Category: sustainability

At the Business Graduates Association, we’re passionate about supporting  Business Schools in developing future leaders. The BGA accreditation is focused on positively impacting students, communities and the economy. Our fastest-growing network in business education is committed to encouraging growth, both personally and professionally. 

Here, we share our top tips on how organisations can work to develop effective leaders, from establishing procedures for decision-making to improving communication skills. 

If you would like to learn more about how a Business School membership can enable you to gain a competitive edge in developing future leaders, please get in touch and email the membership director below. 

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What Makes a Good Leader? 

During a student’s time at a Business School, they’re likely to learn a lot about the importance of becoming a successful leader – but what does that really mean? 

Many professionals argue that the most important leadership qualities can be both inherited and learned. Effective leaders don’t have to hold positions of power, just as there are many different types of people, there are also numerous styles of leadership. 

At the Business Graduates Association, we believe a good leader should possess a number of qualities, including:

• Open-mindedness
• Flexibility
• Dependability
• Self-awareness
• Respect
• Adaptability
• Innovation 

Recognising the responsibility held by Business Schools in developing future leaders is crucial to ensuring individuals can reach their full potential both during and after their studies.

How to Develop Effective Leaders

A professional can’t expect to advance to the top of their field without a willingness to perfect their skill set. Some people are natural-born leaders, but anyone can develop the skills needed to undertake a successful leadership role. 

The best leaders develop leaders. Below, we’ve put together a list of some of the key strategies Business Schools can adopt in order to ensure they’re doing all they can to develop efficient future leaders. This includes offering consistent mentoring and empowering individuals to reach their full potential.  

• Encourage Individuals to Never Stop Learning 

The most effective way to become a good leader is by consistently exposing yourself to new things. 

Learning is a crucial tool, no matter what stage of life you’re in. To ensure that you’re always at the top of your game and are prepared for future challenges, never stop being inquisitive.  

• Empower Students & Graduates

It’s impossible to be the best at everything. At the Business Graduates Association, we’re passionate about empowering students and graduates, helping them to recognise their strengths and improve on their weaknesses. 

Organisations can work to develop future leaders by empowering individuals, trusting their abilities and vocalising their successes. 

• Offer Consistent Mentoring

Aspiring leaders should always feel as though there is someone they can turn to for guidance and support. 

Organisations should appoint mentors and work to develop a structured programme that focuses on building trusting, strong relationships. Provide constructive feedback, offering both praise and advice to help individuals reach their full potential. 

BGA Student and Graduate Membership offers students and graduates of a BGA member School, access to unmatched career development services. From CV-building services to skill assessments, individuals can assess their career path, and learn about what employers want. If you want to check if your School is a member with us, visit here, and if you would like to learn more about the benefits of Student and Graduate Membership, click here. 

• Challenge Them 

Future leaders are expert problem solvers. One of the most effective teaching methods an institution can adopt is enabling students to reveal their capabilities by overcoming challenges. 

As well as developing their critical thinking skills, individuals can also enhance their knowledge when faced with unfamiliar situations. 

The most effective leaders are confident in their abilities. In order to develop confidence in your abilities, you must first overcome challenges. Problem-solving is an excellent way to boost self-esteem, enabling individuals to realise their full potential. 

• Encourage Business Exposure

In order to enable students and graduates to recognise their potential as future leaders, it’s crucial that they are exposed to an array of business leaders. This will enable them to gain a greater understanding of the industry, while also realising the importance of networking with like-minded individuals and forming valuable connections. 

The Best Leaders Develop Leaders

As an educational institution, employer or mentor, leadership development is a crucial aspect of management. As a figurehead, it’s your duty to set a steadfast example for future leaders. At the Business Graduates Association, we strive to enhance a Business School’s readiness to meet future employer demands. 

If you would like to find out more about how Business School Membership could help to increase student recruitment numbers and ensure you’re developing the next generation of business leaders, please get in touch and email the membership director below.

Contact us here

The distinction between legitimacy and legality, the UN’s SDGs as a code of ethics, knowledge transfer and walking the talk on sustainability – all of these ideas were discussed at a recent BGA workshop attended by business school practitioners where the need to change mindset was a common thread. This is true not just for those working and studying at business schools, but also for the wider society, particularly in the way business schools are perceived by others.

