“MBA courses are designed to shape leaders who are resilient and can evolve through adversity”. – Dr. Pratima Sheorey, Director SCMHRD, Pune

Living in an era of transformations, where anticipating ‘what next’ is the key – resilience and agility are two fundamental life skills.

MBA courses are designed to shape leaders who are resilient and can evolve through adversity. When students step into their entrepreneurial careers, building resilience in their team and modelling their behaviour becomes the key to accept the change process in the organisation.

The current pandemic and the ensuing uncertainty are precisely the kind of challenges that future managers and professionals should be trained for and sensitised to.

The Art of Resilience

When students enter an organisation, they tend to work on mundane and repetitive tasks. With time and experience, they are promoted as managers or team leaders. Through these transitions, young managers learn how to realign their priorities. During such kind of transitions, MBA graduates learn about leadership practices in a complex scenario.

While such learnings come within the organisational context, an MBA should prepare you for facing the real world. Building personal resilience, the ability to cope with stress and change, acquiring new skills, all of it comes as a bundle of learnings to build personal resilience, thereby building organisational resilience.

Let us see the pillars of building a resilient organisation through the skills learnt during an MBA programme:

Acceptance of change: The first step to building resilience in an organisation is to accept the change. Understanding how a disruption or change can be adapted to one’s advantage paves the way towards organisational advancement. The ability to adapt will always help an organisation to foresee and reduce negative consequences.

An MBA helps you to acquire the necessary skills to deal with and manage ambiguity. Courses like Change Management will enable them to create lasting improvements and transform the organisation.

Cognizant of changes in the market: At times of crisis, anxiety and stress might turn employees away from the external opportunities and changing market dynamics. During such times, stakeholder communication is crucial in order to strengthen relationships.

Strategic communication, as a part of the MBA course, will teach how to eliminate confusion during tough times and ensure people are being heard. You will also learn how to empower people and maintain successful relationships inside and outside of the workplace.

Creative problem solving: An MBA curriculum will always encourage to be innovative in thinking and foster creative problem-solving skills. Linear or conventional thinking may not help to build organisational resilience. Adversity often brings about innovation and is the time to think out of the box.

An MBA graduate is trained to think strategically in a creative manner, to assess what needs to be done in a complex business scanario. On the basis of the assessment, through relevant tools, they can provide solutions.

Accountability: While learning leadership skills during MBA, personal accountability is also an equally important skill which goes a long way. When faced with difficult situations, the ability to adapt and be accountable for the actions taken and the results thereof, plays an important role. Similarly, enabling executing and building ownership for a particular task by the entire team also helps in delivering desired results even during times of crisis. This team management is also an important aspect of being accountable both at an individual as well at a group level.

Management of business processes: Business-critical processes in certain areas must be robust and compliant. This ensures that the internal operations are efficient, incur lower costs and deliver quality. This, in turn, also builds the trust of stakeholders and customers. Management graduates pursue a discipline that enables them to measure performance and uncover opportunities for cost savings.

These are some of the ways that will help in building a resilient organisation. Bouncing back, getting up and fighting healthy will be the way out during crises. Armed with the right skills and tools will ensure that you will be in for the long haul.