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Features

Published July 2008

A Customer-Driven Approach to Molding Tomorrow’s Leaders

  

  Frank R. Lloyd, Ph.D.

To cultivate exceptional leaders, CLOs must seek changes in the delivery of executive education and collaborate with academic institutions to develop custom course content that is beneficial to both parties.

According to conventional wisdom, 70 percent of employee development happens on the job, 20 percent through formal and informal relationships with bosses and mentors and 10 percent in the classroom.

However, we are seeing a new dynamic emerge, one that suggests that 50 percent of employee development takes place through challenging job assignments, 30 percent in the classroom and 20 percent through community involvement. This theory suggests that powerful learning experiences are available everywhere and that experiential classroom instruction can be tied more closely to the job than ever before.

As a result, CLOs can no longer assume that what is in the business school brochures is all that’s available for meaningful management education. Businesses and executive education providers must work together to design and develop course content and delivery formats.

Many CEOs and CLOs remain skeptical of business schools’ ability to change and deliver programming in executive education that promotes high performance in industries, organizations and teams. They seem to believe schools are restricted to the ABC method of instruction that has been used since teaching began:

A. An educational institution offers courses according to curricula that convey subject matter knowledge in the amount and timing needed for the school to bestow various credentials.
B. An instructor has a predeveloped syllabus for the presentation of course content for each individual course.
C. Each course is presented according to that outline.

Naturally, instructors feel comfortable in that structure because it’s theirs. But if businesses are going to receive the relevant education they need to compete and succeed in the face of demographic challenges, global competition and the accelerating pace of change, it’s going to be the responsibility of CLOs to seek out changes in the delivery of the educational product and the responsibility of educational institutions to listen, question, challenge and advocate. In other words, it’s up to academic institutions and businesses to collaborate in developing and delivering content in a way that will have an immediate and lasting impact.

At first blush, this sounds like a revolutionary concept. But all it really means is that we have to communicate with each other. CLOs need to be clear about their needs, scope and parameters, and educational providers need to understand CLOs’ needs and buying criteria. They have to establish honest, business-like relationships based on two-way communication.

Once this is achieved, businesses can access a university’s research-based content and a learning environment that provides a safe place to think and act differently. More importantly, they can access instructors who facilitate participants’ learning using their own experiences, as well as external perspectives — instructors who challenge participants to think broadly and innovatively, enable them to reconnect with fundamentals and a wider set of purposes and promote reflection and reassessment.