Teaching Evidence-Based Management
The show is dedicated to sharing challenges, techniques, experiences and best practice when teaching evidence-based management to others (from under graduates through to executives). Hosted by CEBMa Fellow and 20 year change management veteran Karen Plum, each episode features experts in the field who have practical experience of teaching evidence-based management and bringing it to life!
Teaching Evidence-Based Management
Teaching evidence-based management to executive students
Teaching evidence-based management to executive students (those who are already experienced managers within organisations) requires a different approach to the teaching of students at undergraduate level.
With executive students, we are presented with people who have seen it all, done it all, and have certainly got the scars on their backs to prove it. These people carry the weight of organizational experience and preconceived notions from management trends they've tried, with varying degrees of success. So armed with examples and a rich understanding of IO psychology, it's the educator's job to help students rise above the noise of past practices, and engage these pragmatic learners in an ultimately liberating approach to evidence-based decision-making.
The guests share their experiences and approaches when teaching executive students - blending academic rigor with the nitty-gritty of the business world. They also talk about how they personally judge the success of their teaching methods and share some advice to those thinking of taking the plunge with executive students, including a warm invitation to contact the Center for Evidence-Based Management!
Host:
Karen Plum
Guests:
- Eric Barends, Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management
- Preston Davis, Assistant Professor of Management, Coles College, Kennesaw State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
- Dr Gary Latham, Professor of Organizational Psychology, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Canada
- Neil Walshe, Associate Professor of Organizational Psychology, School of Management, University of San Francisco, California , USA
Mentions:
Center for Evidence-Based Management
CEBMa Teachers Network
CEBMa’s Online Course Modules
Dr Gary Latham's book: Becoming the Evidence-Based Manager - Making the Science of Management Work for You
Organizational Dynamics Journal - edited by Dr Gary Latham
Contact:
Eric Barends, Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management
Hello and welcome to the Teaching Evidence-Based Management podcast. This time we're looking at teaching evidence-based management to executive-level students. Unlike undergraduates or graduates, executive students usually have at least a few years of working experience, and often a lot more. Often, their experience is in a managerial position, so they know how organizations work. They've seen change implemented, maybe following the latest, brightest idea that everyone's introducing, perhaps around employee engagement or agile or lean. So when teachers refer to the latest fad or fashion, executive students understand what they're talking about. Been there, done that.
Karen Plum:I'm Karen Plum, a student of evidence-based management myself and, having worked in and with organizations my entire career, I have a lot of sympathy with the desire to adopt a more evidence-based approach. I think I probably feel the same as other experienced managers do when they discover evidence-based management - that I wish I'd known about this approach when I was starting out and at many other times when I could see frankly dodgy decision-making going on in organizations. So I'm delighted to explore how experienced educators teach evidence-based management to executive students, whether they've worked as executives themselves or not. Let's get started. For this episode, I talk to four experts and I'll introduce them as we go along. If you'd like to know more about them, there are details in our show notes.
Karen Plum:In an earlier episode of the podcast, we explored teaching evidence-based management to undergraduates. One of the challenges is that these people have probably not yet been exposed to life in organizations, with all their quirks and interesting practices. So when teaching these students, the purpose is to raise their awareness and to teach them critical thinking. It's a way of looking at the world, of not accepting information, facts or decisions at face value, of asking critical questions and satisfying themselves about the trustworthiness of all types of evidence.
Karen Plum:Executive students, on the other hand, have typically worked in organizations for at least a few years. They may have managerial responsibility, and it can be this move to being responsible for a team or teams of people that prompts their interest in different managerial approaches. If you've tried different things and had varying degrees of success, you might wonder what you're doing wrong or whether there's more to this management game than you've learned so far. You're looking for practical things that work in the real world, things that can help you do your job. Let's hear from Eric Barends, Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management on the difference between undergraduates and executive students, with particular reference to the stages of the process, which are about applying evidence from research and gathering evidence from stakeholders, which are covered in CEBMA's online training course.
