Journal of Education for Business

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Using collaborative learning to develop students’

soft skills

Trevor K. England, Gregory L. Nagel & Sean P. Salter

To cite this article: Trevor K. England, Gregory L. Nagel & Sean P. Salter (2020) Using
collaborative learning to develop students’ soft skills, Journal of Education for Business, 95:2,
106-114, DOI: 10.1080/08832323.2019.1599797

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08832323.2019.1599797

Published online: 13 May 2019.

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JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS
2020, VOL. 95, NO. 2, 106–114
https://doi.org/10.1080/08832323.2019.1599797

INNOVATIVE INSTRUCTIONAL CLASSROOM PROJECTS/BEST PRACTICES

Using collaborative learning to develop students’ soft skills

Trevor K. Englanda, Gregory L. Nagelb, and Sean P. Salterb
a
College of Business Administration, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA; bJones College of Business, Middle Tennessee
State University, Murfreesboro, TN, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Managers now emphasize the importance of soft interpersonal skills for success in business. Communication; decisions;
The authors provide an active learning approach to collaboratively teach students basic soft interpersonal; soft skills
skills that are needed in most careers. There are initial startup costs for the instructor, but
this effort soon reaps extraordinary rewards for students. In the authors’ approach, the need
for soft skills arises from a real-world issue that results from the application of technical skills
in an exercise. A decision must be made, which requires students to learn soft skills. Finally,
students apply their soft skills in the real world. The authors provide extensive support for
instructors.

Business executives and academicians have called for
increased opportunities for business students to improve
interpersonal (or soft) skills1 because these skills are
essential for success (Boyce, Williams, Kelly, & Yee,
2001; Hult Labs, 2014; Mullins, 2017; Rotman, 2018). In
fact, Google recently learned that soft skills (vs. technol-
ogy skills) were seven of the eight most important qual-
ities of its top employees (Strauss, 2017). Moreover,
according to job postings for many financial firms,
executives want graduates who can successfully build
networks, which also requires effective use of soft skills.
Timely information from networks helps employees
deal with the uncertainties inherent in real-world
business problems (Hult Labs, 2014). Furthermore,
soft skills are needed to elicit accurate financial infor-
mation from many levels of management when build-
ing financial models.2 In fact, our master of business
administration (MBA) students have asked that soft
skill be taught first (not last) in our course to be more
successful at engaging executives to act on decisions
motivated by their financial analyses of public firms.
The purpose of the present article is to provide a
proven active learning approach for collaboratively
teaching soft skills that requires our students to garner
support for a decision after their analysis (i.e., utiliza-
tion of hard skills) shows that one is needed. While
our underlying hypothetical scenario is easily customiz-
able to different academic disciplines and to different
methods of teaching soft skills, our approach to teach-
ing soft skills is based on Dale Carnegie’s 30 Human
Relations Principles (DC principles; Carnegie, 1981).
We utilize this approach because we teach decision
making in accounting and finance, and one of the
most successful financial executives, Warren Buffett,
attributes his success primarily to the DC principles.3
Additionally, the DC principles have been well received
for more than 100 years around the world.4
To teach the soft skills needed for business decision
making, we first assign a hypothetical business scen-
ario that develops technical financial skills (Part 1 of
the exercise). Application of these technical skills
results in a need for soft skills to garner support from
a superior for a decision. The exercise is conducted in
a controlled online environment where we can
actively engage students to collaborate and enhance
their soft skills using input from each other. This con-
trolled environment is followed by a less controlled
situation where teams of students reach out to

CONTACT Trevor K. England tengland@shsu.edu College of Business Administration, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 77340, USA.
1
Soft skills are interpersonal qualities, also known as people skills, and personal attributes that one possesses (Robles, 2012). Many authors equate
interpersonal skills with soft skills, while others consider them only a facet of soft skills that includes personal qualities and career attributes.
2
This point was made by Kyle Motley, UBS, Director of Credit Risk Assessment. See this video of Kyle starting at the 15:06-, 17:14-, and 18:20-minute
marks: https://youtu.be/4o9Qy69l_qQ.
3
See https://youtu.be/k7gXaPY524I; it is a video titled “BBC Presents Warren Buffett on Dale Carnegie - Dale Carnegie Training.”
4
See www.dalecarnegie.com/locations/nashville/en/.
ß 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

