Description of the video:

So again, talking about leadership, and if we just focus on the United States, what do you consider to be the most serious leadership challenges that American society faces in the president? Okay. I think the biggest challenge here right now is the divisiveness of society that's becoming ever more, you know, us versus them. And we can't get anything done because of that. And, you know, and that just kills me, you know, that we can't we can't agree on pandemic. We can't agree on global warming. But do you think that maybe that divisiveness where we can't agree on the pandemic of, you know, global warming, in some ways, is a failure of leadership or nurtured by, Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, it is. They're only a is. It is. I mean, I think with the last administration, we took many, many steps backwards last US Presidential Administration. I mean, because he fostered that, you know? I mean, Look. But in fairness, he wasn't the only one? No. He had a lot of he had a lot of help. No. He had a lot of He had a lot of help just like we've been talking about, it's the enables. And in fact, Barbara Kellerman forthcoming book is called the enables. And it's specifically about it's not about Donald Trump, it's about the people around Donald Tm reading that book. Yeah. Yeah. I got to read it. So as you consider the leadership challenges we face in the present, what gives you faith? What gives you hope? I almost I'm starting to lose hope. I'm hoping that that maybe we can help in a small way and maybe we can overcome these problems. We know how to do it. We know how to bring divided groups together. It goes back to I mentioned Sharif and his Robbers Cave experiment. He had them work on what he called super ordinate goals. We have superordinate goals, get rid of the pandemic. Stop global warming, you know, save the planet. It's how do we get people to buy into those shared super ordinances. So, you know, again, for the record here if anybody is reading this, I mean, I'm an academic myself, but I think there's a tendency among academics to say, you know, I'll do the research in the publication, but it's not my job to move it off off the campus. No. I mean, it is our job because we're leadership people, right? I mean, so you know, and I've been in groups over the years, and this is actually one of the most fortunate thing of So a group was thrown together, usually sit cherries at these things and ILA is involved. But I got invited a long time ago, and that's where I spent a lot of time of Gem and Blument it was the Desmond 22 after he won the Nobel Prize and he was going to put the money into a leadership center, and so we were called up to Seattle to kind of brainstorm. How could we do this? I thought Gene came with a great idea and we kind of talked about it. Of making that South African center a place where a world leaders would have to come without their entourage and sit down at a table with a facilitator and talk to one another without all the enablers. And they turned it down. They didn't want to go down that path. But I think we need something like that. I think we need to have world leaders behind closed doors, but with experts helping them come up with strategies that will solve these global problems. I, I think that's how it's going to happen. We probably have the start of the technology to do that. But we have no cloud. And you think that there are some problems like climate change that we've been talking about that may almost be without solution because of issues later. Oh, that's what the pessimism part of me says, Yeah, I don't think we're going to stop it until it's too late. And so I don't have a very optimistic outlook for the future. And I'll tell you, you know, the last couple of years of these record temperatures and things like that and, you know, the issues here with fires in California. I've had my brother lost his house, my best friend lost his ranch. You know, that both of those stood for decades. I mean, one case a century without a fire, you know. So I look around and I'm pessimistic. But we're all in this together. We're on this one little planet and so at some point, it's either we fix it or we don't. And if we don't, then The end of the human rights. I mean as we help you look around the world and look at these problems and realize that you don't solve problems without a constituency that's willing to do it. Right. And maybe the lack of that constituency is a failure of leadership, but there are not leaders who are willing to stand up and say, we got to do this. Yeah. And even if it hurts. No. I mean, I think there's plenty of leaders who see it and, you know, but yeah, they're unwilling to put their whole career on the line. To do it, you know, they they lacked the courtage of doing it. I mean, look at what's her name, the young Scandinavian girl. Yes. You know, and she's had death threats, and she's had all these kinds of things that she's a child. I mean, she shouldn't have to, you know, but she's she's embraced this. I mean, if world leaders had the courage that she had, So as you consider your own career, what are you proud of Stef? What gives you the greatest sense of accomplishment? It's the students who have got on to good things. I mean, that's that's like I teared up. I think of that. You know you know. When I think about and, you know, it's an academic, you know, you love when they follow your footsteps. So I think of Stephanie, you know, I call my other daughter, you know,'s last name Johnson. Yeah you know and Chris Rina, even some of the post docs who have gone on and then our undergrads who go into different kinds of careers. I mean, I love now Linked in. I love because I connect with students. They often connect when they graduate. And then all of a sudden I see yesterday, I saw somebody with SD and I went, Well, at least you went into psychology, you should have got a PhD, but SD and that's great, you know. No, I mean, that's what gives me the thrill, you know, that kind of stuff. So would you consider your own career, you have any regrets? There anything you would have changed? I think the big regret is, you know, is what we were talking about. If you could go back if I could go back to graduate school with the knowledge I had now, I might have been able to have a, you know, a really significant impact, but you don't learn how to have an impact until later on. You know, I got asked years ago to do in a last lecture, what were the lessons I learned? And, you know, and then I put it out on my blog, you know, and I said, God, I hope young academics will look at this and learn something from it and be able to advance your careers more quickly because of it. So what were the biggest lessons that you embedded in that? Oh, gosh, I have to think about it. I mean, one of the things was be brave, you know, go up and, you know, because I don't know how many times I saw Bern Bassett conferences, but I was too intimidated to go up and excuse myself. I I'll go ahead and do this renew the end. When I first started teaching public history, I took several of my students to the, you know, state National Conference and we were going home in the car and I said, so what happened would you do? And they said, well, we saw so and so, was it really famous and I said, Well, did you talk to her? They said, No, we just saw her. I was, you know, you just saw Bernie Bass. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you know, and so that was one of them, you know, the other was you know, there was a thing if you want to make a name, you've really got to drill down into something and think about that, think about the impact of what you do. Everything take everything takes way longer than you think it's going to take, you know. So I don't know. Oh, you know, there's a lot about collaboration, about the benefits of collaboration. Do you can consider yourself a work in progress? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think so. I mean, it's kind of hard as you get you know as you get older, you start to think, you know, how much more. But you know, I mean, I learned something every day and I'm always kind of amazed at the things that I learn, you know. And I just wish I mean, sometimes I wish there were more hours in the day for me to learn more. You know, I get the journal issued table of contents now electronically and they come up. Almost daily and I go, I have time to read all this stuff, you know, So you know, everybody's like listening to podcasts. I don't have a commute. I live 2 miles away. When I had a commute, I would I would be than I used to have a long commute and I would I would be thriving on podcast. They didn't have those back then. I listened to books on tape and then realized I zoned out too much and I'd be pushing the rewind button too much. So What are you presently working on? So many things. I have I have a I do this like old school. I showed you in my office and prove it to you, but I I have stickies on my monitor. Because I have I think there's there was 19, there's 24 things I'm working on. And I keep that there so that I can go down the checklist and and I consider it like juggling. How do you keep all the balls in the air without dropping them? And that's how I do it, I look and I go, Okay, which of these projects need attention? You've got a stick I assume a state of the art computer. But your prompts are sticky notes. Stick because they're there and I have to look at them all the time as opposed to the sticky notes. I know we do have sticky notes on the screen, but they'll get covered by something else. So these never get covered. I have a lot of my sticky notes are on the file cabinets to the right side of my computer. Yeah. Professionally, who do you look up to? Who inspires you? Or inspire you? Yeah. I mean, I think they're really, you know, I think there's I think it goes both ways. I think I get inspired by the well known people. You know, but I think I also get inspired by people who you know, our peers or lower level. I think I get inspired by when I see like what our students do when they graduate or even what our students do sometimes when they're here. I mean, I don't have any problem finding like that source of inspiration in just about anybody. I did two this week, I did two reviews of people going up for tenure. One person, I was really surprised at all she had done because I didn't recognize her name. I actually met her at academy last live Academy. And I think that's how she got my name or whatever. And I was really impressed with what she had done, but I didn't look if I if I just looked at her scholarship, I wouldn't have seen all the other things that are in her CV. You know, so that was inspirational. So yeah. I mean, I think I get I find it everywhere, you know. So what do you hope your legacy will be? You know, I don't I think I think the legacy is, you know, being a professor, I think the legacy is really the students. I I kind of like this. One guy told me years ago, he just recently retired and I didn't really collaborate with him. He he was a reviewer of my textbook. But he said pots. You hear that this was yo, the industrial organizational sit. He said, You're the nicest person in Cop. He goes, You are really a pleasure to talk to you because you're so you're so nice and you're so and you seem to be genuinely interested in people, and he said, and you don't put on errors and all that sort of stuff. I really took that as a compliment because all my life, I felt like I was way too nice, and I told you I had to develop my strategy for not being walked on. But I think if people I think that connector thing, if people go, Oh, yeah, that's the guy who used to bring people together at the conference and then they would publish the book or they would, you know, or this was the guy that sort of inspired me to keep working in this area. So I think that more so than my own work, you know, I mean, you know, I think it's more about, did I help everybody else move forward? That would be more important. I'm looking at a list of like six of the articles that you've written out of dozens that I pulled out because they were going to prompt me to talk about some of the things that you've done in your views on leadership. So I was intrigued by a piece that you wrote co wrote with Thompson D Thompson in Oh, 2110. Yeah. Yeah. I I should've looked up the first. Yeah. Yeah. It's in the consulting psychology journal. Right. Right. 