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Organizations today face many persistent challenges, including stubbornly low employee engagement, declining public trust, and growing risk of internal and external activism. Strong managerial communication competencies are vital to addressing these risks, as they are closely tied to building trust, engagement, and resiliency. Globally employers prioritize these communication competencies over other soft skills and technical competencies, yet they have long expressed concern that graduate management education is not adequately meeting this need. To better understand this persistent gap, the research question was “How can Canadian MBA programs, equip managers with advanced communication competencies that will enable them to build trust, engagement and drive change in a complex business context?” The two objectives for this study were to: (1) identify which communication competencies are most important for MBA graduates, students, faculty, program staff and employers; and, (2) identify changes to MBA structure that can support these priorities.
The research uses a sequential exploratory qualitative approach to identify key communication competencies sought by Canadian organizations and compare them with the course content from Canada’s MBA programs. A total of 49 interviews were conducted with Canadian executives, recent MBA graduates, current MBA students, and faculty and staff from Canadian MBA programs.
This research finds there is a misalignment between how employers define a communicative manager and the competencies MBA programs develop in their core and elective courses. Finally, this research proposes a way to help MBA programs better include these key competencies in their curricula, thereby improving outcomes for the post-secondary institutions that deliver these programs and to the organizations that hire their graduates.