executives at a real-world firm of their choosing.
Knowing they will be required to attempt to engage
executives they admire, motivates students to seriously
engage in learning the soft skills taught in Part 2 of
the exercise. In conjunction with doing Part 2, stu-
dents often quickly apply the soft skills they learned
to communicate more effectively with their managers,
coworkers, and family members.
Our approach begins with a hypothetical scenario.
Our MBA students apply hard skills to perform a
financial analysis (any analysis that precipitates a deci-
sion can be used) to discover a major problem with a
financial model provided by their chief financial offi-
cer (CFO). In order to resolve this problem, they
must utilize the DC principles to inform their CFO of
the issue and convince him or her to meet and review
a less prominent model that corrects the problem. To
increase the relevance of the exercise to the current
business environment, students are required to com-
municate with the CFO through email because he or
she is currently unavailable for a face-to-face meeting.
This exercise is performed using a discussion board
in our learning management system (LMS). In the
discussion, each student team collaborates to propose
an email communication to engage its firm’s CFO to
resolve a problem with the CFO’s trusted financial
model; the model was created by the CFO’s trusted
expert and friend but contains a flaw. Students are
tasked with (a) communicating potential problems
with the financial model via an email to their CFO
and requesting a meeting to discuss such problems,
both of which create an uncertain outcome for their
career, and (b) providing individual feedback on other
teams’ proposed emails concerning the same issue. In
the discussion, students collaboratively learn to hone
their soft skills from each other’s comments.
Depending on how the CFO is engaged, one could
lose credibility and have negative career outcomes,
both of which are real-world risks. Finally, our exer-
cise on soft skills addresses five of the critical 10 skills
identified by executives—critical thinking, communi-
cation, comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty, cre-
ativity, and sales (Hult Labs, 2014). It also
incorporates technology by requiring communication
via email, the most frequently used form of business
communication.
To apply the soft skills learned from the exercise,
students are then tasked with applying the DC princi-
ples to engage executives from publicly-traded firms.
In our class, students perform a financial analysis of a
publicly-traded firm and propose an operational
change that will increase the firm's value. Students'
JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS 107
ultimate objective is to engage an executive at their
chosen firm to review and critique their proposal. Our
students’ demand to be taught soft skills before initiat-
ing contact with executives led to the creation of the
exercise in this article.
As evidenced by student testimonials in exit inter-
views over the past three years, results from this exer-
cise have been overwhelmingly positive in the MBA
program. Students have reported increased abilities
and confidence to engage executives at firms. In the
most recent semester, 17 of 21 students successfully
engaged executives at public firms. Soft skills obtained
through this exercise is consistently rated by MBA
students as one of the primary benefits of our course
in accounting and financial decision making.
In the remainder of this article, we review relevant
literature, provide the exercise for teaching basic soft
skills involving the DC principles, provide links to the
documents and models we use, layout the instructions
with teaching notes, and discuss examples we use to
guide students as they apply DC principles to contact
executives at real firms. In the final section of the art-
icle, we offer a conclusion.
Literature review
Hard business skills may be meaningless without soft
skills to complement them (Robles, 2012). Soft skills
help people manage conflict and create inclusive rela-
tionships that improve team performance, idea cre-
ation, negotiation of solutions, and revamping of work
processes (Muir, 2004). More importantly, soft skills
affect how information is shared among colleagues and
the way in which executives perceive and understand
their working environment (Parente, Stephan, &
Brown, 2012). Yet, many students miss opportunities
early in their careers because they do not have adequate
practice integrating business principles and soft skills
(Baldwin, Pierce, Joines, & Farouk, 2011).
Mastery of soft skills is especially challenging in the
electronic business world that is dominated by email
communications. A key challenge with email is that
the miscommunicating of emotions may inhibit rela-
tionships between colleagues (Barsade, 2002; Scifres,
Gundersen, & Behara, 1998). Such miscommunication
can be stressful because the sender must act to correct
the message (i.e., increasing their workload) while
engaging in damage control in maintaining a long-
term positive relationship with the receiver (Derks &
Bakker, 2010). As such, delivering negative messages
via email can be stressful and unpleasant for both the
