For decades companies have faced the conundrum of how to ensure managers can implement what they have learnt at business school when they are back at work. Management guru Henry Mintzberg, scourge of business school complacency, sums it up succinctly: “You should not send a changed person back into an unchanged organisation, but we always do.”
Now Mintzberg’s Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, among others, is addressing the issue of how to ensure the dollars invested in the classroom convert into dollars for the corporate bottom line.
One idea gaining currency is that of “cascading”, in which every manager who has been on a campus-based course has to teach a group of more junior colleagues back in the workplace. It has been more than a decade since Duke CE, the corporate education arm of Duke University, North Carolina, US, promoted the concept, but advances in workplace technology are accelerating its adoption.
“The leader as teacher is very effective,” says Ray Carvey, executive vice-president of corporate learning at Harvard Business Publishing. “The leader goes back and cascades [what he or she has learnt].”