Du tysta, ej glädjerika sköna. Betydelsen av kommunikationsutbildning för att utbilda bättre ledare.
Every year, reports are published that shows how universities fail to meet the demand from companies who are looking to hire students with solid communication skills. At the same time, the importance of communication for effective leadership is constantly increasing. Today, many business schools around the world states that they strive to educate future business leaders and have therefore realized the importance of teaching the skills of communications to its students. The majority of Swedish business schools, however, have not yet made communications an essential part of their curricula. This indicates that most business students in Sweden today, do not receive the toolkit needed to take on leadership roles. This is case study based on interviews with Swedish employers, business students, university faculty and communication experts. The aim of the study is to analyse what type of leadership that employers demand from business students today, and shed a light on what parts of the education in communications that is of most relevance for business schools when trying to educate better leaders. Insights from five qualitative interviews with senior executives at some of the most admired companies in Sweden showed how the seven most important leadership characteristics for business students today, are: passionate, empowering, interactive, creative, visionary, judicious and trustworthy. To find out what the most important parts of a communication education at the Bachelor program at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) could be, we conducted another 16 interviews to get better insights on how the education is perceived today, what an education in communication could exist of and how the school system in Sweden works. The study shows that the three most important communication skills that should be taught at SSE are: presentation skills, negotiation skills and active listening. Together they build a strong foundation and are very likely to improve the student's leadership capabilities. The characteristics that would get the best effect are the empowering, interactive and visionary leadership characteristic. Further, the focus should be on practicing the skills and the students should be highly involved all through the learning process.