Managers to be trained by moderate stress method
Last Thursday the Kiev- Mohyla Academy National University presented a new MBA (Master of Business Administration) syllabus. The syllabus, designed for a six-month training of professionals already having some managerial experience, meets the Western standard and is based on the original experience of Ukrainian companies and managers. Incidentally, the MBA syllabus was drawn up with the aid of the best experts for the General Electric Leadership Development Center. It is at this center that Kiev-Mohyla Academy Business School lectures did their in-service training.
The syllabus is special in being inseparably linked with practice: it includes on the job creative tasks followed by classroom discussion. The syllabus is mainly aimed at developing creativity. Job advertisements very often list such requirements for candidates as initiative, dynamism, team spirit, and work experience. Clearly, work experience is a question of time, while the other requirements are qualities that can be taught. The only question is how.
Some studies, for example, at Stanford University, suggest that tests of intellectual ability tests should be complemented with those of emotional response. Emotional abilities allow one to identify and govern his/her own emotions, motivate him/herself and others, and establish a chain of personal contacts. The research shows that emotional abilities are three times as important for achieving success in the professional sphere as intellectual ones. The life stories of well-known world leaders bear testimony to this: George Soros did a baccalaureate course without getting a master’s, Bill Gates did not graduate from Harvard, and billionaire Richard Branson failed to complete an elementary school course due to poor eyesight and inability to solve simple mathematical problems. What did these people have in common? Tremendous energy. If somebody told them that something could not be done, this meant they were sure to search for the ways to do it. There was an interesting observation that people who had real life problems often make considerable professional progress.
Pavlo Sheremeta, dean of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy Business School, thus commented to The Day the special features of these new methods, “An adult studies best when he/she is under moderate stress. I feel most uneasy when everything goes smoothly. A person under severe stress cannot study well, either, because he/she is panicked, seeing the world only in black and white. To keep a person under moderate stress, some well-established companies resort to the round robin attestation of an employee, i.e., surveying under certain criteria the opinion of his/her colleagues of the same status, immediate superior, customers, and subordinates. Employees are subject to annual attestations, but, following a round robin attestation, an individual has another six months to improve him/herself and minimize the problems. We are going to conduct classes with the new syllabus in such a way that it should be physically impossible to fulfill all the tasks. This is being done for an individual to learn to identify priorities. An individual who lives in comfort will not study well. One must learn to sacrifice one opportunity, because it is impossible to achieve everything in life or do everything ideally.”
An orchestra can serve as the model of a modern professional organization. Orchestras invite only professionals, so what function does then the conductor perform? The National Opera of Ukraine conductor Ivan Hamkalo, speaking at the syllabus presentation, said that the task of a conductor is to set a mental goal (to imagine how the orchestra should sound) and organize the attainment of it, then he must make sure that each musician has the resources to play his part, bring the orchestra’s different parts into a single integral line, set the pace, encourage, and instill energy in the players. In other words, the conductor must inspire not only the conduct of the musicians, he must be able to manipulate emotions, not only his own but also those of his subordinates.
In our lives, we do not set many goals only because we think it is impossible. As early as in the school age we are taught to make standard decisions. “My mathematics teacher,” Mr. Sheremeta says, “was once very nervous that I might be denied a gold medal because the local education authority would not pass my work with a drawing placed at a wrong distance from the margin. What remains in your memory after you leave school is that there is only one standard way to solve a problem (this never happens in real life), as well as the guiding principle to do things the way others do, instead of looking for a way of your own. When you want to achieve a success of your own, you can’t do it in the standard way.”
