Degrees of Leadership

As an undergraduate, were you drawn to courses in psychology, the humanities, and communications as opposed to math and science? You most likely would lean toward the leadership degree, Polding says. If you are more wired into the quantitative side of business, or “if you insist on measurement and statistics as the basis for decisions about where you are headed as a company,” you would be happier in a typical MBA program, he says.

This is not to suggest that leadership programs offer an escape from finance, accounting, and statistics. All five of the programs we looked at include at least one core course in the quantitative side of business. Indeed, required courses with names such as Introduction to Research or Financial Management for Business sometimes are identical to those included in a school’s MBA curriculum.

“The difference isn’t in the content or approach to subjects like finance, but more in the number of those courses you take,” says Nancy Hellerud, associate dean of the Graduate School of Management at Hamline University. Students in Hamline’s masters in management program “might take one course in finance instead of six,” Hellerud says.

Thomas Hanson, professor of organizational leadership at Concordia, explains the difference in emphasis like this: In Concordia’s six-month-old MBA program, most students take multiple courses in finance and accounting. In its eight-year-old organizational management program, he says, “accounting and finance are looked at together. The focus is more on how to understand financial statements and use financial information to improve productivity than on how to produce a financial statement.”

The same principle applies to courses in statistics, Hanson says. In most MBA programs, students are likely to delve into means, medians, standard deviations, probabilities, decision-making trees, queuing theory (how to efficiently move customers through waiting lines), and so on. Concordia’s organizational-management students get some formal training in statistics, but focus more on what kind of research may be required to address particular problems and how to develop a plan for that research.

The choice amounts to a question of where you want to dive deep and where you will settle for working knowledge. A course or two in finance won’t make you an expert at financial analysis or preparing financial statements. Conversely, as Capella’s Williams puts it, “An MBA, by design, teaches you to administer a business. [An MBA program] may tack on a few courses in leadership, but it’s impossible to get a deep understanding of leadership, in theory and in practice, with a couple of courses.”