The Skills MBAs Use the Most That Never Appear on a Syllabus

Walk into almost any MBA program in the country, and you’ll find a relatively consistent curriculum that includes accounting, finance, marketing, operations, and strategy. That’s not a coincidence. 

Accrediting bodies like the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), which oversees more than 900 business schools worldwide, set rigorous standards that shape what programs teach and how they teach it. The result is a remarkably consistent educational experience across institutions, whether you’re at a state school in the Midwest or a top-ten program on the coasts.

What that standardization doesn’t account for is what actually helps people excel once they get to work. A 2024 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which drew responses from more than 20,000 students and 237 employers, found a gap of nearly 30 percentage points between how graduating students rated their own leadership and professionalism and how employers rated them. Students thought they were ready. Their future bosses were less convinced. 

A separate survey of more than 1,000 corporate recruiters across 34 countries by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) found that 62 percent of employers consider interpersonal skills critical in MBA candidates, and 59 percent say the same about communication.

Maurice Schweitzer has spent decades studying exactly this territory. A professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches negotiations at the MBA, undergraduate, and executive levels, Schweitzer researches how emotions, trust, and decision-making shape outcomes in business and beyond. He’s candid about where the curriculum still falls short. “We’ve taken the idea of soft skills far more seriously,” he says. “We might even lecture about networking. But we are largely still leaving much up to self-study.”

Keep reading to find out which unwritten skills separate good managers from great ones, and how Schweitzer, one of Wharton’s most recognized experts on human behavior, breaks down what MBA students can do about it.

Meet the Expert: Maurice Schweitzer

Maurice Schweitzer is the Cecilia Yen Koo Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has spent his career studying the forces that shape how people make decisions, negotiate, and build or break trust. He has published more than 100 articles across management, psychology, and economics journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, the American Economic Review, and Management Science. He also co-authored the book Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both with Adam Galinsky. 

Schweitzer is the academic director of Wharton’s executive education program on effective decision-making, a past president of the International Association for Conflict Management, and a fellow of both that organization and the Academy of Management. His work has been covered by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Economist. At Wharton, he teaches negotiations and advanced negotiations across undergraduate, MBA, and executive education programs, including a course he designed himself.

The Curriculum Has Caught Up, But Not All the Way

The MBA program of 40 years ago looked very different from the one students enroll in today. It was built around technical competencies such as accounting, finance, and the quantitative tools of management. That made sense for an economy defined by manufacturing and hierarchical organizations, where workers might spend entire careers at a single company, moving up a predictable ladder. Command-and-control was the operating model, and the curriculum reflected it.

The economy has since changed. The organizations have also changed. And eventually, business schools changed with them. Leadership, teamwork, negotiation, and public speaking began to work their way into programs that had once reserved their syllabi almost exclusively for hard skills. Some schools began offering improv classes. The soft-skills conversation, long dismissed as secondary, began to take center stage.

But Schweitzer says the shift has its limits: “There wasn’t the fluid flexibility when we were mostly manufacturing, as opposed to a knowledge-based economy where we need to produce ideas, we need to collaborate with other people,” Schweitzer says. “We’ve now moved to thinking about leadership, teamwork, negotiations, public speaking, things we now weave into the curriculum.”

The distinction matters. Covering a topic in a lecture and actually developing a skill are two very different things. And some of the most consequential skills, the ones that determine whether a person is trusted, liked, and effective in a room, may not be formally addressed at all.

Likeability and Trust Are Skills Nobody Teaches

Most professionals assume likeability is a personality trait, something you’re born with or you aren’t. The same goes for trustworthiness. These qualities are often treated as fixed, which means they are also often ignored in formal education. No one puts “be more likable” on a syllabus.

Schweitzer disagrees. He argues that likeability and trustworthiness are learnable skills, not fixed traits, and that treating them as innate is one of the most expensive mistakes a young professional can make. 

The problem, he says, isn’t that people can’t develop these qualities. It’s that the feedback loop that would help them do so is broken: “Being likable is one of the most important skills that we can develop,” he says. “To learn anything well, you need quick and clear feedback. The problem with a lot of social interactions is that the feedback we get is neither quick nor clear.”

In most professional settings, people don’t tell you when you’ve rubbed them the wrong way. They smile, they make excuses, they gradually create distance. “It can take you a while to realize they just don’t laugh around you,” Schweitzer says, “or they feel like you’re not really a good partner on a group project.” By the time the pattern becomes visible, the damage is already done.

This is the gap that no syllabus addresses. Business schools can teach negotiation frameworks and leadership theory, but the granular, interpersonal work of learning how to make people feel at ease, how to project warmth without sacrificing credibility, how to be someone others want in the room, remains largely unstructured. “How do you teach people to be trustworthy, to be credible?” Schweitzer asks.

Emotional Intelligence: What It Actually Means

Emotional intelligence is a term that gets thrown around so frequently in business circles that it has started to lose its meaning. It shows up in job postings, leadership development programs, and MBA marketing materials. But according to Schweitzer, most people, including most business school graduates, have only a surface-level understanding of what it actually involves.

