Next Generation Executive Education – A Customer-Driven Approach to Molding Tomorrow’s Leaders

By Frank R. Lloyd, Ph.D.

In today’s volatile and challenging business environment, oil and gas companies need leaders at every level who can see what lies ahead, understand the issues facing their organizations, and initiate actions to meet the challenges. This is a change from the past when it was enough to train technical professionals to produce shareholder value as well as oil and gas.

Just as the demands of industry leadership are changing, the leadership development game is changing, too.  According to conventional wisdom, 70% of employee development happens on the job, 20% through formal and informal relationships with bosses and mentors and 10% in the classroom. However, we are seeing a new dynamic emerge, one that suggests that 50% of employee development takes place through challenging job assignments, 30% in the classroom and 20% through community involvement. This theory suggests that powerful learning experiences are available everywhere and that experiential classroom instruction can be tied more closely to the job than ever before.

As a result, oil and gas companies can no longer assume that what is in the business school catalog is all that's available for meaningful management education. They can work together with business schools to design and deliver tailored executive education programs that produce exceptional leaders.

Many people in the industry remain skeptical of business schools' ability to deliver programming in executive education that promotes high performance. They seem to believe schools are restricted to the ABC method of instruction that has been used since teaching began:

A.      An educational institution offers courses according to curricula that convey subject matter knowledge in the amount and timing needed for the school to bestow a credential.

B.       An instructor has a pre-developed syllabus to present the content of each individual course.

C.      Each course is presented according to that outline.

If oil and gas companies are going to receive the relevant education they need to compete and succeed in the face of today's demographic challenges, global competition and the accelerating pace of change they must seek out changes in the delivery of the educational product.  Educational institutions, in turn, must listen, question, challenge and advocate.

At first blush, this sounds like a revolutionary concept. But all it really means is that we have to communicate with each other. Oil and gas firms need to be clear about their needs, scope and parameters, and educational providers need to understand their needs and buying criteria. We simply need to establish honest, business-like relationships based on two-way communication in order to collaborate on programs that will have immediate and lasting impact.

Once two-way communication is achieved, oil and gas firms can access a university's resources in a new light.  Research-based content is true and tested.  A purpose-built learning environment provides a safe place to think and act differently. Instructors facilitate participants' learning based on reflection and assessment of their experience, as well as external perspectives.  And access to a full university ensures that the right expert is available regardless of discipline.  And the best business schools display an understanding of the industry that assures relevance.

However, firms should not expect business schools to teach experienced managers the oil and gas business - they know it better than most academics.  Rather, business school instruction should enable experienced oil and gas managers to apply cutting edge business thinking to the industry.  All this adds up to a true learning experience - one that challenges assumptions, reconnects with fundamentals, fosters openness to change, and therefore builds capability.

Oil and gas companies can expect all this from today's leading business schools because the best ones use relationship based delivery models that blur the line between formal training and real life.  They utilize learner-driven teaching methods, flexible delivery, and tailored content to promote application of learning.  And they bring a sophisticated ability to assess the return on investments of time and money in leadership development.

Learner-Driven Teaching Methods

One private exploration and production company came to its partnering university and asked for something "a little different" to build a high performance organization.  They wanted to change their culture from a "take the hill" mentality to one based on trust and teamwork.  So they asked for a curriculum built in real time based on participant feedback and on-going organization culture assessments.  All this would change the way their managers behaved, but it is very different from the training in specific tasks or specialized knowledge that most companies think to provide for their employees through a school or college.

The educational institution accepted the challenge even though it was a departure from what they had done in the past. The instructors had to promote new ways of thinking and behaving within an organizational culture, not convey knowledge within a specific intellectual discipline. To make this program successful, the instructors had to be facilitators rather than teachers.  In the end, both the company and the educational provider benefitted from this relatively unstructured program.  The company's managers were better equipped to get the most out of their teams, and the instructors couldn't remember the last time they were so intellectually stimulated.

Flexible Delivery Schedules: "Spatial Learning"

Time is another reason businesses can profit by partnering with academic institutions to customize executive development programs. Although many companies have high-potential employees who would benefit from educational programs, these companies also realize that these employees are limited in the amount of time that they can spend away from the job in learning activities. The company's bottom line depends on their on-the-job performance.

A university executive education provider faced just such a dilemma with a regional gas transmission company.  This organization desired a leadership development program for its up-and-coming managers to better equip them to sustain growth, manage change, and maintain a strong ethical standard.  To respond to this need within the firm's time constraints, the school devised a concept called "spatial learning" in which curricula were delivered in the three-day periods separated by six weeks.  Four of these periods were spaced out over nine months.  This approach not only was convenient, it promoted sustained behavior change because it allowed participants to take newly learned concepts and tools back to the workplace, try them out, reflect, and debrief with fellow participants in the next class session.

