The New Shepherds

While post-secondary institutions strive to graduate ready-made executives, businesses claim new recruits invariably arrive underdeveloped. Is there a way to lessen the leadership gap?

Feb 1, 2009  

by Caitlin Crawshaw

To Sarah Burghardt, human resources manager for A.D. Williams Engineering in Edmonton, programs like these would seem an encouraging trend. Even so, she says, schools could still be giving students more opportunities to put theory into action, even if employers might tend to agree that leadership is a result of practice. Though the requirement to work under experienced mentors for four years keeps management positions beyond the reach of new engineering hires, Burghardt thinks students might still arrive better prepared if universities and colleges built more practical leadership opportunities into core courses.

“Our experience is typically that when new grads come out, they don’t have the leadership skills or knowledge of human resources,” she says, “or how to deal with people and a lot of the softer side of things.” In fact, she adds, schools might even consider requiring all students to take at least one business course related to some facet of leadership.

As a project manager in Peace River, Ryan Gordon agrees that it would have helped him – to some extent – to have taken more management classes at the university level. After graduating from the University of Calgary in 2004, he says, “I couldn’t have been managing projects right out of school. I would have been completely out of my league.” The 27-year-old surveyor hasn’t found much value in leadership courses he’s taken since starting his career, suggesting that industry cannot always bear the burden of education – perhaps especially when labour markets are as hot as they were recently.

“I found a lot of the things I was [already] aware of, and I found that as much as leadership classes point out these things, they don’t necessarily tell you how to fix them,” he says. “Rarely do one of the textbook solutions ever solve a problem because no problem ever fits the textbook.” As a result, his experiences have led him to believe that true leadership skills are learned largely through experience. Lately, he’s even been struggling to slow down his career development to a pace in keeping with his own confidence in his abilities to lead. “I don’t want to be thrust into something I’ll fail at,” he says. But, he adds, “I’ve no problem taking on leadership roles if I feel I have support.”

It’s that kind of attitude that could carry those students who might have missed out on the university and college programs that focused on soft skills. It’s also something that Burghardt would see as being the upcoming generations’ advantage over seasoned employees in the later stages of their careers: “They have a hunger to do well and go far.”

Whether it’s schools or businesses that provide the appropriate training, ambition may prove to be the key to putting new graduates on the path to leadership. As PwC’s Karen Cooper would argue, it’s up to grads to explore their options, investigate the requirements of careers in the real world and simply work towards becoming well-rounded people.

“Leadership skills,” she simply sums up, “are something that require a lot of personal attention.”

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