sandra J Sucher] taught at Harvard Business School for 23 years, including courses on moral leadership, and leadership and corporate accountability. Trust is a skill and therefore when teaching it, it’s important to use examples instead of lectures.  

In the classroom, I draw on a mixture of cases (I recommend Dave Cote at Honeywell to illustrate a trusted leader balancing different stakeholder needs: ‘Honeywell and the Great Recession (A)’ and ‘Honeywell and the Great Recession: The Economic Recovery (B)’) and examples from real life and great literature to stimulate discussions (William Langewiesche’s American Ground (2002) is a fabulous example of how a group earned originating consent,for example). 

Then using a line of rigorous questioning, I get students to put themselves in a leader’s position. First, we start with observation; I call that step, ‘Describe’. What is the incident that’s happened? What are the leadership challenges? Then we take it deeper; I call that step, ‘Analyse’. Why did it happen? What factors contributed to the present? What do we know and what don’t we know? And finally, I have the students assess and debate the right course of action; I call that step, ‘Judge’. The reality is that in the midst of a crisis or a scandal it’s difficult to know what to do and sometimes there are no clear answers, just tough choices. Students often come into class hoping for right answers – what I hope to give them is a process for thinking through difficult dilemmas. 

Sandra J Sucher (left) is a Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, where she has taught for the last 20 years. At Harvard, Sucher has studied how organisations can change and improve while retaining stakeholder trust and the vital role that leaders can play in the process. She is also an advisor to the Edelman Trust Barometer. 

Shalene Gupta (right) is a Research Associate at Harvard Business School. She is a former Fortune reporter, writing about diversity in Silicon Valley, big data, and smart cities, before which she worked at the US Department of Treasury and had a Fulbright grant in Malaysia. 

Sandra J Sucher and Shalene Gupta are the authors of The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It (PublicAffairs, 2021).

This article is taken from Business Impact’s print magazine (edition: August-October 2021).I

Posted on

Forging partnerships that enhance gender equality

Business Impact article image for Forging partnerships that enhance gender equality.

Forging partnerships that enhance gender equality

Business Impact article image for Forging partnerships that enhance gender equality.
Business Impact article image for Forging partnerships that enhance gender equality.
Strong relationships between business schools and corporates can encourage diversity, equality and inclusion in society, write NEOMA Business School’s Sandie Pédemons and Isabelle Chevalier 

Business schools are natural partners for many organisations, from large corporations to charities and non-profits. These partnerships can be beneficial to both sides. Many organisations see partnering with business schools as an opportunity to gain a competitive edge, as well as providing them with access to some of the world’s best business talent of the future. 

From the business school perspective, successful partnerships can bring exciting internship opportunities for their students, worldwide study trips, valuable projects as part of courses, and, ultimately, recruitment opportunities for their graduates. However, in recent years there has certainly been a notable trend in terms of organisations partnering with business schools in order to offer opportunities to students from minority groups, enhancing diversity and equality.

Partnering with Maison Veuve Clicquot

This is certainly true at NEOMA Business School, which, this year, has partnered with luxury Champagne brand Maison Veuve Clicquot to establish a scholarship programme that will finance tuition fees for 10 international female master’s in management students per year. 

Based in Reims, France, Maison Veuve Clicquot is one of the largest Champagne houses, specialising in premium products. It is credited with creating the first known vintage Champagne in 1810 and inventing the riddling table process to clarify Champagne in 1816. This established company therefore has hundreds of years of history, yet is still adapting and progressing with society, ultimately sharing a commitment to diversity and equal opportunities with NEOMA. This made it a perfect partner for our business school. 

In essence, this scholarship programme is fully in line with our ambitions and aims to support the careers of brilliant female students who have difficulty financing their studies; scholarships are awarded on the basis of social, financial, and academic criteria. Today, young women continue to face barriers to education, so this initiative recognises the vital role that learning plays in the liberation and future success of women.

NEOMA has always taken a strong approach to gender equality, and with the support of Veuve Clicquot, we will be able to go even further by taking proactive action in favour of the talented women who join our School. 

In addition to the scholarship, students will also have opportunities to meet with members of the Veuve Clicquot management committee throughout their studies, enabling them to gain advice on their professional projects. By offering such opportunities, companies can help to encourage much greater inclusion within society for the long term. 

Enabling students from minority backgrounds to flourish

At NEOMA, we have noticed the benefits of foundations, scholarships and solidarity funds, in terms of encouraging inclusion and equality within our business school community – especially over the past 10 years. This is now the case for companies, where issues around diversity and inclusion sit at the heart of the problems faced by managers today. Through partnerships, organisations can make long-term commitments to those from minority backgrounds by opening the doors of their companies to them, and supporting them in their success.

While initiatives to promote diversity and equality already exist within companies and educational institutions, collaboration is now essential in order to create coherence, and to lay future foundations for initiatives and goals between both sides to develop for years to come. This will ensure individuals from more minority backgrounds can be included and can ultimately flourish. 

In our opinion, it is the role of business schools to offer students an open and transparent window on the best of what is being done in terms of inclusion and equality in the professional world. This is all the more apparent in the current business climate, and with a generation that is particularly sensitive to these issues. Let’s not forget that societal commitment has become a lever for companies to work on their employer brand. 

Business schools and companies therefore need to work collaboratively to raise awareness of issues surrounding equality, but also to take action; for example, through delivering salary negotiation workshops and providing scholarships to ensure access to higher education and mentoring is available for all. Only this way will more equal opportunities become available.

This is essential for gender equality – and the figures speak for themselves. Although there is a real awareness in organisations (and the legal obligations play in favour of parity) the equality deficit is still very high. With family life still mainly the responsibility of women, companies must adapt to reassure them that they will be able to develop in a professional environment that allows them to combine the two elements of their lives.

Breaking down stereotypes

And of course, some professional women still have self-limiting beliefs. Business schools and companies must work together to break down stereotypes and repeat the message to a new generation that women can go into fields such as finance. To do this, it’s essential for women to share their stories of successfully combining a professional career with personal fulfilment. Unfortunately, these case studies are still too rare, but the joint commitment of the academic and professional worlds to achieving gender equality will be the best way to change the way things are done.

To conclude, through partnerships such as our collaboration with Veuve Clicquot, we are promoting the notion that by building relationships with companies and developing initiatives that promote equality, we can help to create future leaders who are aware that diversity and richness can be perfectly combined, and that equality can rhyme with normality. These partnerships are essential for the future success not only of our students, but of the companies and business schools involved, ensuring they remain current, accessible and in harmony with communities. 

Sandie Pédemons is Director of Corporate Relations at NEOMA Business School.

Isabelle Chevalier is Director of the Talent and Career Department at NEOMA Business School.

Ambition Front Cover September 2021

This article originally appeared in the print edition (September 2021) of Ambition, magazine of the Association of MBAs (AMBA).

Read this print edition here

Read more Business Impact articles related to diversity:

Discover more articles on diversity
Business Impact Volume 19

Download the latest edition of the Business Impact magazine

Download here

Want your business school to feature in
Business Impact?

