good afternoon I am Amanda Neiman Peters
and until recently I was the Dean of
Dubai campus at a hold International
Business School now this was pretty
confusing for a lot of people because
according to their perception the Dean
of a Business School is kind of supposed
to look something like this if you go to
Google Images this is what you’ll find
and certainly the Dean of a Business
School is supposed to be a lot taller
right but all jokes aside I was the Dean
of Dubai campus when we implemented the
program that I’m going to be referring
to today and so it’s very exciting for
me in fact in my new role now in
research strategy still at halt to be
able to share with you the results of
the program that we implemented now I am
the leader for a research challenge
called transforming behavior and what
that means is this all of our faculty
members globally are invited to
contribute research which identifies the
interventions that will result in
improved business outcomes through
changing the behavior of organizations
and individuals a very important and
sensual foundation of the transforming
behavior challenge is this knowing is
not the same as doing knowing how to do
something is not at all the same as
being able to do it yourself for example
when I watch Serena Williams at
Wimbledon on television I know exactly
what she’s doing I understand and I can
explain to you how she crosses the court
so elegantly and returns the ball back
across with great speed and sometimes I
actually come to believe that I could do
that myself but it only takes a few
short minutes of being out on a court
with a tennis racquet for me to realize
that knowing what she is doing is not at
all the same as being able to do it now
the fact that knowing is not the same as
doing is also a problem for business
schools you see business school
education is set up to provide knowledge
and business school students are
assessed on their ability to demonstrate
that knowledge the problem here is that
when Business School candidate
graduate and they go out into the
workforce they are no longer assessed on
what they know but on what they can
actually do now if you look into the
literature on this topic you’ll actually
find that there are many studies which
show that academic scores representing
knowledge are a very poor predictor of
how people will perform in the workplace
and you know people in industry are
aware of this lack of alignment and they
are responding in 2015 and 2016 three of
the UK’s biggest employers of university
graduates PricewaterhouseCoopers Ernst
and Young and penguin Random House all
dropped the requirement for a specific
level of university performance as a
prerequisite for hiring managers after
years of collecting their own data on
the people applying to their jobs how
about what how they perform when they
were hired they found that how somebody
performed at university was just not a
sufficiently good enough predictor of
how they would go on to perform on the
job now if you talk to business school
professors and business school leaders
and there are quite a few of them in the
room they are all aware that they need
to develop the leadership behavior of
their MBA candidates they know that they
need MBA candidates to be strong leaders
good at team working good at resolving
conflict good at managing stress and I’m
sure many of them believes that this is
actually exactly what they’re doing
they’re taking graduates into the
program at the beginning of the year and
graduating them a year or two later as
stronger leaders however as we said
before Business School education is not
focused on behavior it is focused on
knowledge and so in actual fact it’s far
more likely that this is what they’re
doing taking people into the school at
the beginning of the program and
graduating them a year or two later as
people who know more things are they
different from what they were at the
beginning of the program well of course
they are and if you ask them many of
them will say that they are better
leaders than they were at the beginning
of the program but
we have no systematic evidence that they
are any better at leadership than they
would have been if they’d spent the last
year working in Starbucks or backpacking
around Europe or India you see for a
start we don’t know if they’re any
better in leadership development and
leadership behavior because we don’t
measure what their performance was like
at the beginning of the program secondly
it’s highly unlikely that they have
systematically improved in their
leadership behavior because typical
leadership development activities in
business schools don’t target behavior
they target knowledge so if you look at
the typical leadership development
activities that you’ll find in business
schools
it’s as if they operate according to
some kind of conceptual osmosis if we
discuss ideas and concepts around
students this will somehow soak in
through their skin and change their
behavior the two most common leadership
behavior activities or leadership
development activities that you’ll find
in business schools are these one
leadership courses where we watch videos
of leaders and we talk about leaders and
how they got to be great leaders so
conceptual and theoretical and two we
put students into teams and asked them
to deliver an assignment now the logic
here goes if we put them into teams
they’ll learn team working skills but
the unit of assessment remains the
quality of the output of the assignment
we don’t actually know that their team
working skills are getting any better at
all and in fact while they might be
getting that what they may well be
getting used to working in teams but it
doesn’t matter that they’re and it
doesn’t mean that they’re getting any
better at it and the reason for that is
this is that behavioral change is
actually hard it’s hard to do do people
do not change in their behavior
significantly and quickly because we
just discuss ideas and concepts so in
order to illustrate that to you I’m
going to share with you this study that
was done on 97 undergraduates and the
purpose of this study the researchers
wanted these undergraduates to adopt one