sender and receiver (Derks & Bakker, 2010), while
108 T. K. ENGLAND ET AL.
increasing the likelihood of conflict escalation among
the parties (Friedman & Currall, 2003).
To provide students with more opportunities to
integrate business principles and soft skills, we have
developed an effective active learning exercise that
incorporates email communication and requires the
students to convey a negative message to a superior.
In contrast to a traditional lecture, active learning
exercises require students to engage in the learning
process and think about what they are doing (Prince,
2004). While there are various instructional methods
utilized in active learning, one popular approach is
collaborative learning, which requires students to
work in small groups toward a common goal. This
method enhances learning because students can share
their knowledge and expertise (Prince, 2004) while
discussing contradictory viewpoints (Scager, Boonstra,
Peeters, Vulperhorst, & Wiegant, 2016). Likewise, it
provides exposure to real-world problem-solving tech-
niques because businesses depend heavily on collab-
orative work environments (Yazici, 2004).
Metastudies consistently show that collaborative
learning improves academic achievement, the quality
of interpersonal interactions, and student attitudes
(Prince, 2004). However, these outcomes depend on
the quality of the discussions (Chinn, O’Donnell, &
Jinks, 2000), which increases as students have to
explain their ideas to each other (Veenman, Denessen,
Van den Akker, & Van der Rijt, 2005) and build on
each other’s ideas (Barron, 2003). To increase the
quality of the discussions in our exercise, the instruc-
tors probe students to explain their ideas as well as
provide coaching and feedback throughout the assign-
ment period.
To stimulate interest and enthusiasm, our exercise
uses a real-world scenario that enables students to
connect to and interact with the external world
(Boyce et al., 2001). To enhance learning outcomes,
students are required to generate their own thoughts
and strategy, even if incorrect, at the beginning of the
exercise versus only learning effective models with
correct answers (Baldwin et al., 2011).
After developing their own approach to solving
the problem, students are required to share it with
their peers and instructors for critique and respond
to the critiques. This method allows students to
compare and contrast their own thinking with
others’ thinking. Likewise, it allows them to appreci-
ate the critical feedback and divergent views pro-
vided by their peers and instructors, which further
promotes communication and interpersonal skills
(Boyce et al., 2001).
Exercise with instructor’s introduction and
students’ instructions
Teaching soft skills can be challenging because they
are subjective and create difficulties in consistently
evaluating student outcomes. In developing our exer-
cise, it was imperative to confront these issues by
adopting a semi-structured framework that enabled us
to communicate expectations to students and consist-
ently evaluate their performance. After review of vari-
ous methods, we concluded that our approach would
be based on the DC principles (see Appendix A). The
DC principles have been well received for over
100 years worldwide.5 In fact, Warren Buffett attrib-
utes the DC principles to changing his life for the bet-
ter (Mejia & Ward, 2017). Yet, this exercise is highly
customizable and can be utilized with other methods.
For example, other instructors may prefer to apply the
ideas outlined by Fisher, Ury, and Patton (2011),
which outlines a method of negotiating agreement
without giving in. However, so students can quickly
learn, one needs to first succinctly summarize their
ideas as DC does.
After selecting our approach, we designed our exer-
cise to improve students’ soft skills by requiring them
to grapple with how to handle a contentious, politic-
ally-sensitive situation that arises from applying their
hard business skills in evaluating the results of a com-
plex financial analysis. Reviewing financial informa-
tion to test and verify whether it makes logical sense
is a hard skill we call “sanity checking.” For example,
a simple sanity check is to see whether provided
financial assumptions are consistent with one’s experi-
ence; if not, further checking is warranted. Some sim-
ple ways to perform sanity checking are provided in
Exhibit 1 (see Harvard Dataverse, 2019b). We chose
sanity checking as the hard skill because it is used in
virtually all types of business analysis. However, an
instructor can build this exercise around any hard
skill that leads to a contentious, politically-sensitive
issue that needs to be communicated to a superior.
We begin the exercise by teaching students how to
apply sanity checking to a financial model given to
them by them by their boss, the CFO. After utilizing
sanity checking, students discover that there is a prob-
lem with the company’s financial model and must
convey this negative information to the CFO.
However, the CFO is inaccessible and the information
must be conveyed via email with a request to meet
with him or her concerning the issues encountered
with the model.
5
See www.dalecarnegie.com/locations/nashville/en/.

