Reference no: EM132258686

Becoming a Leader: Early Career Challenges Faced by MBA Graduates Beth Benjamin Charles O’Reilly Leadership development is often cited as an important organizational priority. Despite the criticisms of MBA education, MBA graduates represent one important source of future leaders. Although we have amassed significant knowledge about the roles and functions of senior leaders, we know far less about the challenges faced by younger ones. Indeed, Linda Hill’s seminal work on new managers is predicated on the study of only 19 recently promoted sales managers from two companies (Hill, 1992). Our work here investigates the early career challenges of 55 young leaders who had graduated from an MBA program in the past decade. Based on in-depth interviews, we identified three types of transition that these young leaders described as particularly important to their development, and the four most common challenges they struggled with throughout these transitions. The process of working through these challenges led many of these young leaders to fundamentally change the way they thought about and practiced leadership, thereby facilitating their evolution from individual contributor to experienced leader. Drawing on these observations, we provide suggestions for how MBA programs can be modified to help students prepare for the experiences they will likely have to navigate early in their careers. “In content and pedagogy, the education many business schools provide does little to prepare managers for their day-to-day realities (Porter & McKibbin, 1988: 258).” “Business schools appear to be producing MBA graduates ill-equipped for the challenges of the real world (Chia & Holt, 2008: 471).” In their well-known evaluation of the state of business schools, Porter and McKibbin (1988) lamented the fact that business schools, in their quest for rigor, had lost their relevance. In the two decades since, little seems to have changed. Critics still charge business schools with being largely irrelevant to leadership and the practice of management (e.g., Bennis & O’Toole, 2005; Ghoshal, 2005; Pfeffer & Fong, 2004). Mintzberg (2004) has put it most pun-gently, claiming that we are teaching the wrong material with the wrong methods to the wrong students. If these claims are true, why have business schools failed so abysmally? Critics have identified a number of potential reasons, one of which is that recent MBA graduates lack the skills necessary to effectively manage people. Conger (2004) argues that academic models of leadership typically adopt a one-size-fits-all approach rather than acknowledging that leadership requirements may vary across levels and circumstances. Compounding this, MBA programs typically concentrate on the skills needed by general managers but largely ignore or are ignorant of those needed by their graduates to succeed in their early careers. Indeed, in a symposium on leadership development, Steve Kerr, a scholar-practitioner, observed that “[t]he developmental needs of ‘early’ employees are usually not well known” (Kerr, 2004: 120). The primary mission of business schools is to prepare people to practice their skills in the business world. Unfortunately, many academics do a poor job of developing and organizing new knowledge in a way that can be useful to practicing managers. Instead of teaching what the students need, we often teach what we know—our disciplinary expertise (Tushman & O’Reilly, 2007). An unanswered question is do we know what our students need to know? In their critique of MBA education, Pfeffer and Fong (2002) suggest that business school faculty need to do three things to improve the relevance of MBA education: be more problem or phenomenon focused, listen more to our subjects, and be concerned with applicability as well as theory. Managers clearly would benefit most if these developmentally challenging experiences occurred earlier in their careers rather than later. To address this problem, several prominent researchers in leadership development have suggested straightforward solutions. Hill (1992), for example, suggests that “[M]anagement training should focus on what it means to be and what it feels like to be a manager” (249). McCall (2010) argues that development efforts should “focus not on attributes of the leaders we might call effective leaders, but on the experiences that teach lessons that might, over time, produce effective leaders” (681). These suggestions all argue for a greater understanding of the real challenges faced by younger leaders as opposed to the current preoccupation with theoretical and analytic skills. Hackman and Wageman (2007) note that we need a better understanding of both what should be taught as well as how leaders can be helped to learn.

Question - Reading 9.2 speaks to early challenges faced by MBA graduates in their leadership journey. Speak to these challenges. Have you faced any of them? If so, which ones? How have you dealt with (or would deal with) such challenges?