For questions about editorial opportunities, please contact:

Tim Banerjee Dhoul

Content Editor
Business Impact

Contact Tim
Tim

Share this page with your colleagues

Posted on

Changing the narrative: why we should focus on long life learning rather than lifelong learning

Time for celebration, candles on a cake. Business Impact article image for changing the narrative: why we should focus on long life learning rather than lifelong learning.

Author of Long Life Learning, Michelle R Weise, is on a mission to change the future of education, envisioning a shift from lifelong learning to long life learning. Ellen Buchan and David Woods-Hale caught up with her to learn more

According to the Institute for the Future, as many as 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t yet been invented, so how do we prepare for these jobs when we don’t even know what they are?  

Michelle R Weise, author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet, is on a mission to change the future of education from being divided and siloed, into an ecosystem which is user friendly for job seekers. 

This interview with Weise seeks to investigate how to build a workforce of people who can thrive in these future jobs. 

Why did you decide to write this book? 

One of the impulses for writing the book, was to say: ‘Ok, this concept of lifelong learning is not new – in fact it’s decades old – but it has been very slow to catch fire’. 

The most helpful model was hearing lots of different experts on ageing and longevity, as well as futurists, talk about a longer life and potentially a longer working life. 

We are seeing people stay in the labour market for longer. The concept of a 100-year life, or a 150-year life, suddenly makes our systems look deeply inadequate. If we get a college degree, it seems unlikely that two or four extra years of learning is really going to last us a 60- or 80-year work life. 

That is where the concept began. Instead of being paralysed by inertia about lifelong learning, we flip this model on its head and think about long life learning: what is this going to mean and how is it going to change our behaviour? 

Is preparing for the future about taking courses or having an agile mindset? 

Having an agile mindset is key to success in the future. Sometimes, it’s going to mean that we need to broaden our human skills. There are a lot of prognostications out there that we will have to bring our human skills to bear, and we will have to leverage this competitive advantage that we have, as humans, over the artificial intelligence (AI), computers, or robots whose work we are coordinating and complementing. 

It’s not just that we can be generalists, it’s sometimes going to mean understanding enough about AI to make the right sorts of intervention,s or understanding data science sufficiently to be able to acquire that next job. 

It’s both the human skills such as communication, collaboration, teamwork, systems thinking, agility, and resilience plus having enough tech skills to be dangerous. 

How has Covid-19 impacted the need for long life learning? 

It’s funny, because almost up until the final draft of my book, Covid had not occurred.

What was interesting was this laser focus in the book on people who were not thriving in the labour market. I think, when we tend to focus on the future of work, it’s helpful to move away from the statistics; I was really focused on the 41 million people in the US who were already being left behind by the present of work, people who maybe only had a high-school degree and who were not earning a living wage through their work.

When I had to revise my book because of the pandemic, it really brought front and centre all the deep inequity and the lack of opportunity that existed.  

The pandemic revealed how inordinately stuck our systems were. We couldn’t help large numbers of people move out of their jobs in the retail and hospitality industries when they were completely decimated and shift them into jobs which were open and in demand.

There is an opportunity to take advantage of this unique moment that brought the future to us and made it clear how much work we need to do by pulling down some of the barriers that exist for millions of people. Part of that is to move towards a skills-based hiring environment that allows people to prove they can do the job, instead of relying on blunt proxies for talent such as degrees or credentials. 

Do you feel MBA programmes are equipping people for a long life learning career? 

The question we need to keep front and centre is ‘how do we build and cultivate the best problem solvers for the future?’. That must be something we keep as a shared agenda when we break down the artificial silos of how we create problems to solve for our learners, because whatever we pursue – whether it’s an MBA or a degree in biology or anthropology – no problems exist in a vacuum. The crossing of silos and boundaries exists in any problem we encounter in our work today.

If you look at the kinds of opportunity that exist today, not only do we need those traditional negotiation skills, or the traditional courses we provide in a Business School, it’s about business transformation skills and how we enable the future leaders of our organisations to manage change.

So how do we prepare leaders to meet organisations in the midst of all that volatility? It requires organisational change management – transformation skills – and we don’t deliberately build those into our curricula. It’s fascinating that, at least in the US, most Business Schools don’t teach sales or business development. The jobs of the future will always entail some form of sales. 

How do we remain aligned with the demands of the labour market? I think core to all of this is ensuring that we are infusing curricula with real-world problems and getting people in the mentality of building a mindset of being able to exercise judgement in ambiguous circumstances.

In the book, you call for a different type of learning ecosystem. What does this look like to you?

To build a better future, instead of thinking about multiple systems running in parallel, we need to think about taking an ecosystem approach. 

This came out of the qualitative research we did with people who were part of that US population of 41 million people not thriving in the labour market. We were trying to understand the barriers they faced that prevented mobility, movement, and advancement. We kept hearing the same issues emerge around the inability to access the right career navigation or support services, or to find the right educational pathways that were not a two or four-year degree, or a one-year certificate. 

Five principles emerged: the new kind of learning system must be more navigable, supportive, targeted, integrated, and transparent. We can all think of different sorts of solution, or interesting innovators and organisations that work on career navigation or target more precise opportunities, such as boot camps.

The idea is that it’s not just about one solution, but instead about bringing together lots of different organisations and resources – existing and new solutions – to make this centre around the job seeker, so that they know exactly where to turn and how to navigate their next job change. 

Whose role is it to ensure the workforce is equipped with skills for the future?

It’s on all of us, and that’s the driving motivation behind this ecosystem-based approach. In many cases, there’s a blame game going on where employers criticise higher education for not producing the candidates they need, and higher education blames employers for disinvesting in the education of new workers. Individuals often bear the brunt of this, having to navigate it on their own, especially as they mature in their working lives. 

It is not sufficient for us to continue in this manner, where the bulk of reskilling and upskilling is pushed onto us, as individuals. We need to figure out the skills gaps that we have and where to turn to get the precise education that fills those gaps. We’re just kind of praying and hoping that a future employer will know how to make sense of this new learning.

Our learners need to understand better who they can trust and ways of sorting through the different options – and that’s where venture capital innovators and social entrepreneurs have a role to play in helping all of us to make sense of this burgeoning ecosystem.

It’s not one or the other; it’s not about blowing up something that exists today, it’s about really shifting the orientation around all of us as people and job seekers, because as we think about a longer work life (and the 20 or 30 job changes that we might have to anticipate for the future) we are all going to bump into the same challenges that those who are struggling today are already bumping into. 

It’s this idea of all being stuck in a web of mutuality – which is a term Dr Martin Luther King Jr came up with. If we cut into the curb for the people who are struggling the most, we open opportunities for everyone. It’s this concept of the curb-cut effects – when you focus on the people who really have the most constraints today, that means that all of us are going to be able to take advantage of the new ecosystem we are building. 

So, my answer is that it’s the role of each and every one of us to ensure that the workforce is equipped with the right skills for the future.

Michelle R Weise is the author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet (Wiley, 2021). She is a former Fulbright Scholar and graduate of Harvard and Stanford.

This article originally appeared in Ambition – the magazine of the Association of MBAs.

