Learning, Leadership Development

Challenge

One of the Top 5 business schools in the U.S. needed to modify its pivotal first-year curriculum to meet the needs of an increasingly global student body. It wanted to accelerate the learning of new students and increase their self-awareness and understanding of their strengths as leaders and team members.

The Academic Director of the Executive Skills Program wanted to create greater individual leadership and team capability with the 450 first-year (“MBA1”) MBA students. She wanted to update her curriculum with the latest tools and approaches. Students work in multiple teams, often on virtual teams. They needed a methodology and skills to reduce the start-up time when working on their 85 work-study projects in order to meet the expectations of their international corporate partners.

Action

After competitive review, 5 Dynamics was chosen as the foundational tool set to help the students understand their preferred leadership energies and strengths, to mobilize performance at all phases of a learning process. All 450 MBA1 students received their individual reports and were coached by MBA2 coaches to understand how to focus their Energy on working, learning, and collaboration. The students used team graphs to accelerate the formation of their action learning teams, using the 5 Dynamics as the coaching model. As students join new teams during their two-year program, they will generate new team graphs each time to accelerate the team development process.

Results

All 450 students have completed their 5 Dynamics assessment and received group orientation and individual coaching using the model. MBA2 coaches have rated the course 4.78 on a 5-point scale, a major improvement over prior years.