Getting to class early

PROFESSOR TOM DELONG: I try to get to a class a half an hour before, even when I know the students. When I am mixing with people and shaking their hands, I quit worrying about how I am going to do. Now I'm a little like Tom Tierney in that I'm meeting my own needs doing that. Then I try to get out of the performance and get into trying to feel the spirit and the hearts of the people. I also want to make sure I pronounce people’s names. I looked at the roster beforehand and I was confused, so I kept going over and over it. That’s why I came in early.

back to top

Teacher style makes a difference

PROFESSOR TOM PIPER: What is it that makes students say, “You know, this is going to be fun. I think I'm going to learn”? What is it that makes a difference on that?

As I told some of you, at the privatization program across the river at the Kennedy School there's one professor, Jose Antonio Gomez-Ibanez [Tony], who’s just brilliant on privatization, just brilliant. And he’ll arrive in the classroom fifteen minutes early, and you’ll see him kind of talking with people—either people he hasn’t heard from or he wants to encourage, or just to get a sense of whether or not there is excitement about the case. And so he uses the fifteen minutes just to kind create [interaction]. It’s a costly signal, so it has credibility that maybe he actually cares. And then he’s got his papers laid out, and the moment the bell rings, Tony’s ready. What do you think his first words are? “This is my favorite case of all times!” Every day he had a new favorite.

And then there's another faculty member over there who rushes in with about thirty seconds to go. The papers get thrown on the desk, and he’s looking around wondering where to hang his coat. And he spends the first ten or twelve minutes talking about the Red Sox, who are really having trouble. And he’s walking, and you can just watch.

With Tony, the people are leaning forward. With the second professor, you can just see by about minute five, the person’s slumping and just saying, “I guess he’s not very excited about this material.” So I think that it’s really [important] to come in, to have something that you're excited about, to have it doable so that you don’t have them wasting a lot of time over there.

back to top

Am I in or am I out?

PROFESSOR DELONG: It’s the "inclusionary" dimension. And this is the one that’s most important to your faculty and it’s most important to my students—I have ninety students. The inclusionary dimension; do you have a sense of what that is? The question that every student asks here and that your faculty ask is, am I in the club or out of the club? Am I in or am I out? That’s what we worry about, am I in or am I out? We know, just like all ambiguous behavior is interpreted negatively, there is a constant gravitational pull towards people to feel left out. That is the human condition. You’ll see it with little people, and you’ll see it with big people. They start looking where they are feeling left out. You see that.

My goal, as soon as possible as a teacher, is to convince all ninety students that they are in the club.

back to top

Do students want teachers as friends?

PROFESSOR TOM PIPER: I think students at times think they want us to be friends. Executives want us to go to their parties. MBAs want us to go to their parties. They want to see us as friends, and as soon as we become a friend we’ve disappointed them terribly. They want us to be more than a friend. They want to believe that we are indeed concerned about them, but not friends. I see young faculty get into real difficulty when they lose track of that line between being that figure they hope [to be], and this can change culture to culture. But even in this very, very open culture here they don’t want a friend. They’re very disappointed when you go that route, I think.

back to top

Handling participation anxiety

PROFESSOR FRANCES FREI: So there are two anxieties: One is about, “Do I get a fair chance to get in?” and two is, “What level of expertise is required to share?” So I’ll do them in order.

The first one is getting in. I tell students, if you feel like you're not getting in, send me an e-mail. I want to know if you're not getting in. And it might be that I’ll look and I’ll see, you think you're not getting in and you’ve shared every class over the last four classes. Or somebody’s not getting in and they haven't. So one thing I have is an open line of communication. My bias checks help, because I'm sure I haven't been paying any attention, I'm sure I haven’t seen you, which is surprising because I like to keep my back to the camera, so you’d think I'd be looking right at you.

So that’s the first thing: an open engagement with the students on the learning process about how much they get in.

The second one is the level of expertise. It’s my job to set the expectations. When somebody talks, I work with them to make them sound better and better and better. If you do that, everyone will want to share. So somebody gives me a little bit and I take that and I'm like, "OK, do you mean this and do you mean this?" And we go, and at the end, they're like, "Wow, I'm pretty smart; look how far I got."