Eric Barends:Another difference between undergrads and executive students is that executive students will make the transition from okay, these are the findings from research. Now what? How would this apply? What should I do differently? Or how could I apply this to the workplace? And when it comes to insights that suggest that rather than doing X, you should be doing Y, then they are immediately in a sort of bind like, ok, but you know, I can't go back to my board or my steering group and say, hey, we got it all wrong. We should do X instead of Y, because that is not feasible. That's not the situation.
Eric Barends:So they have a way more pragmatic, realistic approach of taking an evidence-based perspective. So the modules about apply, but in particular, stakeholders is for them way more important than for undergraduate students, because they don't know what the stakeholders are. They don't even know how that works, how the power dynamics in an organization work. While these executives have scars on their backs. They have situations where they saw it should be done this way, but they couldn't because the board or senior managers won't listen or have their own agenda and their power dynamics etc., organizational politics. And they are way more aware of that. So they have more the attitude - yeah, that's easy for you to say, but. So that's a different attitude than undergraduates.
Karen Plum:So executive students come with experience, but of course therein lies the next challenge. Helping them to recognize their experience for what it is or what it may be, and that is it may be flawed, subject to bias, plagued with the need to do what everyone else is doing, etc. etc. And in helping them explore this reality we have to be careful not to embarrass them. Those that are self-aware may come to this conclusion for themselves pretty quickly anyway. But also, it doesn't do anybody any favours to challenge their lack of knowledge by suggesting they're foolish, aren't doing their best, and so on. I was curious to know if evidence-based management is something that students are keen to learn about and to take on board. Here's Dr Gary Latham, Professor of Organizational Psychology at Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
Gary Latham:Oh, yes, I mean, managers today want to have something that's going to help them promote their careers. They may be wanting to change their jobs. They want something on their resumes that's going to catch the eyes of recruiters and, most importantly, they want to have knowledge and skills that they can use with their respective teams - that work. So it's not very hard to fill up a class of minimum of 30. And we usually don't like to go more than 40 or 50. It's easy to go out and market, either make cold calls on companies or just send out information saying - University of Toronto is offering a course on such and such and we have no problem filling the class.
Karen Plum:Having heard so much about managers seeking to learn about the latest fad or fashionable practice, I was encouraged to hear that Gary was having such success in cold calling organizations to promote his evidence-based practice course. So why did he think this was happening?
Gary Latham:Well, I think the public's getting more sophisticated, starting with evidence-based medicine. Also, I think in the area of OB, organizational behavior and human resource management, we probably have a bit of a bad rap from years gone by, where we were studying or teaching Theory X and Theory Y by Douglas MacGregor and Maslow's Need Hierarchy and Hertzberg's Job Enrichment, and it was primarily from a theoretical framework. And now, thanks to the leadership of people such as Denise Rousseau and Eric and Rob Briner and what have you, I think we've made an impact. And, as I say, when we make cold calls or we market and we say, look, we're only going to be covering stuff that works and the word works is underlined, emphasized. It catches people's attention.
Gary Latham:And one more thing - even MBAs, when they were in school years ago, their primary emphasis was on acquiring skills in finance. Well, finance isn't leadership. And the big difference we find today is in an MBA class with 28-year-olds. 30-year-olds, it hasn't changed very much. They still want finance, but by the time they hit 40, and they're in a managerial position with people reporting to them, they're saying, oh my gosh, knowing this finance perspective or that finance perspective, isn' t going to help me get promoted and isn' t going to help me get my team aligned to organizational objectives. I need to update myself. So I think it's relatively easy to get the courses packed with people who are there to learn.
Karen Plum:I also talked to Preston Davis, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management in Coles College at Kennesaw University, and he explained the initial difficulty of persuading potential students to be interested in evidence-based management as part of their course.
