Latest / Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast / Episode 331: Exploring the Fundamentals of Leadership Development

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Episode 331: Exploring the Fundamentals of Leadership Development · Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast

• 0:14
  Speaker A: Welcome to the Clear Admit MBA Admissions podcast. I'm Graham Richmond, and this special episode of the podcast is going to focus on a subject of great interest to anyone thinking about business school, that is leadership development. We're going to tackle the leadership development journey, discuss experiential learning like can leadership be taught? And also cover personal wellness and topics like burnout. Now, since my expertise in leadership is somewhat limited, we've invited an incredible guest to help us explore this topic. Dr. Mike Christian from the University of North Carolina's Keenan Flagler School of Business. Let me offer up just like a quick bio before we bring Mike out onto the show here. So Mike Christian is an award winning teacher and researcher. He is an area chair for the organizational Behavior Area and the director of academic leadership at UNC, Keenan Flagler. He's also an adjunct assistant professor in the department of Psychology and Neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill. Poets and quants named him a best 40 under 40 professor, and the association for Psychological Science honored him as a rising star. And Dr. Christian aspires to help people be their best at work. His goals with research, service, and teaching are to create scientific and social impact. Dr. Christian's teaching interests include human energy optimization, resilience, leadership coaching, leading effective teams, and organizational change. Dr. Christian received his phd in management from the University of Arizona, his master's degree in industrial and organizational psychology from Tulane University, and his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Welcome to the show, Mike. It's great to have you.
• 1:56
  Speaker B: Thank you, Graham. It's great to be here. I appreciate you having me on.
• 1:59
  Speaker A: It's a pleasure. So I want to dive right in because we just have so many great questions that I wanted to get answers to. And I know that our listeners always are thinking about leadership. I mean, a lot of the reason to go to business school is kind of accelerate your career and move into leadership roles. So let's kick things off with a fundamental question, and that is, what do we really know about leadership development? Can it be taught? Isn't it hard to learn how to lead from books? And are some people just born with an innate ability to lead others?
• 2:29
  Speaker B: I love this question, and I hear it quite a bit. I find that it really amplifies a long standing question in the organizational behavior science literature. Early on in the 19 hundreds up through about 1960, there was this assumption that leadership was something that was born, that it was innate, that it was something that was associated with somebody's sort of natural ability to lead. Like, for example, charisma, integrity, being conscientious are all personality traits that are associated with leadership? Definitely. And the leadership literature has shown that those kind of distal personality factors, these foundational characteristics that we often have, a genetic component that's heritable or something that crystallizes at a really early age due to some of the social elements that we are exposed to, those elements of personality, they explain a little bit of variance when it comes to leadership effectiveness. But invariably, when I talk to the most effective leaders that I know, which I do quite a bit, I work with a lot of great leaders, and they explain to me how they got to be so great at leadership. And it has everything to do with learning, with development, with practice, and a general sense of wisdom that one can get through past experience in their development and leadership journey. And this fits with what we know from the science of leadership development, is that although there's maybe 30% to 40% heritability in that personality side, there is a whole lot of variation. So 60% to 70%, that's due to skill development, to practice, to learning. We know that leaders can be trained. We know that leaders benefit very well from attending a school that has a leadership development emphasis. And so for any MBA student or early career executive, or even mid career executive for that matter, practicing learning, being open to growth on the leadership side is a huge predictor of leadership success. Again, some of the great leaders that I know will not call themselves great, but rather would suggest that they're students of leadership. And this is what makes them so great, is that they recognize that they're constantly learning and that they're always improving at leadership.
• 5:26
  Speaker A: Got it? Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I do feel like even when I think about my own career, there's been an evolution and it's a learning process. And, yeah, sometimes going back and remembering some of the things I learned in business school, too. But that kind of brings me to the next question. We talk about kind of people, even in mid career, et cetera. You were mentioning, what are the skills that employers are looking for in the students they're going to hire? I mean, I saw a recent survey, I was at a conference, and some folks from GMAT who make the GMAT exam, they were showing the kind of skills that employers value, and they had done some survey work, I guess, and they said presentation skills, leadership, active listening, and writing skills were all pretty high on the list. But I wonder, what's your sense of things? Because we do hear a lot about other traits, too. I mean, there were some other things around coding or kind of being comfortable with technology and stuff, obviously. But what's your sense of things here, in terms of what are employers really looking for?