 

Posted on

The new normal of collaboration: the view from Latin America

Satellite and planet earth focused on South America. Business Impact article image for the new normal of collaboration: the view from Latin America.

The deans of the School of Management and Social Sciences at Universidad ORT Uruguay, the Universidad de San Andrés Business School in Argentina and Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) EAESP in Brazil discuss new possibilities for Business Schools to partner with others and widen their reach

The fall-out from the Covid-19 pandemic isn’t all doom and gloom. The crisis might just have opened up possibilities for Business Schools to partner in new ways and widen the reach of individual Schools. But competition in an ever-growing market (particularly within the online executive education space) cannot be ignored. Three deans of leading Business Schools in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay discussed trends around globalisation and inter-institutional partnerships on day two of the AMBA & BGA Global Conference 2021.     

‘The pandemic opened up other possibilities we could explore,’ reported Luiz Brito, Dean at Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) EAESP, referring to the uptake of new technology and online learning modes. He outlined a scheme for 30 Business Schools to work together to provide content, with each producing a single elective online in order to benefit from access to all 30. This would minimise operational costs, while offering students diversity of course content. ‘I think this [idea] could now be exploited further and we could make joint courses instead of joint degrees, [in which there are] two or three Schools offering courses together,’ he said. ‘That would enrich the experience of our students.’

He added that the use of remote synchronous learning makes faculty exchange easier and more affordable and is therefore likely to be retained: ‘Faculty exchanges is a key driver because it can promote the further collaboration between Schools.’

Challenges remain, however. Sharing his perspective on the changing nature of alliances, Gustavo Genoni, Dean of the Universidad de San Andrés Business School, reported that some of his School’s guest professors have been banned from teaching at other universities by their home university. ‘They see that the competitive playground has expanded and therefore [have decided that] they cannot keep sharing resources if they are going to compete.’

Digitisation is behind much of this expansion, as Genoni explained: ‘We have Schools from all over the world offering programmes in Argentina. We have to compete on executive education with big universities we didn’t have to compete with before. We have to compete with Harvard, which is crazy because they are much older, much more experienced and much bigger than us. So, we will have to rethink our offer, consider where we want to compete and where we don’t want to, and decide on our niches and areas of focus.’

However, the overriding feeling among these three Business School leaders was that the social isolation experienced by many during Covid-19 has merely served to emphasise the value of a global outlook in business education. To this point, Gastón Labadie, Dean of the School of Management and Social Sciences at Universidad ORT Uruguay, reminded attendees that actions speak louder than words, describing two dual degrees his School has recently arranged with counterparts in China (‘the main trading partner for Uruguay for quite a few years’) and its plans for further agreements with institutions in India.

‘The Indian connection would be very interesting because we have a set of Indian firms that have significant presence in Uruguay, in part even sharing services for the region,’ he commented. ‘Globalisation is even more important than it used to be.’

Brito agreed, adding that ‘what we learned from the pandemic will actually foster further globalisation instead of reducing it.’ He reasoned that Covid-19 had allowed Schools to ‘bring elements of globalisation to all students’, whereas previously, only some were able to take a semester abroad or make international trips.’

However, despite this potential for Schools to collaborate through digital innovations, there was no suggestion that in-person learning would be rendered obsolete. ‘An important part of an exchange programme is the cultural education – doing things in a different culture, broadening your perspective, extending your network,’ said Genoni. ‘And that cannot be done online.’ Labadie highlighted the ‘repressed demand’ for travelling from professors, students, and young people. ‘I think the new normal is going to come both ways – a hybrid combinations of distance learning, face-to-face learning and further traveling in terms of exchanges and degrees,’ he said.

Chair
Andrew Main Wilson, CEO, AMBA & BGA

Speakers
Luiz Brito, Dean, Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) EAESP, Brazil
Gustavo Genoni, Dean, Business School, Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina
Gastón Labadie, Dean, School of Management and Social Sciences, Universidad ORT Uruguay, Uruguay

This article is adapted from a feature that originally appeared in Ambition – the magazine of the Association of MBAs.

 

Posted on

Responsible rankings: can measurements be more fruitful for students, Schools and society?

A fruitful pattern of cut oranges on a baby pink background.

University of Bath School of Management Professor and expert in responsible business, Andrew Crane, on how rankings can effect positive change in the industry, and how to address current criticisms. Interview by Tim Banerjee Dhoul

Recent releases of Business School rankings have been accompanied by media coverage of optouts and boycotts in the context of Covid-19. The omittances have only added to the feeling that rankings are in something of a limbo period amid the clamour for much-mooted and comprehensive redesigns that might allow them to better reflect the current business education landscape. 

That rankings would benefit from change is almost universally recognised. In highlighting many of the problems associated with existing MBA rankings, for example, a 2019 report from AMBA & BGA found – in a survey of 1,328 MBA graduates, students and Business School leaders – that only 11% think rankings reflect the true performance of an MBA ‘very well’. Step forward two years, and the Covid-19 pandemic has provided an impetus for innovation within the business education industry. Might it also present the perfect chance to refresh and revitalise rankings? If so, how can they be made more sustainable for the business world we live in now and the world we will live in in the future?

Andrew Crane is a Professor of Business and Society and Director of the Centre for Business, Organisations and Society in the School of Management at the University of Bath, UK. As an expert in responsible business and the changing role of the corporation in the global economy, Business Impact felt Crane was well-placed to offer a view on the role of rankings and how they might function more responsibly, to encourage positive change in the industry.

What do you think the purpose of (Business School) rankings should be? How does this compare to the real function they currently perform in the sector, as you see it? 

I think Business School rankings should have two main purposes. First and foremost, they should be about giving potential students useful and reliable information that will inform their decision-making, especially about which Schools they should apply to, or enter. Without rankings, prospective students have a dearth of good information on which to base their decisions. 

Second, I think rankings can also be helpful in nudging Business Schools towards whatever we might see as desirable behaviours. A good ranking can be a real driver for change inside Schools. So, as long as the ranking measures things that are important, and measures them in a suitable way, they can have really positive effects on what Business Schools value, what they pay attention to, and ultimately what they do on a day-to-day basis. 

Realistically, one of the main functions that most rankings actually perform is to generate income (whether through sales or advertising revenue) for the media organisations that produce them. It is no surprise, in many ways, that most of the main Business School rankings are produced by media organisations because it is these companies that have recognised how much they have to gain from them. 

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but it can have some negative side-effects on the other potential purposes. Most rankings, for example, are not as far as I am aware (with the exception of the Corporate Knights Better World MBA ranking) designed with any real vision of what Business Schools should be teaching, or the role they should be playing in society. If this vision is not built into the ranking, it may still provide useful information for prospective students, but it will not push Schools to behave in any desired way and nor will it consider how Business Schools will actually change in response to the ranking. 

Business Schools are often accused of ‘surrendering’ to rankings. Is this a fair criticism in your opinion? 

I don’t know about surrendering, because I think some Business Schools actively lobby the rankings quite a bit to try and influence what they measure and how. But what I do think is a major problem is that there is real incentive for Business Schools to game the rankings. By that, I mean that they might seek to get as high as possible a score on the ranking while doing as little as possible to actually change the fundamentals of what the ranking is supposed to be assessing. 