Preston Davis:Normally I give some element about my background right to some extent and I say the one thing I wish I had had, you know, and one of the reasons I went back to grad school was I wanted to understand, like all the mistakes I was making as a leader. Because I had a very, you know, fortunate opportunity to lead a business at a fairly young age, let's say, and I just remember making so many wonderful mistakes and I wanted to understand more about that and more of the things that I was feeling and thinking and just in the business world. And so I was, I'm going to go back to school and I did that, and then, all of a sudden, you know, I kept going back to school because I'm just a lifelong learner and I was fortunate to end up in my doctorate program where evidence-based management was finally taught. And it was like a light bulb hit me, and I think that that's the story I give the students. It's like there's this moment of a light bulb and it hit me and I remember sitting in meetings, arguing, discussing however you wanna say it spending countless hours on matters that were not our differentiators to our business, and things that I just thought in my head there's already a wheel for this. Like why are we reinventing the wheel? Right, but no one knew what the wheel was. And so then someone said, here's evidence-based management, and you can figure out all those wheels that have already been made for you and just put them into your machine. And I was like that makes so much sense.
Preston Davis:And I think that was the spiel I would give, because every student, every executive student, comes in, in their head already thinking I have problems at work, right, oftentimes around, let's say, more HR centered kind of ideas, and I just want to get better and understand how to be better and make better decisions. And I always offer up evidence-based management of hey, we're not forgetting about your gut, we're not forgetting about all the wisdom that you have, but what we're going to add to it is all the scientific and academic research and these findings from countless companies that have already done what you're doing. And now you can use that and stop the ping pong ball back and forth with all the people just wasting time.
Karen Plum:I certainly know that not every teacher of evidence-based management has found it straightforward to include the subject in their courses, or indeed to have a course dedicated to the approach, so I really wanted to understand whether business schools and universities are keen to include the subject in their curricula and the reasons behind their decisions. Here's our fourth guest, Neil Walshe, Associate Professor of Organizational Psychology from the School of Management at San Francisco University.
Neil Walshe:I think universities are torn right now between having a degree of academic integrity, academic legitimacy. Generating a degree that is I'm sorry to monetize it a product that is viable in a very competitive marketplace means that they have to be very clear about what the brand is, what the selling point is, what content is present there, and when it comes to executive students, like executive MBA students or even any professional graduate degree, there has to be a laser degree of focus on what the content is and how the content translates to a specific field of practice. So, accordingly, you'd like to think that that would engender a higher degree of efficacy on the content of what's being taught, but I think there's a movement towards generalisation. I think it's far more desirable for a lot of executive students to have six weeks of financial accounting, six weeks of customer success and to start to think about six weeks of evidence-based management, it's quite jarring in the contrast of how many other classes are offered.
Karen Plum:The need for courses to be commercially viable is, of course, understandable. All organizations need to make money and to offer attractive programmes that people will pay good money for, and when we spoke, Neil emphasised the initial need to explain the value of evidence-based management. As he said, it's hard to be anti-evidence, but it does require commitment to be evidence-based.
Neil Walshe:I think universities, as with a lot of people, when it comes to evidence-based management, it's very difficult to be against the concept. It's very difficult to be anti-evidence. I think very few people want to position themselves in that specific landscape. But, moreover, it takes a lot of commitm ent to be evidence-based and to include an evidence-based perspective in an executive program, takes up a tremendous amount of real estate and, honestly, a lot of social capital among students where there might be a greater degree of effort required to demonstrate - look, this is valuable, this is necessary, this is utilitarian. You're going to use this when that's not always a very clear argument or an easy argument to make for universities, I think.
Karen Plum:So clearly, not all universities and business schools are open to the inclusion of evidence-based management within their programs. But where they are, how do the educators go about teaching the approach?
Preston Davis:It's got to be this hands-on, really meaningful experience. And obviously we have to go through and talk about things like how do you conduct, you know, I would say crude kind of like research. And how do you validate that? How do you go through evidence and what is evidence and all these other things. And I think that one way that I've always teed it up is talking about the importance of their experience and wisdom and not downplaying that right, because if you introduce it in such a way and it's not what evidence-based management is, but I feel like oftentimes the second you start saying, oh, you need to do empirical evidence and use this research, all of a sudden they go well, does my wisdom of my many years of experience in the workplace not matter anymore? I go no, actually it matters a lot, right.
Karen Plum:Having addressed the elephant in the room and acknowledged their role in terms of their experience, Preston's approach is to get students working on a critically appraised topic. They work on this together to address an issue that one of them is currently facing at work, ideally one which the organization is struggling to figure out. He gave an example of a group looking into the relationship between remote working and job satisfaction. This came about because of the practice of many organizations post-pandemic, who had started to require people to return to their offices.
