Soft skills may well be the future competitive edge
BY RICHARD RUBNAN QUE
THE current financial crisis has sparked debate and comments that business schools are partly the cause for creating a breed of businesspeople who are motivated by greed and immediate gratification.
The crisis is believed to be a 'product' of top business school graduates, who are quick in identifying opportunities, creating and marketing products, with nary a thought for proper ethics and business integrity.
In essence, it appears that the leaders of the most influential global companies today (many of whom are from top MBA schools) are driven by one motivation alone - the motivation for quick riches.
Is there now a need to re-look the development of MBA students, and the kind of business leaders that the new century needs?
To me, a high salary and an international career in an exciting global industry are key criteria for an ideal job. As MBA students, we must realise that we are all competing with one another globally.
All MBA graduates are trained to analyse financial statements, conduct operational forecast studies and come up with marketing strategies. So if MBA students are all so uniformly bred and adhere to a certain template, what would be, as marketing managers say, our main unique selling proposition?
A potential good leader must possess not only analytical skills, but more importantly, REIT - Respect, Integrity, Ethics and Teamwork. Today's business landscape requires leaders who are able to 'forgo' immediate gratification in the interests of more strategic, ethical and long-term thinking.
In the past 15 months, as a part-time MBA student at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School, I was given not only a wealth of opportunities to learn from the best professors in the region, but more importantly, to engage in rigorous learning together with some of the world's most brilliant minds.
Despite these analytical and cognitive feeds, I believe that the best way to prepare for the business world is to explore, engage and evolve progressively through experiences outside the classroom. And it was from these explorations, engagements and evolutions that I was able to strengthen my REIT.
As the team leader for two winning teams from Singapore for the CA International Case Competition 2008 in Las Vegas and the UCLA Global Business Leadership Case Competition 2009 in Los Angeles, I learnt the importance of respect and teamwork.
During competitions, working under intense pressure, people get frustrated and the environment can turn tense, even hostile. In my experience in these competitions, managing team dynamics is both a science and an art, requiring both the left and right brains.
As a science, handling teams requires knowledge of each team member's strengths and weaknesses, the different kinds of training and support the team needs, and how to structure discussions to ensure efficiency.
As an art, handling teams requires an array of soft skills customised to each team member. This means that a leader must be able to identify each member's motivations, personalities and even body language to ensure that each member is well taken care of and employed to the best of his abilities.
The experience of being team leader in two competitions allowed me to immerse myself in a quasi-CEO role, handling several VPs under me.
It showed me that being a CEO means not just thinking strategically or thinking of the right thing to do, but more importantly, how to handle and deploy your employees in the most effective manner, giving them tasks that maximise their potential.
The team leader also needs to respect each individual's strengths and weaknesses. At the end of the day, a true leader would need to draw on the strengths of all his team members to take the team and the entire organisation forward.
I was able to further understand and appreciate the importance of integrity and ethics in business when I was the chief organiser of an inaugural study trip to the Philippines in February this year.
REIT is also the key to the sustained success of the companies we visited. The CEOs gave us insights on how they grew their companies from the ground up, how they went through hardships and still remained true in integrity and ethics.
Most businesses would consider shareholders' interests and profitability as top priorities, but what sets these companies apart is their strong company value system. In addition, these successful companies have always had a strong social component in their everyday business operations.
Aside from bottomline concerns, these companies now also use social impact and environment impact as some of their key criteria in their business decisions.
An MBA, as with any other graduate degree, may attest to some level of intellectual calibre (though it's certainly no guarantee). But is intellectual calibre enough to succeed in the real world? Or should today's MBA students do more than just book-learn in the classroom, and party with classmates?
Business schools today are reviewing the idea of just what an MBA degree entails and stands for. But change should come not only from the business school; I believe that each student must also take the initiative, take up the challenge, and make full use of the MBA to not only train one's cognitive skills, but more importantly, seek to build one's soft skills.
And this is what the experience and exposure from competitions, industry visits and networking sessions give you. The best way to grow is to explore, engage and evolve progressively. Who knows, these soft skills might just be the future hard skills necessary to compete in tomorrow's global business landscape.
The writer is a part-time MBA student at NUS Business School