One upshot of this is that Schools end up investing too much time, attention and money on their rankings management processes rather than the things that are actually supposed to be important like the quality and relevance of their teaching. Also, the things they do end up changing may be those that are most likely to get a boost in the rankings rather than those that improve the educational experience. This certainly doesn’t happen everywhere but the pressures to do so are likely felt everywhere. This wouldn’t be a problem if the rankings were all designed with a clear vision of what they were trying to achieve in terms of School behaviour, but I fear that these are largely unintended consequences of Schools managing the measures rather than the fundamentals underlying the measures. 

Salary measurements in rankings often attract a lot of attention, with rankings agencies defending the need to demonstrate return on investment (ROI) to paying students. In this context, should Business Schools pay more attention to the cost of business education programmes?

Return on investment is, of course, important. But the idea that the return on an education should be purely, or even primarily, measured in terms of future salary is, in my opinion, deeply flawed. It is even worse than thinking firm performance should only be measured in terms of profits or share price. Education has so many more dimensions than just the direct economic return – even an MBA degree. It is about learning how to think and make decisions in different ways, building up new skillsets and networks, developing in who we are as human beings and professionals, and lots more besides. 

ROI needs to take these things into consideration as well. So, for me, Schools and ranking agencies should be spending more time and attention on how to assess, compare and communicate these other outcomes of a degree programme. Then, once they have a better handle of what the real return on the investment is, they can talk seriously about what the right level of investment (i.e. degree cost) should be. 

Do you think that many Business School practitioners might view rankings as a ‘necessary evil’? Either way, would it be fair to label them as ‘evil’ and/or ‘necessary’? 

Personally, I have something of a love-hate relationship with rankings. In the area of responsible business where I focus, rankings like the now-defunct Beyond Grey Pinstripes ranking or the Corporate Knights ranking have, for all their problems, been really helpful in pushing for change inside the Schools I’ve worked in. 

On the contrary, rankings like the Financial Times one, for me at least, are rather more undesirable because of what I see as a negative effect on how we view Business School education – far too much comes down to final salary. So, yes, I think they are ‘necessary’ because they provide an important service for prospective students. But some are certainly more ‘evil’ than others! 

This year, rankings releases have been accompanied with boycotts/optouts due to problems associated with Covid-19. What value, if any, can rankings offer without being able to score all eligible institutions? 

I’m not too concerned about this, providing they capture a meaningful slice of the population of Schools. It is not like applicants have every single School in their consideration set. Most are selecting from a much smaller subset anyway. So as long as there are enough being ranked for students to be able to compare sufficient Schools that they could feasibly apply and get accepted into, I think the rankings are still going to be valuable for students – which, after all, is their main audience.

Who is to blame for the problems associated with rankings? The agencies who produce them, the Schools that provide them with data, the prospective students who consume them, or the employers who might derive their perceptions of quality from them?  

This is a tough question! The problem is that we are sufficiently far enough down the road of rankings now that we effectively have a whole system of actors that are complicit in keeping them going, and sustaining the problems that are associated with them. Perhaps a better way of thinking about it is to consider who is best placed to change things for the better. And there I think the buck stops with those producing the ratings. If there are problems, they should fix them. 

Of course, Schools, students, and employers can – and absolutely should – play a role in agitating for change, and providing resources and momentum to fuel the change. But it is the agencies that have to change their rankings. Or else, we need different actors to come up with better rankings. 

If you could devise a new system for ranking Business Schools worldwide, what would your top three ranking criteria/factors be and how would you measure them? 

I think there is space for a variety of rankings focused on different aspects of what might be considered important aspirations for Business School education. 

Core to these should be at least some assessment of the relative learning gain of students on the relevant programmes of study – that is, what advance has there been in aspects such as students’ knowledge, skills, work-readiness or personal development. 

There are lots of potential factors and measures that could be used here, all of which I think tell us much more about the return on investment of an MBA programme than final salary. I also think it is crucial that Schools are assessed on how well they prepare students for tackling the big social and environmental challenges that are facing us as a society, and as a business sector. 

Personally, I think that any MBA programme that fails to progress its students’ thinking on how to address climate change, for example, is in dereliction of its duty as an institution of management education.  

What is your impression of the Positive Impact Ratings (PIR), launched in 2020?

Well, first off, it is great to see a new ranking entering this space and with a different set of actors behind it compared to the usual suspects. And I love that it is focused on positive impact and the sustainable development goals. 

Where I have my reservations is on the methodology. Any ranking that is entirely based on students’ responses about what their School is doing is going to have some inherent problems. Most students simply lack enough breadth of experience of other Schools at any point in time to be able to judge effectively the performance of their own School. What is their point of comparison on what good performance looks like? 

Students are a good judge of their own educational attainment, but I’m less convinced they are a good judge of how advanced their School is in making a broader societal impact. Most of what they learn about how good their School is on these aspects will come from a single source … the School itself. Those Schools that talk internally a lot, and convincingly, about how great they are in making an impact will be much more likely to have students that think the School is indeed doing a good job on these criteria. 

I worry that rankings like this will end up assessing how good the internal communications are of the School rather than the underlying fundamentals. Don’t get me wrong, encouraging Schools to improve how they inform students about their societal impact is a good thing in itself. And students are a good source of information on many aspects of School performance that directly affect them. But the approach of PIR gets it wrong in my opinion when it comes to how we best assess and influence Business School behaviour in the context of impact. 

Let’s give students a strong voice in assessing the impact of business education on themselves, but as far as impact on the wider world goes, I would rather see assessments from external stakeholders, and more objective, comparable criteria.

Rankings are usually very popular, so how might the business education industry go about replacing them with something that equally engaged prospective students around the world?  What else might allow students to ascertain quality in a crowded market? 

I don’t think you can replace them. Even if you got rid of the current ones, others would spring up in their place because they are serving a student need. 

They don’t even need Schools to actively participate if they base their metrics on publicly available data. So eliminating them isn’t a plausible alternative, for me. But you can certainly change them or complement them with other types of assessments or ways of demonstrating quality, relevance and impact.  

Much like in every other industry, there has been a growth in the last few years of sites that aggregate students’ reviews and feedback on universities and courses, which I am sure play a growing part in informing students’ decisions. I’m kind of surprised that we have not yet seen a platform of this type successfully emerge to dominate the MBA market. But I’m sure it won’t be too long. 

In addition, I would expect more specialised rankings of business programmes to emerge that focus on specific topics, much like the sustainability ones. So, for example, are we going to see a Business School ranking focused specifically on entrepreneurship, or marketing, or finance? The more this kind of fragmentation occurs, the more opportunities there are for digging deeper and devising better metrics to measure what really matters. 

So, paradoxically, the solution to the problems of our current rankings might be to have more of them, not less. 

Andrew Crane is a Professor of Business and Society and Director of the Centre for Business, Organisations and Society in the School of Management at the University of Bath, UK. He is a leading author, researcher, educator and commentator on responsible business. Follow him at @ethicscrane.

This article is taken from Business Impact’s print magazine (edition: May-July 2021).