2010. It's called introduction. Well. Right Dale Dt It's called measuring character and leadership. Yeah. Yeah. And we talked a little bit about that, but Yeah. How do you measure character? Well, I mean, you know, we developed a measure of it. And, you know, and it was less than, you know, It was it was good, but it was disappointing. So what I tried to do, and in fact, some philosophers here in the department said, you can't do this. I said, well, I want to measure cardinal virtues. I want to measure, you know, and and but the way we have to do it is we have to have followers rate their leaders, and, you know, does your does your leader have fortitude? Do they press ahead? You know, they will they do the right thing, stand up for the right thing? Prudence, do they really listen to you and take into account your what you got to say? Do they temper them set temperance? Do they regulate their they don't fly the handle? So, you know, we asked them things like that. Like I'm just saying right now. You know, we gave them descriptors of items that were descriptors of their leader's behavior that would be related to the cardinal virtues. I really do believe that that is the way people become good leaders is they have to be temperate. They have to be they have to have fortitude to be courage the courageous follower Yes leader. And they have to listen to people and take in what you know, I think that you can go back to Aristotle and you can get a very good idea of what a good leader is from the ethical idea, philosophical idea. And that's what that was about. And that's I published that instrument, the the validation of that instrument in that in that thing, and then that's Dale and I were the guest editors. So that was the piece we wrote that introduced. So you published a piece in looking through my bifocals here. It's called who emerges as the leader. M analysis individual differences as predictors of leadership emergence, personality and individual differences. I remember I said always one my lessons was it always takes longer than you think? Yeah. What year was that published in 2014 or something? Yeah. And it was in the journal of leadership and organizational studies and in volume 18, which I think is 2014. I I didn't put the date. Okay. Blank. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. P. So okay. So that was 2014 we started that project for Berdie Bass Fest Trift. Oh, my goodness. In 2001. So So what we did was, you know, he did some early work on L ear Emergency. Yeah. You know, because Babel hypothesis, you talk more. And we were we started that met analysis then and we didn't finish it until then. We didn't get it done for the 2001. So when you talk about individual differences as predictors of leader emergence. Personality and individual differences? Yeah. Skills. So is that what is that what personality means a skills the individual differences skills. So so we looked at everything that people had looked at that you measure through the way you measure personality, you know, like, do they have the these traits? Do they have these skills? Do they have these tendencies, these attitudes, you know, and looked across that did analysis of that and what? What were the factors that seem to relate to leader emergence. And it's like it's it's no different than what Bernie came up with. That was the idea we were going to re validate what Bernie did because males get select, they emerge more as leaders, wealthy people emerge more as leaders, extroverts emerge more as leaders, you know, all those kind of things. So you can't make somebody a male who's not. You can't make somebody you can help them. But if you a woman, we know this from other people's research, you got to act like a man and act like a woman. You got to do two things. Do you do you tell your female students that if you want to be successful as a leader, you better develop some male characteristics. I don't think I say that. I don't think I I think with the ideas you present this idea that and this is Alice Agle's idea of there's agentic behavior, which is more associated with males, you know, the task, and there's relationship, you call it communal kind of things that are more associated with women. We know that successful leaders have to be both agentic and communal. You know, the difference is, women really have to be agentic in a very careful way where men can be much more rude about it. And they have to also be communal, but not overly communal to where they're going to do like Hillary Clinton, you're too emotional and you can't be a lead. So the burden of being successful leader is much heavier on on. Absolutely. Absolutely, it's much harder for women. I mean, no doubt. Can you tell your students that? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, That's we women lead a man in leadership. So do you no, no. I I mean, no, no. Do you think that there's been changes? I mean, you've been the fields for a long time. It's been changes, but it's still really difficult, you know? I mean, And sometimes I had to come to this awareness, you know, I mean, Susan's quite a bit younger, but when I first moved here, my daughter was she was born in my youngest who was born in 2000, right? So she I would bring her to work and, you know, in the carrier and put her under the my desk and, you know, and then she's toddling down. And, you know, Susan Murphy later had her kids, and she said, I can't do that. I can't bring my kids to work because it, you know, what would people think? You know, you got male privilege, you know, that was the I did it and I knew I know. And that was I mean, to have that thrown in my face was going, Yeah, you know, I I don't get male privilege as well as I thought I did, you know. So do you think that male privilege plays a role in leadership? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, male privilege gs men leg up and women have it much harder. White privilege? White privilege, absolutely, you know? I mean, you know, I mean, I was a beneficiary of that. So what does a field that is still heavily influenced by white males? What what does it do about male privilege? Well, you don't white I I've run into this on the ILA and actually on this committee because I told you I was on the committee and often they would say, you know, you've got too many white males that you're honoring, you know, I mean, you've interviewed them all, right? So you know how many white males compared to non white. Very few people of color on that list. Yeah. And I think I've been interviewed all the ones that are allowed. Yeah. And I said to them, what do you want me to do? What or the committee, what you want us to do? Because you want us to have the luminaries, but because of all of these issues, we're to white privilege at all, the white males have made the marks. And so do we just now ignore and what we've tried to do is provide that balance. The future, I think, is going to be the opposite. Bernie actually added is a great thing. They asked him in 1970 to predict what manage they didn't use leadership what management would look like in 2000. And man, he hit a lot of things. He said we'll be using computers on a daily basis. You know, they asked him to go forward at his Fsrift, go forward to 2034, or whatever the year would the same distance. Okay. And he said most women in high level or most leaders in high level positions will be women 2034. And he used the research to support that. He said they're better at it. They've got the more communal stuff, and that's what's going to be more important in the future. And, you know, I've always said I hope I'm around to be able to test it because he says there I won't be around to test it, but you know, so I hope that things will change. And I see that. I mean, most of in fact, I think all the committee no. 70% of the committees I'm on are women of dissertations. So that's. And do you think the that's the direction the field just headed in? I think so. And and they're good at it. So three more questions. You wrote a piece 2015. You co author was Sage Sage, SAGD? Car. He's a student. Okay. Yeah. One of your students? Yeah. And you told me actually that you do co author with your students? Yeah. Yeah. So. So 2015, and the piece is called Incorporating soft skills into the collaborative problem solving equation. I appeared in industrial and organizational psychology. Yeah. All right. So for people begin, we're not in your field, what are soft skills? Yeah. So soft skills are the things we've been talking about that lead to charisma, that ability to manage relationships, the people skills. So people skills probably gives you an idea, how do you relate to people and all that. We know that's important. And leaders say, I got to work on my soft skills as the hard skills and the decision making, the number crunching, all that kind of stuff. Business schools mostly teach the art skills. They don't spend much time teaching the soft skills. We have a piece I just did with Scott Allen and Dave Rosh, where we're saying that very few MBA programs are really giving serious attention to leadership. Usually, it's one course. They don't really do intense leader development. And we had the reviewers savaged us. They said, How do you know that? You've been to every business school? Well, my business school, you know, we Yeah, this guy's objective, right? But we eventually got got it into print.

