From Phred Dvorak's February 12 article on M.B.A. Programs Hone "Soft Skills":
[B]usiness schools are devoting [greater attention] to topics such as teamwork, leadership and communicating -- the "softer" side of management. Typically, those soft skills got shorter shrift in M.B.A. programs than "hard" skills such as strategy or financial analysis.
The schools are responding to employers' growing interest in soft skills. Executive suites are increasingly composed of managers running far-flung operations who must attract and retain knowledgeable workers. That puts a premium on skills such as communicating and brokering compromises...
The Stanford Graduate School of Business this fall will revamp its leadership-training curriculum, requiring all first-year students to take personality tests, participate in teamwork and management-simulation exercises and critique their people skills. The school will bring in executive coaches to watch the simulations and offer advice. The training is aimed at getting students to look at how they behave and how effective they are, says Evelyn Williams, an expert in leadership simulations who is overseeing much of the new coursework.
Our M.B.A. students "can pontificate like the best of them. But can they do?" says Ms. Williams.
As I wrote back in December, I'm one of those executive coaches now working with Evelyn at the Stanford GSB's Center for Leadership Development & Research. My colleagues and I are "watching simulations and offering advice," but we're doing a lot more as well.
We're supporting the new Leadership Fellows program headed up by Evelyn, which offers a select group of MBA students the opportunity to develop their leadership and team-building skills, which they'll help teach to the First Year students next fall. We're facilitating T-groups in the school's Interpersonal Dynamics class and supporting other Organizational Behavior courses in coach, mentor and teaching assistant roles. We're developing assessment tools to help students better understand their strengths and areas for development as a leader--and all that's just a start.
These and other activities form an important component of the business school's new curriculum, which...
...includes expanded leadership and communication development. The Strategic Leadership course [which includes sections to be taught by Leadership Fellows] will integrate strategy with leadership development and implementation. Critical Analytical Thinking will have as a major feature the honing of students’ written and oral communication skills. In a new capstone seminar near the end of the two years, students will synthesize what they have learned, examine strengths and weaknesses in their personal leadership style, and reflect on how they hope to achieve their goals as they embark on their careers.
I'm excited to be a part of this initiative at the GSB (where the leadership development opportunities were a lot more limited when I was a student a decade ago), and I'm firmly convinced that this increased emphasis on "soft skills" will prepare these students to be far more effective leaders not just later in their careers but right out of the gate.
