What Business Schools Can Learn from Business
I must confess I bring a certain bias in my perspective, which originates in some decades working first as a therapist, and then as a trainer and coach in the corporate world. As a therapist, I learned to listen before talking, and to ask questions to jointly identify with the patient what we should work on, to help the patient take ownership of his process by introducing occasional challenging questions, and to expand his or her thinking. Later, as an external contractor for coaching and leadership development in the corporate world, I learned to address a potential client with what is called the “consultative selling” approach. When entering a meeting with a prospective client, the automatic expectation was that I would first articulate my experience and skills, and then tell him or her what they needed to do to address their challenges. However, to the surprise of the prospects, this was not the path I chose. Instead, I began by establishing a trusting, personal relationship, creating a safe space for our conversation. Then, I asked what the current needs or challenges were, how they were addressing them, or what they thought would help them to address those needs. Only after this would I assess what I might contribute that could be of value, and I would make an offer that our work together would become a codesigned intervention, where both parties influence the outcome. It was not about selling a service, it was about selling to a person a service.
When the contract for the intervention was assigned, my next task as a coach was to work with the employees. But how to ensure that what the person in the HR department thought was needed would in fact be relevant to, and needed by, the individuals concerned? Building on my previous practice as a therapist, I had learned all too well that many parents ask the therapist to help their children with a particular issue; the trouble was that usually what the parents had “diagnosed” was not relevant to the children’s issues!
In a similar way, it became part of my corporate practice to contact the individuals who would be participating in the development sessions to discuss their personal challenges, needs, and developmental goals. In other words, they were invited to become owners of their learning, by codesigning or influencing the contents and goals of their developmental process. This step created the highest engagement levels, which were a good foundation for any program. I learned the importance of establishing a trusting, personal relationship, and creating a safe space for all the participants. It was not about developing generic skills, it was about developing needed skills of specific individuals. Now, what happens to be my preferred personal approach to the challenge actually corresponds to the development industry’s best practices. Consultants know that their contract will only be renewed if their clients—the participants—give them a positive evaluation, if they find the intervention worth their time and the corporation’s financial investment. Participants have no obligations or compromises to bias their feedback: It is provided to the HR division, and they can speak as honestly as they choose to about the value they experienced.
This client–service provider relationship in corporate training keeps practitioners on their toes, alert to what their participants may need, and drives the agenda of the most successful development professionals as they learn to stay flexible and adaptive to the organic needs of their clients in the room.
Interestingly, the principles of adult learning are currently observed more in a corporate setting than in a business school setting. Why is this so, what is the difference, and is there something that business schools can learn from business?
The first difference is in the power relation. A contracted trainer or coach is providing a paid service to a client and his performance will be measured by client satisfaction, effectiveness, usefulness, and perceived value added of the intervention. On the surface, this is not different from the educational setting: an instructor in a university is hired and paid for bringing his or her expertise and knowledge to students, who will fill in an evaluation form at the end of the term. The instructor’s supervisor will hold periodic conversations about the professor’s performance, and in a world of diminishing tenured positions, it may impact the instructor’s permanence on the job.
However, something else happens in parallel. The instructor in a given subject defines what the learning outcomes will be, selects the contents that students will have to master, and to his or her best knowledge finds ways to accomplish this. The instructor also informs how the mastery or knowledge will be assessed, and what will determine if the student passes or fails. The rules are set by the instructor and the institution, and the students are expected to observe them.
These differing characteristics have a number of consequences. To begin with, they are establishing a different power relationship, where the instructor is still the validated authority in charge of the teaching process. However, the learning process becomes the responsibility of the student, and the instructor will be the one to assess if and how well the student has learned. In other words, teaching is decoupled from learning, something that is different in the corporate training world, where the trainer is responsible for teaching in a way that creates the desired learning, and where the trainer’s performance will be measured by that. Teaching becomes the means by which to achieve the learning, not a goal in itself.
Students in a classroom often act in accordance with this polarized relationship, some by trying to get out of obligations whenever possible, some by assessing what is the minimum required (which can mean the minimum effort to get an A, because who needs an A+?), which are actions that embody the us-versus-you relationship. What do we (students) need to do to please, to conform, to get a good grade? What does the instructor want me to say, not say, memorize, quote? While many graduate students enroll with a passion for development and learning, the system tends to roll passion back into the lanes of “meeting what is expected” to pass, to get the necessary grades, and to graduate.
Certainly no educator has the intention to take the passion out of the equation and to convert the teaching–learning relationship into a pull-push, me-versus-you connection, driven by compliance in lieu of self-motivation. But it is an asymmetrical relationship, and this is widely accepted as a fact. The rules of the game indicate that, once enrolled in a course, it is no longer about what the learner wants, it is about what the instructor indicates has to be covered, and how. This leads to another undesirable consequence, which is the student’s lack of ownership of the learning. When students have no such ownership, it becomes a challenge for the instructor to engage them. Many instructors struggle and try out different techniques and tricks to generate excitement in the students, with varied degrees of success.
A further complication is that the way the relationship is set up doesn’t always go against the will of the students, who play their role in accepting the more passive position—waiting to be entertained, expecting the instructor to fill the airspace with contents and lectures, while comfortably remaining silent, letting him or her run “the show.”
But it does not have to be this way.