Welcome to our last newsletter for this year!
For this quarter we want to focus on the issue of relationships. It is a topic that gets undermined when conducting your MBA studies. However, we believe building relationships with academics and your colleagues can be a great strategy for responding to career challenges that you will be faced after you finish your studies.
We want to help you reflect on how your development of networks can be linked to your personal future career targets. From our experience, and after talking to MBA students, we realised that lots of opportunities are wasted which could make a big difference for when looking to change career or wanting to find a job.
Creating relationships is not the same with having acquaintances! I is about identifying those key areas of interest that can complement your own aspirations. The majority of candidates who are able to make successful transitions in their career depend on their previous relationships with people that can support them.
However peoples’ perceptions of benefits remain very real and yet neglected. It takes time and effort to think what you can get from others and what you can give to others so that there can be a win-win situation.
The current labour market remains difficult and challenging. It is evident that it becomes more and more difficult to create relationships or to reflect on how to manage them when you get to the point of looking for a job.
We want to reinforce the importance of developing relationship with academics as well as other students during your MBA studies.
Develop Relationships with Academics
There is an evident distance between students and tutors!
Tutors can be weary of having students asking too many questions. It is assumed that students need to show more initiative for finding things out. However, the pressure can be overwhelming and students become hesitant of developing any other type of rapport with academics.
Some students do not even consider the possibility of using their institutions’ academic staff as a resource that can assist with their own development. The growing mutual hesitancy by academic staff and students can result to developing a very formal and distant relationship.
MBA Winner is working with tutors that have had direct experience from working at different academic institutions, in different countries, and at different capacities. Our experience tells us that the pool of academics represents a lot of opportunities in terms of getting in touch with people that have experience and knowledge about different sectors.
To seek and develop acquaintances with academic staff goes beyond simply asking for advice. Try to engage in conversations that are more general and which can tap into the experience/background/knowledge of the individual.
You will be surprised for how much information you can draw from academics on matters that have very little to do with assignments! Academics are feeling the pressure when they just have to give you advice and information.
As we mentioned in previous newsletters universities become big and very slow-moving institutions. Students are treated only as numbers. MBA courses remain a very attractive resource for generating revenues. Academics can have little choice in deciding student groups or teaching strategies. As a result, the pressure is passed onto the students. In reality this means that the tutor might not spend more than 10 minutes on reading a piece of coursework.
It is difficult to know how your contacts with academic staff can be useful at the time you are in employment. Some students are trying to make use of Linkedin as a way of reconnecting with their tutors. However, having an extract contact in your Linkedin profile does not in itself add anything special.
Academics are desperate in making contact with people from the industry. The nature of the academic life means that a lot of time is spent on research and teaching. As a result, academics have very little time to actually create new contacts. However, such access allows them to identify opportunities for collecting data for their own research project.
There are times that students can become ‘gatekeepers’ for academics and such individuals are willing to have a very different kind of relationship with the students from what they used to behave as tutors.
Identifying common areas of interest with academics is important. However the paradox is that researchers and students want to rip the benefits of a good relationship when it is ‘there’.
Our advice to you is for you to decide how you can go about developing a professional working relationship with academic staff. Such people can be a potential point of contact where access to information can be more readily available.
Sometimes it is difficult to actually go back to tutors after you have graduated!
It is difficult to re-establish rapport with academics because of the ongoing and frequent contact academics have with new students. This is why it is important to have that personal and light rapport with academics so that you can reinforce the relationship in the future.
Develop Relationships with MBA Students
MBA Students are driven by a lot of ambition to succeed! They work hard in order to progress through the various challenges, get work experience, promotion etc.
However MBA students fail to realise the benefits from seeing how their classmates/colleagues could also become future partners. They might be in the same course but when in employment such contact can be invaluable. Sometimes, there is fear for coming across as ‘needy’ and this puts students off.
However, developing good working relationships with colleagues requires a good strategy for materialising such contacts into future partners.
For this reason, it is important to have good awareness of what is that you can offer to someone else after you graduate and get back to work! Moreover, it is important to visualise how the exchange of information and sharing skills can help you work in new projects and achieve mutual goals.
It is important to remember how motivation is important for all actions people seek to undertake. Individuals want to make decisions when there is some expectation for achieving some type of benefit. A working relationship can either flourish or die because both parties have not tried to make explicit why the possible benefits can be worth the commitment and effort.
Vroom and Lawler were two motivation theorists who tried to explain how people make decision through by creating ‘expectations’. Stacey Adam’s ‘equity theory’ is a similar framework that tries to explain how people produce mental calculations between ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’.
The overall thread you need to remember is that people have to actually sense a specific benefit before they make the effort/commitment to engage with it. The more the perceived benefit is desirable or/and attractive the more likely it is to endeavour to achieve it.
Practically this means that the development of any relationship, and to the point where individuals are willing to want to develop collaborations, requires that you consider the potential mutual ‘benefits’.
If this is not done, then no party will be willing to invest in such relationship. Benefits remain intangible and you need to reflect and consider what people could do in the future rather than where they are at a particular point in time.
Since the pressure of the MBA degree generates pressure to finish assignments, this can be an obstacle in itself from preventing you to see what might happen in the future. For this reason, we want to advice that it is important to consider where people might be in the future, and what kind of relationship you need to develop with them now that you have the opportunity to do so.