He breaks it into two distinct layers. The first is internal: “Do I understand the emotions that I’m currently feeling? Do I understand how to change the emotions that I’m feeling with different regulation strategies?” he asks. 

“The second is external, and considerably more complex. Can I assess other people’s emotions? Can I regulate other people’s emotions? Can I anticipate if you’re angry, how you’re likely to react?”

The practical implications of that second layer are significant. A manager who can read a room accurately has a meaningful advantage over one who can’t. “Somebody who’s emotionally intelligent will recognize that you’re angry even if you tell me that you’re not,” Schweitzer says. “I’m going to recognize it, and I’m going to figure out things to say and do that change how you feel.”

That’s a skill set that goes well beyond self-awareness, which is typically where the conversation on emotional intelligence stops in business school. Schweitzer is direct about the gap. “I think emotional intelligence is incredibly important, and I think the components we teach are incomplete. It’s part of some lectures, but to really be good at it is extremely hard.”

Active Listening as a Competitive Skill

There is a difference between hearing someone and actually listening to them, and most people vastly overestimate how good they are at the latter. In professional settings, this gap has real consequences. Deals fall apart. Feedback gets missed. Relationships erode. And yet active listening, likeability, and emotional intelligence are rarely given serious instructional attention in business school.

Schweitzer brings an unlikely source into his classroom to make this point: “One of the great speakers I’ve had in class is a homicide detective,” he says. “How do you get somebody who could go on to be convicted of a serious crime, spend years in jail, maybe the rest of their lives in jail, to reveal incriminating information to you?” The answer isn’t pressure or interrogation tactics. It’s the ability to make someone feel genuinely heard, to project trustworthiness, and to create the kind of conversational environment where people open up.

That same skill translates directly to the boardroom, the client meeting, and the negotiating table. The executive who makes a direct report feel truly listened to builds loyalty. The consultant who picks up on what a client isn’t saying closes more engagements. The manager who knows how to draw information out of a reluctant colleague solves problems faster. These are competitive advantages, and none of them appear on a course catalog.

Fixed vs. Growth Mindset: Why It’s More Complicated Than You Think

The fixed-versus-growth mindset framework, popularized by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, has made its way into everything from elementary school classrooms to Fortune 500 leadership training. The basic idea is familiar to most MBA students: people who believe their abilities can be developed through effort tend to outperform those who see their traits as fixed. It’s a compelling concept. It’s also, according to Schweitzer, more nuanced than it’s typically applied.

The mistake, he says, is treating mindset as a single global trait: “Fixed versus growth, it’s not a general belief,” he says. “Someone might have growth mindsets about these five things, but fixed mindsets about other things.” A person can genuinely believe they can improve as a public speaker while simultaneously believing that great leaders are simply born that way. These beliefs operate independently, and the ones that matter most are the ones attached to the skills most critical to your success.

He points to a familiar phenomenon to illustrate how fixed beliefs form. “You see a great comic, or a great leader, or a great orator, or you watch the Olympics every four years. You see these people who have been working their whole lives, and they seem like they’re a different class of person,” Schweitzer notes. When we watch someone perform at the highest level, we tend to conclude that they were simply made that way, rather than recognizing the years of deliberate practice behind what we’re seeing.

That conclusion, Schweitzer argues, is not just wrong—it’s costly. “If you believe you can’t negotiate, you won’t work at it. Any criticism suggests maybe you’re just a bad negotiator, and you don’t want to hear it.” The fixed belief doesn’t just limit development. It actively blocks the feedback that would enable development.

How to Actually Improve

If the skills that matter most in business are largely left to self-study, the question becomes how to actually study them. Schweitzer has a framework for this, and it starts not with action but with honest self-assessment.

“Step one is to recognize what your gaps are,” he says. “Am I better at networking, better at public speaking? Do I want to be more likable, more trustworthy? How am I coming across to people, and how would I like to come across?” Most people skip this step entirely, moving through their careers with only a vague sense of where their interpersonal gaps actually are.

The harder part comes next. Once you’ve identified the gap, you have to find a way to get honest feedback on it, which requires a level of vulnerability that doesn’t come naturally in professional settings. Schweitzer suggests going directly to the source. “It could be that I’ve got to do something a little uncomfortable, like going to someone and saying, ‘I’d love feedback from you. I’m trying to work at being more trustworthy and more likable. Can you point me to things that might have rubbed you the wrong way?’”

The principle underlying all of it is the same one that applies to any skill, interpersonal or otherwise. Time, effort, and openness to criticism are the variables that move the needle. “You could record yourself public speaking, then sit down with somebody and say, what’s working well, what’s not working well?” he says. “It’s an openness to feedback. Know that asking people not just for the rating, which is super useful, but for real feedback, that’s what gets you better.”

The MBA program will teach you finance and strategy. It will give you frameworks and case studies and credentials. What it won’t do is tell you whether you’re easy to trust, easy to work with, or easy to be around. That part, as Schweitzer sees it, has always been on you.