In May, HEC Montréal’s Centre for Productivity and Prosperity – Walter J. Somers Foundation published its annual study. One finding caught our attention in particular: better-managed companies tend to be led by people with higher levels of education.
That finding closely reflects our own experience in the field. Over the past 36 years, we have worked with more than 2,000 business leaders, and a very large proportion of them held university degrees. Engineers and Chartered Professional Accountants were especially common, along with leaders from finance and business administration. Many also held a master’s degree or another graduate-level qualification.
The study also notes that in Quebec, only 33% of SMEs are led by someone with at least a bachelor’s degree. That figure deserves far more attention in the discussion around Quebec’s productivity gap, because business performance also depends on leaders’ ability to understand complex problems, make better decisions, and continuously improve how their companies operate.
A university degree alone guarantees very little. Its real value lies in the intellectual habits it can help develop: learning how to learn, structuring one’s thinking, analyzing complex problems, testing assumptions, and recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge. Those abilities become especially important when decisions simultaneously involve strategy, operations, finance, technology, and people.
We also see recurring patterns among the strongest leaders we work with. They read, keep learning, challenge their own ideas, seek expertise they do not have, and surround themselves with people who are more capable than they are in specific areas. They view training, consulting, and outside expertise as ways to accelerate learning and improve decision-making.
Our experience also points to another pattern. Leaders with less formal education sometimes have fewer reference points for objectively assessing their own management practices, which can make it easier to overestimate the actual performance of their company. Strong management cultures are built on the ability to measure, compare, learn, and continuously test assumptions against results.
In Quebec, we talk extensively about technology, automation, artificial intelligence, and investment as ways to improve productivity. We pay far less attention to the skills and leadership capabilities of the people running our companies, even though technology in the hands of a management team that cannot integrate it effectively rarely creates a lasting advantage.
After working with thousands of business leaders, our conclusion remains remarkably consistent: the best companies invest as much in the quality of their leadership as they do in equipment, technology, and processes. The quality of a company rarely exceeds the quality of the people leading it.
