Online MBA Forum

I'm about to take a new job, and I've just been looking at the CVs of my new staff. Of the twenty people that will be reporting to me, two of them have recent MBAs.

I'm now considering how I can best use them. This is going to be interesting, because I know that one of the MBAs applied for the job that I have got, and obviously failed. So I have a feeling that I may have a little fight on my hands.

I usually don't have great problems in these kind of situations, apart from anything else, my management style tends to be to give people roles and to let them get on with things, as long as they inform me of results, and if they have a problem. If they don't do these two things, then they are in trouble.

If the MBAs have any sense, they'll enjoy this stuff and realise that I'll let them do things their way. They can practise on the present situation, and then start working out how to further their careers - if they're good enough, they should be able to get my job in a year or two.

Many of the projects that MBA students work on during their program are group work projects, as they simulate real life situations where few people work outside a team. However there are problems in assessing an indvidual's contribution to a project. It can be very difficult to work out who has done what, and to what standard, when you are presented with a total project.

However, one way of dealing with this when you are teaching on an MBA is to give the problem to the students. They have to either work out how to identify individual contributions to the project, or to be confident that there was equal effort and equal talent in each part of the whole.

Just another management dilema.

The Chief Executive of my organisation has just finished her MBA. I had a long talk with her about what difference she felt it had made to her work.

She was adamant that the biggest difference it made to her was the way in which she organised her work. Previously she had listed the tasks to do, prioritized them and then done them one by one. Now, as they came in, she decides who should be doing this work on the senior management panel, and diverts it straight to them. She says that if she has to consider tasks more than once, she is wasting her time. Her clear desk policy is real, and if at the end of the day she has tasks she needs to do herself, they are scheduled in her diary, and she does not consider them until the scheduled time.

She says that this is giving her an enormous amount of time to do real work. She regards her team as a part of her workforce, and so each task is handled by the person who is best at that area of work. She says that the change, for her, is a different framework, plus an understanding of the value of individual people who have real knowledge in their areas of expertise.