Drawbacks to old-school ways

The Life: Emerging nations look to changing learning by rote but impact will take a generation.

An often-overlooked element of leadership preparation is the educational background of leaders.

In the Booz & Co report, Youth in GCC Countries: Meeting the Challenge, the consultancy outlines an issue critical to understanding how to lead successfully in the region.

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"Traditional teaching methods in the GCC countries emphasise repetition and memorisation rather than skills highly valued in the modern workplace, such as creative thinking, brainstorming, problem solving, and personal initiative," the report states.

"In traditional teaching environments, teachers have a command-and-control function in the classroom; instead, they should be acting as facilitators, pointing the way for students to develop their sense of individual responsibility and find the information they need to solve the problems presented to them. "Significantly, too, traditional teaching methods do not instil in youth an entrepreneurial spirit of healthy risk taking."

It is within this paragraph that Booz & Co not only addresses opportunities for improving the regional education system but also two consequences of leadership.

The first consequence relates to the leader's background when taking on a top position.

An often-overlooked element of leadership preparation is the educational background of leaders. While this thought typically leads one to review their university level, the formative years for their thinking style take place during the elementary years.

The academic performance - such as grades - is not as important an indicator of leadership success as the style of education. That often boils down to rote memorisation versus an experiential and reasoning-based model.

Furthermore, the absolutely best performance comes when the reasoning-based educational model is coupled with organised extra-curricular activity.

So, the question is, what is a leader to do if they come from a rote memorisation education background? These leaders need to make concentrated efforts to enhancing their verbal and critical reasoning skills and focus on the importance of the softer skills for the teaming dimension.

The second consequence is the reality that when leading an emerging market workforce most in the individual contributor ranks are from the rote memorisation background.

While there are positives to this background, this is a considerable leadership consequence and the more aware the leader is of their team's background, the better they can lead.

Just last week, during several meetings with leading companies in the GCC, the conversation gravitated to the variance in the critical and verbal reasoning abilities depending on the educational background.

The outcome of this is in regards to how readily an employee applies discretion in decision-making and judgement.

Most of the emerging markets are working towards educational reform. But the impact of this will not be felt in the workforce for another generation.

What is an organisation to do in the meantime?

Leaders need to be aware of this and work doubly hard to compensate for the workforces' educational background and build the skills necessary for workplace performance.

There is one other point to be aware of from the Booz & Co insight: the teaching style begins the conditioning process of what future employees look for from a leader. People like to be led like they have been led. Keeping this in mind, many employees are comfortable with their background style and perform better under a clear patriarchal, not democratic, style of leadership.

Tommy Weir is an authority on fast-growth and emerging market leadership, author of The CEO Shift and the managing director of the Emerging Markets Leadership Centre