Failing Tomorrow’s Leaders
When it comes to developing leaders of the future, North America’s business schools fail to walk the talk, says Stanford University’s Jeffrey Pfeffer.
A high-profile educator, thinker, and author, Pfeffer says business schools offer plenty of experiential activities, leadership labs, self-assessments, and group project work. The problem, he writes in a paper, is that “there is little peer-reviewed research evaluating such efforts and the available, albeit limited, evidence is almost completely inconsistent with the idea that business schools are having positive effects on the development of student values and attitudes. . .”
Pfeffer offers a number of research findings as indirect evidence. For example, a recent study by The Aspen Institute found that business school students’ confidence in their ability to manage values-based conflicts at work fell throughout their time in the program, as did the proportion of people agreeing that they had opportunities to practice ethical decision-making as part of their MBA. The survey also showed that the importance students placed on “having a positive impact on society” decreased the longer students were in an MBA program.
The problem, Pfeffer writes, is that leadership development initiatives are not core activities of business schools. He says they are weakly tied to the rest of the curriculum, frequently staffed by non-tenure track instructors, and offered outside regular class times.
These are Pfeffer’s suggestions for how business schools can get serious about leadership development:
Measure using the right criteria. “Schools need to measure not just the starting salaries of their graduates but outcomes that are proximately related to their stated mission of leadership development. Based on the results of such measurements, schools need to learn what seems to working well and what is working less well and adjust their activities accordingly.”
Change the marketing message. “Schools should emphasize leadership development in their marketing to prospective students and in how they brand themselves. Organizational identities matter and if leadership development is a critical part of the mission of business schools, it needs to be a more central part of the schools’ identity.”
Evaluate faculty with an emphasis on leadership development. “While not all faculty and all courses need to be held accountable for accomplishing the schools’ stated mission of leadership development, at least some of the evaluation of research and teaching ought to incorporate this objective.”
Leadership Development in Business Schools: An Agenda for Change, by Jeffrey Pfeffer; Graduate School of Business Stanford University (Research Paper No. 2016, February 2009)
Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com