• 6:22
  Speaker B: Wow. Yeah. So I think that employers are hungrier now for soft skills than they were even ten years ago. There's an increasing expectation that an employee has the ability to be agile, to be entrepreneurial, to work with people, to solve complex issues. I mean, our world is becoming complex. It's getting very dynamic and has some volatility. And what this really means is that we have a need to learn to adapt, to pivot, to make changes. And when you're working on a team that has a change that's impending or needs to solve something that involves complexity, typically it's not for one person to be able to solve. Typically, you need to draw on multiple people and be able to have input from others. And so what an effective leader can do is be able to manage people in such a way that they can bring in their input and solve complexity, because they recognize that no one person knows it all. And so we find that in a lot of the employers that we have relationships with, they care quite a bit about a person's ability to integrate information, to solve complex problems, and to work with other people, to build an empowered team. And so this is something that we focus on quite a bit at Keenan Flagler. We help our students to develop tools to solve these kinds of problems. And these problems exist, I think, very interestingly, across silos. So if you're in a large bureaucratic organization or even in a small five person team, you'll find that people know different things, they represent different elements to the problem. If you have somebody on a team that is focused on finance and somebody on a team that's focused on ops, they have a different representation of problems. And what a leader who's effective can do is empower both of those perspectives so that the common solution, the common goal, is something that the team arrives at together, because neither perspective is going to be the most valuable, but instead, solutions should emphasize both. So what we train our leaders to do is to think about, hey, we have a problem, we have a situation that we might need to adapt to, or something that's just complicated. Who do I go to? Who do I bring into this circle so that we can have a discussion and get input from different parts of the organization? And the last thing I'll say about that is that that process isn't simply about solving the problem. It's also about generating commitment to the solution. Going back to your question about are leaders born or made? Well, nobody's born with the understanding, the ability to say, you know what? I need to get all of these different perspectives in order to generate a sense of buy in to a solution. This is a skill set. This is something that you can learn and practice. And so this is another piece that we really focus on, is we put our students into situations where they get to solve complex problems, where they get to have real experiential learning and practice those skills, because this is not the kind of subject that you could just take a multiple choice test on and listen to some lecture. It's also not something that you can just read in a book that you pick up off the airport shelf, despite some of those books having a lot of really good lessons, and they are interesting. I do think that the best way to get good at leadership is to practice it, and that's what business school really can give you. That's very effective, and that's something that we really take pride in, is our ability to do leadership development that is experiential. So on the employer side, we find that our students are very effective when they talk about those experiences. Employers love to hear that, hey, I have learned something very real, and here's the experience I've had, maybe in running a club, in an experiential activity that has made a real impact. We give our students the ability to have real outcomes in our leadership development work, and talking about those real outcomes and talking about the effect that they had on other people can be really compelling.
• 11:30
  Speaker A: So I want to push you a little bit further, because I think a lot of our listeners, when they think about business school, they think of lectures and classes and tests and a lot of reading and such. And I know the experiential component is something schools talk about, but I want to hear, if you would just a little bit more about how are you connecting students to impact, because I think a lot of people will say, well, you could put a student into an internship or an in semester kind of project with a company, but how does it really work so that they get this chance to sort of try out their leadership skills? So if you're willing to just comment a little more on what they're doing in the program, it's really interesting to me.
• 12:06
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's critical to us that students leave business school with memories of the experiences that they had. I think that one of the best predictors of having that, something that sticks in your mind is whether you actually had an impact. Those real memorable experiences that we can give our students, it's a hallmark of our program and something that we are trying to constantly maximize on. And so we find that many of our students come to Keenan Flagler hoping to make an impact in their career and in their life, and maybe they haven't realized that they're going to be able to start in their schooling time. And so we try to help our students to uncover their impact and also accelerate it. So what I mean by that is we give them opportunities to figure out where can they have an impact during school. Now, granted, there's a lot of things going on, right? And so they have a first priority to themselves and to making sure that they are benefiting themselves in their own skill development and education. But during that process, we think that leadership development is the place to make a difference, while you are also making a difference for yourself. So we have opportunities that abound for impact, including things like many, many student clubs. We have a MBA ASA, which is the student governing body. We have a program called StaR, which is basically a consulting program where student teams affect results. That's the S-T-A-R acronym.
• 13:52
  Speaker A: Got it.