Preston Davis:I think that addressing real-life questions and issues and concerns that they're having in the moment and then walking them through the process to uncover not only the evidence that they need to be bringing from their experience and from their workplace and how to validate that evidence. But then looking into research and looking into all the other empirical data that might be out there and say how do we bring all that together and then craft a true recommendation? And then again, because I want them to have something tangible, how do you then present that in a meaningful way that you might be able to encourage your employer to change, right,
Karen Plum:All the guests spoke about the importance of using research constructively. This isn't about saying that organizations are doing everything wrong, but having taught people an approach and a framework, they now have something they can use in the future to make better decisions and secure better outcomes. Neil Walshe has tended to move away from initially working on specific student issues as this can get very context specific and people can become constrained by the barriers they perceive in their own organization, making it hard for them to break away from their preconceptions of what won't work. So instead, Neil has his students focus on a real-life third-party situation, which creates the need to find out about the specific challenges and problems in that organization.
Neil Walshe:I'll introduce somebody to the class and it's a discovery process of what are the challenges, what are the problems, what are the opportunities. You know the painful magic wand question of if you could change anything in your organization, what would it be and why. Once you have a class of evidence based management, students leverage all that towards a third party that's not part of the class, it gives them a certain degree of latitude and freedom to not be bound by - w ill it work in my company - they get to project a lot of those things onto somebody else.
Karen Plum:Neil gave me an example about a technology company his students worked with, having taken a brief from the organization.
Neil Walshe:And this person said well, most simply, the biggest problem we're having is trying to find the best way of onboarding that facilitates retainment. We're trying to maximise retainment by onboarding. And that's sort of a gift of a question really, within evidence-based management, because it immediately allowed people to say - get all the initial statements - to go well, what we do and what I've always done, and in my experience, and there's this friend of mine who works in a company similar to yours and he's done this and it's done that. And once they all get out of the way, you get to stand back, excuse me, and a ctually start to say well, hold on, let's look at the inference in the question. First of all, you know we're trying to create onboarding that maximizes retention. What's the relationship between those two constructs? And why do we expect that B will be affected by A? And that becomes oh, that's a good point, and what's the evidence around that? And okay.
Neil Walshe:And then, beyond that, what's the best method of onboarding? Well, best for whom and in what context? And actually hold on, what the hell is onboarding? What does onboarding mean? And onboarding in my company means this, and in this company it means that, but for the person they're speaking to.
Neil Walshe:Oh, no, no, no, onboarding is everything that happens from day one to day 30. So it becomes this discovery process for these students to understand that there's no standardization, there's no systematization, there's no integration of these concepts, there's no common semantics. And t hey don't get that if they bring their own questions in, because it becomes very difficult not to have some degree of social capital tied up in the value of your own question. So for me, that was the biggest transition in teaching executive students was not to allow them to bring their own questions in initially. Now they do, eventually they'll do a critically appraised topic based on something that has a significance and relevance to them. But I think for the instruction of the teaching of evidence-based management, the efficacy and the liberation that comes from addressing somebody else's problem allows them to have a status of, you know, a problem solver or to be solution focused for somebody else. They don't have that social capital tied up with it.
Karen Plum:It's so tempting to bring our own experience into these sorts of discussions.
Karen Plum:We're keen to help and we get carried away in simply providing plausible sounding solutions.
Karen Plum:For me, this approach focuses on learning by doing. As Neil says, they learn that there's no standard accepted definition of the terms being bandied around by everyone in a way that implies that they're all talking about the same thing. This in turn creates curiosity in the students to know more about the terms and their relationship with each other. A nd it also teaches them so much about the way they questioned the person with the problem to understand what they're assuming about how the constructs relate to each other, what steps have already been taken along the path to a solution, and so on. Generally, the more questions you ask, the more questions present themselves as you dig into the murkiness of what we all take as read, particularly when spoken by a confident, powerful person. Another aspect which Gary Latham mentioned was dividing his students into groups based on the types of organization they work in, so that they're working on assignments alongside peers who work in the same industry or face similar challenges, helping them see they aren't alone in experiencing those issues.
