HBS MBAs’ 'Lean In' Adaptation Targets the Confidence Gap in Children

Can the messages of female empowerment contained within the pages of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean in be adapted for a five to eight-year-old reading level? Two students in Harvard Business School’s (HBS) MBA class of 2017 don’t just think it’s possible, they think exposing children of this age to some of the book’s basic tenets can help improve the confidence gap between what men and women believe they can do and achieve in their careers. This gap is something they say they have witnessed even among the high potential cluster of emerging leaders they call classmates at HBS.  

Taking inspiration from Sheryl Sandberg

The result of adapting the ideals - as penned by Facebook’s influential COO in Lean In - for a children’s audience is Brave Becca. Its ultimate aim is “to change the lives of young girls just like Sheryl Sandberg changed our lives,” according to Ching-Ching Chen, who co-wrote the book with her fellow HBS MBA student, Preeya Sud.

Both say that Sandberg has been a key source of inspiration in their careers thus far, as they believe she has been to the vast majority of their peers. Yet, when they began their MBA at Harvard Business School in 2015,  they detected a confidence gap that was evident from the way in which their female classmates expressed themselves – preceding their opinions with phrases along the lines of ‘I think’, ‘it’s just my opinion’ or even ‘I’m probably wrong, but this is what I’m going to say’.

For all their knowledge and application of female empowerment ideals, like Sandberg’s, in their careers to date, something was up. “We’ve all tried to live by these ideals but when we got to HBS we were still facing some of these issues,” says Sud, who’d asked herself, “why are they not working for us right now?” A graduate of LSE and a postgraduate law qualification in the UK, Sud outlined the problem of ‘caveating’ one’s words in this way by telling her classmates: “We’re undermining the comments we’re making and we have to make sure that we speak with confidence.”

Chen admits that she still has trouble practicing all of the concepts Sheryl Sandberg preaches, for example in ensuring she ‘speaks up’, but says: “The fact that these things are always at the back of my mind has been really critical in getting me where I am today. What we want to do is transfer that message to young children to attack the confidence gap before it ever begins.”

Central to this plan is facilitating conversations between children and their parents. “There is an argument that says that we need that conversation to make sure that these ideals hit people at a young age and so people don’t get stereotyped,” reasons Sud.

Of course, adapting the complex concepts contained within the pages of Lean In for a children’s audience is not without its difficulties and “that,” according to Sud, “is where we explored some of the things we’ve been learning in a lot of our classes at HBS.”

How a children’s book emerged from HBS’s FIELD program

Produced in collaboration with four of Sud and Chen’s fellow cohort members, Brave Becca has emerged from FIELD, a program that runs throughout the first year of the Harvard Business School MBA. Sud explains that the program starts as something that “encourages you to talk to your classmates and understand different perspectives, and gets the discussion going on things like diversity.” Students then start working in teams and are able to work on unfamiliar concepts and in unfamiliar contexts, through international travel for instance. Its culmination this year has been the launch of a product tying together what the team has learned throughout the year. Having identified what they wanted to accomplish with their product, this particular team of MBAs locked their sights on the children’s book market. “It’s one of the fastest-growing segments within the publishing industry and it’s a high impact market,” explains Chen.

The book, which conjures its plot around a novice, yet ambitious, female wizard named Becca and a troublesome dragon, doesn’t try to cover all of Lean In. Instead, it focuses on one chapter in which there are three principal concepts: Speaking up; acting with confidence (even if you’re not necessarily feeling it on the inside); and not attributing results to luck. To spark those all-important conversations, meanwhile, the book contains an activity section, which asks questions of its readers – something which produced some thought-provoking feedback when the team tested the book out in libraries.

“When we were asking why Becca didn’t sit at the front of the class, one girl said she was afraid to say something wrong, just like me. I feel like that in class a lot,” recalls Chen. As heartbreaking as this sounded to Chen at the time, the conversation this response provokes is exactly what the MBA students were hoping for. “It gets parents to say ‘it’s ok when we’re wrong because we learn something new’. That’s what we wanted to create in terms of the experience as a whole.”

