As a result of the recession many organizations have instituted staff reductions and reorganizations at the management levels. In doing so, leaders have an opportune time to rethink management structure, leadership styles and involvement in executive education.

Ronald Hefetz, Alexander Grashow and Martin Linsky, in their article Leadership in  Permanent Crisis in the July-August Harvard Business Review argue that when the economy recovers, things won't return to "normal," which will require a different kind of leadership, one that requires leaders to be far more adaptive; to embrace disequilibrium (ie., orchestrating conflict, chaos and confusion); and to promote leadership throughout the organization. Further, they argue that this requires leaders who place self-care (physical and emotional) high on the priority list.

The recession has raised questions about the predominant business model and the leaders implementing that model--one that focuses primarily on shareholder profit and short term financial results.  Many recent public surveys have shown that consumers, employees and investors question the ethics and morality underlying the current business paradigm, and no longer trust business leaders. Add to this the impending influx of young Generation Y workers into the workforce--who place high value on the bottom lines of social responsibility, sustainability and how employees are treated--and it brings into clear focus the need for not just a new style of leadership, but the executive programs that train those leaders.

In my article in the National Post, Time To Scrap The MBA To Prepare Leaders? I said " the problem with many business school leadership programs is that they teach ideas, not real life behaviors, and business school professors are chosen by virtue of their ability to publish detailed research, not having had leadership experience themselves. Understanding something intellectually often has little to do with being able to do it. Adult learners need experiences and coaching to turn concepts into leadership capabilities."

It seems like business schools are aware of the credibility gap and some are responding. In the recent Harvard Business Review, Professor Thomas Malone of the MIT Sloan School of Management is quoted as saying that executives "need to start reviewing the purpose of a business as maximizing the contribution of society subject to the constraints of producing a reasonable profit--not the other way around." And Harvard Business School Professor Rakesh Khurana was quoted as saying that a "management version of the Hippocratic Oath would fundamentally change the way business decisions are made." Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, offered in collaboration with Spain's ESADE Business School, now uses leadership skills and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices as levers of internal change, responding to the interests of customers, employees, shareholders,communities, and the environment without losing competitive advantage. The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is redesigning business education for the 21st century with a curriculum based on integrative thinking, for business solutions.

In a sense the recession has done us a favor, forcing us to take a deep hard look at the way we do business. As Henry Mintzberg, Professor of Management Studies at  McGill University argues in his article, Rebuilding Companies as Communities, in the Harvard Business Review, "companies must remake themselves into places of engagement, where people are committed to one another and their enterprise."  Mintzberg says that the recession produced a far greater crisis than an economic one--the crisis of "people's sense of belonging to and caring for something larger than themselves."

The rebuilding of companies as comunities will require a rethinking and renewal of executive education programs so that people once again have a sense of belonging and trust for leaders--an urgent but much needed task.

Ray Williams is President of Ray Williams Associates, a company providing leadership training and executive coaching services in Vancouver.