Teaching the SDGs in totality

Ali Awni, a professor of practice and director at The John D Gerhart Center for Philanthropy, Civic Engagement and Responsible Business at the American University in Cairo (AUC), outlined the value of positioning the UN SDGs as an all-encompassing set of principles to follow.

“A school has to stress that the SDGs are taught in totality. You have to look at the SDGs as a code of ethics – you cannot really divide it and say I’m going to do one and ignore 10. You have to have a minimum acceptability performance across them all.”

Awni also pointed to India’s new National Education Policy as an example of what needs to change in business education. The policy talks, in his words, of the need to “reorient the education system from one focused on sorting top talent and identifying top talent students to one that is focused on human development that can improve learning for all.”

“Think about it,” he went on to explain. “Education is about sorting the top talent. It’s looking for the gold medallists. We’re not trying to spread sports to every facet of society and there is never any mention of human development that can improve learning for all.

“Innovations do not serve the base of the pyramid, with few exceptions. We don’t celebrate frugal innovation and grassroots innovation because they tend to be more pragmatic and open source. This makes development and sustainability horizontal and not vertical, which requires a realistic and multi-disciplinary approach.

“In my view, schools of business can play a major role in changing and creating the mindsets of graduates who can go out and change their communities. Once you have enough of a critical mass, then it becomes a culture and a movement.”

Disrupting conventional thinking

How can you foster the conditions in which movements spring? For Henley Business School Africa’s dean and director, Jon Foster-Pedley, it starts with challenging schools to go further in their actions on sustainability and disrupting conventional thinking.

“I want to think about the difference between legality and legitimacy,” Foster-Pedley said. “Extinction Rebellion says that the science is clear. We’re definitely heading towards catastrophic climate change, or feeling it already, and the government and wider society is mainly ignoring this. Therefore, we have to do something about it.

“Where should business schools sit here? Of course, being seen to be the provocateurs or activists is very uncomfortable. In fact, many people would say it’s absolutely not what business schools would do, but I would question that now. 

“What sort of ethics do we need to deal with? Do you want to build a world where you know our children are, collectively, going to grow up in a boiling planet with fewer species and less opportunity?

“If we want to really engage with sustainability in business schools, we have to not just study and talk about this, we also have to integrate these thoughts like DNA into the heart of our activities and be prepared to challenge some of our most sacred thoughts.”

Ensuring students are “awake to what’s happening”

Jane Usher, head of department at Milpark Business School, also questioned whether current approaches were sufficient, arguing that business schools must “walk the talk” on sustainability in their operations and that their faculty members should do the same.

“Business schools have a very important role to play in promoting awareness and finding innovative ways to enable their students to embrace specific aspects of sustainability. It is threaded throughout the curricula of our schools in South Africa, but I wonder if we are doing enough.”

Usher then outlined Milpark’s current teaching approach in this regard. “We have a module on business ethics and corporate governance and a module specifically on social responsibility and environmental management. All of our postgraduate and MBA students do these foundational modules and they underpin all the modules that come after that.

“We want to ensure that students have a theoretical understanding and are able to analyse corporate social responsibility issues. They also need to be able to understand that current forms of economic activity are either unsustainable or, at least, will be subject to a wider raft of ethical social environmental constraints in the future. They need to be forward-looking and they need to be awake to what’s happening in their communities and localities.

“The most important element in this [social responsibility and environmental management] module is that students need to identify a charity within their community who is willing to work with them. Students learn what is happening and what is required from the charities and then find ways of assisting them to ensure that they are sustainable, that they can receive funding and that they can continue to have an impact within their local community… We’ve seen students who have graduated and still go back to the charity.”

Mutually beneficial collaborations

The importance of knowledge transfer for business schools in developing and furthering sustainability solutions was discussed by Helmi Hammami, a professor of finance and accounting at Rennes School of Business.

Hammami began by drawing on a Cambridge University definition that, “knowledge transfer is a term used to encompass a very broad range of activities to support mutually beneficial collaborations between universities, businesses and the public sector.”