While the exercise is customizable to meet an
instructor’s needs, the specific instructions for our
version follow. We allow the exercise to be performed
throughout one week. Please note that, except for
individual critiques, the exercise is utilized by forming
teams of students. Each team posts their proposed
email to the CFO, then students are individually
responsible for doing critiques of other teams’ emails
and responding to critiques. This approach helps
reduce instructor time constraints while allowing for
swift group and individual grading. More importantly,
groups of 2–4 students provide more meaningful
interaction, which enhances collaborative learning out-
comes (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 2007).
Students’ instructions
Financial statement modeling ideally provides business
executives with the ability to see how contemplated
operational changes are likely to affect firm value and
finances. In financial statement modeling, the firm’s
future financial statements are estimated several years
into the future. You are provided two financial state-
ment models to complete this exercise. The first
financial model is based on Simon Benninga’s finan-
cial modeling (Benninga, 2014).6 Simon Benninga is a
prominent financial scholar and is recognized as one
of the “fathers of financial modeling.”7,8 The second
financial model was developed based on substantial
input from an experienced and respected banking pro-
fessional, Kyle Motley (all mistakes are our own). Kyle
was Director and Credit Risk Officer at UBS
Investment Bank, a Senior Associate for Valuation
Services at Alvarex and Marsal in Chicago, and now
contracts for valuation work through his company,
Back Office Valuation & Consulting.
Part 1: Learn and apply hard skills (sanity checks)
to find an issue
In this part, utilize your financial hard skills to sanity
check and discover the error in the financial statement
model based on Benninga (2014). Nagel (2017b) out-
lines our suggested way to sanity check the model.
6
One can obtain the original Excel valuation model that was developed
and used in Benninga (2014) by going to http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/
financial-modeling-fourth-edition. The results obtained using the original
Benninga model are very similar to the results obtained using the model
we provide, which is based on Benninga’s original model. One will need
to fill in missing information to use Benninga’s original Excel model by
referring to the assumptions provided on page 176 for “Interest rate on
debt” in Chapter 6 of his textbook.
7
See https://www.modeloff.com/the-simon-benninga-award/.
8
See https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/memoriam-simon-benninga.
JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS 109
You might first check how stock price changes as sales
increase and whether the long-term free cash flow
growth rate makes sense. By way of background, the
model is created by utilizing the financial information
of Caterpillar (CAT), a large, mature firm. For large,
mature firms, increased revenue growth should lead
to greater cash flows and higher stock prices.
Additionally, finance professionals typically set the
assumed long-term free cash flow growth rate at no
more than 3% (sometimes less) for U.S. firms. The
reason for this assumption is that a firm cannot grow
faster than the economy in perpetuity, and the U.S.
economy is currently growing at about 2–3% per year.
If a firm grows faster than the economy, it must even-
tually acquire all other businesses, which culminates
with the firm becoming the economy. For example,
can Amazon.com Inc. grow free cash flow at 25%þ
per year forever? Finance professionals suggest it can-
not because it will become the economy due to either
acquiring all other firms or bankrupting them.
Next, sanity check the Motley-inspired model
(based on The Kellogg Company) to determine if the
same error exists. After you sanity check the Kellogg
model, we give you the sanity checks results for CAT
in Part 2. The Motley-inspired and Benninga-based
models can be downloaded by using the following
links: Motley-inspired Model–Kellogg (Harvard
Dataverse, 2019b) and the Benninga-based Model for
CAT (Harvard Dataverse, 2019c). You will need to
use the PC version of Excel because it allows for itera-
tive calculation. If you open the models and a circular
reference error exists, please watch Nagel (2017a) for
instructions to fix the error. Once you have reviewed
both models, use the information gleaned from your
sanity checks to complete Part 2.
Part 2: Learn and apply soft skills utilizing the
DC principles
Your firm’s CFO has told you to utilize the Benninga-
based model to value the potential acquisition of
CAT. The CFO is a close personal friend of Benninga
and considers him a mentor and world-renowned
expert in corporate finance. Hence, he considers
Benninga’s model to be the superior method for
determining the value of Caterpillar’s stock. However,
as you discovered with your sanity checks, the
Benninga-based model has major flaws, and its use
for making such a strategic decision concerns you.
As an alternative solution, you are aware of the
Motley-inspired model through your MBA studies.
