Yale SOM Seeks to Prepare MBAs for Working in Global Teams

A new part of the MBA program’s core curriculum at Yale School of Management (Yale SOM) is designed to throw a few modern foibles into students’ learning experience.

“Would we be doing our students any favors by eliminating complications and problems? No,” Edward Snyder, Yale SOM’s dean, told Quartz in reference to a course that will now be required of all its MBAs.

Addition to the core curriculum reflects modern working realities 

The new addition to the school’s core curriculum, known as ‘Global Virtual Teams’, introduces students to the challenges of working remotely with teams that are spread across international borders, time zones and cultures – an increasingly common facet of the modern business world.

Indeed, Yale SOM says the course comes in response to hearing about some of the difficulties students have experienced during summer internships requiring them to work with global teams. The simple truth is that plenty can go wrong when you rely solely on technology and forms of electronic communication to keep your team connected.

“One of the big problems global teams face is in how they hand off and coordinate information - when you’re not always working together in real time, you need to be sure the team has what it needs to execute without interruptions, questions, or delays,” Amy Wrzesniewski, one of the faculty members behind Yale SOM’s new core course, explains.

Another problem can be making cultural assumptions, according to Wrzesniewski’s fellow course instructor, Michael Kraus: “We are products of our own cultures and so much of the time, we operate on our own assumptions. How we think we make decisions is not often how others make decisions. That’s not an assumption you can make, particularly when working cross-culturally.”

Yale SOM draws on Global Network for course’s follow-up project

Teaching on the new course runs for only three consecutive days, but its lessons then feed into a further aspect of Yale SOM’s core curriculum, known as the ‘Operations Engine’. In this, Yale SOM students work with those of HEC Paris and Mexico’s EGADE Business School on a week-long virtual team simulation project that plays out in real time. Facilitating this particular cross-continental collaboration is the Global Network for Advanced Management – a network of business schools to which all three institutions belong.

Bringing about “increasing connectivity” with the Global Network was named among Snyder’s highlights for the year at Yale SOM, as was the introduction of the ‘Global Virtual Teams’ course. According to management professor and director of the school’s MBA core curriculum, Olav Sorenson, the course can help ensure students hit the ground running when they progress to their post-MBA careers.

“Our hope is that they will develop a set of skills for how to interact better with people who might be working from different cultures and different time zones, so when they go into real jobs they’ll be able to drop right in and be productive from day one.”