“We cannot do innovation by just sitting in our offices. Innovation is about knowledge transfer,” he then explained. “There is a myriad of channels [through which we can] share knowledge. First, we have our students – we train our students, they go for internships and then they are on the job market. These are very good ways to disseminate the knowledge that we create in schools/universities, training and workshops.

“Then you have research projects and publications that serve the community, businesses and society. Following this, you have consultancy, new business creation and community engagement.  These are channels we can transfer knowledge to outside the boundaries of our organisations. This is what we call the ‘knowledge triangle’ – a model that makes the links between research, higher education and business.”

Hammami, a senior advisor to the Rennes School of Business dean on knowledge transfer, ended by saying that the process is not without its challenges. Here, he returned to the central theme of the need to shift mindsets, albeit of those outside the business school sector in this instance. “Business schools are not always seen as hubs of knowledge creation. There is a misperception about what such schools do, with narratives that they live in a bubble that is disconnected from the reality of society and business needs.”

This event forms part of a series of capacity-building workshops organised by the Business Graduates Association (BGA) across the world. The next workshop takes place on Thursday 16 February 2023 in Berlin, Germany. Learn more here.

Business schools play a vital role in preparing students for future employment by giving them the tools and skills needed to succeed in their professional lives.

While this is a key component to improving the future, and building more awareness to responsible management, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and sustainability. It ultimately lies within the business school to lead the way by trendsetting, innovating and evolving to the needs of our planet and to develop leaders of the future.

At the AMBA & BGA Global Conference 2022, Bodo Schlegelmilch, Chair of AMBA & BGA’s Board of Trustees, was joined by Josep Franch, Dean of ESADE Business School, Ramon Llull University, Clara Raposo, Dean of ISEG Lisbon School of Economics and Management, and Himanshu Rai, Director of the Indian Institute of Management Indore, to outline the main issues surrounding CSR, climate change and sustainability. They also discussed how, as a global community of business educators, we need to act collectively – and quickly – to future-proof leaders.

Schlegelmilch described the era into which business education is moving as a “vortex”. He explained: “We have so many developments going on, and they’re all connected to each other. We need to deliver different contexts.”

“We have a very different geographical footprint, but we have competitors coming in from different countries. We need to focus on the social impact we make, and how new priorities are shaping business schools, and we need to think about our purposes as business educators.”

Stimulating the discussion, Schlegelmilch asked the panellists whether they were optimistic about what business schools were achieving in terms of developing responsible leaders.

Raposo explained: “I think we are doing a better job than five years ago. From my experience, we are doing a lot. We are on the right path, but we need to take sustainability as an objective into the mission of our schools. The pandemic has shown how we are interrelated – but we must pass the message to all our students, so they can relate the work they do to the impact they have.

“We have to take sustainability seriously – talk about it and make it part of the culture of the school. Our students must be open-minded and understand the impact they have on others.

“Equally, faculty have to be aware of how their teaching and research contributes to sustainability, within a structure of motivation. We need to refocus our research and intellect to understand the big challenges the world is facing – and pass it on in the curricula.”

Picking up the conversation, Rai moved to suggest what business education could do better. “Five years back, we were paying lip service to terms such as sustainability,” he said. “We never practised what we preached. There is a lot of effort going in, but a lot more that can be done. We need to move beyond empathy and move to compassion, and this can only be done through experiential learning.”

Concluding the debate, and commenting on the pressure on business schools to adapt MBA programmes or to make them shorter, Franch added: “The right word here is ‘transformation’. You can be under pressure, but [schools] need to have an identity. I couldn’t care less about the threat of ‘three-month MBAs’ – that’s not my game. [My concern is that] business schools need to change attitudes.

“We have courses on sustainability and there is an urgency around including sustainability modules for rankings, but sustainability must be at the core of all courses – from marketing to finance. We must redesign our core and change attitudes at our schools. My recommendation is that students are a tremendous force for change in your organisation. Use them. You need to have a vision, change attitudes and focus on transformation.”

This article has been adapted from one which originally appeared in the July/August 2022 edition of Ambition, the magazine of the Association of MBAs (AMBA).

Runaway climate change and rampant inequality are ravaging the world. Who will lead us to a better future?

