I had an article published in the “Soapbox” column of the higher educational section of the Financial Times recently. It is a little long, but I think it is important that business schools teach the right stuff to help employees and organizations to survive the trauma of layoffs and heal the wounds. Here are excerpts of that article:
Management as a profession of scientific, clear, and antiseptic methodology was a myth in the early days of Fredrick Taylor’s “Scientific Management,” and is totally irrelevant to the needs of today’s organizations. Many new managers, particularly newly minted, inexperienced MBA’s and undergraduate business majors come to the business world with the expectation that it is a place of rationality, subject to objective analysis and thoughtful, quantitatively based decision making. This is somewhat a result of their own naiveté, but more from being subjected to quantitatively biased curriculum and the teaching of management professors who have spent their entire lives in classrooms – from grade school through graduate school, then into the role of teacher – and have never actually worked in a business. Those business professors who have industry experience, too often gained it during the “good old days” when things were more predictable and people were seen as long term assets to be nurtured and developed over a career as opposed to the current paradigm of people as costs to be reduced. Here are three things business schools need to do in order to be relevant to today’s business organizations.
- Move beyond the traditional – usually fragmented and disliked – organizational behavior course, into actually teaching the two core competencies increasingly valued in today’s business environment: self-awareness and interpersonal skills. Faculty must have the ability to help students examine their motivational patterns, reduce their blind spots, and develop and practice coaching, and transition facilitation skills. This requires getting past academic turf issues and partnering with disciplines such as psychology and sociology as well as a much more experiential pedagogy including internships and practicums.
- Rectify the lopsided imbalance of head skills with an equal dose of heart skills. As safe and sterile as it may seem, managers can’t analyze people out of their pain. They need to connect with them at the heart and not the head. When employees are in the midst of a crisis of identity and purpose, they are not interested in strategic analysis, demand curves, or decision trees. They need “high touch, low tech.”
- Find faculty who have the ability and desire to understand and deal with the real issues faced by organizations. Business organizations are struggling to come to grips with a new, short term, provisional, psychological employment contract. Unfortunately, tenured, research oriented, quantitatively focused, business school faculty members are often unable to generate the necessary empathy and requisite transition facilitation skills to be of much help to students who will face this “real world.”
If business schools are to avoid the fate of dinosaurs and automobile manufactures, they need to equip their students with the skills and perspectives that will be of value to today’s business organizations. The untenable alternative is to keep their insular, tenured, quantitatively orientated, analytical heads in the sand, and not even have the visibility to see the world passing them by.
