2012 Dean of the Year: Harvard’s Nitin Nohria

“It was not a question of selection,” he adds. “It was subtle things that were happening: the calling patterns of faculty members, women not leaning forward to get more attention, women feeling anxious about being too smart and feeling less desirable. There was this likability and competence tradeoff that women suffer much more than men. There is a lot of research that shows it is harder for a woman to be both well liked and competent than it is for a man. So when it comes to women, we tend to see them as either competent but not likable or likeable but not competent. We have a harder time placing them in the category of being both, and women intuitively understand that and therefore sometimes may have been saying that at Harvard Business School I want to be liked so I don’t want to be the person who is the smartest in the class. Men didn’t have that issue.”

SOFTWARE TO ENCOURAGE FACULTY TO GRADE WOMEN MORE FAIRLY

The school began doing more coaching on the front end to encourage women to step up in class, but it also made faculty more aware of the problem so they could actively address it. Among other things, Harvard created a grading tool that allowed professors to keep track of their calling patterns in class. The software program, says Nohria, “will tell you if you are calling evenly on men and women or if there is a bias to who you call on. Are you grading your women more harshly than your men? You enter your grades in this tool very day and it will analyze the class. It is a small thing that makes you mindful. We have elevated the mindfulness of people because there is no willful bias. This is not discrimination that looks like the days of discrimination when people said women are inferior or African Americans are inferior. We have none of that. If it’s happening, it’s happening in these subtle ways and we realized that which is reassuring.”

Nohria did not shy away from confronting another sticky issue that emerged last year when a female MBA student disclosed an off campus sexual assault that involved “unwanted groping” of her breasts. The incident was part of a broader pattern of Mad Men-like behavior at HBS, including excessive drinking and behavior that many would consider sexual harassment. One female first-year student had been informed that the men in her section had voted her to have “the second best rack”  (see Concern Over HBS’ ‘Man Men’ Culture).

As part of the school’s leadership development exercises, the school began a session devoted to the incidents and asked student leaders to facilitate the conversations. “We have been more willing to explicitly confront this issue than anybody else,” says Nohria. “Are we at a place where our culture is fully inclusive? No. We have work to do but with great determination we are working on every piece of this.

GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OF SUCCESS RATES FOR WOMEN FACULTY

“We are doing similar and thoughtful analysis on the faculty culture. If you look at the success rate of women faculty at HBS, particularly junior faculty, it is has not been the same as men. We have more tenured women than any other business school. One in three of our incoming faculty are women so we are now at least getting women into the pipeline. Our greatest challenge is how do we allow them to succeed after that first promotion from assistant to associate professor. After that it seems they all have roughly the same success rates as men.”

As for Norhia’s final I in his five priorities—integration—he points to the success of Harvard’s Innovation Lab, which opened in November of 2011 as a central place where students, entrepreneurs and local businesses work together to share knowledge and collaborate on ideas. When the iLab opened on Harvard’s Allston campus, adjacent to the business school, some expressed worry that the university’s undergrads would rarely take advantage of the place because it was located across the river from the main campus.

Located on the first floor of Batten Hall at 125 Western Ave. on Harvard’s Allston campus, adjacent to the business school campus, the i-lab reactivates the building that once housed WGBH-TV’s studios (see Harvard Opens New Innovation Lab).

“Everyone was nervous whether anyone from the other side of the university would come,” admits Nohria. “It was the known edge of the universe. like Harvard Business School itself was considered to be this forbidding deep place so that people thought they were not welcome on the HBS campus.”

However, two-thirds of the users of the lab have come from students outside the business school. The initial hope was that by the end of the first year of operation, roughly a third of the students would be non-MBAs. “Every time we have created some metric for success, it has gone off the charts,” adds Nohria. “When we announced the President’s Challenge, we said if we had 20 teams that would be victory. We had 130 teams. The first year we have exceeded every expectation we had on success. It is a testament to the excitement that exists on this campus about innovation. We have been able to unlock it and I feel we are just beginning.”

‘THE FANTASY OF LEADERSHIP’

All in all, it has been a highly productive year for Dean Nohria, a year of unusual achievement, even though it was also marked by tragedy. But even in the saddest moment of this past year in the job, Nohria instinctively knew what to do and how to do it.

“We tried to make sure that the family knew that while at some point this is a grief that you will have to live with, you should always know that we are a part of that extended family and we will be helpful to you every step of the way,” says Nohria.

“Sometimes, these things look like you exercise leadership,” he muses. “People think you were decisive. You knew what to do. It’s the fantasy of leadership. That is so far from the truth. The instincts of so many people at this institution made me feel fortunate to be dean of a place where our collective instincts were right.”

DON’T MISS: 2011 DEAN OF THE YEAR: DARDEN’S ROBERT BRUNER or THE REINVENTION OF HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

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