After using the model to estimate the value of
110 T. K. ENGLAND ET AL.
Caterpillar’s stock (and sanity checking the results),
you find it is superior and want to convince the CFO
of the same.9 Now enter into the online discussion
and perform the following:
1. By midnight Tuesday, your team must draft and
post an email requesting a meeting with the CFO
to the discussion board. In this email, you must
inform him of the issue that leads to your meet-
ing request and disclose the Motley-inspired
model. Remember you are asking the CFO to
abandon his friend and mentor to adopt a less
well-known model. Be brief and concise but
clearly explain the logic behind your suggestion,
which should be based on the results of your ana-
lysis and sanity checks.
In order to gain cooperation from the CFO, pre-
pare your email using the 30 Dale Carnegie
Human Relations Principles in Appendix A as the
underlying framework. At the end of your email,
explicitly explain how your team used individual
Dale Carnegie Principles and give the sentence(s)
where you applied each principle. You are not
required to utilize all 30 principles—keep the
email concise because your CFO is busy and
receives many emails each day.
2. By midnight Thursday, each student (not group)
is required to critique at least two emails posted
by other groups. Your critique is to address both
the logic and the appropriate application of the
Dale Carnegie Principles. The goal is to be con-
structive, so be sure to follow the first Dale
Carnegie principle: Do not criticize, condemn,
or complain.
3. By midnight Friday, respond to critiques provided
by instructors and classmates to your group’s
email in Step 1. Meeting the minimum number of
postings will not qualify you for an “A” on this
discussion. A discussion means that you actively
comment throughout the week, respond to posts,
and ask intriguing questions to your instructors
and fellow students. Being able to effectively and
efficiently sanity check critical decisions and then
come to voluntary agreement with those holding
contrary views is a critical skill for any business
professional. Mangers are frequently required to
resolve disagreements among colleagues.
9 10
We created a valuation model for CAT using the Motley-inspired model.
The sanity checks made sense for the CAT model as they did for the
Kellogg model. Further, we confirmed our sanity check findings for the
Motley-inspired models (and the Benninga-based model of CAT) with
multiple valuation professionals.
Application of soft skills learned from
the exercise
To internalize the soft skills developed in Part 1 of
the exercise, students are next tasked with applying
the DC principles to electronically network with exec-
utives from publicly-traded firms. In our class, stu-
dents’ objective is to engage executives (via email or
similar electronic medium) at their chosen firm to
review and critique the proposed operational change
they developed from their analyses.10 Refer to Exhibit
2 (see Harvard Dataverse, 2019a) for a summary of
the application exercise and the related teaching notes.
Benefits accrue from these exercises for instructors
and students. Instructors can easily broaden their
executive network by staying in the loop with stu-
dents, and the teaching load is light because students
are self-motivated. Additionally, the grading workload
is light because the exercises are mostly completed by
teams. Each team’s assignment is to turn in the com-
munications used to contact the executive (emails,
etc.) along with a reflective description of the commu-
nication process. The communication trail allows for
in depth assessment of the team, if desired. Of course,
team assignments eliminate the possibility of assessing
individual student mastery. On the other hand, group
projects give the opportunity to assess teamwork and
allow students to actively learn from each other.
In our experience, students often successfully net-
work and gain confidence in applying their soft skills.
Moreover, most students are amazingly energized by
the opportunity to engage with executives they
admire, which enhances the overall learning environ-
ment for our class. Finally, students have successfully
applied their newly learned soft skills to resolve real-
world impasses. For example, one student worked as a
server at a national chain restaurant. She had ideas for
improving the restaurant’s appeal to millennials by
instituting the Open Table app. She had been repeat-
edly referred to her firm’s complaint line and gotten
no feedback. Once she applied the DC principles and
contacted executives within the company, she gained
strong support and feedback from the firm’s CFO and
his team.
Another team focused on getting Toyota to sell
high performance pick-up trucks. They successfully
obtained feedback from the Chief Engineer at Toyota
Motor Corporation about their idea to power a
Some instructors may be concerned that contacting executives exposes
the school to reputational risks while students are still are pursuing their
degrees. However, in our experience, the skills learned from this exercise
have allowed such interactions without any negative reputational
consequences to our institution or to the students.