I think that if you do that with students, if you work with them.... It’s my obligation, by example, to show that it’s OK to share without expertise. And that’s, I think, a critical thing to do.

back to top

Helping students succeed

PROFESSOR PIPER: They come in fearful that they're going to fail. They’ve left positions; they’re high achievers; they haven’t failed before, often. And I think it’s important to redefine it away from how to evaluate students and toward how to help them succeed, and then to carry through on that. A lot of what you're doing in the first fifteen minutes before a class begins, when you haven’t heard from a student, is you're trying to understand how you can be helpful to that student. That's the warm cold calls. That's saying, “Why don’t you know you're going to start tomorrow?” It’s talking with the person. So a lot of it is, I think, changing away from evaluation towards, "How can we help people succeed in here?"

back to top

Celebrate participation

PROFESSOR FREI: Well, I think that part of it comes from the fact that you're celebrating any little bits of doing it, and so that helps a great deal. And you want to raise expectations. You set high standards and you are as generous as possible at helping people along the way. And you don’t need the Harvard Business School (HBS) culture for that. I did that at Wharton, and Wharton is a lecture environment. And I went there and we had case discussions there. Not just like here, but much different than all of the other lecture environments there. I taught at the University of Rochester; again, the same thing. So the key, the high standard, is that I'm not going to leave Gustavo until we get something good, and I will be very generous about helping him, and it’s going to be very apparent how much I helped him, and the environment is going to be such that he’s not going to want as much help next time. He’s going to have pride when he gets to be more helpful himself, and I will celebrate that.

back to top

Support and motivate

PROFESSOR FREI: I want to create an environment such that if I call on you and you don't know the answer, I'm going to lavish you with attention. And I'm going to walk closer to you and I'm going to say, “Well, just give me a little bit and we’ll work with what you have. Tomorrow, you're going to have prepared more. Because while I was really helpful in making you sound smarter and smarter and smarter, you really wished you knew a little bit more coming in, as did everyone else.” So I would let go of any strictness and do it much more, again, on the informal side. I just find it to be much, much more effective.

back to top

Starting with a question

PROFESSOR DELONG: Before we jump into this case about Tom Tierney, what I would like each one of you to do is to take out a piece of paper and answer the following question—in fact, I want you to write down a question. The question I want you to write down is this: What is the most important answer that you need while you’re here at the Harvard Business School?

PROFESSOR DELONG'S COMMENTARY: The reason I often ask students to write down a question is because I want to focus them on the experience here. And then I want them quickly to talk to someone else, because that starts generating energy, and I'm not the only one who has to generate the energy. Does that make sense?

Turn to the person next to you and talk about this question.

My students, when they get to my class at 8:30 in the morning, some of them have been up all night. Some of them have had, perhaps, a tragedy. Some of them are thinking about the fact that they haven’t read the case. So it centers them, and they have to get into McCollum 202. They have to get here if I asked a specific question. OK?

back to top

Importance of questions

PROFESSOR JIM HESKETT: As one of my mentors, Chris Christensen, always used to say, there are two questions that are absolutely critical, the first one and the last one, and it’s very important to get the first one right, and it’s also very important to get the last one right, because you can then encourage discussion of the class beyond the end of the class. So what Marcelo was describing during our discussion can take place—people would remember and think about it and talk about it and you get more airtime.

back to top

Influencing behavior

PROFESSOR FREI: We've known for twenty years that you can use instrumental controls or normative controls for employee behavior and for organizational behavior. It is known that you can either have the carrot and stick, instrumental controls, or you can have “I'm going to shame you into behaving well,” normative controls. And we’ve known for a very long time that normative are much, much more effective for employees, much more effective. They’re just harder to do. It takes an enormous commitment to instill norms, whereas for instrumental, I can just give you a list of, “You do this behavior and this good thing will happen; you do this behavior and this bad thing will happen.” So if we sort of think about the extremes again, instrumental and normative, for employees it’s well known that normative is more effective.

back to top

Ambiguous behavior

PROFESSOR DELONG: All ambiguous behavior is interpreted negatively. Let me say it again: All ambiguous behavior is interpreted negatively. And when I'm running from one class to the next and I have ten minutes between classes, and I'm running up this stairway, and I've just finished a case, Jorge says to Tom, his professor, “Tom, great lecture, great class.” And I look at him, and I run past him, because I'm going to the next class—how does he interpret that interaction? “What did I do wrong?” That interaction took less than a second. He’s thinking, number one, “Boy, Professor DeLong’s arrogant. Professor DeLong teaches the advanced course on human behavior and this is the way he treats me?” Then he says, “You know, I made a comment in class today. I thought it was good, but maybe it wasn't.” And then he says, “I thought I was going to get a good grade. Maybe I'm not doing well.” I’ve just ruined his day!

back to top

Vary your mediums

PROFESSOR HOWARD STEVENSON: There’s an old expression that I learned, “To eliminate the tedium, vary the medium.” You know, one of the things that I think has benefited Harvard Business School is that we’ve broken away from the strict pattern. I went to school six days a week, seventeen classes a week, and they were all the same. Well, one of the things that happened in this modern world that we talked about yesterday is you can’t do that. You need to vary the medium so that the students are awake. It’s one of the reasons why, if you want to give a talk, I suggest that you use a lot of slides, because every time you put up a new slide, it's a signal to wake up, because there might be something on it.

back to top