Gender equality and the Harvard Business School experience

When it comes to the MBA experience, the question of how business schools can and should do more to eradicate gender bias and level the playing field between men and women has become a key point of debate for our time. Not least, because of schools’ great potential to influence the upper echelons of tomorrow’s senior workforces.

Harvard Business School is no exception to this challenge and indeed, the school’s dean, Nitin Nohria, made a public apology for its past failings with regards to gender equality at an event in 2014. However, Chen and Sud have been suitably impressed by some of the measures the school now has in place.

Chen says the way a program such as FIELD – with its commitment to encouraging the exchange of perspectives – has become ingrained into HBS’s culture is a sign of the positive changes taking place. Sud, meanwhile, points to the school’s attempts to ensure that class interaction rates are a fair representation of its makeup – in terms of its proportions of female and international students, for instance. “Every class has a scribe that sits at the back and writes down every comment and who’s saying it, and then the professor will actually stand at the front of the class, maybe every couple of months or so, and say ‘I’ve come to give you an update on my calling pattern’,” she explains, before adding: “In terms of percentages, it’s always within about 1% of the actual statistics of the class!”

Of course, underpinning much of the class debate and, for Chen, “part of what makes HBS so viable,” is the case study method. While case studies have attracted criticism for the paucity of their female protagonists, both these class of 2017 students can instantly recall a recent case they have studied in which women have taken the lead or in which gender has been the central theme. “The great thing about these classes is there’s a great level of respect for each other,” says Sud, adding: “We can have a very open and honest debate.”

Case studies at HBS: “You have to trust your gut and share your thoughts”

Again, it is the conversations that seem central in helping to root out the tendencies to stereotype, even when the person you might be stereotyping is yourself. Chen says that she has “never been the one to put myself out there to, say, raise my hand and speak my views.” She now realizes that, while she could get away with not doing this at undergraduate level, “it simply doesn’t fly at HBS.” This is a principal reason why Chen wanted to pursue an MBA in the first place:

“Most of the time,” she explains, “no matter how prepared you are with the case, you’re not going to be 100% prepared to argue. You have to trust your gut and share your thoughts. That’s been a really great experience for me and has really been pushing me outside my comfort zone.” 

Chen came to Harvard Business School from Morgan Stanley’s New York office and its global capital markets division. Yet, at undergraduate level, she combined economics and international studies with music – a passion for which she retains - and was looking to use her MBA to find a way of combining the financial and creative strings to her bow through a change in career. “I came here with a clear vision of wanting to make this career switch. Then, you come here and there’s just so much more on offer. It’s been absolutely phenomenal, but I think the biggest thing is making sure you stay true to what that vision is,” she says.

Sud, meanwhile, sought an MBA to “to round out” her skillset a little more, having spent the previous five years working on brands such as Wella and Braun for Procter & Gamble, a job that culminated in her holding responsibilities across six countries. Her creative side has led her to take on the role of editor of HBS’s student newspaper, The Harbus. She says the MBA is helping to crystallize exactly how she can go about achieving her career goals, such as her long-standing ambition of being able to influence how an organization goes about enhancing diversity and female participation in the workplace. “There’s such a wealth of advice here and students who have made different career choices. You can really channel their expertise to help inform your career decision. It stretches the boundaries of what you think is possible and the people around you make you really humble because you understand that there’s so much left to achieve.”

MBAs plan series to get people talking about the confidence gap “earlier on”

As for Brave Becca, the plan is to develop her first published adventure into a series of adaptations. Chen and Sud point out that there are many other chapters to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In for starters, but also name-check HBS professor, Amy Cuddy, whose concept of ‘power poses’ feeds into 2015’s Presence, as well as The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, as other works they are looking into. By offering children a window into the topics these books tackle, it’s a cultural shift they’re really hoping to instigate and one which stops the confidence gap between boys and girls from developing long before tomorrow’s future leaders find themselves in a position to go to business school.  

“We’re realistic, we’re not going to be able to speak to the whole world, but by creating a campaign, encouraging people to talk about it – and talk about it earlier on – we’re able to move in the right direction,” concludes Chen.