Posted on

Spearheading change and igniting innovation in an uncertain world

Chess board with a bronze pawn standing out. Symbolic to strategy, igniting innovation, spearheading forward with change.

Representatives of TBS Business School, ESADE, and Lagos Business School consider new approaches to management education and methods for meeting the changing needs of students and employers

Bringing together pioneers in the field of Business School innovation, Chair of AMBA & BGA Bodo Schlegelmilch led a discussion on the trends that decision makers in higher education need to anticipate at the fully online AMBA & BGA Global Conference 2021.

Representing Business Schools in Spain, Nigeria and France, panellists delved into digital transformation and the future of business education, disruption in the sector, and programmes and course delivery can evolve to reflect the changing needs of students and the future requirements of employers.

Panellists also outlined their post-Covid-19 predictions for how Business Schools must prepare themselves for the ‘new normal’ and future-proof themselves against continuing volatility.

For example, David Stolin, Professor of Finance at TBS Business School, described how his partnership with comedian, Sammy Obeid, has helped bring ‘novel perspectives’ to students and to innovate their learning. He explained that ‘collaborating with people outside the traditional Business School environment is very fruitful’, adding that the work had started prior to Covid-19, but that the pandemic had prompted him to find the most engaging audio-visual content.

The idea of ‘making education palatable and entertaining’ was noted by Schlegelmilch with regards to ESADE Business School’s work on the gamification of education.

Chris Ogbechie, Dean and Professor of Strategic Management at Lagos Business School, pointed out that one of the most significant implications of Covid-19 is that competition is no longer limited by geography. As a result, students have few restrictions when it comes to choosing programmes and related materials. Schools, such as his own have therefore been charged with finding new ways of staying relevant and capturing the attention of students outside the School’s traditional catchment areas.

Ivanka Visnjic, Director of the Institute for Innovation and Knowledge Management at ESADE Business School, noted that the industry is experiencing an acceleration in the adoption of technology, highlighting the use of video in content delivery, and increased competition in the learning marketplace. She explained that ‘Business Schools are competing with global brands, head-to-head, with no geographic boundaries’, and that this is forcing them to re-examine their value proposition for students. Visnjic used the analogy of online videos being less like a movie, and more like the theatre wherein, ‘students are co-producers’ of knowledge: relevant guest contributors can be invited to the stage to stimulate conversation, thanks to the new technologies moved to the forefront of learning by the pandemic.

Chair
Bodo Schlegelmilch, Chair, AMBA & BGA; Professor of Marketing, WU Vienna

Speakers
Chris Ogbechie, Dean and Professor of Strategic Management, Lagos Business School, Pan-Atlantic University, Nigeria
David Stolin, Professor of Finance, TBS Business School, France
Ivanka Visnjic, Director, Institute for Innovation and Knowledge Management, ESADE Business School, Spain

This article is adapted from a feature that originally appeared in Ambition – the magazine of the Association of MBAs.

Posted on

The skills you need to be a sustainable leader

A future leader sitting on a bench outside holding his phone with his briefcase on the side.

What traits do you need to be a ‘sustainable leader’? Alison Watson, Head of the School of Leadership and Management at Arden University, looks at qualities to embrace and develop, and outlines why businesses will need them

Our next generation of leaders are going to be under intense pressure to incorporate sustainable practices into everything they do. They will need to ensure that businesses around the globe are contributing to the social, environmental and economic issues impacting our planet. This article considers the skills that business graduates will need to develop to ensure they can become the sustainable leaders of the future.

Changing consumer demands require adaptation

Brands across a wide variety of sectors and fields are placing a huge focus on sustainability right now – and with good reason. With the effects of climate change becoming ever more prominent and a rising public awareness around the pitfalls of some of the elements of western life we take for granted, such as fast fashion and unnecessary food waste, many consumers are looking to buy goods and services from businesses that operate in ethical and sustainable ways.

In 2021, sustainability has become an issue that is impossible to ignore and businesses, in turn, have become compelled to act. The leaders of today must adapt quickly to meet this consumer demand – their businesses risk being left behind if they are unable to do so. 

Meanwhile, the development of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals has driven many businesses to think about how they can incorporate environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) goals within their organisations to become cleaner, greener and more ethically minded.

But what about the leaders of tomorrow? How will these changes impact them?

Leadership the world needs

The leaders of tomorrow will be expected to be holistic in their approach and make decisions based on sound moral and ethical principles. They’ll need to empower their teams and be visionaries about the ways in which we can revolutionise business to maximise sustainable and ethical practices. 

Put simply, they must become people who will drive change and help create a better world by addressing the core social, environmental and economic issues affecting our planet.

But what core traits will business graduates of today, and therefore the leaders of tomorrow, need to develop to be successful sustainable leaders?

Long-term-thinking visionaries

In business, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the now – and that’s understandable when you consider the multiple pressures our business leaders are under as part of their everyday roles. CEOs are typically working in fast-paced environments and often don’t have the short-term stability to make sound, long-term decisions on projects which won’t bring about an assured uplift in profits.

The sustainable leaders of tomorrow, however, will need to be able to align those short-term business objectives with longer-term, strategic plans that consider objectives related to economic health, the environment, people and society. 

At their core, sustainable leaders should have a comprehensive worldview which contemplates and understands humanity’s place as part of a global ecosystem. They will need to consider how we can minimise our impact on the world around us and ensure we are responsible stewards of the planet we call home.

Once they’ve identified their longer-term objectives, these individuals will need to be able to lead and influence others. Leaders will need to take others along on their journey in generating a commitment necessary to ensure everyone works towards a common set of objectives and goals.

As individuals with a strong moral compass, sustainable leaders must also focus on making decisions that are rooted in moral and ethical principles. They should also be able to back these decisions to the hilt – being responsible and accountable for the decisions they make and the outcomes that follow them.

Seekers of collaboration

The best sustainable leaders are expert collaborators who seek involvement in networks that can broaden their understanding of the business landscape and the way it impacts our world.

By engaging with other leaders from a range of specialisms and sectors, leaders can broaden their horizons and continually inform their developing worldview. It can help to adjust their perspectives and enable them to build strong, long-lasting relationships with key stakeholders. These networks will also reinforce an understanding of people across various cultures and backgrounds, allowing leaders to become keen advocates of diversity.

At the heart of this, sustainable leaders must have a deep understanding of people. They need to know how to empower and get the best from their teams while having a deep emotional and social intelligence which enables them to gauge the impact of their decisions on the people around them.

Effective educators

By its very nature, being a sustainable leader means embarking on a period of change within an organisation. The best leaders take others along on this journey with them, not only by influencing and inspiring, but also by educating their teams so that they understand the reasons behind the decisions being made.

When it comes to managing their people, sustainable leaders must focus on coaching and mentoring, rather than dishing out commands and giving direct instruction. They should empower their teams to learn for themselves and hone their abilities so that they are able to address core challenges themselves – exploring, learning, and devising actions which can help them to address the common challenges they face.

All of this will help ensure that they develop their business’ culture in line with the objectives they have set out, embedding sustainability within the corporate culture and giving their organisation the best possible chance of supporting the world’s sustainability agenda.

