MBA Leadership

Leadership Development in MBA Programmes Roger Gill, PhD, Director, Research Centre for Leadership Studies, The Leadership Trust Foundation, and Visiting Professor, University of Strathclyde Graduate School of Business

Leadership Development in MBA Programmes Roger Gill University of Strathclyde Graduate School of Business

Where does “leadership” fit in the MBA curriculum in business schools? What is the purpose of a leadership course in an MBA programme? And can leadership be “taught” anyway? These are questions I frequently have to confront in my role as a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde Graduate School of Business and programme director for the MBA with a Specialism in Leadership Studies run jointly by Strathclyde and The Leadership Trust Foundation. In the first issue of Business Leadership Review in April 2004, Jonathan Gosling argued that “leadership development within management education should develop the ‘character’, integrity, skills and discursive intelligence necessary for the responsible exercise of power”.1 Who would argue with this? But the problem is more about how such characteristics of leadership can be developed, particularly within the constraints of an MBA programme, in which business and management functions compete with one another for classroom time and academic credits. Too few MBA programmes require leadership to be studied, practised or developed in any depth. At worst leadership does not exist in the MBA curriculum at all. Almost as bad is where it is buried in an organisational behaviour course, typically occupying a mere half-day or evening session (three hours). A significant improvement is where it is an elective course occupying, say, 20 hours. Better still is where it is a required course, alongside marketing, finance, strategy, organisational behaviour, etc. But, even then, leadership may be regarded, as Gosling says, as a “functional” specialism in business schools – as a silo like marketing, finance or operations. Leadership so far has not gained the academic credentials of subjects like medicine, law and philosophy, and that subjects like psychology for a long time struggled to achieve in universities. Nevertheless, progress has been made. For example, the MBA in Leadership Studies at Strathclyde and The Leadership Trust recognises the need for future senior and chief executives in the public and private sectors to have a deep understanding of leadership and a wide set of well-developed leadership skills built upon a solid foundation of business and management theory and practice. It is leadership without doubt that makes the crucial difference in being more or less effective as a manager, director or CEO. It is not necessarily, or even usually, functional knowledge and skills that do so, nor “experience” or general intelligence (commonly known as IQ), especially at the top in organisations. Top executives are not necessarily more “intelligent” than executives lower down the hierarchy. My five-year review of the leadership literature has

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Leadership Development in MBA Programmes Roger Gill, PhD, Director, Research Centre for Leadership Studies, The Leadership Trust Foundation, and Visiting Professor, University of Strathclyde Graduate School of Business

led me to conclude that the leadership role requires us to operate on several different (but related) dimensions: the cognitive, the emotional, the spiritual, and the behavioural.2 Effective leadership certainly requires the cognitive skills of perception, analysis, synthesis, reasoning, intuition, imagination, judgement and decision making (IQ), but it also requires emotional intelligence (EQ) - the ability to understand the feelings and needs of oneself and others, to display self-control and self-confidence (but not arrogance or conceit), and to use interpersonal skills to respond to others’ feelings and needs in appropriate ways. To paraphrase EQ guru Daniel Goleman: high IQ makes you a good English teacher; adding high EQ makes you head of the English Department; high IQ makes you a brilliant financial analyst; adding high EQ makes you CEO.3 Warren Bennis, one of the world’s foremost thinkers and writers in the field of leadership, concurs: “…emotional intelligence is much more powerful than IQ in determining who emerges as a leader. IQ is a threshold competence. You need it, but it doesn’t make you a star. Emotional intelligence can.”4 Recent thinking about leadership has taken us into the spiritual dimension of life and work. The key idea here is that people need to have meaning and value in their life and work, for example doing something that makes a positive difference to other people’s well-being. Meaning and value depend very much on the beliefs and values that underlie our motives, which in turn drive our behaviour. Effective leadership therefore entails understanding this and providing meaning and value in the work that people do (this is spiritual intelligence, or SQ). And effective leadership also requires not only knowledge of what to do and how and when to do it, but also behavioural skills – the ability actually to do it, for example to use inspirational language, listen actively for understanding, or use the participative style of leadership to achieve consensus. My research has also revealed five key areas of effective leadership as a step towards an integrative or general model.5 Effective leadership is characterised by: Vision and mission – defining and communicating a meaningful and attractive vision of the future and a mission or purpose through which the group (or organisation or nation) will pursue it. Shared values – identifying, displaying and reinforcing values that group members share and that inform and support the vision and mission. Strategy – developing, getting commitment to, and implementing rational (“intelligent”) strategies to pursue the vision and mission and that reflect shared values.

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Leadership Development in MBA Programmes Roger Gill, PhD, Director, Research Centre for Leadership Studies, The Leadership Trust Foundation, and Visiting Professor, University of Strathclyde Graduate School of Business

Empowerment – empowering people to be able to do what needs to be done by giving them the self-awareness, knowledge, skills, authority, freedom, resources and opportunity to manage themselves. Motivation, influence and inspiration – motivating, influencing and inspiring people to want to do what needs to be done. Jonathan Gosling suggests that leadership development has been dominated by “people skills”.6 Their development, in areas like coaching and teambuilding (aspects of empowerment), influencing skills, responding positively to people’s needs and wants, and the inspirational use of language, is rightly part of any MBA programme. But leadership also requires vision, a strong sense of mission or purpose, the ability to develop a sense of community based on shared values, all of which can provide the meaning and value in what people do at work, and – usually overlooked in the organisational behaviour or psychological literature and associated “teaching” – the development and implementation of strategies – the ways and means of pursuing the vision and mission that is consistent with shared values. Can leadership be taught? Leadership, like any set of skills, cannot be taught, but it can be learned and developed. “Teaching” a course on leadership therefore means providing the opportunity for participants to acquire the necessary knowledge and understanding of human behaviour – this is the “science” of leadership – and the opportunity to practise and develop the required skills through action learning or experiential learning. Again, like any skill set, leadership requires wisdom – the understanding of when and how to use the wide range of skills that constitute leadership. This is the “art” of leadership. At the very least, full-time MBA programmes can teach “about” leadership – about its cognitive, emotional, spiritual and behavioural dimensions and the five key elements described above – and provide a limited opportunity for skill development through experiential learning. Executive MBA programmes, run part-time or on a modular basis, where participants are in full-time work, on the other hand also provide the unique opportunity for participants to address real leadership issues in their contexts. In these programmes, participants can and should have the opportunity to present and reflect on their current and anticipated future challenges, explore how to handle them (using leadership theory) and, through action learning in the workplace, put ideas into practice, learn from their experience through feedback and coaching, and, as a result, become outstanding leaders. Practice makes perfect – when we do the right thing. If you would like to comment on this article, please email [email protected]

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Leadership Development in MBA Programmes Roger Gill, PhD, Director, Research Centre for Leadership Studies, The Leadership Trust Foundation, and Visiting Professor, University of Strathclyde Graduate School of Business

1

Jonathan Gosling (2004), ‘Leadership development in management education’, Business Leadership Review, 1 (1), April 2 Elaborated in Roger Gill (forthcoming), Defining Leadership. London: Sage Publications. A working paper is available from The Leadership Trust Foundation (research@leadership. org.uk) 3 Daniel Goleman (1997), Beyond IQ: Developing the Leadership Competencies of Emotional Intelligence. Paper presented at the Second International Competency Conference, London, October 4 Warren Bennis (1994), On Becoming a Leader, 2nd Edition. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley 5 Roger Gill, op.cit 6 Jonathan Gosling, op.cit

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