The faculty of the future needs advanced facilitation, coaching and mentoring skills to complement traditional lecturing. We encourage an “and and” rather than an “either or” approach, moving beyond a currently dominant dichotomous perspective. Business schools will need to encourage exchanges and collaborations between academics and practitioners to an extent where their differences dissolve, replaced with evolved professionals who routinely cross from one role to another. In effect, the future faculty will serve as institutional role models for social entrepreneurship.
We anticipate far greater diversity of educators and researchers, including discipline-oriented, transdisciplinary, collaborative and practice-oriented faculty. In future, collaboration across disciplines and different walks of life becomes the rule rather than the exception. Similarly, compensation, selection and promotion schemes for both education and research faculty will grow to reflect these requirements in a stimulating and transparent manner.
There are five main areas which need to be considered when creating a faculty ready to embrace our vision:
- A professional commitment to serve the common good
- A commitment to the mission of the school
- A passion for teaching, learning and discovery
- A strong interest in issue-based research and action research methods
- Diverse experiences, skills, backgrounds and interests.
Broadening the skills, experiences and competencies of faculty represents the single biggest level in achieving the 50+20 vision. Business schools are urged to create conditions that trigger faculty’s intrinsic motivation to grow and develop. Creating an environment that promotes change and an appetite for learning and development is one aspect. The next challenge lies in the creation of effective training and re-training programs for both new and existing faculty. Such training needs to ensure the development of skills and competencies that are rarely present in today’s faculty, including:
- A concern for broad, up-to-date, transdisciplinary knowledge of the complex existing and emerging environmental, social, technical and economic trends worldwide.
- Exposure to emerging practices and tools for measuring and evaluating economic, environmental and social concerns across all fields of business.
- Knowledge of the application of the basic management disciplines, matched with knowledge of ethics, entrepreneurship, leadership, sustainability and technology.
- Interdisciplinary business knowledge across all subject areas to ensure critical, well balanced and relevant business thinking.
- Strong coaching competence and skills to ensure personal learning and development.
- Expertise in the methodologies of action learning and the creation of effective action learning platforms as well as whole person learning and person centered learning.
- Mastery of systemic thinking and risk analysis together with other approaches which enable holistic decision-making in a fast-changing environment.
- Networking capabilities to establish field work projects in partnership with a broad range of stakeholders worldwide.
50+20 is currently exploring three concrete concepts, consisting of a 2-month and a 6-month immersion program, as well as a new approach to PhD and DBA education. Given that training both existing and new faculty represents a collective challenge, professional associations like EFMD, AACSB or academic associations like the Academy of Management support the creation of such regional or global training initiatives and platforms. Collaboration with existing providers of transformational learning, leadership or coaching training will speed up the creation of off-site training and development centers for existing (and potentially new) faculty.