• 13:53
  Speaker B: And, man, that is just an awesome program. It is actually a vehicle for helping real companies solve real problems. So it's essentially a form of consulting that a company, usually local companies, will pay a sum to work with a student team, and that student team takes on a real consulting project and will do the research and understand the situation that the company is facing and make recommendations. And throughout that process, they have coaching on their leadership development. So it's a win win. Students learn, make an impact, and companies benefit as well. We also have, in addition to those cocurricular opportunities in some of our courses, we have opportunities for impact as well. I teach a leading groups and teams class, and one of the projects that we have is called an impact project, where we talk about the motivating potential of impact when you're managing a team. And so we help the teams in the class, during the class to uncover what's important, what difference can we make right here, right now, during this semester? And they will create a project, solve the complexities that are associated with that project, and make a difference. And so some of these teams have earned thousands of dollars for charities. Some of these teams have helped to place animals at animal shelters, and the whole time they're learning about teaming. So I would say that impact is something that can be motivating for our students. I would also say that learning about impact is something that can help them as leaders of other people. So as a scientist, which is my primary job, one of my principal loves next to my family. And of course, the teaching side as well, is studying impact, studying the behavior of people in organizations and how we motivate them. And impact is a big part of that. So what we know is that people can make a difference in many ways. So you might make a difference to somebody by smiling at them in the hallway. You might make a difference to somebody by saying, hello. There are very little things that you can do, but there's also broader social impact. And so when we think about impact, we can think about it across multiple levels. There's the micro and there's the macro. And each of those steps, it helps people feel as though they're significant, as though they occupy an important part of the organization, an important part of the world. And that feeling is something that's intrinsic to humans, that they need to feel that. It's a principal need that we have is that we are indeed autonomous individuals who make a difference in the world. Some of the great leaders use that understanding really well. And there's a story of John F. Kennedy, who was speaking to the custodial staff at NASA in the JFK, was known to have said that you're not just mopping floors, you're putting a man on the moon. And the point was simply that he was trying to help connect the custodial staff's work to the larger mission that was helping. This is something that he was trying to do with all Americans, was connect them to the larger mission, this aspirational journey to the moon. Now, I saw this in some of my work with hospital directors that I work with at the Department of Veterans affairs. So as part of my job, I do some work with executives in what we call executive education. And I was working with some folks who are directing hospitals across the US for the veterans. So these are veterans hospitals. And a critical element of their work is that it's hard. They're working for a large bureaucracy. They're not funded as well as private hospitals. And so they hire doctors, nurses, administrators to work for the VA. And it's not because of the money. There's something else there. And so when they came to me and we started talking about motivation problems that they're having, I mean, the pay is not as good. They're overregulated. They feel bureaucratic. One of the leaders actually spoke up in our class when we said, hey, how do you get engagement in a difficult situation like that? And one director had a secret, and she said, that secret there is to understand people's purpose and to connect them to the impact that they make in their jobs. And so she said, know, why do you think people work for the VA? Well, it's because they care about veterans. It's because they care so much for the veterans of our country that they decide they're willing to put up with the hassles. And so what she does is she connects everybody in her organization with the larger purpose, with the purpose of the veterans. So she basically told me a story. It was very cool. That was about basically doing the same thing that JFK did. She walks floor to floor and meets with the custodial staff and the folks that are keeping the floors clean at her hospital. And she says, the worried family of the veteran that was sitting here in this waiting room while this person was undergoing a procedure, they felt confident about the world class care that happens here at this hospital. Because the floors were clean. Right. And so that was a really powerful moment for me when I recognized that, hey, this science that we do, it really works.
• 20:11
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 20:11
  Speaker B: Wow. We encourage our students, and it's something that I try to do as well, is to help people to see the impact that they make in the world that they're involved in. Not everybody has this hospital director role or CEO role right away, but you can help people to see the results that they have. Sometimes it's just displaying gratitude. Sometimes it's recognizing somebody's excellent work, but that's a hallmark of great leadership.
• 20:45
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I think everyone tuned in is now very excited about all the potential to learn how to lead. That comes with going to business school. And so what I want to do now is just stepping back for a moment. You probably know that admissions teams at business schools often say that they're looking for evidence of leadership and teamwork skills in an applicant's resume or their essays or even the letters of recommendation. And I know you tend to mostly work with students, but do you have any advice for applicants who are thinking about business school and they're kind of looking to perhaps still build and showcase their leadership and teamwork experience? We often hear from applicants who claim that they're just too junior to have had leadership experience. So I know our listeners would love to have your thoughts here. Like, if you're a candidate for business school, how do you sort of take inventory and find the kind of material that might resonate with an admissions reader?