Gary Latham:Because the class typically has 40 plus students, I divide them up on the very first day. Those of you with large or working in large organizations you're to sit over here. Those in medium-sized organizations sit here. Those of you in family-owned organizations sit over here. And then when I break them into groups, the things they're discussing have similarities among them, and that keeps them extra relevant. Then they have to come back and give reports as to what they're going to do, how they're going to do it and any concerns or fears they may have. A nd, interestingly, the toughest are always in family-owned. How am I going to convince my parents that this is the right thing to do?
Karen Plum:It was interesting to discover more about how educators go about teaching the approach, and I wondered how they judged the overall success of what they do with students beyond the usual course evaluation scores and test results. Here's Neil.
Neil Walshe:I do have the highest and I've tracked this. I have the highest rate of return of students who take evidence-based management than any other class I take. Meaning, if I was to look back one year after a student graduates, be it undergraduate or graduate, there's a much higher percentage of people who stay in touch with me having gone through an evidence-based management class with me than those who haven't. Now, that's a small sample. I know the N is very small on that, but it's notable is that the people who have a conversion experience and who actually go this is useful and I still use it and it's helpful.
Neil Walshe:And it might only be helpful in the sense of where they draw evidence from or how they suggest other people draw evidence or how they've used an evidence-based management perspective in their own sphere of influence and that's the most common thing people say is that, yeah, when I'm asking people to say you know, somebody about two weeks ago got in contact with me and said funny story, I don't need anything from you. I just wanted to tell you we were doing a whole new recruitment cycle and our new recruiter had said hey, I'd really like to adopt this new way of looking at recruiting and using job crafting as a way to recruit people. You know where we advertise 50% of the job and then we ask them to fill out the rest of the components and say how they want to grow in the organization and have career trajectory be part of it. And I think that could be really impactful. And this person was able to say to them hey, what's the evidence that that is the case and what's the switching costs associated? And if you can go and assemble that degree of evidence and bring it back to us, we can make a better decision. Because you know the person that was in charge of authorizing that decision did not know any literature around job crafting or around you know, career planning or what the effect has on retention.
Neil Walshe:They said they were able to give away a huge amount and you know the web address for CEBMa and give this to this person who then started to go through the process and you know, compile a good question and then assemble literature and start to look at a value of process. And it's become an expected norm that there's now a mechanism in place is, if you want a new initiative, having a good idea is not the metric anymore. It has to have a good idea that has substance, that has applicability, that has some evidence behind it and that's very reassuring. I think that's proof of concept that I get out of teaching this that you might not get in teaching something else. It's very rare somebody else will come back and say - that thing that I did in your class five years ago, a thing happened today that it made sense. You don't get that a lot.
Karen Plum:If you want a new initiative, h aving a good idea is not the metric. I love that. Here are some of Gary's indicators of success.
Gary Latham:Well, I guess I have two or three indicators. One, the exam is based on typically the same questions year after year. How are you going to persuade your boss, or how are you going to persuade your team, because lots of them are CEOs themselves of small organizations. How are you going to persuade your boss or team to use X, Y or Z? And of course, I fill in the blank on X, Y or Z. I also have a chat line and on the chat line, they're rewarded in so many points toward their grade for coming up with tough questions for their classmates, and the classmates get rewarded for coming up with solutions. So for the entire semester, say from September to December, or from the beginning of the semester to the end of the semester.
Gary Latham:That's all they're thinking about is - I got to figure out how to use this. I got to figure out how to use this. And, if they can, oh, I also have another indicator when I come down early, are there people waiting to see me? So that's an unobtrusive indicator. How long do I stay after class? S o I can tell right away whether I'm on the right wavelength with them.
Karen Plum:And here's Preston's take on success.
Preston Davis:I will say that the capstone of the program, they go on a consulting engagement. They actually get to work in an international setting. They get paired up with a company. Typically they're smaller companies, like anywhere from maybe 50 to 100 people or something like that. They're like really, really incredible opportunities. But then they go and do like a true consulting practice engagement and a lot of them are like go to market. A lot of them are just like process change kind of internal.
