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Ignore the tech bros – the right MBA can make you a better leader

20 Jan 2025

It’s time to see beyond the lazy stereotype of the ‘frat boy’ MBA and recognise the value of regional programmes to develop and support critical leaders, argues University of Galway’s Prof Kate Kenny.

There are turbulent times ahead for Ireland’s leaders. We will need critical and independent thinkers, embedded in industry and regional networks.

But the landscape of executive education is changing, and I see three causes for concern.

In-house training is not enough

I was on a video call with a senior HR manager at one of the newer multinationals in Galway last March. I was asking whether his company considered MBA programmes for training its senior executives. It was part of some research I was carrying out, to discover how we were seen by employers in the region.

“We need our staff to be on-message,” the HR manager was telling me. “Nowadays, we train people ourselves. We keep it in-house.”

This, apparently, is a trend among some such firms. Rather than sponsor staff to go on part-time MBAs in local universities, budding leaders are prescribed customised and on-message training focused on the company and its goals.

For the company to be agile, my interlocutor explained: “we need our executives to think as one. It helps us respond quickly in today’s volatile market”. Quickly, maybe. But wisely? I wasn’t convinced.

Whether the west of Ireland is best served by this approach remains to be seen. Multinationals have a powerful presence in Galway and the region. They train up talented leaders, we are told, who sometimes create new firms and new jobs later on.

‘People suffer when leaders are poor’

This works best when said leaders are embedded locally. As one of our alumni Stephen* (all names have been changed) told me, even years after he graduated, his MBA connections help him problem-solve. When a new opportunity, or a difficult problem, arises at work: “I can pick up the phone and meet someone in town for a chat.”

How well does ‘in-house’ training of senior executives enable meaningful connection? If local multinational corporation (MNC) leaders only have their contacts back at Chicago HQ or over in Singapore R&D to chat to? They could be passing other senior managers with similar concerns walking the prom in Salthill of an evening, without a clue who they are. That would be a waste.

Is this absence of connection going to make it easier for leaders to leave, if Trump’s changes come in? This is the first of my worries: we need our MNC executives to be embedded in the region, and Ireland’s business ecosystem.

Part-time MBAs in local third-level institutes and universities are ideal for this. In-house training? Not so much.

Short courses won’t cut it

Outside of the MNC world, there is a trend in cost-cutting firms to replace longer-term executive programmes such as MBAs with short, skills-based micro-courses offered by outside providers.

For sure, these short courses have their place for learning specific skills. But if our aim is fostering leadership, they don’t work well.

The leadership problem is acute. Right now, leadership is a concern for organisations, and it is a concern for the country. Just choose your debacle from this week’s news: a chaos of poor choices and worse communication, escalating into the crisis that makes the front-page headline. Where nobody seems to know what was happening except that things are going wrong, and it is costing a lot of money.

People suffer when leaders are poor.

There is no easy fix for this. There is no magic shortcut to enable someone with power to learn how best to use it. For philosopher Hannah Arendt, it is only through periods of withdrawal from the world, reflecting on our values and the impact of our choices, that a moral self can develop. The history of the twentieth century, as she points out, is a painful indictment of leaders that opted not to do this.

Recent research reinforces the importance of time and reflection: leadership development needs long-term engagement, in collaboration with a group of peers and mentors, self-questioning and reflection. It means being held accountable, again and again.

So, leadership takes time. Time spent with similar others. As Mark*, an MBA alumnus and CEO of a local charity told us at a recent open day, he valued his classmate relationships because “it is lonely at the top”.

Whether you run a charity or a public department or a global subsidiary, it is not easy to be the one in charge. This is why MBA groups develop strong bonds, when given the time to do so. We faculty are rarely involved; we just facilitate by creating space for groups to form and meet, like the away weekend in Connemara at Galway’s MBA, where new first-year students share their aspirations, challenges and the things they want to do in the years ahead.

There is a depth of relationship and trust that develops over the duration of a campus-based, two-year part-time MBA programme – fostering leadership learning that just cannot be replicated with quick-hit courses.