Toyota truck with a CAT diesel engine. Utilizing
LinkedIn, they were able to connect with the Chief
Engineer for Trucks at Toyota, and he provided
detailed feedback about their proposed business idea
for Toyota. Overall, major employers from all indus-
tries tell us they want students to cultivate their own
networks to obtain the information needed to do their
jobs and improve the company, and anecdotally, this
exercise facilitates the development of the soft skills
necessary to be successful in accomplishing this task.
Teaching notes
Instructors can greatly reduce their workload by
strongly motivating the exercises. Graduate students
are typically motivated through their desires to suc-
cessfully build their own networks and resolve com-
munication impasses. Undergraduates are usually
motivated by their desire to successfully engage with
their manager, their coworkers, or with employers at
networking events. Students’ motivation typically
increases when they learn that DC principles have
been used for more than 100 years and include
endorsements from successful executives in their com-
munity, and many have taken the DC course. In fact,
prior students suggested that we introduce the DC
principles in an exercise so they could learn and util-
ize them to successfully (a) contact executives, (b)
deal with teammates, and (c) help them in their cur-
rent jobs. Many students are motivated by the success
of other students and the opportunity to successfully
connect with a business executive who may later be a
source of advice or a reference.
Teaching notes specific to the exercise are included.
Please note that the exercise is customizable to almost
any real-word situation or discipline (e.g., it could be
utilized by accountants, doctors, scientists). To cus-
tomize the exercise, the instructor must first choose a
real-life hard skills assignment that requires a final
decision. We provide a hard skills assignment to learn
sanity checking because such checks are nearly univer-
sally done. In our hard skills assignment, the outcome
is a decision to try to convince a superior to reject
one well-respected financial modeling approach and
in favor of another less utilized approach. This deci-
sion leads to the politically sensitive, interpersonal
problem that requires soft skills to garner support
from a superior without derailing the employee’s car-
eer aspirations. While our exercise is designed for the
finance industry, the instructor can use any hard skills
assignment that leads to a situation that must be
resolved using soft skills.
JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS 111
The next step is to create student teams. We typic-
ally see instructors use two options. First, the
instructor can assign teams based on the students’
capabilities. Alternatively, students can choose their
own teams. We usually follow option two after coach-
ing students on how to form effective teams. One
important aspect to consider is that group heterogen-
eity increases knowledge gains through the amount
and diversity of ideas available to the group (Scifres
et al., 1998).
The last step is to create a discussion board for the
exercise in your LMS with the detailed instructions
outlined in Section 3. Once the discussion is created,
the instructor can guide the students. We have had
multiple instructors manage this soft skills discussion.
New instructors easily get a sense of how to guide the
discussion by reading through discussion threads from
the prior semester. To assist new instructors in utiliz-
ing the exercise effectively, we provide the following
two examples of discussion threads from past classes:
 Discussion thread for Team Synergy (Harvard
Dataverse, 2019d).
 Discussion thread for Team LIFO the Party
(Harvard Dataverse, 2019e).
In these discussion threads, you can see typical
responses from the instructor (search for comments
from “Trevor” to find these replies). This is the point
where giving guidance with thought provoking ques-
tions enhances critical thinking and the effectiveness
of the collaboration. As DC would say, “Ask questions
(of the students), do not give direct orders.”
The following are some additional suggestions we
have learned from using this exercise over the years:
1. Give a specific due date (early in the discussion
period) for posting each team’s proposed email
with the references to the DC principles. Without
a due date, we have found some teams do not
post their proposed email until the discussion
period is nearly over.
2. Without the requirement to explicitly explain how
DC principles are used, students do not think
through how they applied the principles.
3. Require students to individually critique at least
two teams’ proposed emails within two days after
the initial emails are posted. Individual critiques
involve all students and enhance the collaborative
learning environment. The two-day time limit
seems to give students with hectic schedules
enough time to engage.
112 T. K. ENGLAND ET AL.
4. Set and motivate the standard for grading. We
find students improve their engagement when
they understand our standard for grading their
