Survey: Less than 20% of execs think MBA prepares for real-life management challenges

In a recently released survey of international business executives conducted by Egon Zehnder International, only 20% of the executives surveyed said that an MBA prepares people to deal with the real-life challenges that a manager must face. Less than 20% of the international executives surveyed also agreed with the statement that “during an MBA, you are trained to deal with the real challenges faced by a manager.”

Corporate concerns about the power of an MBA are not new. As you may know, various studies highlight the growing dissatisfaction among corporations worldwide with the skills business schools are teaching to MBA students. For example, according to surveys conducted a few years ago by The Association of Graduate Recruiters (in the UK), employers continue to seek – and continue to find scarce – the personal skills that will make MBA graduates valuable employees. These surveys go on to point out that what employers seek most from new graduates are enthusiasm, self-motivation, interpersonal skills, team-working, and good oral communication – and that these skills are more important than specialist knowledge.

Earlier this year, Northeastern University’s College of Business Administration formally announced an overhaul of its full-time MBA program. The news here is that the school is focusing on working and partnering with the businesses that hire their MBAs in ways that most business schools do not. Moreover, a central tenant of this transformed MBA is a heightened focus on developing these personal skills through a unique combination of skills assessment and implementation of a personal development portfolio.

“Personal assessment is all the rage at business schools right now,” says Brendan Bannister, professor and head of the human resources group at the College of Business Administration at Northeastern University. Prof. Bannister was also in charge of the skills design team that spent two years planning the changes at Northeastern. “While things like our online personal development portfolio or learning teams are not unique in and of themselves, no other MBA program offers the combination of components aimed at both identifying and improving these critical personal skills.”

For those who think classes in leadership and communication sound like fluff, administrators warn that soft skills are actually hard work. "They involve our own emotions and other people in a way that technical skills do not," says Bruce Clark, the faculty coordinator for the M.B.A. program at Northeastern, recently revamped with the help of more than 20 employers to incorporate eight soft skills.

Last year, Northeastern University College of Business Administration (CBA) conducted over two-dozen in-depth interviews with Global 500 companies. “We had to push them to go beyond the platitudes, and to tell us what they really wanted, and where business schools were failing them,” said Thomas Moore, dean of CBA. “Very few universities take the time to identify corporate partners and work with them to understand exactly what skills-sets they want in the MBAs they hire. Based on corporate feedback, students will supplement a rigorous MBA curriculum with management intensives and skills modules to develop abilities in communications, interpersonal effectiveness, project management, and ethics.”

An example of one of the executives Dean Moore met with was Ken Barnet, a Vice President at State Street who has worked with MBA students as interns as well as with newly-graduated MBA students. Dean Moore met one-on-one with Mr. Barnet, soliciting his input on what worked — and didn’t work — in standard MBA programs. Specifically, Barnet was asked to identify those skill sets that employers find most valuable and determine how the MBA program could more effectively fulfill employer needs. In January of 2006, Barnet also participated in a focus group with the College of Business Administration’s faculty in an effort to answer those questions.
“When Dean Moore came to my office to meet with me one-on-one, it made me feel like Northeastern was treating me as a valued customer – and I really liked that,” Mr. Barnet said. “He truly wanted to know what skills sets Northeastern MBA grads could develop to help them better add value when they came to State Street.”

Mr. Barnet also noted that he sits on the finance career advisory board, which meets to provide a sounding board to the finance faculty as they work to revise the curriculum.

“After meeting with the faculty, it was clear to me as they presented their new curriculum that they had listened to what we said during the focus group,” Mr. Barnet noted. “For example, Northeastern is offering focused skills classes on business analysis and project management – not just focused on textbook learning and theory, but on practical skills development.”

After talking with their corporate partners, the most frequently cited skills of effective managers (and leaders) were as follows:

· Verbal communication
· Managing time and stress
· Managing individual decisions
· Dealing with complexity and ambiguity
· Project Management
· Business Analysis
· Recognizing, defining and solving problems
· Motivating and influencing others
· Delegating
· Setting goals and articulating a vision
· Self-awareness
· Team building
· Managing conflict
· Leading positive change
To identify, assess and strengthen these skills sets of their students, CBA has created a skills program that goes across all the students’ course work, consisting of four key components:

1. Skills intensives
2. Learning teams, led by corporate coaches
3. Personal development portfolios
4. Corporate residencies