positive health-related behavior and
have that become a habit on a daily
basis so in this study there were a
variety of different behavior
is that the participants could choose
and the first was this very simple eat a
piece of fruit with breakfast
the second was this drink a bottle of
water with lunch and the third was this
go for 20 minute run before dinner now
what I want to highlight to you about
this behavioural change is that it’s
very straightforward
the people who are participating in the
program were very positively disposed
towards these behaviors the behavior is
very simple I think you and same
interpretation of drinking a bottle of
water with lunch right it’s not complex
it’s not open to interpretation what’s
also really important is that these
candidates have the opportunity to
perform this behavior every single day
because every single day we think about
having breakfast having lunch having
dinner and that’s not necessarily the
same as when it comes to say resolving a
conflict right so simple behavior I have
the chance to perform every day how long
on average does it take 97
undergraduates to adopt that behavior as
a regular daily habit well it’s a simple
answer to that in 66 days over two
months to learn to adopt that behavior
so it just became a habit without me
thinking about him but imagine this
imagine that now my objective is not on
average across the cohort now my
objective is every single one of those
undergraduates needs to adopt that
behavioural change how long would that
take what is the range the individual
range in days
that it takes for every one of the
ninety seven to adopt that behavioral
change and this is the answer between 18
and 224 days 224 days to learn to eat a
piece of fruit
turns out behavioral change is harder
than we thought now back in 2014-15 we
launched a major leadership development
curriculum it put behavioral change at
the absolute core of the program and let
me be clear about this this is no
conceptual osmosis this is a major
investment of
I’m resources energy stress okay and we
were highly stressed about it
this program is an eight month program
it runs in parallel to all of the core
courses and in 2014-15 it had 57 hours
of workshops 58 hours of team working
and leadership simulations number two
important future leadership was not some
vague idea out there I don’t know did
they improve in leadership I don’t know
depends on your definition of leadership
leadership was very specifically defined
we have a leadership behavioral
competency model with three key
foundations adaptive thinking
interpersonal influence team working
skills and on each of those three
foundations there are specific
behavioral competencies like resolving
conflicts constructively third important
feature of this program it has dedicated
faculty members so we did not simply
tack this on to the workload of our
professors of entrepreneurship or
managerial economics we hired dedicated
faculty members to teach this program
the program also has a significant
amount of peer-to-peer behavioral change
coaching and professional coaching and
on top the students adopted many of the
best practices from industry like
writing a personal development plan
tracking their progress measuring and
reporting on it now how do we assess
their progress on this particular
program well we did two key things one
we took their self-assessment and we
took peer assessment of their
performance of these behavioral
competencies so when I say let me
actually discover we did this at the
start of the program three months in and
eight months in so that’s at the end of
the program and when I say peer
assessment what we mean is this the
performance of the behavioral
competencies was assessed for each
individual by the group of people they
were working with at the time and of
course at the beginning of the program
three months in and eight months in that
group of people changes right now if I
take how people’s behavior was rated on
average by their peers and co-workers at
the end of the program after eight
months
and compare that to the how their
behavior was rated at the beginning of
the program did they improve well thank
goodness yes they actually did okay so
what’s really important is about the
dancer that I’m going to show you here
is this this represents 635 MBA students
they came from 79 different countries
the total group was about 60 percent
male forty percent female and they took
their MBA program full-time at one of
our five campuses internationally and
what you can see on this chart and
particularly where you see the great big
bars over there you can see that the
pattern of improvement leadership
behavior improvement was the same
irrespective of the campus on which they
did their MBA now what I’ve done there
with that blue line is I’ve taken out
the effective campus and I’ve just put
the average across the total school and
you can see a significant amount of
leadership behavioral improvement when
we ran the program again in 2015 16 now
everybody has got a year of experience
we could improve it we could make it
better we actually managed to shift that
line purple line now so that now more
people showed more behavioral
improvement and leadership development
fantastic that’s really great so what
we’ve now been able to show is that if
we put our MBA candidates through an
eight-month intensive behavioral change
program they will develop in their
leadership behavior at least in the
perception of their peers but that’s not
really the issue here’s the real issue
it didn’t work quickly this didn’t work
overnight three months into the program
I’d say actually progress was pretty
disappointing and this table here what
you can see is the three pillars of
leadership behavior that we mentioned
adaptive thinking interpersonal
influence and team working skills and on
the table you can see the average of how
peers rated individuals at the start the
program three months in and eight months
in now here’s at the start of the
program this is a five-point scale so
three is sort of roundabout neutral okay
and what happened at the start of the
program is people rated their peers as