• 21:39
  Speaker B: Yeah. So, Graham, I will first qualify that I am not on the admissions team. But I do think about this quite a bit, and it's an issue that I think is actually a false issue. So I think students oftentimes worry about that question. What kind of leadership experience do I have? Do I have the right leadership experience to get into this particular MBA program? And yeah, we're a competitive MBA program, but what we are looking for is an interested leader who has potential. It's not necessarily somebody who's had a formal leadership role, but rather has recognized that they have leadership roles in many things that they do in their lives. So something that one of our former deans, Doug Shackleford, used to say was that at Keenan Flaglery, we know that you can lead from the seat that you're in. And I really agree with that. I think that that's what we're dealing with here when we're working with students who have different roads, who have different levels of experience or have different plans that they're going to enact when they go to their next job. And so we try to help our students to recognize that even if you're not in a formal role in your next job, you can still be a leader. You can still help the team to run effectively, you can still communicate upward, you can still learn and develop the skill set that you'll need for your next promotion. When we look at applicants, we see that some of our MBA students, there are students who have run businesses. Some have been in charge of teams, but others have played a leadership role in a sports team or in a club. Many students have charity work, volunteer work, or any other form of organizing people. So that leadership question, what's your leadership experience? It's often loaded, and I think that redefining it is going to be effective for students writing their admissions essays in the sense that, well, I had a student once who told me that she hadn't been in a formal leadership role, and so she was not a leader, had never been a leader before. And I disagreed because she had so many other opportunities, other experiences that she listed on her vita that helped me to see this student has been a leader in so many informal ways. So the question is, how do we define leader? And that's the main issue. Right. And a leader is simply somebody that can influence people towards goals. And that ability to influence people can manifest in so many ways in social relationships, in teams that you're on in family life. And what I would encourage students to do is to think about what are the times that I've helped somebody or persuaded them or moved them towards a goal that's been effective? And you talk about that and you talk about the cognizance that you have about what that experience was like and the result, then you'll be demonstrating the hallmarks of leadership. So I'd say that most MBA programs won't get too hung up on a student not having led a team before. It can be great if you have having that real world business experience, running a team, dealing with complex problems, managing conflict, building trust, but you could have done it in so many other ways, too. And what we're really looking for is the aptitude, the curiosity, the interest, and the willingness to learn and grow. So, like I've said before, we believe that leaders can be built, and we view our job as a leadership development organization to do that, to help you to build the leadership skill set that you need to have for your next career and for the journey that you'll take during that career.
• 25:49
  Speaker A: Yeah. So that's, I just think, terrific advice. I'm hoping that everyone listening is feeling a lot better about, because I think in some respects, sometimes the application forms for business school have questions like how many? Tell us the name, the role that you had, salary, and then, like, number of direct reports. And people get really panicked when they're like, oh, I don't have people reporting directly to me. I work in a team. But you just gave a lot of really great ways that someone could think about defining leadership. That's more than just kind of headcount that's reporting to you. So that's terrific. I did want to ask you, you had mentioned something when we first started talking about doing this podcast about the leadership journey metaphor, and I wanted you to just talk about that for our listeners.
• 26:31
  Speaker B: Yeah. So that's about how we design our curriculum. And in the previous question, we were just talking about how some students come in with different levels of leadership experience. What we recognize is that people start from different spots, right? So they come into an MBA program with various skills and experience in their lives in terms of their leadership. And what we do is we meet you with the needs that you have and we assess what it is that you can best benefit from in order to grow to the leadership potential that you have within you. So, as an example, I had a student a couple of years back who had been an officer in the Marine Corps, and he was incredibly interested in developing leadership potential. I mean, he already had developed a lot of leadership potential. He's one of these leadership mavens who's going to eventually become a fantastic leader because he's never going to view himself as finished.
• 27:35
  Speaker A: Right?