Description of the video:

So again, talking about leadership, and if we just focus on the United States, what do you consider to be the most serious leadership challenges that American society faces in the president? Okay. I think the biggest challenge here right now is the divisiveness of society that's becoming ever more, you know, us versus them. And we can't get anything done because of that. And, you know, and that just kills me, you know, that we can't we can't agree on pandemic. We can't agree on global warming. But do you think that maybe that divisiveness where we can't agree on the pandemic of, you know, global warming, in some ways, is a failure of leadership or nurtured by, Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, it is. They're only a is. It is. I mean, I think with the last administration, we took many, many steps backwards last US Presidential Administration. I mean, because he fostered that, you know? I mean, Look. But in fairness, he wasn't the only one? No. He had a lot of he had a lot of help. No. He had a lot of He had a lot of help just like we've been talking about, it's the enables. And in fact, Barbara Kellerman forthcoming book is called the enables. And it's specifically about it's not about Donald Trump, it's about the people around Donald Tm reading that book. Yeah. Yeah. I got to read it. So as you consider the leadership challenges we face in the present, what gives you faith? What gives you hope? I almost I'm starting to lose hope. I'm hoping that that maybe we can help in a small way and maybe we can overcome these problems. We know how to do it. We know how to bring divided groups together. It goes back to I mentioned Sharif and his Robbers Cave experiment. He had them work on what he called super ordinate goals. We have superordinate goals, get rid of the pandemic. Stop global warming, you know, save the planet. It's how do we get people to buy into those shared super ordinances. So, you know, again, for the record here if anybody is reading this, I mean, I'm an academic myself, but I think there's a tendency among academics to say, you know, I'll do the research in the publication, but it's not my job to move it off off the campus. No. I mean, it is our job because we're leadership people, right? I mean, so you know, and I've been in groups over the years, and this is actually one of the most fortunate thing of So a group was thrown together, usually sit cherries at these things and ILA is involved. But I got invited a long time ago, and that's where I spent a lot of time of Gem and Blument it was the Desmond 22 after he won the Nobel Prize and he was going to put the money into a leadership center, and so we were called up to Seattle to kind of brainstorm. How could we do this? I thought Gene came with a great idea and we kind of talked about it. Of making that South African center a place where a world leaders would have to come without their entourage and sit down at a table with a facilitator and talk to one another without all the enablers. And they turned it down. They didn't want to go down that path. But I think we need something like that. I think we need to have world leaders behind closed doors, but with experts helping them come up with strategies that will solve these global problems. I, I think that's how it's going to happen. We probably have the start of the technology to do that. But we have no cloud. And you think that there are some problems like climate change that we've been talking about that may almost be without solution because of issues later. Oh, that's what the pessimism part of me says, Yeah, I don't think we're going to stop it until it's too late. And so I don't have a very optimistic outlook for the future. And I'll tell you, you know, the last couple of years of these record temperatures and things like that and, you know, the issues here with fires in California. I've had my brother lost his house, my best friend lost his ranch. You know, that both of those stood for decades. I mean, one case a century without a fire, you know. So I look around and I'm pessimistic. But we're all in this together. We're on this one little planet and so at some point, it's either we fix it or we don't. And if we don't, then The end of the human rights. I mean as we help you look around the world and look at these problems and realize that you don't solve problems without a constituency that's willing to do it. Right. And maybe the lack of that constituency is a failure of leadership, but there are not leaders who are willing to stand up and say, we got to do this. Yeah. And even if it hurts. No. I mean, I think there's plenty of leaders who see it and, you know, but yeah, they're unwilling to put their whole career on the line. To do it, you know, they they lacked the courtage of doing it. I mean, look at what's her name, the young Scandinavian girl. Yes. You know, and she's had death threats, and she's had all these kinds of things that she's a child. I mean, she shouldn't have to, you know, but she's she's embraced this. I mean, if world leaders had the courage that she had, So as you consider your own career, what are you proud of Stef? What gives you the greatest sense of accomplishment? It's the students who have got on to good things. I mean, that's that's like I teared up. I think of that. You know you know. When I think about and, you know, it's an academic, you know, you love when they follow your footsteps. So I think of Stephanie, you know, I call my other daughter, you know,'s last name Johnson. Yeah you know and Chris Rina, even some of the post docs who have gone on and then our undergrads who go into different kinds of careers. I mean, I love now Linked in. I love because I connect with students. They often connect when they graduate. And then all of a sudden I see yesterday, I saw somebody with SD and I went, Well, at least you went into psychology, you should have got a PhD, but SD and that's great, you know. No, I mean, that's what gives me the thrill, you know, that kind of stuff. So would you consider your own career, you have any regrets? There anything you would have changed? I think the big regret is, you know, is what we were talking about. If you could go back if I could go back to graduate school with the knowledge I had now, I might have been able to have a, you know, a really significant impact, but you don't learn how to have an impact until later on. You know, I got asked years ago to do in a last lecture, what were the lessons I learned? And, you know, and then I put it out on my blog, you know, and I said, God, I hope young academics will look at this and learn something from it and be able to advance your careers more quickly because of it. So what were the biggest lessons that you embedded in that? Oh, gosh, I have to think about it. I mean, one of the things was be brave, you know, go up and, you know, because I don't know how many times I saw Bern Bassett conferences, but I was too intimidated to go up and excuse myself. I I'll go ahead and do this renew the end. When I first started teaching public history, I took several of my students to the, you know, state National Conference and we were going home in the car and I said, so what happened would you do? And they said, well, we saw so and so, was it really famous and I said, Well, did you talk to her? They said, No, we just saw her. I was, you know, you just saw Bernie Bass. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you know, and so that was one of them, you know, the other was you know, there was a thing if you want to make a name, you've really got to drill down into something and think about that, think about the impact of what you do. Everything take everything takes way longer than you think it's going to take, you know. So I don't know. Oh, you know, there's a lot about collaboration, about the benefits of collaboration. Do you can consider yourself a work in progress? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think so. I mean, it's kind of hard as you get you know as you get older, you start to think, you know, how much more. But you know, I mean, I learned something every day and I'm always kind of amazed at the things that I learn, you know. And I just wish I mean, sometimes I wish there were more hours in the day for me to learn more. You know, I get the journal issued table of contents now electronically and they come up. Almost daily and I go, I have time to read all this stuff, you know, So you know, everybody's like listening to podcasts. I don't have a commute. I live 2 miles away. When I had a commute, I would I would be than I used to have a long commute and I would I would be thriving on podcast. They didn't have those back then. I listened to books on tape and then realized I zoned out too much and I'd be pushing the rewind button too much. So What are you presently working on? So many things. I have I have a I do this like old school. I showed you in my office and prove it to you, but I I have stickies on my monitor. Because I have I think there's there was 19, there's 24 things I'm working on. And I keep that there so that I can go down the checklist and and I consider it like juggling. How do you keep all the balls in the air without dropping them? And that's how I do it, I look and I go, Okay, which of these projects need attention? You've got a stick I assume a state of the art computer. But your prompts are sticky notes. Stick because they're there and I have to look at them all the time as opposed to the sticky notes. I know we do have sticky notes on the screen, but they'll get covered by something else. So these never get covered. I have a lot of my sticky notes are on the file cabinets to the right side of my computer. Yeah. Professionally, who do you look up to? Who inspires you? Or inspire you? Yeah. I mean, I think they're really, you know, I think there's I think it goes both ways. I think I get inspired by the well known people. You know, but I think I also get inspired by people who you know, our peers or lower level. I think I get inspired by when I see like what our students do when they graduate or even what our students do sometimes when they're here. I mean, I don't have any problem finding like that source of inspiration in just about anybody. I did two this week, I did two reviews of people going up for tenure. One person, I was really surprised at all she had done because I didn't recognize her name. I actually met her at academy last live Academy. And I think that's how she got my name or whatever. And I was really impressed with what she had done, but I didn't look if I if I just looked at her scholarship, I wouldn't have seen all the other things that are in her CV. You know, so that was inspirational. So yeah. I mean, I think I get I find it everywhere, you know. So what do you hope your legacy will be? You know, I don't I think I think the legacy is, you know, being a professor, I think the legacy is really the students. I I kind of like this. One guy told me years ago, he just recently retired and I didn't really collaborate with him. He he was a reviewer of my textbook. But he said pots. You hear that this was yo, the industrial organizational sit. He said, You're the nicest person in Cop. He goes, You are really a pleasure to talk to you because you're so you're so nice and you're so and you seem to be genuinely interested in people, and he said, and you don't put on errors and all that sort of stuff. I really took that as a compliment because all my life, I felt like I was way too nice, and I told you I had to develop my strategy for not being walked on. But I think if people I think that connector thing, if people go, Oh, yeah, that's the guy who used to bring people together at the conference and then they would publish the book or they would, you know, or this was the guy that sort of inspired me to keep working in this area. So I think that more so than my own work, you know, I mean, you know, I think it's more about, did I help everybody else move forward? That would be more important. I'm looking at a list of like six of the articles that you've written out of dozens that I pulled out because they were going to prompt me to talk about some of the things that you've done in your views on leadership. So I was intrigued by a piece that you wrote co wrote with Thompson D Thompson in Oh, 2110. Yeah. Yeah. I I should've looked up the first. Yeah. Yeah. It's in the consulting psychology journal. Right. Right. 