Preston Davis:But what I always pitch and the thing that I always feel like okay, I maybe did a successful job in getting this idea of evidence-based management in their heads, is if they use some of those practices in that engagement, right.
Preston Davis:And so if they're using, let's say, the PICO kind of framework, if they're using and bringing in evidence from academia and doing the research, all of a sudden I'm like, okay, they have a meaningful change in the way that they evaluate and go about doing business. When I see a good amount of students in that capstone project bringing in these practices in a real world setting to help advise a company, that makes a difference for me. That's like my element of hey, was this meaningful? Did they get something out of it and are we somehow getting evidence-based practices into business? Do I anticipate that these individuals are then going to go back into their work settings and, over time, start kind of pushing this idea? Because if they, you know it's, it's a snowball and it's a, and it's a growing one, I think that if I can help accumulate a little bit more snow and make a little bit bigger and we get there a little bit faster, I think you know, done my duty, A nd finally, Eric .
Eric Barends:Most executive students I teach need to conduct a CAT a critically appraised topic, or a rapid evidence assessment on a topic that is relevant for their organization.
Eric Barends:Part of that assignment is also bringing the findings from the CAT or the REA to the organization and then they explain how that landed within the organization and when they somehow manage to bring it on the attention and it has a sort of follow up in terms of, okay, if this is what we know from re search, it may be important to this or that. When there's a follow-up on that, for me that's a measure of success. It can be very simple. It can also be like hey, we should take a baseline measure and we have this simple scale that really helps us to determine whether we have an issue with X or Y. Simple steps, simple things. If they have the opportunity or they create the opportunity to set the next step, okay. If we now do, if we know this, now what, and then follow up oh, we should measure your baseline or we should take into account this moderator, or this insight is very important, w e should emphasize this in the project or with our stakeholders, then I feel indeed it has success.
Karen Plum:I find all these examples very revealing because they speak to the practical application of evidence-based management. Did the student understand the process and how to apply it, and did they at least take the right approach to inform and facilitate better, more evidence-based decision-making in their organization? Finally, I asked all the guests what piece of advice they'd give fellow educators who are thinking about teaching evidence-based management. Here's Neil Walshe to kick us off.
Neil Walshe:For anybody thinking of teaching evidence-based management, please understand that the possibility of doing so is massively increased by you reaching out and contacting the Center for Evidence-Based Management. The extent of their resources, the module is wonderful, and the willingness indeed of the community, the population of those who already teach evidence- based management, to be involved in your exploration of your own capacity or the marketplace for a class in it, is huge. We consistently talk to each other and we actually have I think a community that's built on a degree of resource that I don't see in a lot of other aspects of management. So if you're thinking of teaching this stuff, don't leave that on the table. Make sure you get involved in that community. Reach out. There've been a wonderful set of resources and beyond names on a page Eric and Denise and indeed Rob Briner there's people behind all those names that are more than willing to contribute, you know their own failures and their, their mechanisms of success, and my own as well included into that. There are people that are willing to talk to you and I think the more of us that are doing this, the greater the legitimacy of the process for sure.
Karen Plum:And the next advice comes from Gary Latham.
Gary Latham:There's lots of literature accumulating on this subject. So Eric and Denise Rousseau and Jeff Pfeffer have lots of information on this. I'll give a plug for my book on Becoming the Evidence-Based Manager by yours truly Gary Latham, and start reading those things, because they're written in everyday language so that it's memorable and meaningful and the information themselves will give you lots of cues as to how to speak in class.
Gary Latham:Big problem we academics have is that we're taught how to speak to one another and that's just great, except it's an exclusive club. No one outside your field understands a word you're saying. So if you read the kinds of material I'm suggesting, you'll learn how to speak to the public, and the public's going to love you for it. Oh, I have to give another shameless plug. I'm the editor of Organizational Dynamics. Organizational Dynamics only has one purpose to communicate behavioral science information to managers and MBA students. So it's free of all academic jargon and it is written to be evidence-based. And it's the kinds of papers you can disseminate to students and managers and know they're going to read it, understand it and like it.
