Ernest O’Boyle is the Dale. M. Coleman Chair of Management and an associate professor in the Management and Entrepreneurship Department, teaching Leading Organizations, Leadership and People Management, and co-teaching Designing High-Performance Organizations.
What is the most rewarding aspect of your job?
Seeing course concepts applied to someone’s career. I love that in Kelley Direct, students are often working full-time jobs and can experiment with the course content in their daily lives. It is immensely rewarding when I hear someone tell me, “Hey, I integrated best practices in brainstorming, and it worked great” or “Using the materials on conflict resolution, my boss and I were finally able to get on the same page about my career.” An MBA is an applied degree, so watching what are oftentimes already capable managers learn and grow into top leaders is the best part of my job.
What can students expect from your Kelley Direct courses?
Students will learn the hard science behind soft skills. There is an immense amount of information and misinformation out there and leaders often find themselves so overwhelmed with diluted, impractical, conflicting, and sometimes downright wrong recommendations, that they throw their hands up and just try to go it alone. Although a completely understandable sentiment, there is a better way. In my class, students can expect to first learn what an evidence-based claim actually is, and how to sift through that which is scientifically sound from that which is just some consultant, popular press book, TED talk, etc. trying to sell you something. So, if you want to learn how to run a virtual meeting, how to motivate stars and black holes, or what qualities and strategies the best leaders possess and employ, then my classes will present the most relevant, timely, and accurate evidence as it pertains to those topics.
How has COVID pushed you to teach in new ways?
The pandemic is a tragedy on a global scale, but it has not altered my teaching approach or pedagogy one bit. The reason is that Kelley Direct is perfectly suited and was specifically designed to be an immersive, distance education experience decades before it became a necessity. We are consistently ranked one of the top, if not the top, online MBA programs in the world. We know how to do this right and are constantly finding new ways to evolve to become even better. While other programs scramble to overhaul their “sage on the stage” approach to an exclusively online environment, we’re fine-tuning our existing and successful model. (more…)