2010. It's called introduction. Well. Right Dale Dt It's called measuring character and leadership. Yeah. Yeah. And we talked a little bit about that, but Yeah. How do you measure character? Well, I mean, you know, we developed a measure of it. And, you know, and it was less than, you know, It was it was good, but it was disappointing. So what I tried to do, and in fact, some philosophers here in the department said, you can't do this. I said, well, I want to measure cardinal virtues. I want to measure, you know, and and but the way we have to do it is we have to have followers rate their leaders, and, you know, does your does your leader have fortitude? Do they press ahead? You know, they will they do the right thing, stand up for the right thing? Prudence, do they really listen to you and take into account your what you got to say? Do they temper them set temperance? Do they regulate their they don't fly the handle? So, you know, we asked them things like that. Like I'm just saying right now. You know, we gave them descriptors of items that were descriptors of their leader's behavior that would be related to the cardinal virtues. I really do believe that that is the way people become good leaders is they have to be temperate. They have to be they have to have fortitude to be courage the courageous follower Yes leader. And they have to listen to people and take in what you know, I think that you can go back to Aristotle and you can get a very good idea of what a good leader is from the ethical idea, philosophical idea. And that's what that was about. And that's I published that instrument, the the validation of that instrument in that in that thing, and then that's Dale and I were the guest editors. So that was the piece we wrote that introduced. So you published a piece in looking through my bifocals here. It's called who emerges as the leader. M analysis individual differences as predictors of leadership emergence, personality and individual differences. I remember I said always one my lessons was it always takes longer than you think? Yeah. What year was that published in 2014 or something? Yeah. And it was in the journal of leadership and organizational studies and in volume 18, which I think is 2014. I I didn't put the date. Okay. Blank. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. P. So okay. So that was 2014 we started that project for Berdie Bass Fest Trift. Oh, my goodness. In 2001. So So what we did was, you know, he did some early work on L ear Emergency. Yeah. You know, because Babel hypothesis, you talk more. And we were we started that met analysis then and we didn't finish it until then. We didn't get it done for the 2001. So when you talk about individual differences as predictors of leader emergence. Personality and individual differences? Yeah. Skills. So is that what is that what personality means a skills the individual differences skills. So so we looked at everything that people had looked at that you measure through the way you measure personality, you know, like, do they have the these traits? Do they have these skills? Do they have these tendencies, these attitudes, you know, and looked across that did analysis of that and what? What were the factors that seem to relate to leader emergence. And it's like it's it's no different than what Bernie came up with. That was the idea we were going to re validate what Bernie did because males get select, they emerge more as leaders, wealthy people emerge more as leaders, extroverts emerge more as leaders, you know, all those kind of things. So you can't make somebody a male who's not. You can't make somebody you can help them. But if you a woman, we know this from other people's research, you got to act like a man and act like a woman. You got to do two things. Do you do you tell your female students that if you want to be successful as a leader, you better develop some male characteristics. I don't think I say that. I don't think I I think with the ideas you present this idea that and this is Alice Agle's idea of there's agentic behavior, which is more associated with males, you know, the task, and there's relationship, you call it communal kind of things that are more associated with women. We know that successful leaders have to be both agentic and communal. You know, the difference is, women really have to be agentic in a very careful way where men can be much more rude about it. And they have to also be communal, but not overly communal to where they're going to do like Hillary Clinton, you're too emotional and you can't be a lead. So the burden of being successful leader is much heavier on on. Absolutely. Absolutely, it's much harder for women. I mean, no doubt. Can you tell your students that? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, That's we women lead a man in leadership. So do you no, no. I I mean, no, no. Do you think that there's been changes? I mean, you've been the fields for a long time. It's been changes, but it's still really difficult, you know? I mean, And sometimes I had to come to this awareness, you know, I mean, Susan's quite a bit younger, but when I first moved here, my daughter was she was born in my youngest who was born in 2000, right? So she I would bring her to work and, you know, in the carrier and put her under the my desk and, you know, and then she's toddling down. And, you know, Susan Murphy later had her kids, and she said, I can't do that. I can't bring my kids to work because it, you know, what would people think? You know, you got male privilege, you know, that was the I did it and I knew I know. And that was I mean, to have that thrown in my face was going, Yeah, you know, I I don't get male privilege as well as I thought I did, you know. So do you think that male privilege plays a role in leadership? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, male privilege gs men leg up and women have it much harder. White privilege? White privilege, absolutely, you know? I mean, you know, I mean, I was a beneficiary of that. So what does a field that is still heavily influenced by white males? What what does it do about male privilege? Well, you don't white I I've run into this on the ILA and actually on this committee because I told you I was on the committee and often they would say, you know, you've got too many white males that you're honoring, you know, I mean, you've interviewed them all, right? So you know how many white males compared to non white. Very few people of color on that list. Yeah. And I think I've been interviewed all the ones that are allowed. Yeah. And I said to them, what do you want me to do? What or the committee, what you want us to do? Because you want us to have the luminaries, but because of all of these issues, we're to white privilege at all, the white males have made the marks. And so do we just now ignore and what we've tried to do is provide that balance. The future, I think, is going to be the opposite. Bernie actually added is a great thing. They asked him in 1970 to predict what manage they didn't use leadership what management would look like in 2000. And man, he hit a lot of things. He said we'll be using computers on a daily basis. You know, they asked him to go forward at his Fsrift, go forward to 2034, or whatever the year would the same distance. Okay. And he said most women in high level or most leaders in high level positions will be women 2034. And he used the research to support that. He said they're better at it. They've got the more communal stuff, and that's what's going to be more important in the future. And, you know, I've always said I hope I'm around to be able to test it because he says there I won't be around to test it, but you know, so I hope that things will change. And I see that. I mean, most of in fact, I think all the committee no. 70% of the committees I'm on are women of dissertations. So that's. And do you think the that's the direction the field just headed in? I think so. And and they're good at it. So three more questions. You wrote a piece 2015. You co author was Sage Sage, SAGD? Car. He's a student. Okay. Yeah. One of your students? Yeah. And you told me actually that you do co author with your students? Yeah. Yeah. So. So 2015, and the piece is called Incorporating soft skills into the collaborative problem solving equation. I appeared in industrial and organizational psychology. Yeah. All right. So for people begin, we're not in your field, what are soft skills? Yeah. So soft skills are the things we've been talking about that lead to charisma, that ability to manage relationships, the people skills. So people skills probably gives you an idea, how do you relate to people and all that. We know that's important. And leaders say, I got to work on my soft skills as the hard skills and the decision making, the number crunching, all that kind of stuff. Business schools mostly teach the art skills. They don't spend much time teaching the soft skills. We have a piece I just did with Scott Allen and Dave Rosh, where we're saying that very few MBA programs are really giving serious attention to leadership. Usually, it's one course. They don't really do intense leader development. And we had the reviewers savaged us. They said, How do you know that? You've been to every business school? Well, my business school, you know, we Yeah, this guy's objective, right? But we eventually got got it into print.