Alison Watson is Head of School of Leadership and Management at Arden University. Alison has a wealth of experience in business and management having worked for a number of large retailers as an operations and project manager. Her recent research interests focus on inclusion and encouraging wider access to higher education.

Posted on

The dark side of confidence

A line of eggs, and one egg is daydreaming to be king. This is symbolic to dreaming big, overconfidence and arrogance.

Reining in pride is a crucial part of business education, says Rita Trehan, co-author of Too Proud to Lead

Business Schools are magnets for talented, ambitious people who are used to achieving what they set out to do. Usually, these driven students go on to become emerging leaders in organisations and their hard work is rewarded with success. 

But too much success also presents possible pitfalls. After a string of accomplishments, young leaders may conclude that their successes prove that their decisions are always correct, and that their ideas are always the best. That attitude risks leading them to dismiss the ideas and perspectives of colleagues. The word for this is ‘hubris’, and it is equally dangerous for the person displaying the hubris as it is for those working with them.

The importance of well-functioning teams whose leaders prioritise co-operation, humility and open-mindedness are clearly demonstrated in my work as the head of a consultancy that helps CEOs and their organisations examine their culture. So, too, are the dangers of what happens when overconfidence is left to grow unchecked. Leaders’ overestimation of themselves and underestimation of others result in poorer outcomes and missed opportunities for both the business and the person who succumbed to hubris.

How hubris works and how to fight it

Too often in both corporate leadership and business education, we equate the drive to succeed with the pressure to succeed at all costs. The pressure on executives and students to achieve results can lead them to abandon any attempts to consult and co-operate. The pressure to meet and outperform, be it for a class or an earnings report, leads to short-termism and a relentless pursuit of success at the expense of broader considerations. 

This results in leaders being wrongly admired for their overconfidence, drive and single-mindedness. It rewards autocratic decision-making by CEOs and boards, and the forgoing of consultation and collaboration. In the short term, the results from this approach might look good and indicate that things are working. In the longer term, it is bound to lead to problems. Poor collaboration leads to siloing throughout the organisation, which can lead to the creation of fiefdoms in which data is not shared but wielded for power against ‘competitors’ within the company. It is not a recipe for long-term thriving.

Companies concerned with legacy, long-term survival and staying relevant are broadening their purpose. Profit and shareholder value are no longer sufficiently broad aims — businesses need to develop a purpose- and values-driven vision for the future. 

By doing so, they are democratising their purpose and creating ownership of it throughout the organisation. By adopting a shared vision, instead of a CEO-driven vision, companies will diffuse most of the risks of a skewed, hubristic approach taking root. 

The trend towards ‘purpose’ as the key driver of a business’s vision for the future is a healthy one and involves all relevant stakeholders naturally – the board, employees and suppliers, as well as the customers and communities. 

This broadening of responsibility creates a need for greater transparency and a wider set of obligations, which forces CEOs to adopt a more inclusive approach. In this way, ethical, equitable, environmental and societal values become a part of their decision-making.

Business Schools can take the lead

Hubris, like so many other issues, is easier to prevent than it is to reverse. That makes Business Schools the perfect place to curb overconfidence in the next generations of leaders. Fortunately for educators, teaching this is not an additional curricular goal to add to the heap — it can be integrated into the existing syllabus.

Not unlike other competencies in business education, teaching against hubris needs to include the development of critical-thinking skills and emphasise the values of collaboration, long-term thinking and the practice of welcoming alternative and opposing viewpoints. 

Stopping hubris requires: 

1. Being able to spot the warning signs — lack of collaboration, lack of humility and a lack of understanding (or willingness to understand) regarding the effects of their decisions.

2. Understanding why people fall victim to hubris, and which kinds of environments encourage it and how to avoid them.

3. Examining high-profile examples that illustrate the business consequences of hubris, both at the level of companies — such as WeWork, General Motors, Uber and Deutsche Bank — and at the individual level – among the executives whose overconfidence in their infallibility led to predictable failures that tarnish their otherwise brilliant careers. The lessons of history must be accompanied by education in anti-hubris values and skills to check overconfidence.

Cautionary tales

I doubt many readers would need more than a moment to think of several examples of hubris in business. There are cautionary tales among both individuals and entire companies: They’re blockbuster movies and 600-page biographies, or, in the case of Boeing, the subject of tragic TV news for weeks. 

Educators can use these examples as case studies. In the 2021 book, Too Proud To Lead, my co-authors and I look at four cautionary tales. The We Company, once again rebranded as WeWork, shows us, ironically, how its name was belied by a failure to embrace true openness and collaboration, while its investors’ unquestioning faith in Co-Founder, Adam Neumann, constitutes its own form of a complementary, enabling hubris.

While Neumann was overconfident in his own abilities, and instilled that in his acolytes and investors, the subject of our second case study, General Motors (GM), is overconfidence in the permanence of the status quo. GM’s failure to compete with Japanese automakers in the 1980s and 1990s cost it market share and reputation. After its recovery in the late 2000s, aided by the US taxpayer, GM seems once more to be underestimating a new wave of competition — this time from Tesla and the industry-wide move to electric vehicles.

Travis Kalanick’s Uber, meanwhile, shows how building an arrogant corporate culture infects and undermines the reputation and potential for long-term success of a business founded on a great idea. Kalanick, Uber’s Co-Founder and first CEO, oversaw incredible growth at Uber but there have been multiple accusations of sexual harassment and unethical competitive practices at Uber during his reign. An air of invincibility, from the top down, continues to haunt the company. 

These examples offer an indication of how some leaders – to their own detriment – close themselves off, assume the future will look the same as the present, and believe in their own invincibility. All these failures have their basis in some form of unchecked power, but none to the degree of our fourth case study, Deutsche Bank (Deutsche). 

Deutsche’s expansion in the 1990s led it to becoming the biggest bank in the world, with assets of more than $2 trillion USD. Instead of seeing themselves as stewards of capital, Deutsche’s leaders interpreted this growing pool of wealth as proof that they could launder money and manipulate markets. Its scandals have cost it revenue and reputation; it has since been eclipsed by other lenders in the EU, not to mention US and Chinese banks.

Focusing on a positive vision of leadership 

Hubris is not just a label for the defeated, to be appended to the loser as a badge of chastening. It is also important to discuss the hubris of iconic leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. What is there to be regretted in the careers of the most successfully acquisitive business figures of our time? Doesn’t their influence and wealth prove that their confidence was earned and that any arrogance, however unfortunate, didn’t get in the way of their success? Why shouldn’t students emulate their risk-taking and tenacity? 

In some cases, the backlash against their hubris is in progress: Domination at all costs appears to have put Facebook, Amazon and other tech masters, such as Google, en route to being broken up or otherwise subdued by governments around the world. In other cases, the damage is measured in what could have been: If Amazon was less focused on bending its commercial partners, employees and yes, even its customers to its will, who knows what else the business could achieve? Better pay for workers and better terms for suppliers would cost Amazon money, margin and profit to fix, but probably not enough to wound it or slow it down appreciably. It would also thin the ranks of Amazon boycotters and the desire of its critics to rein it in. 