• 27:36
  Speaker B: You never master leadership. Instead, you are always growing and you're a student of it for your life. He was that type. I also had a student who was similarly incredibly interested in leadership and she was a low level analyst on a financial services team before her MBA. She didn't feel that she had a leadership, a skill set that she could draw on. But when you look at these students on paper, you say, well, these students are remarkably different in terms of the place that they're starting. But both took a unique path to getting to their current careers and are both highly placed and really good careers now as leaders. And so what we try to help our students to understand is that no matter where you start, if you have interest and curiosity, then you can grow to maximize your potential. And so the journey is different for everybody. But we do see that in our programming there is a consistency that most students will experience and it's the way that we try to design our programming to meet you in a tailored and kind of custom way. And so what does that look like? Well, basically we have a series of milestones that every student in an MBA program will undergo. And so those milestones include the start of classes, finishing the first year and having an internship, and then graduating in the second year and moving on to a job. And in between there are also predictable milestones. So what we do with our leadership development curriculum is we say, well, where are the places in that natural progression that we can help students to develop leadership potential that fits with what they need at that moment. For example, students find themselves early on in the program, say, even during the orientation period, asking, what do I want? What do I want to do here? What is my goal? And that's a moment. Those questions are happening very early. And so as a leadership development program, we work through an orientation programming curriculum that helps our students to generate self awareness, to take surveys and understand where are their natural strengths as leaders and what is it that they're going to need for the careers that they're thinking about. And so then students will work together in teams as they master some of the technical skills that are important to the MBA. So right away, students often find themselves working in technical classes on finance and accounting and operations. And that's an opportunity for leadership development because these students will be working in teams on projects and helping each other with mentorship. And so we have a presence there as well during that time. And then students have interviews to connect with internships. And when they return, we look for opportunities to discuss those experiences and the lessons that they had about the culture of the place that they were at whether that was a good fit for them. And in the second year, we offer our most experiential leadership classes. And so the journey that most of our students will experience is one that really starts with skill building and the technical skills in their first year. And then in the second year, it's trying things out, it's being safe to fail, it's getting to experiment with all of those technical skills and saying, hey, how can I integrate what I know about, say, big data, solving complexity with other people and actually apply these skills? So the first year in our MBA, it's really about skill building, and the second year it's about application. And so we see this narrative playing out for students. It starts at orientation and it doesn't stop. Just with graduation, it doesn't stop. We instead have a concerted effort to continue to connect with our students over time so that during their career we recognize, hey, you're going to be going through a trajectory of progression, a series of changes in terms of your leadership. And we're here for you to help to talk through those and to help to reampplify some of the skills that you may not remember from your first two years in the MBA program.
• 32:21
  Speaker A: Got it? Yeah. So talking about this leadership journey, and this is a perfect segue because you're talking about when people have graduated, they're out into the workforce, this journey kind of continues. But another thing we hear a lot about, especially with people in senior positions and, well, anyone just working hard. I mean, is this idea about wellness and work life balance and what's the role of personal balance and wellness? And I know you have some thoughts on this as an area that you kind of do some research into. So I'm just curious to hear your take on just work life balance and wellness.
• 32:52
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think that balance is something that is a big part of the conversation now in modern society for a reason. And I am very interested in wellness at work. It's a big part of my research. There is a lot of new information that we're learning about what it really takes to have what we would call balance or wellness. I think that one thing is that balance is a little bit of a misnomer because balance implies that you have two opposing forces pushing against each other. So you could think of balance as something that implies more of a set of opposing forces versus something like harmony. I like to think of it that way. I like to think of the human experience as one that's constantly dynamic and moving back and forth between things. Balance implies a sort of constant, okay, that you're always in balance. And I just don't think that's realistic. I think that instead, it can be helpful to think of some moments in your life as opportunities for growth. And those often come with stress, and that's normal and natural. And the key to having what I think, wellness, replenishment, positive attitude, is that you lean into those moments and do the best you can, but you also find opportunities to replenish your energy, to take care of yourself, and to prioritize yourself. And so whether you call it balance, whether you call it synergy, whether you call it harmony, doesn't really matter. But what we do know is that the