Communications Gain Importance in MBA Programs

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. —  Graduate business students in Fred Talbott’s advanced presentations course are expected to go out with a laugh. Their final assignment is to give a stand-up comedy routine in front of their classmates.

Sound tough? That’s the whole idea, said Talbott, a professor of communications at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University.

“If you can do that, you can master any form of speaking,” he said.

Comedy is one tool business schools use to teach communications skills to students seeking master’s degrees. Educators say they recognize the growing importance of communication in the information age and are adjusting their course offerings accordingly.

But teachers and business people disagree on whether schools are placing enough emphasis on communications training.

Survey after survey shows that employers rank communications skills high on the list of things they look for in new hires, said Paul Argenti, a professor at the Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College.

Yet a recent study found that schools aren’t moving fast enough in adding communications training to their course work, said David Pincus, director of the MBA program at the University of Arkansas.

“The progress has been small and inching, yet there seems to be an improving attitude toward that end,” Pincus said.

Communications training includes teaching students basic skills such as writing memos and other correspondence and giving presentations. It can also cover strategy topics such as persuasion and how to deal with the media.

About half the 215 MBA programs that responded to a survey sent out by Pincus and others require students to take a management communication course, the study found. Three out of 10 recommend that students take an elective communications-related course.

Many schools have tried to incorporate communications into their MBA programs in some form, often in response to feedback from the business community.

At Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., students are asked to join the Graduate Toastmasters Club to gain speaking skills.

Graduate students at Georgia State University’s College of Business Administration must complete a one-day workshop in business communication skills. And at the Eller School of Management at the University of Arizona, communications training is included in other classes that cover marketing management and organizational behavior. First-year students there also attend a series of weekly communications workshops.

While a few schools have had communications training for decades, many have added it just in the last five years or so, Pincus said.

Still, in many cases, communications aren’t given the same established status as such subjects as finance and accounting.

“The very best of this country’s schools have both required and elective curricula in management communication and highly competent people to teach in them,” said James S. O’Rourke, an associate professor and director of the Eugene B. Fanning Center for Business Communication at Notre Dame. “The story is mixed elsewhere.”

Schools recognize that such training is important, but administrators haven’t committed the resources needed to develop and maintain successful programs, O’Rourke said.

“Even at many good schools, communication sections in MBA courses are crowded, faculty are inexperienced, poorly paid and not tenured,” he said.

Schools often have a tough time attracting qualified educators to a field where they will automatically be given second-class status, Pincus said.

Business people say good communication skills may not get a graduate that first job, but they’ll help an employee win the first promotion.

Entry-level accountants with good technical skills may be hired even if they don’t communicate well because people they work with can handle presentations, said Jim Verney, former chief operating officer of Creative Culinary Concepts, which owns restaurants.

“But if they don’t get better in communication skills, then I think their upward ability is limited,” Verney said. “The ability to communicate your ideas clearly and succinctly is crucial the higher up you go in a corporation.”

The nature of organizations helps explain why some schools have been slow to add communication training, Pincus said.

“There’s usually a lag time between the recognition of a need and then being able to restructure your organization to meet the need,” he said.

Some educators also resist the pressure to teach skills they think should have been taught in high school and college, said Ronald E. Frank, dean of the Goizueta Business School at Emory University in Atlanta.

Some students say they welcome the flexibility to design their own curriculum, rather than being required to take communications courses.

Susan Inge, a 1996 graduate of the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, had been working for six years before going back to school to get her MBA and felt comfortable with her communications skills.

“Business schools in general are getting older students with more experience,” she said. “You have a more sophisticated student as a customer.”

Adding communications training to an already tough course schedule often means something else has to be cut because of time and budgetary constraints, Frank said.

“If somebody told me that my budget was being cut, and I had to eliminate my marketing curriculum or my communications curriculum, I know which one would go,” Frank said.