Hubris, of course, thrives beyond the c-suites of the world’s largest corporations. Being ‘too proud to lead’ can cause the downfall of leaders in organisations of all sizes, as well as the downfall of lower-level managers and business students who have bought into their own early hype. Leaders of organisations you once worked for may come to mind. We do not need to dwell on these examples. Instead, we can focus on a positive vision of what kinds of leadership business education can hold up. Leaders who think through their purpose and align this to a wider purpose for their organisation are broadening their aims and aspirations to be more inclusive, more in touch with the wider world and more in tune with changing trends and sensibilities. These leaders regard this not as a demeaning activity, but an empowering one. With the emphasis on empathy, nurturing relationships, and collaboration, leaders are driven by group focus rather than self-focus, which leaves little opportunity for the self-centred nature of hubris to set in.

Holistically successful leaders do something that I call ‘walking the hubris tightrope’ – they attempt to balance ambition and drive with purpose and service. This art form is more of a process than a destination — avoiding hubris is not a box to be checked off but a value to be imparted. Whether educators choose to teach this will profoundly shape the next generation of business leaders.

Rita Trehan is a business transformation expert and the Founder of consultancy, Dare Worldwide. 
She is also the co-author of Too Proud to Lead: How Hubris Can Destroy Effective Leadership and What to Do About It (Bloomsbury Business, 2021). 

This article is taken from Business Impact’s print magazine (edition: May-July 2021).

Posted on

Do recruitment fairs still work in the new online Business School admissions landscape?

Online admissions landscape looking to future alone.

Recruitment fairs for prospective candidates have long held a command over Business Schools when it comes to accessing students. But are we now seeing repercussions for an admissions ecosystem that was already starting to change pre-Covid-19? Molly Innes investigates

Business School admissions teams have long relied on the recruitment (or admissions) fairs as an important avenue for attracting prospective candidates, travelling around the world to take up spots in crowded halls and network with students. But Covid-19 put a stop to that.

Many of these fairs moved online in early 2020, leaving many Schools to question whether the model still works, and if it’s worth stretching their budgets for a virtual room in an online admissions fair, where the number of attendees in some rooms can reportedly be as low as zero.

This article seeks to find out how industry insiders have dealt with problems such as low attendance, unsociable hours, and budget cuts, as well as how it’s changed their approach to admissions.

Do virtual admissions fairs work?

Recruitment fair companies were thrown into flux when the pandemic hit. They were forced to change their setups rapidly in time for the next round of admissions events. Petia Whitmore, Founder of My MBA Path, was Managing Director of The MBA Tour when Covid-19 hit – a role she left at the end of 2020. The MBA Tour is one of many recruitment fair providers – others include QS and Access MBA – that, pre-pandemic, held large in-person events across the world. But Whitmore says that she’d been encouraging the board at The MBA Tour to start providing more online events even before the pandemic.  

‘There’s nothing like a pandemic to force us to face the fact that the product needs to change,’ Whitmore says of the early days of Covid-19 lockdowns and shifting the recruitment model.

At the start of the pandemic, Schools had little choice but to sign up for online admissions events. It was ride the wave or be left behind.

‘It was a crucial time for Business School admissions to make sure we weren’t losing contact with students,’ says Kelly Sugrue, Assistant Dean of Admissions at Brandeis International Business School. ‘Fortunately, for most Business Schools, it was after what we would typically consider to be our recruiting season when fairs would be taking place. We were at the tail end of our cycle, and more trying to stay engaged with potential candidates.’

But that wasn’t the experience for all Schools. While many had long attended physical admissions fairs, when the format moved online, some were left wondering whether it worked at all. ‘The very first iterations of all of the virtual fairs sucked. All of them,’ says Lawrence Mur’ray II, Senior Assistant Dean at Gabelli School of Business, Fordham University. ‘Many tried to take the experience of an in-person event and just translate it right into a virtual event, and that doesn’t work.’

Alongside that, access to information on demand means that prospective candidates have had alternative ways of interacting with their target Schools for a while. And now that the initial shock has subsided and Business Schools are in the swing of a second full recruitment cycle since Covid-19 began, some are thinking twice about virtual admissions fairs.

Access vs. effectiveness: fairs dividing opinion

‘The problem with the fairs was that they were already declining in interest,’ says Sugrue, who points towards a rise in prospective candidates finding information online and engaging with Schools directly, rather than through a third-party vendor.

Sugrue adds that schools are now more wary of the format: ‘They might have tried it out of habit last year not knowing how else they would reach students, but I think unfortunately the fairs were not productive in that sense.’

However, there are mixed opinions across the Business School admissions landscape. Barbara Coward, MBA admissions consultant and one of LinkedIn’s top 10 voices in education for 2020, says that while the students she works with aren’t necessarily gearing up for recruitment fairs, they do serve a strong purpose. ‘For the Schools, fairs can help them find more talent, have more touch points, and go to areas they might not usually have had access to,’ she says. ‘In-person fairs would go to the big cities, but not the smaller towns. As a result, somebody from Salzburg, for example, who wants to do an MBA but might not want to travel to a big city for an event, has easier access online. I do think it’s a way to uncover, discover, and tap into more talent that would otherwise go unnoticed.’

Barbara’s comment points to the wider benefit of virtual fairs: accessibility. Although the virtual fair model might not be 100% effective for all Schools, from a candidate perspective it opens up the possibility of interacting with Schools they previously wouldn’t have had access to.

In 2020, the MBA Tour ran 41 virtual events in the summer and fall season, with 28,000 registrations and 11,000 attendees. ‘Because geographical travel limitations no longer existed, candidates could attend from anywhere in the world, allowing Schools to meet more candidates and a richer diversity of candidates at a single event,’ says Danielle Boland, current Managing Director of The MBA Tour.

But it hasn’t always been straightforward for some schools to secure attendees for their individual rooms at virtual recruitment fairs. ‘I found that the bigger-branded Schools’ online rooms were always packed, whereas Schools perhaps not as well recognised, but potentially a good fit for certain candidates, were left empty for longer periods of time,’ one Business School professional wishing to remain anonymous confided.

Measuring the ROI of an admissions fair

For the admissions team at Maastricht School of Management (MSM), the move online gave an opportunity to stay in contact with candidates in a way that many hadn’t experienced before – but that doesn’t mean all channels were effective. ‘From our end, we did specific zoom meetings and kept in regular contact with students that were already in the pipeline,’ says Inka Diddens, Recruitment Officer at MSM. ‘The feedback we got from them was that they really appreciated us taking their worries away.’

But when it comes to ‘early-funnel’ prospective candidates, MSM has found the process of online events trickier to navigate. ‘It’s been more challenging. With specific markets, we noticed things like a worse internet connection, which means we can’t do video calls, or there are delays,’ says Diddens, before adding: ‘There have been no shows too, more no shows than when we were face-to-face. That candidates don’t show up, it’s just a different commitment from their side.’

While the candidates’ approach may be different, the costs aren’t necessarily lower for an online event, leaving some admissions staff to question the return on investment (ROI) for them, when compared to an in-person event.

