Get set...sweat... and then go!
Adil Malia of Coca-Cola draws the contours of a management degree

Attract and recruit the best prepared, most professional and brightest young minds of today,” reads an emerging Indian business school’s website. Browse through some more management school websites and you’ll see similar showcasing of talent. Just as organisations ‘customise’ products and solutions, management education seems focused on grooming its protégé to be ‘automatic winners’. Indeed the management education structure seems slated to equip students with the requisite knowledge, perspective and outlook that will enhance their value to employers.

So, does an MBA degree prepare students to leap forward with a ‘can-do’ spirit and a ‘win-win’ attitude? Jack Welch says that the “impact of an MBA is really only good for a year or so”. The degree helps a graduate get a better starting salary or land a better job. And, it also creates something of a little Halo effect. MBAs are presumed to be intelligent and capable, their bosses watch them hopefully and in many cases give them extra opportunities to contribute and grow.

In short order, however, an MBA’s performance kicks in and in the vast majority of organisations that is all that comes to matter. The MBA excels or sinks and the advanced degree becomes forgotten either way. In business, your real credentials ultimately are your results and how you’ve gotten them. Essentially, the ‘automatic winners’ become successful not because of a degree gotten on the graduation day but because of their performance ever since and their ability to apply their learnings to real-life situations in the market. Therefore, the leap from being a scholar to practitioner requires the ability to not only understand theory but also apply it in practice. And this sense of ‘application’ is nothing but a blend of knowledge-based skills and emotion-based skills. Very often, careers may plateau or get derailed simply because of lack of emotion-based skills or emotional intelligence — the ability to communicate, get along with others, team building, and get in the direction you want to go as a group.

So, how can management schools gear up their education pattern to enhance student’s performance and bridge the college world-corporate world divide? Consultant and professor of organisation behaviour at Marriot School of Management, Kerry Patterson describes the typical MBA programmes to be an “arena where students are expected to be brutal to each other”. In his view, students and MBA graduates need to study human interaction and model effective communication to build teamwork. When the student faces the transition from classroom to boardroom, reality bites. Reality that induces one to forego the days of being a lone ranger in the MBA programme and become enmeshed in teamwork, the quintessential contradiction of individual achievement. All the preparatory group projects and presentations in B-school suddenly fade out and seem grossly inadequate. The reality is vastly different. “Between the idea and the reality... lies the shadow.” This quote by TS Eliot best summarises this transition experience from one environment to the other.

Essentially, the argument is that while business schools offer specialised training in the functions of business, there needs to be a greater emphasis on imparting general education in the ‘practice of management’. Perhaps a change in the entire classroom scenario is warranted. Whist students are held unto their solo demonstration of academic excellence, there now needs to be a definitive way of performance appraisal in management schools where soft skills also earn merit. Merely calling a group of students a “team” doesn’t make them one.

Currently, MBA education doesn’t appear to help students with high-stakes conversations, conflict resolution, or anything that would facilitate a team. In practice, management education is about becoming a student of human interaction, ie not just having the best of ideas but saying it in a way that is not disrespectful. So, it’s not just about developing the right argument but also being aware of how the argument is unfolding and capitalising on what is left ‘unsaid’ or ‘implied’. So out goes the fuddy duddy report card and in comes the performance appraisal process replete with a person-specific fingerprint on the knowledge, competencies, attitudes and overall value each student impresses.

In fact a lot of interventions have recently been undertaken by the top business schools of the world to foster greater student camaraderie. Top American business schools like Harvard have adopted policies that prohibit students or their schools from disclosing grades to recruiters. The idea is to reduce competitiveness amongst students linked to their corporate placements and create a less contentious ambience. In fact, some schools just release grades on team projects. The rationale is that grades on team projects are an important indicator of whether a student pulls his or her own weight or works well with others.

— Adil Malia is former VP-HR, Coca-Cola India Inc. Top