Sarah Stuart: Learning to lead - and be led

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Opinion

Joining a classroom 25 years after you last vacated a school seat is a daunting prospect. Those first few weeks last year at the University of Auckland's cavernous Business School were disorientating.

Thousands of two-decades-younger undergraduates swarmed the study rooms and social spaces like an enormous amorphous whole, each moving part knowing instinctively, it seemed, where and when they needed to be and which university website log-in would help them get there.

For weeks I wandered lost around the floors, searching for the Decima Glenn Room (Sir Owen's mother, I presume) or Rm 2OC1, whatever that meant. I asked penetrating questions of the student centre staff, of my fellow lost MBA colleagues and, most successfully, of the undergraduates lying around on the carpets.

As if offering their seat to the elderly on the bus, they would jump up to help, carefully walking me to the doors I needed to find and reassuring themselves that I was capable from there on in. Now I find myself shoving them in the coffee queue and complaining about the sushi packets they leave in the lecture theatres. Last year's saviours have become this year's irritants.

Once inside the Case Study rooms, there is no confusion about where the adult students are. Up front, fighting for the centre row, highlighter pens open and ready to strike, folders full of notes from the last lecture artfully arranged for easy access.

Executive MBAs are for the highly motivated. They're much easier for the highly organised. Whether your $40,000 two-year-fee is funded by your employer (who is probably extracting a two-year bond as payback) or your own family coffers, chatting down the back of the room isn't really an option.

Through the dullest of subjects, say Quantitative Theory, there has been a rush to be the one to answer the first question. Lecturers spend as much time dodging the over-talker as trying to spark discussion.

One of the big lessons this year is what Forbes.com calls "learning how to get a bunch of highly-strung, Type A personalities to work together as a team", which is number four on their list of the most underrated reasons to get an MBA. If the phrase 'Type A' makes you gag, try Forbes' number one underrated reason: "the chance to make lifelong friends who will accomplish great things over their careers in business". No pressure.

In assigned groups of four or five, we struggle to take orders, back down, agree to compromise and bow to others' greater knowledge/talent/turn in the manager's chair.

I've been lucky: my colleagues - a bank sustainability and community manager and a project manager from a large corporate - have taught me to be more open, more patient (yes, really, guys) and to navigate the world of Powerpoint and Excel without the aid of a PA. This week we spent hours in small group study rooms, re-evaluating the business model of a start-up IT company one of them has been spruiking for 18months.

We put the company's revenue model, customer plan and marketing focus through three new business frameworks, analysed where the holes were and came up with four suggestions to achieve the first sale.

Picking apart someone's business baby isn't pleasant - for them. But after six months as a tight unit we've learned to navigate some difficult territory together.

So 25 years after leaving the classroom the lessons I'm learning now aren't just business tools, hard skills, and how to find your way around the University's complex infrastructure - things that I could perhaps have absorbed in my late teens.

How to lead leaders. Enjoying being led. Arguing without rancor. Putting the integrity of your team above all else. Listening to intuition that is not your own. Viewing your most beloved creation through the critical eyes of others - these are not easy tasks for students used to being the one in charge.

But they are perhaps the most valuable skills for the next two decades of my career.