you know just like a little bit better
than new
that’s kind of what you would expect
this is the very very start of the
program before they’ve done anything
well three months in those numbers have
gone up but not that much if I wanted to
say that on average across my cohort
people had significantly developed in
their leadership behavior I would want
that number to go from an about neutral
to at least like a four out of five
right which is quite a bit of the time
well it turns out they did go to a four
out of five but it took eight months
it’s okay months for them on average to
demonstrate this behavioral change but
here’s an even more important point and
it’s this it didn’t work for everyone
after eight months of this program 18
percent of our students globally in 2014
15 did not show any improvement in
leadership behavior as assessed in the
eyes of their peers now we know from
this study of undergraduate
banana-eating that we just looked at
that people take different amounts of
time to change their behavior right now
I don’t personally have the data on why
these 18 percent of people did not
change but what I want to put to you is
this if after an eight month intensive
leadership behavioural change program
they did not change their behavior then
all we can really include conclude is
that it’s highly unlikely that typical
MBA programs with their conceptual
leadership development actually improve
leadership skills in the majority of
their students to any significant degree
and therefore I conclude that this is
indeed the model that is in operation
can we really expect our students to
improve in complex leadership skills
through simple exposure to leadership
concepts it’s actually far more likely
that they don’t and in fact a recent
study of highly celebrated CEOs found
that those with an MBA were far more
likely than the others to take
self-serving decisions with short term
results at the expense of the people in
the environment around them and that is
exactly the paradigm that’s in play when
we put people into a team working
situation and our
them to produce an assignment if you’re
made to work in a team to produce an
assignment but the unit of assessment
remains the assignment itself then the
incentive is simply to do whatever it
takes to get the best short-term result
and so we have three major
recommendations for business schools
that want to improve the leadership
capability of their students the first
is this if you want to improve
leadership behavior then you need
programs that directly target leadership
behavioral development the second is
this you need dedicated faculty you
cannot expect that a faculty member who
has been hired for his or her expertise
in accounting can also teach leadership
and frankly you’re not really taking the
concept seriously if you think any old
person can teach leadership skills
you wouldn’t think any old person can
teach accounting finally you need to
change the unit of assessment the unit
of assessment needs to include behavior
and not just knowledge thank you for
your time and attention
[Applause]
and until recently I was the Dean of
Dubai campus at a hold International
Business School now this was pretty
confusing for a lot of people because
according to their perception the Dean
of a Business School is kind of supposed
to look something like this if you go to
Google Images this is what you’ll find
and certainly the Dean of a Business
School is supposed to be a lot taller
right but all jokes aside I was the Dean
of Dubai campus when we implemented the
program that I’m going to be referring
to today and so it’s very exciting for
me in fact in my new role now in
research strategy still at halt to be
able to share with you the results of
the program that we implemented now I am
the leader for a research challenge
called transforming behavior and what
that means is this all of our faculty
members globally are invited to
contribute research which identifies the
interventions that will result in
improved business outcomes through
changing the behavior of organizations
and individuals a very important and
sensual foundation of the transforming
behavior challenge is this knowing is
not the same as doing knowing how to do
something is not at all the same as
being able to do it yourself for example
when I watch Serena Williams at
Wimbledon on television I know exactly
what she’s doing I understand and I can
explain to you how she crosses the court
so elegantly and returns the ball back
across with great speed and sometimes I
actually come to believe that I could do
that myself but it only takes a few
short minutes of being out on a court
with a tennis racquet for me to realize
that knowing what she is doing is not at
all the same as being able to do it now
the fact that knowing is not the same as
doing is also a problem for business
schools you see business school
education is set up to provide knowledge
and business school students are
assessed on their ability to demonstrate
that knowledge the problem here is that
when Business School candidate
graduate and they go out into the
workforce they are no longer assessed on
what they know but on what they can
actually do now if you look into the
literature on this topic you’ll actually
find that there are many studies which
show that academic scores representing
knowledge are a very poor predictor of
how people will perform in the workplace
and you know people in industry are
aware of this lack of alignment and they
are responding in 2015 and 2016 three of
the UK’s biggest employers of university
graduates PricewaterhouseCoopers Ernst
and Young and penguin Random House all
dropped the requirement for a specific
level of university performance as a
prerequisite for hiring managers after
years of collecting their own data on
the people applying to their jobs how
about what how they perform when they
were hired they found that how somebody
performed at university was just not a
sufficiently good enough predictor of
how they would go on to perform on the
job now if you talk to business school
professors and business school leaders
and there are quite a few of them in the
room they are all aware that they need