physiological nature of being a person, the fact that we have this fight or flight response to stress, is something that we all share. And that fight or flight response is something that we can mitigate with what we call the parasympathetic nervous system. So the fight or flight, right? That's when you're under stress, the heart rate goes up, the blood rushes away from your non vital organs and into your muscles so that you can leave or fight, right. The alternative, or, sorry, the opposing nervous system is the parasympathetic nervous system, which is known as like the rest or digest nervous system. And that response is something that we can engineer into our lives. And so the notion that I research is energy crafting. And what I mean by that is that it's possible for us to be discretionary and to have agency over our own energy, so that is to control the energy that we experience in our lives. For me, that idea was something that was really compelling to me because of something that happened to me early in my graduate school. I was working at Tulane University, and I lost everything in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And everything, most of it wasn't that important to me. It was like a couch and a tv and stuff like that. But there were some elements of that loss that were very difficult from a work perspective. I was a PhD student and had been just working my butt off on what's called a metaanalysis, which is basically compiling all the research that has ever been done on a topic. And my topic was energy was human engagement, work engagement. The question that I was asking was, what are the reasons that people engage or disengage at work? And then the hurricane took it from me, right? And so I didn't have it saved in the cloud in 2005, and I instead had a bunch of copies printed out that I left on the floor of my home when I evacuated. And so that was taken by the flood, that was a bummer. And that was an opportunity for me to either quit and go back to my earlier career or to re up and try again. Right? And so that to me was a moment that defined me. And I look back at it now and I say, man, I'm so glad that I chose to redo that meta analysis because I redid it with a new frame of mind. I redid it with this frame of mind of what is it that drives us to feel resilient under stress. And that's not a question that I would say that I have a full answer to, but we know a lot about it now. And I would also say that it was a great thing for me because I met my wife, I have my son now, and I have just a great role here at UNC Chapel Hill, Keaton Flagler as well. So that story to me is something that illustrates this cornerstone of balance, which is there are times when you have to lean into the stress. It wasn't easy for me to lean into the difficulty, know while I was gutting my house, also start redoing a really difficult meta analysis. But leaning into that did lead to a sense of positivity because I felt like, hey, I'd conquered something I had learned. And so recognizing that life is dynamic and you can't always be feeling good, but if you push through and have the grit, then you can feel great if you find the ways to replenish your energy in a microcosm on a daily basis, I do stuff I do like and I do stuff I don't.
• 38:50
  Speaker A: Right?
• 38:51
  Speaker B: And so some of the stuff that I don't like doing, like as an area chair, I get a lot of email and I call it my personal email jail. And I get to decide when I'm going to deal with that email, right? And to me, it's not an energy replenisher. Usually, unless somebody sends me an email with like a kitten in it or something, that could be energy replenisher, right. I also try to engineer in the times when I'm getting the replenishment. So I think about it in terms of red and green. Sometimes during the day I'm in the red, and other times I need to balance that out with the green. And so in a microcosm on a daily basis, trying to find the rest. And replenishment that I need can be helpful on the research side, from a perspective of what we call stress inoculation research. Anybody who lifts weights knows that the idea of pain equals gain. Understands that you have to stress yourself in order to grow. And this is true both physiologically in terms of muscles, but it's also true in terms of the way that we handle ourselves under stress and grow as leaders. So we know that leadership is something that accrues over time as you're able to handle more and more. And your ability to be resilient is something that grows like a muscle. And so the thing that people forget most commonly is that you have to restore, you have to replenish. If you don't do those things, then you're not going to have reap the gains of lifting the weights, if you will. Right. So lifting a weight stresses your muscle, it tears your muscle fibers, and then you have to eat some protein and you can't go lift weights again for a couple of days. You have to let your muscle get a little bit stronger. That happens to us mentally as well when we're dealing with stress. And so this is, to me a really apt metaphor because it helps me to recognize that those difficult moments are actually growth. Those difficult moments are actually opportunities for me to get better at something, for me to be growing. And that kind of reframe can be, I think, really helpful.
• 41:14
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, that's, that's a great way. Now I'm thinking all about how I work and. No, this is terrific. And I'm sure our listeners are, too. So I know we're kind of running out of time, but I had two questions that I really wanted to ask you. So maybe we can just kind of zip through them because I really wanted to know your answers to these questions. So the first one is about career planning and students. I think MBA students often feel a lot of pressure to find the right career. And this is notion of should the student pursue their passion, look for places to have impact, or seek financial stability because it costs a lot of money to go to business school. So what does the research say about work meaning versus just going for where the cash is?