Description of the video:

So again, talking about leadership, and if we just focus on the United States, what do you consider to be the most serious leadership challenges that American society faces in the president? Okay. I think the biggest challenge here right now is the divisiveness of society that's becoming ever more, you know, us versus them. And we can't get anything done because of that. And, you know, and that just kills me, you know, that we can't we can't agree on pandemic. We can't agree on global warming. But do you think that maybe that divisiveness where we can't agree on the pandemic of, you know, global warming, in some ways, is a failure of leadership or nurtured by, Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, it is. They're only a is. It is. I mean, I think with the last administration, we took many, many steps backwards last US Presidential Administration. I mean, because he fostered that, you know? I mean, Look. But in fairness, he wasn't the only one? No. He had a lot of he had a lot of help. No. He had a lot of He had a lot of help just like we've been talking about, it's the enables. And in fact, Barbara Kellerman forthcoming book is called the enables. And it's specifically about it's not about Donald Trump, it's about the people around Donald Tm reading that book. Yeah. Yeah. I got to read it. So as you consider the leadership challenges we face in the present, what gives you faith? What gives you hope? I almost I'm starting to lose hope. I'm hoping that that maybe we can help in a small way and maybe we can overcome these problems. We know how to do it. We know how to bring divided groups together. It goes back to I mentioned Sharif and his Robbers Cave experiment. He had them work on what he called super ordinate goals. We have superordinate goals, get rid of the pandemic. Stop global warming, you know, save the planet. It's how do we get people to buy into those shared super ordinances. So, you know, again, for the record here if anybody is reading this, I mean, I'm an academic myself, but I think there's a tendency among academics to say, you know, I'll do the research in the publication, but it's not my job to move it off off the campus. No. I mean, it is our job because we're leadership people, right? I mean, so you know, and I've been in groups over the years, and this is actually one of the most fortunate thing of So a group was thrown together, usually sit cherries at these things and ILA is involved. But I got invited a long time ago, and that's where I spent a lot of time of Gem and Blument it was the Desmond 22 after he won the Nobel Prize and he was going to put the money into a leadership center, and so we were called up to Seattle to kind of brainstorm. How could we do this? I thought Gene came with a great idea and we kind of talked about it. Of making that South African center a place where a world leaders would have to come without their entourage and sit down at a table with a facilitator and talk to one another without all the enablers. And they turned it down. They didn't want to go down that path. But I think we need something like that. I think we need to have world leaders behind closed doors, but with experts helping them come up with strategies that will solve these global problems. I, I think that's how it's going to happen. We probably have the start of the technology to do that. But we have no cloud. And you think that there are some problems like climate change that we've been talking about that may almost be without solution because of issues later. Oh, that's what the pessimism part of me says, Yeah, I don't think we're going to stop it until it's too late. And so I don't have a very optimistic outlook for the future. And I'll tell you, you know, the last couple of years of these record temperatures and things like that and, you know, the issues here with fires in California. I've had my brother lost his house, my best friend lost his ranch. You know, that both of those stood for decades. I mean, one case a century without a fire, you know. So I look around and I'm pessimistic. But we're all in this together. We're on this one little planet and so at some point, it's either we fix it or we don't. And if we don't, then The end of the human rights. I mean as we help you look around the world and look at these problems and realize that you don't solve problems without a constituency that's willing to do it. Right. And maybe the lack of that constituency is a failure of leadership, but there are not leaders who are willing to stand up and say, we got to do this. Yeah. And even if it hurts. No. I mean, I think there's plenty of leaders who see it and, you know, but yeah, they're unwilling to put their whole career on the line. To do it, you know, they they lacked the courtage of doing it. I mean, look at what's her name, the young Scandinavian girl. Yes. You know, and she's had death threats, and she's had all these kinds of things that she's a child. I mean, she shouldn't have to, you know, but she's she's embraced this. I mean, if world leaders had the courage that she had, So as you consider your own career, what are you proud of Stef? What gives you the greatest sense of accomplishment? It's the students who have got on to good things. I mean, that's that's like I teared up. I think of that. You know you know. When I think about and, you know, it's an academic, you know, you love when they follow your footsteps. So I think of Stephanie, you know, I call my other daughter, you know,'s last name Johnson. Yeah you know and Chris Rina, even some of the post docs who have gone on and then our undergrads who go into different kinds of careers. I mean, I love now Linked in. I love because I connect with students. They often connect when they graduate. And then all of a sudden I see yesterday, I saw somebody with SD and I went, Well, at least you went into psychology, you should have got a PhD, but SD and that's great, you know. No, I mean, that's what gives me the thrill, you know, that kind of stuff. So would you consider your own career, you have any regrets? There anything you would have changed? I think the big regret is, you know, is what we were talking about. If you could go back if I could go back to graduate school with the knowledge I had now, I might have been able to have a, you know, a really significant impact, but you don't learn how to have an impact until later on. You know, I got asked years ago to do in a last lecture, what were the lessons I learned? And, you know, and then I put it out on my blog, you know, and I said, God, I hope young academics will look at this and learn something from it and be able to advance your careers more quickly because of it. So what were the biggest lessons that you embedded in that? Oh, gosh, I have to think about it. I mean, one of the things was be brave, you know, go up and, you know, because I don't know how many times I saw Bern Bassett conferences, but I was too intimidated to go up and excuse myself. I I'll go ahead and do this renew the end. When I first started teaching public history, I took several of my students to the, you know, state National Conference and we were going home in the car and I said, so what happened would you do? And they said, well, we saw so and so, was it really famous and I said, Well, did you talk to her? They said, No, we just saw her. I was, you know, you just saw Bernie Bass. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you know, and so that was one of them, you know, the other was you know, there was a thing if you want to make a name, you've really got to drill down into something and think about that, think about the impact of what you do. Everything take everything takes way longer than you think it's going to take, you know. So I don't know. Oh, you know, there's a lot about collaboration, about the benefits of collaboration. Do you can consider yourself a work in progress? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think so. I mean, it's kind of hard as you get you know as you get older, you start to think, you know, how much more. But you know, I mean, I learned something every day and I'm always kind of amazed at the things that I learn, you know. And I just wish I mean, sometimes I wish there were more hours in the day for me to learn more. You know, I get the journal issued table of contents now electronically and they come up. Almost daily and I go, I have time to read all this stuff, you know, So you know, everybody's like listening to podcasts. I don't have a commute. I live 2 miles away. When I had a commute, I would I would be than I used to have a long commute and I would I would be thriving on podcast. They didn't have those back then. I listened to books on tape and then realized I zoned out too much and I'd be pushing the rewind button too much. So What are you presently working on? So many things. I have I have a I do this like old school. I showed you in my office and prove it to you, but I I have stickies on my monitor. Because I have I think there's there was 19, there's 24 things I'm working on. And I keep that there so that I can go down the checklist and and I consider it like juggling. How do you keep all the balls in the air without dropping them? And that's how I do it, I look and I go, Okay, which of these projects need attention? You've got a stick I assume a state of the art computer. But your prompts are sticky notes. Stick because they're there and I have to look at them all the time as opposed to the sticky notes. I know we do have sticky notes on the screen, but they'll get covered by something else. So these never get covered. I have a lot of my sticky notes are on the file cabinets to the right side of my computer. Yeah. Professionally, who do you look up to? Who inspires you? Or inspire you? Yeah. I mean, I think they're really, you know, I think there's I think it goes both ways. I think I get inspired by the well known people. You know, but I think I also get inspired by people who you know, our peers or lower level. I think I get inspired by when I see like what our students do when they graduate or even what our students do sometimes when they're here. I mean, I don't have any problem finding like that source of inspiration in just about anybody. I did two this week, I did two reviews of people going up for tenure. One person, I was really surprised at all she had done because I didn't recognize her name. I actually met her at academy last live Academy. And I think that's how she got my name or whatever. And I was really impressed with what she had done, but I didn't look if I if I just looked at her scholarship, I wouldn't have seen all the other things that are in her CV. You know, so that was inspirational. So yeah. I mean, I think I get I find it everywhere, you know. So what do you hope your legacy will be? You know, I don't I think I think the legacy is, you know, being a professor, I think the legacy is really the students. I I kind of like this. One guy told me years ago, he just recently retired and I didn't really collaborate with him. He he was a reviewer of my textbook. But he said pots. You hear that this was yo, the industrial organizational sit. He said, You're the nicest person in Cop. He goes, You are really a pleasure to talk to you because you're so you're so nice and you're so and you seem to be genuinely interested in people, and he said, and you don't put on errors and all that sort of stuff. I really took that as a compliment because all my life, I felt like I was way too nice, and I told you I had to develop my strategy for not being walked on. But I think if people I think that connector thing, if people go, Oh, yeah, that's the guy who used to bring people together at the conference and then they would publish the book or they would, you know, or this was the guy that sort of inspired me to keep working in this area. So I think that more so than my own work, you know, I mean, you know, I think it's more about, did I help everybody else move forward? That would be more important. I'm looking at a list of like six of the articles that you've written out of dozens that I pulled out because they were going to prompt me to talk about some of the things that you've done in your views on leadership. So I was intrigued by a piece that you wrote co wrote with Thompson D Thompson in Oh, 2110. Yeah. Yeah. I I should've looked up the first. Yeah. Yeah. It's in the consulting psychology journal. Right. Right. 