I spent one morning last week at a meeting of the Institute for Supply Management’s Richmond chapter. I was particularly interested in hearing from a panel of chief procurement officers on the topic of professional development.
Roy Grier (Dominion), Richard Kelly (Altria) and Tony Millikin (MeadWestvaco) spent ninety minutes talking about a variety of topics. I sincerely wish more of our students would have been in attendance to hear their advice about the skills that will be needed among the leaders of tomorrow. Each man was incredibly candid. The question and answer period was very rich.
Millikin repeatedly referenced EQ as an important differentiator among procurement professionals. (His view is shared by many of the executives I have talked to in various roles in other firms.) The ability to truly understand others and to lead and react appropriately is an incredibly important skill that can be honed.
Related to this, Grier talked about Dominion’s emphasis on “soft skills” including one’s ability to relate to others as a criterion for advancement. He made specific mention of the firm’s focus on an employee’s ability to be part of a team.
Kelly advanced the discussion by touching on another aspect of interpersonal relations – one’s ability to persuade. He and the others were clear that they were not just talking about a procurement professional’s interactions with suppliers. In fact, Millikin specifically mentioned an individual’s ability to persuade partners within the business. Grier couched this as an ability to articulate a position succinctly.
Each panelist mentioned one or two additional skills during the discussion. For Millikin, it was a an individual’s willingness to be truly accountable and to show a strong desire to overcome a challenge. For Kelly, it was an individual’s deep understanding of a market, with the financial and analytical skills to gain a fresh perspective through data. For Grier, it was a combination of integrity and good judgment that separates out the stars at Dominion.
I am thrilled that the Robins School is partnering with the supplier development professionals in each of these three firms on a leadership program for CEOs of minority businesses. (Capital One and Exxon Mobil are also supporting the program that will begin in June.) Their collective commitment to the development of tomorrow’s leaders is evident in their own practices. I hope our MBA students will take this advice to heart.
Among the most widely circulated articles over the last couple of days has been a New York Times piece by Kelley Holland entitled, “Is It Time to Retrain B-Schools?” You can link to it here: http://tinyurl.com/ce5lnv.
Holland offers a thoughtful piece on the state of the MBA today, with a particular emphasis on ethics and values in the curriculum. She also includes quotes from several of the most vocal critics of MBA programs. I encourage you to read through it and offer your comments below.
On the same day it was published, Financial Times published a column by Stefan Stern called, “Why MBA Bashing is Unfair.” You can link to it here: http://tinyurl.com/dj29kb. I think his piece has a great deal of merit. Among other things, he touches on the topic of humility, which was the subject of a recent post here.
I am inclined to distribute these two readings to our incoming class as a means of starting a discussion during our Opening Residency. We certainly have work to do on the curriculum and in structuring our cocurricular activites, especially in the area of personal assessments and career guidance. We shouldn’t need major financial crises to prompt us to make changes.
I look forward to your feedback.
A recent study conducted by faculty at Audencia Nantes School of Management (France) examined the skills desired by firms in identifying the managers of tomorrow. In interviews with recruiters from 15 major international companies and in an e-mail questionnaire sent to alumni, several behavioral competencies were cited considerably more often than technical skills. (I read a summary of the study that was published in Global Focus, an outstanding periodical published by the European Foundation for Management Development.)
The most striking finding to me was this one: Three out of four recruiters spoke of the need for humility.
Over the last twelve years I have certainly received numerous phone calls from former students who, a year or two after graduation, were seeking advice about how to charge forward more rapidly in their organization. I should be clear that I am referring to undergraduates I have taught. Most had grown frustrated and were convinced that they were smarter, wiser and better than those around them. In every case, I counseled them to be patient and humble, and to be appreciative of life near the bottom of the hierarchy. (By the way, the origin of the word humility can be tied to the Latin word for “earth.”)
Those phone calls and my own conversations with recruiters have made me aware that humility is not something taught in the typical business school curriculum. To the contrary, many programs in business (undergraduate and MBA) enroll very proud students who leave business school with additional pride related to the completion of a rigorous course of study.
I believe the secret to instilling humility in our students might be found in courses related to decision-making. My own approach to teaching this topic includes a section on overconfidence, which tends to be an eye-opener for students. Through exercises, case studies and rich discussion about the reasons why we suffer from overconfidence and the consequences associated with a lack of humility, I hope to ground these students and encourage them to be more deliberate.
While I don’t anticipate us creating a semester-long course on humility, I do think that many former professionals in the banking and finance arena could provide powerful guest lectures on the dangers of pride to today’s MBA students.
Fifteen years ago, during a graduate school course on decision-making, I read a fascinating study by Victoria Medvec (now at Northwestern’s Kellogg School) on counterfactual thinking. Medvec and her co-authors (including Tom Gilovich) found that bronze medalists at the 1992 Olympic Games were actually happier than silver medalists. Why would this be?
I’ve written before on this blog about reference points, which provide the answer to this intriguing question. The silver medalists are more likely to imagine how they might have won gold. The bronze medalists are more likely to think about what it might have been like to leave the Olympics without a medal. Each has engaged in counterfactual thinking by imagining an outcome that is contrary to what actually occurred. But, because the silver medalists create an “upward” counterfactual, their satisfaction with their own outcome is reduced, while the bronze medalists’ “downward” counterfactual raises satisfaction with their own outcome.
This kind of cognitive behavior also occurs in situations where we choose one option over another and can occasionally lead to regret years later. Many of us consider questions like, “What if I’d chosen a different job or a different MBA program many years ago? How might my life and career have been different?”
If we manufacture rather rosy counterfactual outcomes through this psychological process — and many of us are wired to do just that — we’ll experience some negative affect. It could be disappointment, guilt, regret or sadness, all of which are being investigated by social psychologists.
I began thinking about this topic again recently after several conversations with successful and unsuccesful entrepreneurs. Many of them wove counterfactuals into their stories of how their business fared in its earliest months and years. It strikes me that counterfactual thinking among entrepreneurs might be a rich area for future research.
By the way, Neal Roese published a nice, if not widely-read, text a few years ago entitled If Only. It does a nice job of bringing research on counterfactuals to a lay audience. I suspect the book is still available via Amazon. Have a look and send me a note about other potential applications of counterfactual thinking in the realm of commerce.