Karen Plum:So lots of practical advice available from those sources. There are more details and links in our show notes. Next, here's Preston.
Preston Davis:Yeah, I think that one of the main things that have been beneficial, at least for student reception, is just that idea of let them bring the questions they need answered, the ones that they're struggling with, and then use those as the framework to outline going through the process of evidence-based management and the insights that might help from that perspective. I think, from a program that gets really tough.
Preston Davis:Academia is its own interesting beast and I was just very fortunate that the powers that be are very open-minded, and I think that in business school settings, one of the biggest pushes now, I mean even maybe just in all academia is like what's the value of a degree? And I think that there's been enough I don't know political discourse or national and media attention to this idea of you know student debt, what are they getting out of it? You know employers are saying, oh hey, we're getting these, you know undergrads, but then we have to teach them everything anyway because they actually don't know any practical business skills or something. And so I think this gives something to universities to say well, we're teaching practices that these students can bring into the workplace day one. You're getting students that are learning a new way to do critical thinking right, to bring in evidence, to bring in experience, to not discount all the things that happen in the world and to not discount things that have been known and that are known from other businesses.
Karen Plum:And the final advice comes from Eric.
Eric Barends:I often say and I think that's a nice, nice quote, I don't know if it's mine or it came from something else. Evidence-based practice starts with a practical question, not with an academic answer. And a lot of academics start with an academic answer rather than just having a discussion with the practitioner. So what exactly are you doing in your organization? What kind of issues is your organization struggling with at the moment? What are important trends? What are important challenges? And then go from there rather than sort of push approach. These are insights. This is important. You should know this. This is, to be honest, actually how evidence-based management started - a whole bunch of academics being very sad that their brilliant research insights were not used within practice and by practitioners. But I don't think that's the right approach. You should start with the problem of the practitioner and then go to the academic or research answer, not the other way around.
Karen Plum:As with so many things in life, there's no one-size-fits-all approach to teaching evidence-based management to executive students. Several of the guests spoke about their experience teaching these students in an organizational setting where organizations run their own programmes which teach an evidence-based approach. The needs of each type of executive student or student group will vary depending on their level of experience, their self-awareness of things that have and haven't worked in the past and their openness to changing their approach in the future. As educators, the sweet spot here is having a good knowledge of IO psychology research, a grounding in the benefits of taking an evidence-based approach to management and to have worked and been responsible for managing others. This combination allows the teacher to identify with the executive student's world, to emphasise with the challenges they face, to give practical examples and to help the student navigate the wealth of academic research that could help with their problem. Eric told me that part of the art here is gently coaxing the executive student through conversation and encouraging them to think more deeply about the issues, not simply giving them direction. This resonates with the practice of evidence-based management within organizations. You have to be respectful of where people are and gently draw them towards a different way of thinking and responding to the situations they face. A big part of all of this is speaking the same language. As Gary mentioned, academics have their own jargon, shortcuts and ways of speaking, as with all professions. Being able to dip into the executive's world, where they use different terms, can help bridge the gap between academia and business. And let's face it, universities and business schools are also organizations with their own power and political dynamics, curious decision making and things that make no sense. So if you've only worked in an academic institution, you'll have experienced much of this stuff already. The biggest reward here is that if we're successful in helping senior, influential executive students to adopt a more evidence-based approach, then there's every chance they will encourage a wider adoption of the practice. In turn, this can promote a shared language and understanding and start to replace "the way we do things around here with a more robust, effective decision-making process which starts with truly answering the question - what actually is the problem we're trying to solve? And then we can be open to change, based on a critical evaluation of the available evidence. And that's it for this episode.
Karen Plum:I'd like to thank my guests Eric Barends, Preston Davis, Gary Latham and Neil Walshe. If you'd like to know more about them, take a look at our show notes. If you want to find out more about them. Take a look at our show notes If you want to find out more about teaching evidence-based management or to join the CEBMa Teachers Network, please head to the website cebma. org. Again, there's a link in our show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Goodbye.