2010. It's called introduction. Well. Right Dale Dt It's called measuring character and leadership. Yeah. Yeah. And we talked a little bit about that, but Yeah. How do you measure character? Well, I mean, you know, we developed a measure of it. And, you know, and it was less than, you know, It was it was good, but it was disappointing. So what I tried to do, and in fact, some philosophers here in the department said, you can't do this. I said, well, I want to measure cardinal virtues. I want to measure, you know, and and but the way we have to do it is we have to have followers rate their leaders, and, you know, does your does your leader have fortitude? Do they press ahead? You know, they will they do the right thing, stand up for the right thing? Prudence, do they really listen to you and take into account your what you got to say? Do they temper them set temperance? Do they regulate their they don't fly the handle? So, you know, we asked them things like that. Like I'm just saying right now. You know, we gave them descriptors of items that were descriptors of their leader's behavior that would be related to the cardinal virtues. I really do believe that that is the way people become good leaders is they have to be temperate. They have to be they have to have fortitude to be courage the courageous follower Yes leader. And they have to listen to people and take in what you know, I think that you can go back to Aristotle and you can get a very good idea of what a good leader is from the ethical idea, philosophical idea. And that's what that was about. And that's I published that instrument, the the validation of that instrument in that in that thing, and then that's Dale and I were the guest editors. So that was the piece we wrote that introduced. So you published a piece in looking through my bifocals here. It's called who emerges as the leader. M analysis individual differences as predictors of leadership emergence, personality and individual differences. I remember I said always one my lessons was it always takes longer than you think? Yeah. What year was that published in 2014 or something? Yeah. And it was in the journal of leadership and organizational studies and in volume 18, which I think is 2014. I I didn't put the date. Okay. Blank. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. P. So okay. So that was 2014 we started that project for Berdie Bass Fest Trift. Oh, my goodness. In 2001. So So what we did was, you know, he did some early work on L ear Emergency. Yeah. You know, because Babel hypothesis, you talk more. And we were we started that met analysis then and we didn't finish it until then. We didn't get it done for the 2001. So when you talk about individual differences as predictors of leader emergence. Personality and individual differences? Yeah. Skills. So is that what is that what personality means a skills the individual differences skills. So so we looked at everything that people had looked at that you measure through the way you measure personality, you know, like, do they have the these traits? Do they have these skills? Do they have these tendencies, these attitudes, you know, and looked across that did analysis of that and what? What were the factors that seem to relate to leader emergence. And it's like it's it's no different than what Bernie came up with. That was the idea we were going to re validate what Bernie did because males get select, they emerge more as leaders, wealthy people emerge more as leaders, extroverts emerge more as leaders, you know, all those kind of things. So you can't make somebody a male who's not. You can't make somebody you can help them. But if you a woman, we know this from other people's research, you got to act like a man and act like a woman. You got to do two things. Do you do you tell your female students that if you want to be successful as a leader, you better develop some male characteristics. I don't think I say that. I don't think I I think with the ideas you present this idea that and this is Alice Agle's idea of there's agentic behavior, which is more associated with males, you know, the task, and there's relationship, you call it communal kind of things that are more associated with women. We know that successful leaders have to be both agentic and communal. You know, the difference is, women really have to be agentic in a very careful way where men can be much more rude about it. And they have to also be communal, but not overly communal to where they're going to do like Hillary Clinton, you're too emotional and you can't be a lead. So the burden of being successful leader is much heavier on on. Absolutely. Absolutely, it's much harder for women. I mean, no doubt. Can you tell your students that? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, That's we women lead a man in leadership. So do you no, no. I I mean, no, no. Do you think that there's been changes? I mean, you've been the fields for a long time. It's been changes, but it's still really difficult, you know? I mean, And sometimes I had to come to this awareness, you know, I mean, Susan's quite a bit younger, but when I first moved here, my daughter was she was born in my youngest who was born in 2000, right? So she I would bring her to work and, you know, in the carrier and put her under the my desk and, you know, and then she's toddling down. And, you know, Susan Murphy later had her kids, and she said, I can't do that. I can't bring my kids to work because it, you know, what would people think? You know, you got male privilege, you know, that was the I did it and I knew I know. And that was I mean, to have that thrown in my face was going, Yeah, you know, I I don't get male privilege as well as I thought I did, you know. So do you think that male privilege plays a role in leadership? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, male privilege gs men leg up and women have it much harder. White privilege? White privilege, absolutely, you know? I mean, you know, I mean, I was a beneficiary of that. So what does a field that is still heavily influenced by white males? What what does it do about male privilege? Well, you don't white I I've run into this on the ILA and actually on this committee because I told you I was on the committee and often they would say, you know, you've got too many white males that you're honoring, you know, I mean, you've interviewed them all, right? So you know how many white males compared to non white. Very few people of color on that list. Yeah. And I think I've been interviewed all the ones that are allowed. Yeah. And I said to them, what do you want me to do? What or the committee, what you want us to do? Because you want us to have the luminaries, but because of all of these issues, we're to white privilege at all, the white males have made the marks. And so do we just now ignore and what we've tried to do is provide that balance. The future, I think, is going to be the opposite. Bernie actually added is a great thing. They asked him in 1970 to predict what manage they didn't use leadership what management would look like in 2000. And man, he hit a lot of things. He said we'll be using computers on a daily basis. You know, they asked him to go forward at his Fsrift, go forward to 2034, or whatever the year would the same distance. Okay. And he said most women in high level or most leaders in high level positions will be women 2034. And he used the research to support that. He said they're better at it. They've got the more communal stuff, and that's what's going to be more important in the future. And, you know, I've always said I hope I'm around to be able to test it because he says there I won't be around to test it, but you know, so I hope that things will change. And I see that. I mean, most of in fact, I think all the committee no. 70% of the committees I'm on are women of dissertations. So that's. And do you think the that's the direction the field just headed in? I think so. And and they're good at it. So three more questions. You wrote a piece 2015. You co author was Sage Sage, SAGD? Car. He's a student. Okay. Yeah. One of your students? Yeah. And you told me actually that you do co author with your students? Yeah. Yeah. So. So 2015, and the piece is called Incorporating soft skills into the collaborative problem solving equation. I appeared in industrial and organizational psychology. Yeah. All right. So for people begin, we're not in your field, what are soft skills? Yeah. So soft skills are the things we've been talking about that lead to charisma, that ability to manage relationships, the people skills. So people skills probably gives you an idea, how do you relate to people and all that. We know that's important. And leaders say, I got to work on my soft skills as the hard skills and the decision making, the number crunching, all that kind of stuff. Business schools mostly teach the art skills. They don't spend much time teaching the soft skills. We have a piece I just did with Scott Allen and Dave Rosh, where we're saying that very few MBA programs are really giving serious attention to leadership. Usually, it's one course. They don't really do intense leader development. And we had the reviewers savaged us. They said, How do you know that? You've been to every business school? Well, my business school, you know, we Yeah, this guy's objective, right? But we eventually got got it into print.