Specifically Tailored Course Content

The head of a regional drilling company recently asked an executive education department to design a course for its "landmen" that had nothing to do with improving their skill in researching land titles and mineral rights holders. They needed to master high level negotiations so that they could quickly and non-controversially secure drilling rights from the myriad of landholders atop new gas fields.  To do so, the company's business school partner worked with its master negotiation teacher and a local "landman" to develop an actual drilling situation into a case study that could be used to demonstrate proven successful negotiation techniques in the gas fields, rather than in the typical customer-supplier situations that most business people face when negotiating.

Immediate Application

Whether we are talking about learner driven teaching, flexible delivery, or tailored content, the ultimate test of collaboration between a business and a business school partner is the application of new learning for the benefit of the company and the participant.

Many custom executive education programs do this by embedding projects into the program structure. One large exploration and production company did this with a business school partner in a program for high potential leaders.  The management committee assigned several strategically important business issues to participant teams, asked them to apply program learning to each situation, and make recommendations back to the committee.  Not only did the participants do so, they asked top executives to apply program concepts in support of the teams' recommendations.  This was a clear demonstration of the new culture of initiative and leadership that the company sought to develop through the program. 

In order for business challenge projects to be successful components of executive education programs, the company needs to be clear about the firm's overall business situation, the management development implications of its business challenges and the resulting learning agenda. The business school provider must listen, question and challenge to identify and structure tangible business issues into effective learning vehicles.

When this communication occurs, a company can achieve immediate benefits from the application of learning to specific projects, as well as long-term benefits as the participants continue to apply their learning to new situations.

Using business projects as part of a customized learning experience makes it easier to assess the effectiveness of a program and the company's return on investment. For example, it is easy to identify the number of program projects that "go live," retain executive sponsorship and achieve their business metrics.

Assessing the Return on Investment

Overall, business schools and companies are getting smarter about measuring the return on investments in employee development.  Thanks to the recent growth in custom programs, several long-term and organization-wide studies of the impact of management training have been completed.  Some show that money and time spent on training correlate with direct business impact:  margin per employee, increased shareholder value, and revenue gains.  Others show that investments in training correlate with promotions, performance differences, and better business decisions.  In fact, because the positive evidence is so broad, we now can speak with confidence about the return on learning and customize assessments to the desired outcomes. 

Critical Mass and Global Reach

There is high demand for leadership programs in the oil and gas industry these days.  The impending retirement of up to 80% of skilled oil and gas professionals in the next five to ten years demands that companies develop a critical mass of talent ready to assume leadership responsibilities at enterprise, business-unit and top functional levels. Not only that, these groups of officers, executives and high-level managers must be in alignment with the organization's overall mission and strategy and mobilize their employees around the world.

Achieving critical mass and global reach is another area in which businesses and executive education providers can profitably collaborate - if they will communicate well. Here is how a mid-sized exploration and production company collaborated with a business school provider to achieve alignment within its executive group.  The firm had grown through acquisition and merger, and it needed to integrate a management group that was widely dispersed throughout the Americas.  They worked with a business school to give the group a common business language and leadership tools through a set of programs tied to their succession plan.  They provided internal learning opportunities for mid-level managers through custom programs and externally focused learning for high level executives through participation in an open enrollment program.  Over time, the school and the company worked together to adapt program content to changing organizational needs.

Growing Tomorrow's Leaders Today

What are the leadership traits oil and gas firms need to be looking for as they enter the second decade of the 21st century?  This is how the CEO of a Houston-based gas transmission company outlined "the skills and talents required of tomorrow's leaders" in a letter to her educational partner.

"Our culture looks to create an environment where leaders must be willing to be questioned, demonstrate vulnerability and not take things personally. In other words, good leaders need to be able to embrace change and overcome failures . . . Our leaders also must be able to demonstrate passion, energy, and be ruthlessly disciplined. While discipline, execution and safety are key ingredients to our success, this must be balanced with a thirst for creative ideas and a willingness to challenge the status quo."

An off-the-shelf, straight-from-the-catalog business school course will not meet the needs of this CEO or others who want to establish their next leadership generation. Oil and gas firms and business schools must collaborate to do so.  This means that the firms must clearly articulate need, scope and outcomes, and the providers must clearly express their capability, compatibility and commitment. When such open, two-way communication happens, companies can access the rigor of the academy, and business schools can access the relevance of the workplace. Together, they can develop and deliver customized educational experiences for oil and gas executives that impact immediate success and long-term survival.