Managing Leadership^®

Yesterday’s discussion of the almost mystical faith that has developed in the efficacy of the MBA generated some interesting points among the comments. One of them appears to revolve around the value of the degree as a predictor of performance by hiring or promoting firms. The other, interestingly, looks at the question from the other direction, asking what sort of manager - MBA or otherwise - people prefer to work for. We will take a look at these issues over the next few days.

To begin with, Joe Raasch, author of The Happy Burro and legitimately proud holder of an MBA, points out that firms need some criteria for screening the piles of resumes they receive for management jobs at various levels. On the one hand, they could struggle through each meticulously embellished depiction of the candidates’ profound challenges faced in their worklives, and their singular genius and heroism in surmounting them. On the other, they could look for an apparently clearer indicator of knowledge, discipline, and ability, such as an MBA degree.

Moreover, Joe points to another aspect of the issue: many firms have mid-level or even higher positions that, for a variety of commonly encountered and perfectly appreciable reasons, cannot ordinarily be filled from their internal career pipelines. So, they still can’t evaluate candidates based on close-up experience with them; they have to go through the same process of balancing the story-telling in the experience column against the more easily assessed and verifiable items in the education column. Which seems to make more sense, at least to serve as an initial culling of the mountain of applications?

It should be noted here that Joe decidedly is not arguing that this is a premier approach to handling the issue; he is just highlighting the presence and logic of it, inasmuch as this important perspective was insufficiently addressed in my original post. So, let’s look at it again.

In many countries there are protections for classes of people against discrimination in hiring practices. In the United States, one tool in this effort is the concept of the Bona Fide Occupational Qualifiation (BFOQ). That is, if you claim that an employee must be a man, or have a college degree, or the like, in order to apply for a particular job, you must be able to prove that the requirement is positively linked to the safe and effective performance of that job. This prevents direct or indirect discrimination against people unable to meet the nominal stated requirements but who are otherwise, in fact, fully capable of performing the actual duties at hand.

In addition to helping to thwart intentional (and unintentional) discrimination, the use of the BFOQ has come to be an effective tool for hiring firms, themselves. It forces them to examine the elements of the jobs they are filling, and to try to ascertain what sort of capabilities or preparation will indicate the presence of these. In particular, it has driven them to question what had previously been viewed as obviously valid assumptions about what not only predicts, but what is a fundamental requirement for, successful job performance.

How many firms really understand the specific elements of the jobs their managers do? How many can point back from a comprehensive appreciation of those elements to the education, training, and experience - if any - that are their precursers? I’m not talking about fill-in-the-blank opinion, here, but specific, rigorous study.

We’ve noted here before that there is a fitful beginning underway to recognizing that an MBA may not actually appear - at least not exclusively or even prominently - among the predictors discovered by such study. In particular, we’ve seen that at least one academic, Professor Henry Mintzberg, is questioning those commonly held assumptions about the MBA as currently understood, and pushing for those studies. More work needs to be done. But it can’t really proceed until there is more awareness of the need for it.

However, that still leaves us with Joe’s point about the value of the MBA as a screening device for hiring or promoting firms. If only at some indirect level, it is hard to argue that possession of one doesn’t suggest actionably positive promise in a candidate. If further study reveals that we ought to abandon that screen for lack of more direct evidence of its value, what will take its place? Will firms simply have to adopt some vague position about the story-telling capabilities of their applicants based on their entries in the resume experience column?

We’ll take a look at that, tomorrow. On Friday, we’ll wrap up with a view from the opposite direction. Please do join us!

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Today’s tip: Speaking of magical reliance on unproven assumptions, please see this very interesting piece, by Jeremy Dean of PsyBlog, about graphology - handwriting analysis of personality. According to the item, up to 90% of companies in some contries regularly use it to screen job applicants.

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