DePaul Is In the Forefront of Business Schools Offering Assessment Center Exercises

Melissa Laughlin, a manager at Iliad Corp., faced a busy Monday morning after returning from an extended vacation abroad. Memos requiring action filled her in-box, she had been chosen to deliver a presentation on a vital company initiative, and several team meetings were scheduled to make decisions affecting the direction of the corporation.

This may sound like a typical hectic work day for any middle manager in America. But in reality Laughlin was a DePaul MBA student participating in an assessment center, a role-playing management exercise that tested her mastery of people skills during a 2 1/2-hour compressed “workday” at Iliad, a fictional company. Laughlin, who has since graduated from DePaul and works as a marketing manager for a major consulting firm, said the business simulation “revealed management strengths I was not aware I had and helped me to capitalize on them. Also, it helped me identify areas that needed improvement. These insights have helped me in my career and everyday life.”

DePaul’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business launched the assessment center simulation for MBA students this fall, after a successful pilot program in which Laughlin participated last year. Only about a half-dozen pioneering business schools across the country offer the program.

“Assessment centers are relatively new to the academic setting, although they have been embraced in military and corporate circles for decades and are one of the best predictors of managerial job performance,” said Professor of Management Robert Rubin, a member of the faculty team that introduced the assessment center at DePaul.

“While traditional MBA program activities are well equipped to provide feedback on technical skills, few have found methods to assess interpersonal skills effectively,” Rubin said. “Most interpersonal feedback is accomplished through self-assessment, such as personality tests. Assessment centers provide a more objective, external evaluation of interpersonal skills.” These skills include the ability to lead a team; effectively make decisions; prioritize, plan and organize tasks; identify and synthesize relevant information and express ideas clearly.

Such practical people skills are the keys to management success, Rubin said. “Technical skills will always be important for professionals, but for those who want to move up the corporate ladder and take on more responsibility, technical skills are not enough. Research has shown that effective managers are not simply technical gurus but also posses strong interpersonal skills. What many people discover when they become managers is that their most important decision of the day might not be how to solve an accounting problem but instead is how to motivate a member of their team to put forth greater effort.”

DePaul’s business school becomes Iliad Corp. one Saturday each quarter. About 150 MBA students enrolled in all sections of DePaul’s required management 500 course, Managing Effective and Ethical Organizational Behavior, gather at the school to perform their roles as Iliad managers. Prior to the exercise, students receive a packet of company background materials, including Iliad’s history, mission statement, organization chart, financial and shareholder statements, executive biographies and a wide range of memos. When they arrive at their desks, they find an in-box of correspondence and requests, a meeting schedule and information about a company presentation they will make.

Students are assessed on the tasks they choose to tackle, the memos and reports they produce, and their performance at meetings and presentations, which are videotaped, during the exercise. Using a detailed management behavior checklist, the materials are analyzed by a team of industrial-organizational psychology graduate students at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUE), the first university to offer the assessment center simulation for students.

For example, reviewers will rate student oral presentations using a -1 to 1 scale based on criteria such as did the speaker develop an outline, state the purpose of the presentation, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of proposed actions, provide a clear closing statement, speak confidently and enthusiastically, among other skills. Two weeks after the exercise, students receive a detailed report on their interpersonal skills performance.

“We then ask the students to come up with a plan to address their feedback. This can mean further coursework to address a particular issue or extracurricular activities, such as joining Toastmasters to improve presentation skills,” Rubin said. Some even reveal their findings to co-workers and fellow students and ask them to provide ongoing advice on how they can improve their skills.

Laughlin said she learned through the assessment center that she could improve her teamwork skills, which led to a change in her management approach during meetings. “It raised my awareness that during meetings I need to seek input from everyone rather than just rely on people to assert themselves and provide their opinions,” she said. “By seeking out this input, I know where everyone stands and it helps me to build support for an idea. The assessment center also indicated that my biggest strength was leadership, which has boosted my confidence and helped me to perform better as a leader.”

In addition to the benefits for students, the assessment center provides DePaul with empirical data to compare its students’ collective management skills with those of more than 4,000 other MBA students at seven other universities that utilize the Iliad assessment center. SIUE keeps data from these academic assessments and will run a comparison at the end of the academic year. If the comparison shows a general deficiency in a certain skill, DePaul can adjust its business school curriculum to emphasize instruction in this skill, Rubin said.

Bill Bommer, a management professor at Cleveland State University and president of Academic Behavior Assessment, the organization that created the first assessment program at SIUE, noted, “Most business schools pledge in their mission statements to inculcate leadership and managerial skills, but few have taken the steps necessary to attempt to measure such outcomes objectively. Assessment centers allow for individual student development but are also quite useful in programmatic assessment to determine whether the school is fulfilling a key aspect of its mission.”