to develop the leadership behavior of
their MBA candidates they know that they
need MBA candidates to be strong leaders
good at team working good at resolving
conflict good at managing stress and I’m
sure many of them believes that this is
actually exactly what they’re doing
they’re taking graduates into the
program at the beginning of the year and
graduating them a year or two later as
stronger leaders however as we said
before Business School education is not
focused on behavior it is focused on
knowledge and so in actual fact it’s far
more likely that this is what they’re
doing taking people into the school at
the beginning of the program and
graduating them a year or two later as
people who know more things are they
different from what they were at the
beginning of the program well of course
they are and if you ask them many of
them will say that they are better
leaders than they were at the beginning
of the program but
we have no systematic evidence that they
are any better at leadership than they
would have been if they’d spent the last
year working in Starbucks or backpacking
around Europe or India you see for a
start we don’t know if they’re any
better in leadership development and
leadership behavior because we don’t
measure what their performance was like
at the beginning of the program secondly
it’s highly unlikely that they have
systematically improved in their
leadership behavior because typical
leadership development activities in
business schools don’t target behavior
they target knowledge so if you look at
the typical leadership development
activities that you’ll find in business
schools
it’s as if they operate according to
some kind of conceptual osmosis if we
discuss ideas and concepts around
students this will somehow soak in
through their skin and change their
behavior the two most common leadership
behavior activities or leadership
development activities that you’ll find
in business schools are these one
leadership courses where we watch videos
of leaders and we talk about leaders and
how they got to be great leaders so
conceptual and theoretical and two we
put students into teams and asked them
to deliver an assignment now the logic
here goes if we put them into teams
they’ll learn team working skills but
the unit of assessment remains the
quality of the output of the assignment
we don’t actually know that their team
working skills are getting any better at
all and in fact while they might be
getting that what they may well be
getting used to working in teams but it
doesn’t matter that they’re and it
doesn’t mean that they’re getting any
better at it and the reason for that is
this is that behavioral change is
actually hard it’s hard to do do people
do not change in their behavior
significantly and quickly because we
just discuss ideas and concepts so in
order to illustrate that to you I’m
going to share with you this study that
was done on 97 undergraduates and the
purpose of this study the researchers
wanted these undergraduates to adopt one
positive health-related behavior and
have that become a habit on a daily
basis so in this study there were a
variety of different behavior
is that the participants could choose
and the first was this very simple eat a
piece of fruit with breakfast
the second was this drink a bottle of
water with lunch and the third was this
go for 20 minute run before dinner now
what I want to highlight to you about
this behavioural change is that it’s
very straightforward
the people who are participating in the
program were very positively disposed
towards these behaviors the behavior is
very simple I think you and same
interpretation of drinking a bottle of
water with lunch right it’s not complex
it’s not open to interpretation what’s
also really important is that these
candidates have the opportunity to
perform this behavior every single day
because every single day we think about
having breakfast having lunch having
dinner and that’s not necessarily the
same as when it comes to say resolving a
conflict right so simple behavior I have
the chance to perform every day how long
on average does it take 97
undergraduates to adopt that behavior as
a regular daily habit well it’s a simple
answer to that in 66 days over two
months to learn to adopt that behavior
so it just became a habit without me
thinking about him but imagine this
imagine that now my objective is not on
average across the cohort now my
objective is every single one of those
undergraduates needs to adopt that
behavioural change how long would that
take what is the range the individual
range in days
that it takes for every one of the
ninety seven to adopt that behavioral
change and this is the answer between 18
and 224 days 224 days to learn to eat a
piece of fruit
turns out behavioral change is harder
than we thought now back in 2014-15 we
launched a major leadership development
curriculum it put behavioral change at
the absolute core of the program and let
me be clear about this this is no
conceptual osmosis this is a major
investment of
I’m resources energy stress okay and we
were highly stressed about it
this program is an eight month program
it runs in parallel to all of the core
courses and in 2014-15 it had 57 hours
of workshops 58 hours of team working
and leadership simulations number two
important future leadership was not some
vague idea out there I don’t know did
they improve in leadership I don’t know
depends on your definition of leadership
leadership was very specifically defined
we have a leadership behavioral
competency model with three key
foundations adaptive thinking
interpersonal influence team working
skills and on each of those three
foundations there are specific
behavioral competencies like resolving
conflicts constructively third important
feature of this program it has dedicated
faculty members so we did not simply
tack this on to the workload of our
professors of entrepreneurship or
managerial economics we hired dedicated
faculty members to teach this program
the program also has a significant
amount of peer-to-peer behavioral change
coaching and professional coaching and
on top the students adopted many of the