‘We were looking at fall [autumn] events and in some cases they were more expensive than they’d previously been in person,” said Sugrue. ‘I found it astounding, especially when they were less productive in terms of candidate lead generation.’

Rodrigo Malta, Managing Director of MBA Recruitment and Admissions at McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, says the potential ROI and expectations of an online fair were not the same as that of an in-person event for his School. ‘Our goals for virtual affairs were different. So for us, we had the ROI we expected, because we didn’t expect the same type of event,’ he says.

‘There were some that were poorly attended, and a waste of time, but there were some virtual fairs where we had a strong ROI, but it was a different kind of ROI. It was top of the funnel, building leads versus the deeper engagement and relationship building which we’d seen in the past.’

Navigating the timezone problem

In-person fairs put everyone in the same physical space, but virtual events throw up an entirely new challenge for both prospective candidates and admissions staff – timezones. Navigating this issue when staff and students are dialling in from around the world has been a serious issue for some.

One prospective candidate, Cecilia, an engineering student in Argentina, found that balancing her studies while looking to join online events was unmanageable. ‘I found they didn’t match my timezone when I was looking,’ she says – although it is worth noting that Cecilia was early in the admissions pipeline.

Schools struggled with timezone problems too, with admissions staff often having to wake up exceptionally early or be active late at night, hours potentially conducive to mental health and burnout issues among staff. ‘We had events that were at one o’clock in the morning; it was not good.’ says Mur’ray. However, Mur’ray feels that candidate engagement was improved with his School’s own events: ‘I think most of the prospective candidates appreciated the fact that we could now specialise or tailor our activities to their interests.’ The same was the case for MSM, which reports being able to keep in contact with onboarding candidates in a much more personal way than they’d had the allowance for previously.

Whitmore, meanwhile, suggests that the timezone issue isn’t much different from when recruiters are on the road for in-person events. ‘You work mornings and evenings, you’re up at 3am to catch a flight, from Beijing to Shanghai for example, you work weekends because the events are very often on weekends, or evenings when they’re in person because you’re not going to do them in the middle of the day when the candidates are at work,’ she says.

There are also ways around timezone differences. ‘We find that online events we hold or participate in are best when they work for multiple timezones,’ says Sara Vanos, Marketing Director for MBA Programmes at HEC Paris.  

Schools running their own events

Recruitment fairs pre-Covid-19 offered Schools the chance to connect with a range of students, with a clearer indication of who would be present from a candidate perspective. There was also increased opportunity for candidate interaction – if a candidate was queuing for one School’s stand, admissions staff at different desks had a chance to grab their attention while they were waiting.

However, Business Schools have now been running more of their own events as a way to ensure they’re both in contact with candidates across the funnel, and able to claw back some of their budget which goes on paying fees to a third-party vendor. ‘Budgets were already being slashed even before Covid-19, so this accelerated these changes,’ says Mur’ray, adding that his School has seen a positive response from running its own events. ‘The legacy vendors still tried to make it the same as in person. But when we host our own events, we don’t have to do that at all.’ The result, according to Mur’ray, is that its incoming MBA intake is more international than it was before the pandemic.  

Online events run by Schools have included everything from one-to-one meetings with candidates, to wider talks and tailored webinars; Schools have had the power to leverage their in-house capabilities and experiment more, at a lower cost.

‘We’ve definitely done less partner events, because we’re able to host our own virtual events pretty easily, and are fortunate to have a pretty robust prospective funnel,’ says Malta. ‘We looked to partner events to add to our top-of-funnel efforts and complement leads we didn’t necessarily have. We did less partner events, but when we did them, they were very targeted,’ he added.

It’s tricky to see where the future is headed for online Business School recruitment, and what impact it will have further down the line. The pandemic upturned the sector, and perhaps we are now seeing the repercussions.

‘Due to the overwhelming success of The MBA Tour’s virtual events in 2020 (and in response to travel restrictions), we have continued to offer the virtual series in 2021 and expect it to remain a critical part of our offerings into 2022 and beyond,’ Boland says.

But will Schools continue to attend now they see what they can achieve in-house? ‘We don’t need them like we did before,’ suggests Mur’ray.

Molly Innes is currently a Features Writer at Little Black Book. She previously worked at Business Insider, and at BusinessBecause covering MBAs and business education. Her freelance work includes features for admissions platform, Libereka, and the Guardian. 

Posted on

Transforming learning into business impact

A kid with short black afro hair punching into the sky. The young kid is in a blue and gold superhero outfit with a mask, cap and a lightning bolt icon on his t-shirt. This is to symbolise transformation and impact.

Tomorrow’s world requires impactful leadership. Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Ignacio de la Vega outlines four areas of focus for business educators and 10 top leadership skills that they should seek to develop in their cohorts

In a session of the AMBA & BGA Global Conference 2021 that was streamed live from Mexico, Ignacio de la Vega, Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, Faculty and Internationalisation at Tecnológico de Monterrey, discussed his research on the topic of transforming learning into business impact.

De la Vega explained that capitalism isn’t sufficient to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, or even to mitigate its impact, arguing that it is up to all of us to work towards improvement and to harness the positives of the pandemic’s disruption. For example, he argued that the pandemic has helped the ‘world to heal’ and that people’s confinement within their homes has improved the planet’s environmental health, due to a reduction in pollution and waste.

‘The future started many years ago and the pandemic accelerated this disruption,’ he said. For Business Schools and many other educational organisations, the disruption has led to a ‘new model’ of learning during Covid-19, with programmes going fully online. However, this new approach has not been embraced by all, due to a number that include a lack of the appropriate equipment, funding and access to the internet.

De la Vega believes that to build the leaders of the future business educators must have a real purpose and impact on societies and communities through technology, science and research, while also keeping up to speed with trends. For him, four key areas of focus stand out:

  • Building new skillsets and mindsets
  • Fostering lifelong learning
  • Democratising executive (and all) education
  • Contributing to finding solutions to the world’s ‘wicked’ problems

10 top leadership skills for the future

Summing up the session, de la Vega looked ahead to 2025 and predicted that 10 key skills will become paramount for our leaders of the future:

  1. Analytical thinking and innovation
  2. Active learning and learning strategies
  3. Complex problem-solving
  4. Critical thinking and analysis
  5. Creativity, originality and initiative
  6. Leadership and social influence
  7. Technology use, monitoring and control
  8. Technology design and programming
  9. Resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility
  10. Reasoning, problem-solving
    and ideation

For business educators, the biggest challenge will be to keep these at the forefront of their minds and to infuse them into the DNA of their Business Schools, he believes.

Ignacio de la Vega is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, Faculty and Internationalisation at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico. He also leads its entrepreneurship centre (Instituto de Emprendimiento Eugenio Garza Lagüera). Previously, he served as Dean of EGADE Business School and Dean of the Undergraduate Business School at Tecnológico de Monterrey.

This article is adapted from a feature that originally appeared in Ambition – the magazine of the Association of MBAs.

Facebook-f Linkedin-in
About
For StudentS & Graduates
For Business SchoolS
For Sponsors
Contact and Support
Copyright 2018 BGA | Designed by Favoured
Translate »