One of the most essential roles of the general manager is to be the person who can move an organization forward through the most tangled of circumstances, says Professor Amy Edmondson, “where there is uncertainty, different points of view, and high stakes, whether economic, reputational, or human safety.”

To help prepare students for this work, Edmondson and Assistant Professor Tiona Zuzul teach Making Difficult Decisions: The General Manager’s Job. The EC course is based on the hypothesis that the results you achieve as a general manager—and the success of your team or organization as a whole—are determined less by the facts of certain circumstances and more by how you think about it.

The first module focuses on cognition, to help students understand that “there’s always leeway or alternative ways to think about a situation,” Edmondson says. Then they dive into conversation itself, examining what is said, how, and by whom—and how that shapes the outcome. This second module examines how to design a process that leads to high-quality conversation: Who should be in the room? What are the rules of engagement? The third module steps back to focus on decisions in the broader organizational context, and how decisions shape and enact strategy. The final module examines the role of the general manager in driving necessary changes and, ultimately, the course studies the centrality of decision-making inside complex organizations in an uncertain world.

Students prepare cases about the kinds of companies you’d expect to see in an HBS course, from PepsiCo to aluminum, from life sciences to financial services. But a quarter of the cases are about extreme and sometimes tragic events that span organizations, such as the Chilean mining rescue of 2010, the sinking of the cargo ship El Faro, and the failed launch of the Challenger shuttle. “These situations make visible the sorts of dynamics that can be present but are more under the surface or at least more difficult to study in typical settings,” says Zuzul, whose research focuses on the link between context and cognition—how people frame the world around them and how that shapes their actions.

The course also features dialogues with case protagonists and other GMs, as well as six lab sessions in which students role-play in real-time simulations. It’s a practice they bring even to the traditional case discussions: “We try to put people on the spot and not just talk about what they would do, but ask them to actually do it,” Edmondson says. If a student says, “So-and-so should’ve done X, Y, or Z,” Edmondson and Zuzul will respond: “Okay, give it a go. How would you say that?”

“That’s not something that they do frequently in the HBS classroom, and we think it’s an impactful way for them to put their theories into action and see what a large gap there often is between thinking about and communicating a decision,” Zuzul says. Of the fourth-semester course, Edmondson and Zuzul say their job isn’t to weed out anyone who isn’t ready to graduate. Rather, they want to provide practical tools. “And we believe very strongly that the ideas, the frameworks, and the skills we’re teaching are lifelong skills. You’ll need to keep improving them your whole life,” Edmondson says.

Post a Comment