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BabsonMBA "Babson's Evening MBA program enables me to advance at my own pace and provides an academic forum that facilitates connecting ideas and concepts previously taught separately." — Andrew Sweet Director of Finance, Fidelity Investments Evening MBA Babson Fast, Flexible, Integrated, Innovative Babson's Evening MBA Program provides working managers with high-quality management education that fits their career goals. U.S. News & World Report has ranked Babson's Evening MBA among the Top 15 in the country for six consecutive years. The program's innovative features include: • New integrated "cluster courses" that provide cross-functional perspectives • Shorter completion time — just three years — due to curriculum integration • Hands-on experience through real-world consulting projects • Career Paths that develop competencies in specific career fields To learn more about this leading-edge program, visit www3.babson.edu/mba/programs/evening-mba/ F.W. OLIN GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AT BABSON COLLEGE Wellesley, MA ly to have higher ethical standards. How do these two factors go hand-in-hand? In the emotional intelligence domain, we look at the 18 com- petencies of leaders, and one of them is integrity. It's not that everyone who is strong in emotional intelligence will neces- sarily be high in integrity, since people can be high or low in any of the competencies. Someone can be very high in integrity and not so high in other qualities, or high in other qualities and not so high in integrity. Instead of saying emo- tional intelligence increases ethical tendencies, I'd say that it certainly can if that's one of a person's strengths. Business schools can focus on ethics in a number of ways. whether or not they'll rise to the top. Most of what students learn in business school are, from an organizational point of view, threshold competencies. These are the analytical skills, the expertise that is taken for granted, that you need to hold a job. But they're not the abilities that will distinguish between the best and the worst, or between those who are promoted and those who are not. Rather, it's the skills with- in the domain of emotional intelligence that much more pow- erfully seem to predict which person will be chosen to head a team or a group or a division or be named president. I say that on the basis of internal studies by hundreds of One way is to raise awareness by having students reflect on various scenarios they might encounter in the business world and rehearse how they would handle them. Such exercises give students an opportunity to do prelearning rather than learning the hard way. So it makes sense to have an ethics course that is not theoretical, but more practical in terms of scenarios and cases. What do you think today's business schools need to do to turn out executives who will be excellent leaders? I would really like to encourage schools to give students whatever opportunities they can to hone these skills because these are the skills that, once students are in the workplace, are the distinguishing competencies that will determine organizations using the competence modeling methodology. In these studies, researchers look at different people who've held the same job and determine those who were the stars and those who were average. They do a systematic analysis of the abilities exhibited by the stars that the average people don't exhibit. These turn out to be abilities like fantastic col- laboration skills, persuasive communication, initiative, flexibil- ity, the drive to achieve better results, emotional self-manage- ment, and self-confidence. Those abilities are the emotional intelligence basis for leadership. Essentially you're saying that individuals must be able to draw on the so-called "soft skills" or they won't be good leaders. It's a paradox. Soft skills have hard consequences. ■ z BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2003 23