Description of the video:

So again, talking about leadership, and if we just focus on the United States, what do you consider to be the most serious leadership challenges that American society faces in the president? Okay. I think the biggest challenge here right now is the divisiveness of society that's becoming ever more, you know, us versus them. And we can't get anything done because of that. And, you know, and that just kills me, you know, that we can't we can't agree on pandemic. We can't agree on global warming. But do you think that maybe that divisiveness where we can't agree on the pandemic of, you know, global warming, in some ways, is a failure of leadership or nurtured by, Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, it is. They're only a is. It is. I mean, I think with the last administration, we took many, many steps backwards last US Presidential Administration. I mean, because he fostered that, you know? I mean, Look. But in fairness, he wasn't the only one? No. He had a lot of he had a lot of help. No. He had a lot of He had a lot of help just like we've been talking about, it's the enables. And in fact, Barbara Kellerman forthcoming book is called the enables. And it's specifically about it's not about Donald Trump, it's about the people around Donald Tm reading that book. Yeah. Yeah. I got to read it. So as you consider the leadership challenges we face in the present, what gives you faith? What gives you hope? I almost I'm starting to lose hope. I'm hoping that that maybe we can help in a small way and maybe we can overcome these problems. We know how to do it. We know how to bring divided groups together. It goes back to I mentioned Sharif and his Robbers Cave experiment. He had them work on what he called super ordinate goals. We have superordinate goals, get rid of the pandemic. Stop global warming, you know, save the planet. It's how do we get people to buy into those shared super ordinances. So, you know, again, for the record here if anybody is reading this, I mean, I'm an academic myself, but I think there's a tendency among academics to say, you know, I'll do the research in the publication, but it's not my job to move it off off the campus. No. I mean, it is our job because we're leadership people, right? I mean, so you know, and I've been in groups over the years, and this is actually one of the most fortunate thing of So a group was thrown together, usually sit cherries at these things and ILA is involved. But I got invited a long time ago, and that's where I spent a lot of time of Gem and Blument it was the Desmond 22 after he won the Nobel Prize and he was going to put the money into a leadership center, and so we were called up to Seattle to kind of brainstorm. How could we do this? I thought Gene came with a great idea and we kind of talked about it. Of making that South African center a place where a world leaders would have to come without their entourage and sit down at a table with a facilitator and talk to one another without all the enablers. And they turned it down. They didn't want to go down that path. But I think we need something like that. I think we need to have world leaders behind closed doors, but with experts helping them come up with strategies that will solve these global problems. I, I think that's how it's going to happen. We probably have the start of the technology to do that. But we have no cloud. And you think that there are some problems like climate change that we've been talking about that may almost be without solution because of issues later. Oh, that's what the pessimism part of me says, Yeah, I don't think we're going to stop it until it's too late. And so I don't have a very optimistic outlook for the future. And I'll tell you, you know, the last couple of years of these record temperatures and things like that and, you know, the issues here with fires in California. I've had my brother lost his house, my best friend lost his ranch. You know, that both of those stood for decades. I mean, one case a century without a fire, you know. So I look around and I'm pessimistic. But we're all in this together. We're on this one little planet and so at some point, it's either we fix it or we don't. And if we don't, then The end of the human rights. I mean as we help you look around the world and look at these problems and realize that you don't solve problems without a constituency that's willing to do it. Right. And maybe the lack of that constituency is a failure of leadership, but there are not leaders who are willing to stand up and say, we got to do this. Yeah. And even if it hurts. No. I mean, I think there's plenty of leaders who see it and, you know, but yeah, they're unwilling to put their whole career on the line. To do it, you know, they they lacked the courtage of doing it. I mean, look at what's her name, the young Scandinavian girl. Yes. You know, and she's had death threats, and she's had all these kinds of things that she's a child. I mean, she shouldn't have to, you know, but she's she's embraced this. I mean, if world leaders had the courage that she had, So as you consider your own career, what are you proud of Stef? What gives you the greatest sense of accomplishment? It's the students who have got on to good things. I mean, that's that's like I teared up. I think of that. You know you know. When I think about and, you know, it's an academic, you know, you love when they follow your footsteps. So I think of Stephanie, you know, I call my other daughter, you know,'s last name Johnson. Yeah you know and Chris Rina, even some of the post docs who have gone on and then our undergrads who go into different kinds of careers. I mean, I love now Linked in. I love because I connect with students. They often connect when they graduate. And then all of a sudden I see yesterday, I saw somebody with SD and I went, Well, at least you went into psychology, you should have got a PhD, but SD and that's great, you know. No, I mean, that's what gives me the thrill, you know, that kind of stuff. So would you consider your own career, you have any regrets? There anything you would have changed? I think the big regret is, you know, is what we were talking about. If you could go back if I could go back to graduate school with the knowledge I had now, I might have been able to have a, you know, a really significant impact, but you don't learn how to have an impact until later on. You know, I got asked years ago to do in a last lecture, what were the lessons I learned? And, you know, and then I put it out on my blog, you know, and I said, God, I hope young academics will look at this and learn something from it and be able to advance your careers more quickly because of it. So what were the biggest lessons that you embedded in that? Oh, gosh, I have to think about it. I mean, one of the things was be brave, you know, go up and, you know, because I don't know how many times I saw Bern Bassett conferences, but I was too intimidated to go up and excuse myself. I I'll go ahead and do this renew the end. When I first started teaching public history, I took several of my students to the, you know, state National Conference and we were going home in the car and I said, so what happened would you do? And they said, well, we saw so and so, was it really famous and I said, Well, did you talk to her? They said, No, we just saw her. I was, you know, you just saw Bernie Bass. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you know, and so that was one of them, you know, the other was you know, there was a thing if you want to make a name, you've really got to drill down into something and think about that, think about the impact of what you do. Everything take everything takes way longer than you think it's going to take, you know. So I don't know. Oh, you know, there's a lot about collaboration, about the benefits of collaboration. Do you can consider yourself a work in progress? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think so. I mean, it's kind of hard as you get you know as you get older, you start to think, you know, how much more. But you know, I mean, I learned something every day and I'm always kind of amazed at the things that I learn, you know. And I just wish I mean, sometimes I wish there were more hours in the day for me to learn more. You know, I get the journal issued table of contents now electronically and they come up. Almost daily and I go, I have time to read all this stuff, you know, So you know, everybody's like listening to podcasts. I don't have a commute. I live 2 miles away. When I had a commute, I would I would be than I used to have a long commute and I would I would be thriving on podcast. They didn't have those back then. I listened to books on tape and then realized I zoned out too much and I'd be pushing the rewind button too much. So What are you presently working on? So many things. I have I have a I do this like old school. I showed you in my office and prove it to you, but I I have stickies on my monitor. Because I have I think there's there was 19, there's 24 things I'm working on. And I keep that there so that I can go down the checklist and and I consider it like juggling. How do you keep all the balls in the air without dropping them? And that's how I do it, I look and I go, Okay, which of these projects need attention? You've got a stick I assume a state of the art computer. But your prompts are sticky notes. Stick because they're there and I have to look at them all the time as opposed to the sticky notes. I know we do have sticky notes on the screen, but they'll get covered by something else. So these never get covered. I have a lot of my sticky notes are on the file cabinets to the right side of my computer. Yeah. Professionally, who do you look up to? Who inspires you? Or inspire you? Yeah. I mean, I think they're really, you know, I think there's I think it goes both ways. I think I get inspired by the well known people. You know, but I think I also get inspired by people who you know, our peers or lower level. I think I get inspired by when I see like what our students do when they graduate or even what our students do sometimes when they're here. I mean, I don't have any problem finding like that source of inspiration in just about anybody. I did two this week, I did two reviews of people going up for tenure. One person, I was really surprised at all she had done because I didn't recognize her name. I actually met her at academy last live Academy. And I think that's how she got my name or whatever. And I was really impressed with what she had done, but I didn't look if I if I just looked at her scholarship, I wouldn't have seen all the other things that are in her CV. You know, so that was inspirational. So yeah. I mean, I think I get I find it everywhere, you know. So what do you hope your legacy will be? You know, I don't I think I think the legacy is, you know, being a professor, I think the legacy is really the students. I I kind of like this. One guy told me years ago, he just recently retired and I didn't really collaborate with him. He he was a reviewer of my textbook. But he said pots. You hear that this was yo, the industrial organizational sit. He said, You're the nicest person in Cop. He goes, You are really a pleasure to talk to you because you're so you're so nice and you're so and you seem to be genuinely interested in people, and he said, and you don't put on errors and all that sort of stuff. I really took that as a compliment because all my life, I felt like I was way too nice, and I told you I had to develop my strategy for not being walked on. But I think if people I think that connector thing, if people go, Oh, yeah, that's the guy who used to bring people together at the conference and then they would publish the book or they would, you know, or this was the guy that sort of inspired me to keep working in this area. So I think that more so than my own work, you know, I mean, you know, I think it's more about, did I help everybody else move forward? That would be more important. I'm looking at a list of like six of the articles that you've written out of dozens that I pulled out because they were going to prompt me to talk about some of the things that you've done in your views on leadership. So I was intrigued by a piece that you wrote co wrote with Thompson D Thompson in Oh, 2110. Yeah. Yeah. I I should've looked up the first. Yeah. Yeah. It's in the consulting psychology journal. Right. Right. 