best practices from industry like
writing a personal development plan
tracking their progress measuring and
reporting on it now how do we assess
their progress on this particular
program well we did two key things one
we took their self-assessment and we
took peer assessment of their
performance of these behavioral
competencies so when I say let me
actually discover we did this at the
start of the program three months in and
eight months in so that’s at the end of
the program and when I say peer
assessment what we mean is this the
performance of the behavioral
competencies was assessed for each
individual by the group of people they
were working with at the time and of
course at the beginning of the program
three months in and eight months in that
group of people changes right now if I
take how people’s behavior was rated on
average by their peers and co-workers at
the end of the program after eight
months
and compare that to the how their
behavior was rated at the beginning of
the program did they improve well thank
goodness yes they actually did okay so
what’s really important is about the
dancer that I’m going to show you here
is this this represents 635 MBA students
they came from 79 different countries
the total group was about 60 percent
male forty percent female and they took
their MBA program full-time at one of
our five campuses internationally and
what you can see on this chart and
particularly where you see the great big
bars over there you can see that the
pattern of improvement leadership
behavior improvement was the same
irrespective of the campus on which they
did their MBA now what I’ve done there
with that blue line is I’ve taken out
the effective campus and I’ve just put
the average across the total school and
you can see a significant amount of
leadership behavioral improvement when
we ran the program again in 2015 16 now
everybody has got a year of experience
we could improve it we could make it
better we actually managed to shift that
line purple line now so that now more
people showed more behavioral
improvement and leadership development
fantastic that’s really great so what
we’ve now been able to show is that if
we put our MBA candidates through an
eight-month intensive behavioral change
program they will develop in their
leadership behavior at least in the
perception of their peers but that’s not
really the issue here’s the real issue
it didn’t work quickly this didn’t work
overnight three months into the program
I’d say actually progress was pretty
disappointing and this table here what
you can see is the three pillars of
leadership behavior that we mentioned
adaptive thinking interpersonal
influence and team working skills and on
the table you can see the average of how
peers rated individuals at the start the
program three months in and eight months
in now here’s at the start of the
program this is a five-point scale so
three is sort of roundabout neutral okay
and what happened at the start of the
program is people rated their peers as
you know just like a little bit better
than new
that’s kind of what you would expect
this is the very very start of the
program before they’ve done anything
well three months in those numbers have
gone up but not that much if I wanted to
say that on average across my cohort
people had significantly developed in
their leadership behavior I would want
that number to go from an about neutral
to at least like a four out of five
right which is quite a bit of the time
well it turns out they did go to a four
out of five but it took eight months
it’s okay months for them on average to
demonstrate this behavioral change but
here’s an even more important point and
it’s this it didn’t work for everyone
after eight months of this program 18
percent of our students globally in 2014
15 did not show any improvement in
leadership behavior as assessed in the
eyes of their peers now we know from
this study of undergraduate
banana-eating that we just looked at
that people take different amounts of
time to change their behavior right now
I don’t personally have the data on why
these 18 percent of people did not
change but what I want to put to you is
this if after an eight month intensive
leadership behavioural change program
they did not change their behavior then
all we can really include conclude is
that it’s highly unlikely that typical
MBA programs with their conceptual
leadership development actually improve
leadership skills in the majority of
their students to any significant degree
and therefore I conclude that this is
indeed the model that is in operation
can we really expect our students to
improve in complex leadership skills
through simple exposure to leadership
concepts it’s actually far more likely
that they don’t and in fact a recent
study of highly celebrated CEOs found
that those with an MBA were far more
likely than the others to take
self-serving decisions with short term
results at the expense of the people in
the environment around them and that is
exactly the paradigm that’s in play when
we put people into a team working
situation and our
them to produce an assignment if you’re
made to work in a team to produce an
assignment but the unit of assessment
remains the assignment itself then the
incentive is simply to do whatever it
takes to get the best short-term result
and so we have three major
recommendations for business schools
that want to improve the leadership
capability of their students the first
is this if you want to improve
leadership behavior then you need
programs that directly target leadership
behavioral development the second is
this you need dedicated faculty you
cannot expect that a faculty member who
has been hired for his or her expertise
in accounting can also teach leadership
and frankly you’re not really taking the
concept seriously if you think any old
person can teach leadership skills
you wouldn’t think any old person can
teach accounting finally you need to
change the unit of assessment the unit
of assessment needs to include behavior
and not just knowledge thank you for
your time and attention
[Applause]
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