discussion posts. The grading criteria should focus
on whether the students add value to the discus-
sion. Our grading rubric (see Appendix B) for
discussions was developed by a CEO of a national
multiemployer pension fund and has been verified
by many senior executives. We use this rubric to
grade all class discussions as it reflects the reality
of how our students will often be evaluated in the
professional world, and we find that students
appreciate the guidance our grades provide
toward their professional development.
Conclusion
To meet the increasing demands that soft skills be
taught in business schools, we have developed an
active learning exercise that teaches the utilization of
soft skills in the electronic business world. The exer-
cise requires minimal cost and time for instructors
and is customizable for any academic discipline.
While various approaches can be chosen to teach soft
skills, our approach uses the DC principles (see
Appendix A). As such, we provide a roadmap for
teaching softs skills through collaborative learning
along with the supporting student instructions, docu-
ments, and teaching notes that are needed to make
the teaching task easy. To provide students with an
opportunity to apply their soft skills in a real-world
setting, we require students to contact executives at a
public firm of the students’ choosing to, hopefully,
gain feedback on their course project. In most all
instances, these interactions are conducted
electronically.
Our approach emphasizes the need for students to
learn soft skills as follows:
 A real-world issue is discovered through the appli-
cation of hard financial skills that requires politic-
ally-sensitive, electronic communications with their
superior. We chose sanity checking as the hard
skill because it is prominently used in finance.
However, the instructor can substitute a hard skill
from any discipline that leads to an issue for which
such a communication is required.
 Students are required to attempt to successfully
engage executives at a publicly traded firm of their
choosing to review their class project. While not
required, in most all instances, these communica-
tions are conducted electronically. This assignment
makes the need for soft skills apparent and worth-
while. Most student see the potential to widen
their network, and after completing the exercise,
most students are successful in garnering feedback
from executives.
Acknowledgments
The authors appreciate the suggestions and comments from
seminar participants at the Financial Education Association
2018 annual meeting. Further, they appreciate comments
from Deana Raffo, Kyle Motely, and many MBA students
that helped refine their approach to teaching soft interper-
sonal communication skills needed to make busi-
ness decisions.
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114 T. K. ENGLAND ET AL.
29. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy
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you suggest.
Appendix B
Discussion grading rubric
1. Voluntary engagement that moves the discussion for-
ward and provides equal opportunity for others to
engage. Grade range 100–90%. You prepared by seeing
what teams wanted to accomplish and then helped
them do it in ways the team(s) appreciate.
a. The comments are relevant to the topic.
b. The comments are succinct.
c. The comments are plausible.
d. The comments are well organized.
e. The comments are thought provoking.
f. The comments add an alternative viewpoint.
2. Voluntary engagement that lacks reflective thought and
attention. Grade range 89% to 80%.
a. The comments are only tangential to the topic.
b. The comments are not succinct.
c. The comments are not well organized and may
confuse fellow students.
d. The comments lack reflection and preparation for
the topic.
3. Involuntary engagement (only responds after being
questioned by an instructor) that moves the discussion
forward. Grade range 79–70%. You prepared but did
not engage.
a. The comments are relevant to the topic.
b. The comments are succinct.
c. The comments are plausible.
d. The comments are well organized.
e. The comments are thought provoking.
f. The comments add an alternative viewpoint.
4. Involuntary engagement (only responds after being
questioned by an instructor) that lacks reflective
thought and attention OR nonresponsive. Grade range
60% or less.
a. The comments are only tangential to the topic.
b. The comments are not succinct.
c. The comments are not well organized and may
confuse fellow students.
d. The comments lack reflection and preparation for
the topic.
e. Cannot provide a relevant response to the cur-
rent topic.
5. Unprofessional comments, repeated negativity (as per-
ceived by others), or dominating the discussion without
allowing other students to respond. Grade range 60%
or less. For the best solution, we need to encourage
and incorporate all contributions.
Students may have responses in different categories
throughout the discussion. The instructor will evaluate
all responses and assign an overall grade based on
your collective responses.