Leadership and Coaching in Nepal – Deborah Koehler (part 10)

MBA Graduating Students – Employability

The concepts of apprenticeships or Part Time jobs are not common in Nepal. Students frequently go straight from the College to their Masters Degree with no work experience. During their Masters Degree study they do have one internship where they are placed in different businesses. These placements vary in success. Most just use the students to crunch numbers and in some they are treated like real employees.

The class I taught was about employability skills. Now that they have finished their MBA Studies they are ready to work. But my big question is, is the work force ready for them? Most of the managers in existing positions are products of the culture, which means in a Japanese sense, the Sempai and Kohai relationship: hierarchical management. In this acculturated relationship the lower member cannot ask to the higher member and the higher member does not do the lower members job. There is a subservient role the new hire must play and continue to play all through their career. This means that there is a lot of deskilling of the bright young graduates as the existing managers for whom they will work will neither train nor development them.

The good news is that some of the companies are training their managers to manage these newly educated MBA students but most of them get frustrated and leave the country. There is a trend for the new ones to begin their own businesses in Nepal but then the challenge is that their parents do not see entrepreneurialism as a viable career options. They would rather spend $500,000 to send them to USA for a PhD which is useless in the contact of Nepal, but it happens. Today’s students need only to write up their thesis and then apply for jobs.

There were only 4 hours for the workshop, I had to think what was the most useful. The mandate for the class was How to Lead from the Front and Teamwork and working with difficult people. A very broad mandate. As they already had all the management theory and PowerPoint lectures about habits and principles I decided to focus on self-awareness. How aware were they of their own habits and actions. When they take an interview – how aware where they of what the interviewer was looking for in the candidate. Also how aware were they of the people they might be working with and would they be looking for a familiar work environment working with others like themselves or would they be aware of the challenge of working in new environments.

Again I tried the Theory U exercise of what it means to be self-directed. After the exercise – we discussed the security of the collective in Nepal of moving towards people that they talk to every day and how unconsciously they moved away from others that they did not know or that maybe they had a “bad” past experience. I asked them to connect their awareness with their actions – and to talk about it in groups.

What their felt experience was that they had been learning the theory but today was the first time that they realized that the actual doing of working in a diverse team involved “themselves”. Because they don’t have work experience the self concept is that they are great team players but when the exercise pointed out how they disengaged from the group or did not come into contact with others – they experienced their own “way of working” that might be limiting them on the job. We did talk then about how judgment arises and how this judgment of others or of self might influence them in the job interview or when they are employed. They asked how to get rid of this judgment. My answer was at first they needed to be aware that it existed. The quality of their Awareness would be a function of the Quality of their Actions – they could not change their actions unless they had awareness of their Judgments.

Being an aware human being is not easy. The students seem to value the 4 hours and wanted more. I left feeling there was so much more for these students to learn. They are so eager to make their mark and have a good career but are the business in Kathmandu ready for them to welcome them with good jobs to take advantage of their good education and motivation? It must and it will. This is development in the purest sense. Part 11