I’ve been thinking about what could be Henley’s official “position” on Personal Development. If this sounds like a simple question to you, then allow me first to disabuse you of that thought; it’s actually quite problematic.
In this post I’d like to try to explain why and then, having addressed that, in the second post I will move on to stating several tentative ideas about PD which, I think, state where we are taking the subject, positioning it not only in relation to the MBA education experience but extending it as a statement of something much bigger.
Many Business Schools have some kind of position on Personal Development. Usually the only way to find out what that is by seeing what they say about it in their marketing material or what they reveal about it via their programme information. Any position on PD could be said, I suppose, to come predominately either from without or from within. ‘From without’ means that a school has probably surveyed what it considers to be its market and come to the conclusion that this market demands PD, or something like it, be a component of the course (i.e. be one of the course’s benefits). Alternatively it could also be that because so many of their competitors seem to be think it so then they, too, must follow suit. This is a compelling position among MBA programmes entangled in rankings battles and it ensures that PD will be pluralistic, plastic and will often rely on non-teaching staff supplemented by “expert” input bought in from outside. There’s an overlap with career-related skills development and an advocacy of competency-based frameworks, an extensive use of psychometrics (and resourcing), and advocacy of coaching and mentoring support. Actual integration with the MBA curriculum is minimal when it is mainly the external that influences PD because assessment is expensive and integration of behavioural skills to academic learning outcomes is hard to do without a deeper philosophical intent. The net result of this position is often a strong marketing message but a weak return on an MBA’s investment because the intellectual energy of the course is focused on the rest of the curriculum. PD is demoted to a very few measurables, such as how happy the participants were with the CV writing classes, or the presentation courses, or the mock interviews, or the mentor programme, or just simply with the time taken for job placement (and, of course, level of salary). No connection to the education is really needed to measure the effectiveness of the PD in such a case.
The other position for PD, whereby it comes from within, is often driven by the institution’s culture, history and type of clientele (i.e. the sort of students and the sorts of organisations they work for). It is also much rarer in the market. Where a School has taken the position on PD that it is intellectually significant there may still be many of the manifestations of career assistance and advice that one finds in externally driven schools, but there is something else, too. PD is part of the curriculum itself. This may be implicit in practice-oriented forms of assessment that require a reflective component, and it may be explicit in PD being a course in its own right. To take this position is to acknowledge not only that PD is not merely ‘training’ and ‘skills-building’, but is an epistemic member of the family of domains such as Marketing, Finance, Leadership or Strategy (albeit a much less researched one).
Anyone wondering what the hell I’m talking about can compare and contrast two examples. The first, which I would class as illustrative of the “PD from without” school is an Exec MBA from a little-known institution, London Business School. The second, much closer to my “PD from within” idea, is the Exec MBA at Aston University in Birmingham.
Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog 
It seems to me that there is a key question that it would be useful to answer here:
Is Personal Development part of my MBA, or is an MBA part of my Personal Development.
Another thought would be to acknowledge the intellectual and cultural heritage of the business school, i.e. openly state its views on the individual, the scope of free will, and also discuss what good actions are.
@finn, thanks for this thought. Is it all just a question of perspective (two sides, one coin)? Or is one thing sub-ordinate to the other? If the first, then it doesn’t really matter which way round. In case of the second, I think some MBA programmes take the first view, but by default the majority assume the second.
@marianne, I agree if you mean ‘the business school’ in indivdual cases (not if you mean in general as an institution per se), but it often feels as though market forces and instant communication squeeze a School’s heritage and, in an over-stocked MBA market, the safe bet is to conform to what everyone is doing. That may be over-stating a homogeneity that in fact isn’t there to the degree I’m suggesting, but when success is measured (in ever shortened time periods) by the number of accreditations and ever-higher position in rankings, and where the ambition for careers is to reach a level of seniority before a corresponding level of maturity or wisdom, courses that “go their own way” are much rarer.
Hi Chris,
Perhaps I was being a little obtuse — I think my question lies at the heart of the matter.
To me the ‘from without’ viewpoint says that an MBA is just a product in a marketplace, which contains a number of sub-products or modules. “PD is a module that is popular at the moment. We therefore need a PD module of our own and will look outside ourselves to find out what that means. If the market changes we will drop it, or any of the other modules.”
The underlying viewpoint here is extrinsic: “Other people tell me what is important.”
The Personal Development starting point, however, would surely be an intrinsic one: “I am a unique human being, with unique needs, capabilities and skills. My life goal is to ‘actualise’ that self to the greatest degree possible.”
Under this view, a person might decide to do any number of developmental activities, including in some cases an MBA.
In that viewpoint the PD ‘module’ must surely be the most important module on the course. The MBA is a part of their PD, so the PD module is the one in which they review/reflect on how they are progressing against their initial intentions. And in doing so it is also the place where people learn to become better at the continuous cycle of “understanding who I am and putting it into better practice and understanding who I am and putting it into better practice and…”.
A similar dichotomy applies to people’s reasons for doing an MBA: either ‘extrinsic’ (“looks good on my CV, increases my salary”) or ‘intrinsic’ (“learning stuff that will help me become more who I want to be”).
These are, I think, two competing world views in our culture. And so I also agree also with Marianne: the way PD is treated is a reflection/manifestation of which worldview is dominant within the business school as a whole.
But ultimately, surely, the most important thing is that the position taken must match (be congruent with) the underlying philosophy being taught by the PD department. Namely, does it teach that the role of PD is to help each person inwardly to find out who they are and become that? Or does it teach that the role of PD is to help each person outwardly to match against a standard that has been defined by someone else?
Henley’s official [external] “position” on Personal Development must surely match its own [internal] “position”.
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