• 41:57
  Speaker B: I love that question, and I think that it's a really common question for students to ask. I actually asked that question to Mike Barkley, who is a former CEO of Kind Bars. Kind is a value oriented, principle oriented brand that's focused on purpose. Mike knows a lot about passion, and he talks about the passion that he has for kind. And I asked him during a panel, hey, for a new graduate starting out, someone who might be in a new junior position, how is it that you can find purpose in your career? And is it something that you need to have passion for right away? The answer is that passion can sometimes come later. Passion can be the thing that you find early, but it can also come later. And this really fits with what we know about research as well. The research literature is starting to suggest that setting passion as your criteria for success. Am I able to match my passion to my career and pick the thing that I love that might not be a formula for happiness. Instead, one thing that I would encourage students to think about is how can I do something that I'm really good at and get so good at that, that people value what I do and they find my work significant and they find that my skill set is something that makes me unique. Because those feelings, the feelings of being significant, of being great at something, can translate into a feeling of being passionate for that thing. And so there's two ways of looking at it. You might have a career that you're passionate about pursuing and you know right now what it is that you love and what you want to do. And there's other. From the other side of the coin, you might know that you're really good at something and you're going to pursue that and then find that later. You absolutely love being the best at that thing.
• 44:00
  Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah, I'm sure that this is going to be so much food for thought for everyone. Tuned in the last question. I would be remiss if I didn't ask this last question. So everywhere you turn, people are talking about a world dominated by big data and artificial intelligence. I was just at a lecture recently where admissions officers were gathering over concerns about applicants using Chat GPT to write all their essays. Or there's just this constant beating of the drum about this future that we're headed into. And I just wondered, what do you think about people skills in this future? Will they matter more? Will they matter less? Because Chat GPT is going to be thinking for us. Where does this sort of land leadership and people skills?
• 44:45
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. And, boy, is it changing. Right now, I'm pretty interested in AI as well, and the large language models. I saw a cartoon this morning in, I think, Newsweek that had a picture of a man smashing his computer, saying, come on, you stupid thing, work. And he's hitting the computer on top. And then it says in the next panel, soon thereafter, there's a robot that says AI smashing the man on the head, saying, come on, you stupid thing, work right. I hope that that is not actually our future. I do think, though, that there is an increasing need for people, not a decreasing need for people. So as machine learning improves. People are increasingly going to outsource some of the complex tasks to AI, but there's never going to be a substitute for social interaction, for communication, for influencing people towards goals. Leaders are always going to be relevant. So to some extent, I believe that more than ever, we need generalists. We need people who have a skill set that is broad and that can help to address all across the core specializations that maybe there's AI tools that can help with, but that students who think about their approach to leadership as learning to solve problems from multiple angles, using different expertise that they might have developed in, let's say, finance, accounting, marketing, operations, they're able to integrate, synthesize, make sense of patterns, make sense of big data. So yeah, it's an interesting time. There's going to be a lot of change that any applicant to an MBA program now is going to be contending with. And it's something that we take very seriously. We're leaning into both big data and also to understanding the ramifications of AI. It's not something that I think from a pedagogical perspective is going to do our students any good to, say, legislate away or make rules that they can't use it, because I think that it's a core skill. It's recognizing that AI can be a helpful tool in some ways and it's very flawed in other ways at this stage in its evolution is something that we want our students to be able to learn about and to become effective in using that as just another tool for leaders. So our job, I think, as educators, is to help our students to understand what are the right questions to ask AI, what are the general patterns that they can see from their human perspective, to use the large language models and machine learning. In my mind, the ability of an AI is the promise of an AI is the ability to integrate and synthesize across millions of data points in ways that maybe the human brain hasn't been able to effectively understand. But if we're able to guide the machines towards solving problems with many, many inputs, then we might be able to come up with new innovations. And I'm very bullish on our future.
• 48:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, and I think it's great you have a front row seat for a pretty exciting time. I agree with you. I think that leadership and kind of people skills is going to continue to be incredibly important, maybe even more so as we head further into this future. Mike, I just want to thank you so much for all your time today. I know you have probably courses to teach and things to grade and many other things that you could be doing, including maybe email jail time, as you mentioned. But I appreciate you making some time to talk with us, and I know I learned a lot. I'm sure our listeners did as well. So thank you so much for doing this.
• 48:40
  Speaker B: Absolutely, Graham. It was quite a pleasure to be on this podcast, and thank you very much.
• 48:45
  Speaker A: You're welcome. All right, so, folks, that's going to be a wrap on this episode. Please stay tuned for more episodes of the clear admit MBA admissions podcast, and we will see you sooner.