These massive challenges – and shifts, including pandemics, resource pressures, and shrinking biodiversity – threaten our existence. Megatrends, such as the push for a clean economy and the unprecedented focus on diversity and inclusion, offer exciting opportunities to heal the world and prosper. But governments cannot do this alone, and business must step up.

Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever and co-author of Net Positive explained how businesses and business schools can profit from fixing the world’s problems together, in discussion with AMBA & BGA CEO Andrew Main Wilson at the AMBA & BGA Global Conference 2022.

Given the crises in the world today, Main Wilson asked Polman about his own observations around the climate emergency. “The sense of urgency has never been higher,” said Polman. “The UK Met Office has predicted that we’ll pass 1.5 degrees of climate change in the next five years. Our current projection is a 14% increase of carbon emissions [by 2050]. Since Covid, we have seen an increase in climate action. [The pandemic gave us] a pause and a moment of reflection, and this led to a change in trajectory, which I think is here to stay.

“In 2021 alone, we added 30% more renewable power in Europe. Companies are moving and making commitments on science-based targets, which is important. We are at the point at which the cost of not acting is higher than the cost of acting. People are moving rapidly from seeing climate action as ‘risk mitigation’ to seizing an opportunity.”

But Polman added: “There are forces at play that are holding us back. Food and energy prices are holding us back. There is a part of government and even business that wants to go back to the ‘old world’ and get more fossil fuels from the ground.

We have to fight against this, because it would be a disaster. On food security, there are people who want to cut more forest to respond to the food crisis. We need to resist this and accelerate the transformation to more regenerative agriculture. We need to work together to deal with these global issues. We are growing apart – and this will be the biggest challenge, because we must work together as citizens of planet Earth.”

Polman moved to discuss the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which was designed to decouple growth of business from environmental impact, and to increase positive social impact.

“It is a philosophy through which we take responsibility for our total handprint in society,” he said. “We do not think companies can outsource their value chain and their responsibilities. Profit through purpose is very possible. Our purpose [at Unilever] was to make sustainable living commonplace, and this is important because it gave direction to the company and provided a sense of certainty. We wanted to be driven by impact, while being profitable.

“At Unilever, our engagement went up; our employer brand went up; our resilience and our value chain went up; our innovation started to increase – and all of this translates into better results. We truly behaved like billionaires – through supporting billions of people – and this is what counts. It starts with courage. Courage and commitment are vital. If science says we must cut carbon by 30%, we must make that commitment. But it takes courage to work with government to drive these commitments and the change.

“Ask yourself two very simple questions: ‘Am I solving the world’s problems or creating them?’ and ‘Is the world better off because my organisation is in it?’.”

Moving on to address the delegation of business school deans directly, Polman said: “Management education plays an incredibly important role in galvanising companies and broader society. You have to educate future leaders to do this. We are short of both leaders and trees. Business education is the most followed [academic area] in the world, and when people enter into it, they are still lofty in their goals and keen to make a difference in the world. When they leave, research shows, they want to make [more money].

“Somehow, we are turning wonderful human beings into monsters. This is a crisis of greed, selfishness, and apathy. It’s so important that we create these leaders who are systemic thinkers, driven by a sense of purpose, who embrace the power of partnership, and can think a little bit broader than the narrow definition of a business school, or maximisation of profits. They need to understand the power of humanity and taking care of our human capital. 

“Management education needs a drastic change – and not a day too soon if we want to achieve these sustainable development goals. Rankings are still too based on starting salaries; research is valued in a way that makes co-operation difficult.”

Concluding the session, Polman said: “Two-thirds of students want to learn more about sustainability, and want it integrated into their programmes; 80% of students want to work for companies that use environmental practices. Frankly, universities are not responding at the level we need. Your own research shows that the bulk of [students] at your institutions recognise the importance of climate change, but only one third of Schools have [climate change] integrated in their curriculum – and it is not embedded in the whole learning experiences. I have to say there is still more work to be done at the academic level.”

This article has been adapted from one which originally appeared in the July/August 2022 edition of Ambition, the magazine of the Association of MBAs (AMBA).

Main image credit: Héctor J Rivas on Unsplash