Not all MBAs are created equal

We are constantly hearing about the views of Sheryl Sandberg, Elon Musk and other stars of business: MBAs are outdated relics from a past obsessed with prestige and big pay. This lazy stereotyping does not do justice to the people my colleagues and I encounter in our classrooms.

We are all familiar with the joke: the elitist ‘frat-boy’ MBA programmes charging outlandish fees for a one-year, full-time experience. Programmes that promise to turn an ambitious twenty-something into the kind of cut-throat capitalist that led Prof Henry Mintzberg to dub such MBAs a “menace to society”.

But while they share a label, the part-time executive MBA programme is a completely different entity.

‘We have leaders with dilemmas, complex work lives and a wish to make sense of the formidable, constraining systems they find themselves leading’

Take Galway’s MBA for example. While we welcome executives from public and private sectors alike; our classroom draws CEOs from domestic violence charities, leaders in homelessness services and mental health organisations. We have doctors figuring out where care really sits in the new managerialism of Irish healthcare, or the marketisation of GP delivery services. We have defence forces staff well aware of the scandals as they honour their commitment to service and to the citizens the army protects. We have environmentally minded and empathetic engineers succeeding to vice-president roles in profit-maximising, market share-obsessed multinationals.

We have, in short, leaders with dilemmas, complex work lives and a wish to make sense of the formidable, constraining systems they find themselves leading. And a wish to better understand their own power to effect change. That, contra to the stereotype, is the MBA student we meet in the classroom here in Galway. Our programme reflects the wide breadth of leadership in this country.

In a further contrast to the stereotype, any decent executive MBA programme is going to foster critical thinking, far removed from the old-fashioned ‘Master of the Universe’, Gordon Gekko approach to work and life.

Business managers can and do find themselves in impossible positions; even Karl Marx had words of empathy for managers under capitalism. A quality programme offered by thoughtful academics is not going to skirt around this fact.

We see the results of critical thinking. We bring MBA groups to visit bastions of big business, and centres of international leadership. I have witnessed students, for example, grilling logistics managers at Amazon’s leading distribution centre in North America about their human rights practices when it comes to how workers are treated. And challenging high-profile diplomats about their organisation’s record on protection of women against violence, the student in question drawing on her own years’ experience at the coalface of domestic violence support.

I recall her classmate Saoirse* informing a senior Fordham University professor that the ESG and sustainability approach adopted by most US firms, in her own assessment, amounted to little more than “lipstick on a pig” – a phrase I have found difficult to erase from the memory. “I have over 20 years in a west of Ireland engineering firm,” Saoirse continued, unfazed by the eminence of the lecturer, “I know greenwashing when I see it.”

These examples show why, as an executive MBA director, I grew tired of the lazy corporate stereotypes. It is so very far from what we do. I reject the media depictions. We should defend our quality, part-time and regionally embedded MBAs.

We are lucky to have people committed to this country who are interested in being better leaders. And thoughtful ones. And ones with critical leader-friends. Because, let’s be honest, you cannot make difficult choices on your own.

I am not saying our MBA students change the world. Some might. Others might end up in organisations with values very far from their own, hopefully not too many.

But my guess is that all will find themselves in the wicked situations that tend to mark leadership roles, facing impossible dilemmas and reluctant compromises. And when they do, it will be consciously and with a set of tools to assist the challenge.

They might be kept awake at night wondering whether the choices align with the promises they made to themselves, and, by no means unrelated, to their classmates. That is no bad thing.

We should not cede leadership education to the cynics, the short courses or the ‘on-message’ corporate trainings any time soon. Given all the changes we now face in this country, it is too important.

By Prof Kate Kenny

Prof Kate Kenny served as programme director at University of Galway’s Executive MBA at the J E Cairnes School of Business and Economics (2022-2025), and as MBA programme director at Queen’s University Belfast for three years (2015-2018). She teaches on the MBA at University of Galway. Her latest book, Regulators of Last Resort: Whistleblowers, the Limits of the Law and the Power of Partnerships, is published by Cambridge University Press this month. 

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