Trends in Business School: Happiness, Purpose, and Self-Awareness

MIT Sloan recently announced that it will offer their MBA students a course on happiness. It’s good timing. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2022 report found that only 21 percent of employees feel engaged at work and, while just a third of employees reported to be thriving, a full 19 percent said they were “miserable.” MIT’s course, titled Pursuing Happiness and a Meaningful Life, will explore research findings on happiness and purpose, and provide students with self-assessment surveys, introspective weekly exercises, and guest speakers. Robert Pozen, MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer, says it will teach students to, “enhance their own happiness by changing their behaviors.”

MIT is the latest among prestigious MBA programs to offer courses focused on soft skills and emotional-awareness. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal published a profile of Harvard’s in-demand course offering titled Leadership and Happiness. The course, pitched and designed by Arthur Brooks, an HBS Professor, social scientist, and writer behind The Atlantic’s “How to Build a Life” series, contends that happiness is a byproduct of decision-making, not of chance. That good leaders must know how to cultivate happiness for themselves and their teams. His ideas resonate. Although the class has doubled in size from its original 72 students over the past two years, it still has a waiting list.  

At Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, students can take Organizational Behavior 374: Interpersonal Dynamics, better known as “touchy feely.” The course focuses on self-awareness as a key to effective and productive communications and relationships. Yale’s School of Management offers students a course titled Mastering Influence and Persuasion, which provides them with the means to more authentically persuade and motivate others. University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School allows students to apply for a six-week program, “P3: Purpose Passion and Principles,” in which participants take a structured approach to considering and defining what success and happiness looks like for them. 

The wide-spread existence of these courses within the most prestigious MBA programs is a clear indication that the business world’s valuation of soft skills and emotional intelligence is increasing. There is real value in learning to find purpose and joy, and helping others to find it too.

IQ is Important, but Don’t Forget About EQ

This summer, NYU Stern updated its MBA application to include an EQ Endorsement. Separate from the professional recommendations, Stern is asking applicants to have a friend or colleague submit a clear and compelling example of the applicant’s emotional intelligence. While NYU is at the forefront of formalizing the request for a demonstration of emotional intelligence, admissions committees have long been interested in self-awareness, maturity, leadership, and other skills highly correlated with EQ.  Demonstrating that you have the academic prowess to succeed in an MBA program is no longer enough; it is also critical to display emotional intelligence throughout your application.

There are several current models and definitions of Emotional Intelligence. One commonly used definition is from Mayer, Salovey and Caruso’s 2008 article in American Psychologist. “Emotional Intelligence includes the ability to engage in sophisticated information processing about one’s own and others’ emotions and the ability to use this information as a guide to thinking and behavior. That is, individuals high in emotional intelligence pay attention to, use, understand, and manage emotions, and these skills serve adaptive functions that potentially benefit themselves and others.”

Essentially, those with a high EQ can work successfully with others by understanding how emotions play a role in the workplace through employees’ thinking, decision-making, and conduct. This understanding helps those with EQ to have positive interactions with others, but it is much more than just building camaraderie with coworkers. Emotional intelligence is also the driving force behind persuasion and leadership, and those who are adept can facilitate difficult situations and conversations effectively and improve the motivation and performance of colleagues using these skills.

Mayer and Salovey created a developmental model of emotional intelligence, with four key components (each with four sub-components):

-        The ability to perceive emotions in oneself and others accurately.

-        The ability to use emotions to facilitate thinking.

-        The ability to understand emotions, emotional language, and the signals conveyed by emotions.

-        The ability to manage emotions so as to attain specific goals. 

Read more about the model here: http://www.theeiinstitute.com/what-is-emotional-intelligence/4-mayer-and-salovey-model-of-emotional-intelligence.html

While some people have higher EQ levels innately, it is also a skill that can be enhanced through increasing self-awareness and practice. As such, in your business school applications, you can showcase your emotional intelligence strengths, but also show self-awareness by referencing those areas that you are actively working to develop.

Take the time to weave examples of your emotional intelligence throughout your essays as well as in your recommendations. EQ-related skills are often included on the recommenders’ skills assessments so make sure that your recommenders are aware of your abilities in this arena by providing them with stories and anecdotes that they can consider when filling out the skills assessment and completing the open-ended question(s).

Some prompts to help you start thinking through specific examples that will illustrate your emotional intelligence include: 

-        Describe difficult co-worker or team dynamics and how your emotional awareness allowed you to repair these relationships and/or environments.

-        Reference times where perceiving and responding to the emotions of others helped you to drive a conversation or project forward in a different, but ultimately more effective manner.

-        Think through examples of relating to others, particularly others who are different from you, to increase teamwork or buy-in to an idea or project.

-        Think further about those times you’ve disagreed with colleagues in a rational and beneficial way, which ultimately helped you determine the best path forward.

-        Consider a time when you assisted a coworkers’ development by giving them difficult feedback or having a tough conversation.

With many corporations and recruiters showing an interest in emotional intelligence, thinking through how you can continue to develop and showcase your EQ will be a beneficial investment of time, not just for the MBA application period, but for all of your professional endeavors going forward.