2010. It's called introduction. Well. Right Dale Dt It's called measuring character and leadership. Yeah. Yeah. And we talked a little bit about that, but Yeah. How do you measure character? Well, I mean, you know, we developed a measure of it. And, you know, and it was less than, you know, It was it was good, but it was disappointing. So what I tried to do, and in fact, some philosophers here in the department said, you can't do this. I said, well, I want to measure cardinal virtues. I want to measure, you know, and and but the way we have to do it is we have to have followers rate their leaders, and, you know, does your does your leader have fortitude? Do they press ahead? You know, they will they do the right thing, stand up for the right thing? Prudence, do they really listen to you and take into account your what you got to say? Do they temper them set temperance? Do they regulate their they don't fly the handle? So, you know, we asked them things like that. Like I'm just saying right now. You know, we gave them descriptors of items that were descriptors of their leader's behavior that would be related to the cardinal virtues. I really do believe that that is the way people become good leaders is they have to be temperate. They have to be they have to have fortitude to be courage the courageous follower Yes leader. And they have to listen to people and take in what you know, I think that you can go back to Aristotle and you can get a very good idea of what a good leader is from the ethical idea, philosophical idea. And that's what that was about. And that's I published that instrument, the the validation of that instrument in that in that thing, and then that's Dale and I were the guest editors. So that was the piece we wrote that introduced. So you published a piece in looking through my bifocals here. It's called who emerges as the leader. M analysis individual differences as predictors of leadership emergence, personality and individual differences. I remember I said always one my lessons was it always takes longer than you think? Yeah. What year was that published in 2014 or something? Yeah. And it was in the journal of leadership and organizational studies and in volume 18, which I think is 2014. I I didn't put the date. Okay. Blank. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. P. So okay. So that was 2014 we started that project for Berdie Bass Fest Trift. Oh, my goodness. In 2001. So So what we did was, you know, he did some early work on L ear Emergency. Yeah. You know, because Babel hypothesis, you talk more. And we were we started that met analysis then and we didn't finish it until then. We didn't get it done for the 2001. So when you talk about individual differences as predictors of leader emergence. Personality and individual differences? Yeah. Skills. So is that what is that what personality means a skills the individual differences skills. So so we looked at everything that people had looked at that you measure through the way you measure personality, you know, like, do they have the these traits? Do they have these skills? Do they have these tendencies, these attitudes, you know, and looked across that did analysis of that and what? What were the factors that seem to relate to leader emergence. And it's like it's it's no different than what Bernie came up with. That was the idea we were going to re validate what Bernie did because males get select, they emerge more as leaders, wealthy people emerge more as leaders, extroverts emerge more as leaders, you know, all those kind of things. So you can't make somebody a male who's not. You can't make somebody you can help them. But if you a woman, we know this from other people's research, you got to act like a man and act like a woman. You got to do two things. Do you do you tell your female students that if you want to be successful as a leader, you better develop some male characteristics. I don't think I say that. I don't think I I think with the ideas you present this idea that and this is Alice Agle's idea of there's agentic behavior, which is more associated with males, you know, the task, and there's relationship, you call it communal kind of things that are more associated with women. We know that successful leaders have to be both agentic and communal. You know, the difference is, women really have to be agentic in a very careful way where men can be much more rude about it. And they have to also be communal, but not overly communal to where they're going to do like Hillary Clinton, you're too emotional and you can't be a lead. So the burden of being successful leader is much heavier on on. Absolutely. Absolutely, it's much harder for women. I mean, no doubt. Can you tell your students that? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, That's we women lead a man in leadership. So do you no, no. I I mean, no, no. Do you think that there's been changes? I mean, you've been the fields for a long time. It's been changes, but it's still really difficult, you know? I mean, And sometimes I had to come to this awareness, you know, I mean, Susan's quite a bit younger, but when I first moved here, my daughter was she was born in my youngest who was born in 2000, right? So she I would bring her to work and, you know, in the carrier and put her under the my desk and, you know, and then she's toddling down. And, you know, Susan Murphy later had her kids, and she said, I can't do that. I can't bring my kids to work because it, you know, what would people think? You know, you got male privilege, you know, that was the I did it and I knew I know. And that was I mean, to have that thrown in my face was going, Yeah, you know, I I don't get male privilege as well as I thought I did, you know. So do you think that male privilege plays a role in leadership? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, male privilege gs men leg up and women have it much harder. White privilege? White privilege, absolutely, you know? I mean, you know, I mean, I was a beneficiary of that. So what does a field that is still heavily influenced by white males? What what does it do about male privilege? Well, you don't white I I've run into this on the ILA and actually on this committee because I told you I was on the committee and often they would say, you know, you've got too many white males that you're honoring, you know, I mean, you've interviewed them all, right? So you know how many white males compared to non white. Very few people of color on that list. Yeah. And I think I've been interviewed all the ones that are allowed. Yeah. And I said to them, what do you want me to do? What or the committee, what you want us to do? Because you want us to have the luminaries, but because of all of these issues, we're to white privilege at all, the white males have made the marks. And so do we just now ignore and what we've tried to do is provide that balance. The future, I think, is going to be the opposite. Bernie actually added is a great thing. They asked him in 1970 to predict what manage they didn't use leadership what management would look like in 2000. And man, he hit a lot of things. He said we'll be using computers on a daily basis. You know, they asked him to go forward at his Fsrift, go forward to 2034, or whatever the year would the same distance. Okay. And he said most women in high level or most leaders in high level positions will be women 2034. And he used the research to support that. He said they're better at it. They've got the more communal stuff, and that's what's going to be more important in the future. And, you know, I've always said I hope I'm around to be able to test it because he says there I won't be around to test it, but you know, so I hope that things will change. And I see that. I mean, most of in fact, I think all the committee no. 70% of the committees I'm on are women of dissertations. So that's. And do you think the that's the direction the field just headed in? I think so. And and they're good at it. So three more questions. You wrote a piece 2015. You co author was Sage Sage, SAGD? Car. He's a student. Okay. Yeah. One of your students? Yeah. And you told me actually that you do co author with your students? Yeah. Yeah. So. So 2015, and the piece is called Incorporating soft skills into the collaborative problem solving equation. I appeared in industrial and organizational psychology. Yeah. All right. So for people begin, we're not in your field, what are soft skills? Yeah. So soft skills are the things we've been talking about that lead to charisma, that ability to manage relationships, the people skills. So people skills probably gives you an idea, how do you relate to people and all that. We know that's important. And leaders say, I got to work on my soft skills as the hard skills and the decision making, the number crunching, all that kind of stuff. Business schools mostly teach the art skills. They don't spend much time teaching the soft skills. We have a piece I just did with Scott Allen and Dave Rosh, where we're saying that very few MBA programs are really giving serious attention to leadership. Usually, it's one course. They don't really do intense leader development. And we had the reviewers savaged us. They said, How do you know that? You've been to every business school? Well, my business school, you know, we Yeah, this guy's objective, right? But we eventually got got it into print.

Description of the video:

So again, talking about leadership, and if we just focus on the United States, what do you consider to be the most serious leadership challenges that American society faces in the president? Okay. I think the biggest challenge here right now is the divisiveness of society that's becoming ever more, you know, us versus them. And we can't get anything done because of that. And, you know, and that just kills me, you know, that we can't we can't agree on pandemic. We can't agree on global warming. But do you think that maybe that divisiveness where we can't agree on the pandemic of, you know, global warming, in some ways, is a failure of leadership or nurtured by, Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, it is. They're only a is. It is. I mean, I think with the last administration, we took many, many steps backwards last US Presidential Administration. I mean, because he fostered that, you know? I mean, Look. But in fairness, he wasn't the only one? No. He had a lot of he had a lot of help. No. He had a lot of He had a lot of help just like we've been talking about, it's the enables. And in fact, Barbara Kellerman forthcoming book is called the enables. And it's specifically about it's not about Donald Trump, it's about the people around Donald Tm reading that book. Yeah. Yeah. I got to read it. So as you consider the leadership challenges we face in the present, what gives you faith? What gives you hope? I almost I'm starting to lose hope. I'm hoping that that maybe we can help in a small way and maybe we can overcome these problems. We know how to do it. We know how to bring divided groups together. It goes back to I mentioned Sharif and his Robbers Cave experiment. He had them work on what he called super ordinate goals. We have superordinate goals, get rid of the pandemic. Stop global warming, you know, save the planet. It's how do we get people to buy into those shared super ordinances. So, you know, again, for the record here if anybody is reading this, I mean, I'm an academic myself, but I think there's a tendency among academics to say, you know, I'll do the research in the publication, but it's not my job to move it off off the campus. No. I mean, it is our job because we're leadership people, right? I mean, so you know, and I've been in groups over the years, and this is actually one of the most fortunate thing of So a group was thrown together, usually sit cherries at these things and ILA is involved. But I got invited a long time ago, and that's where I spent a lot of time of Gem and Blument it was the Desmond 22 after he won the Nobel Prize and he was going to put the money into a leadership center, and so we were called up to Seattle to kind of brainstorm. How could we do this? I thought Gene came with a great idea and we kind of talked about it. Of making that South African center a place where a world leaders would have to come without their entourage and sit down at a table with a facilitator and talk to one another without all the enablers. And they turned it down. They didn't want to go down that path. But I think we need something like that. I think we need to have world leaders behind closed doors, but with experts helping them come up with strategies that will solve these global problems. I, I think that's how it's going to happen. We probably have the start of the technology to do that. But we have no cloud. And you think that there are some problems like climate change that we've been talking about that may almost be without solution because of issues later. Oh, that's what the pessimism part of me says, Yeah, I don't think we're going to stop it until it's too late. And so I don't have a very optimistic outlook for the future. And I'll tell you, you know, the last couple of years of these record temperatures and things like that and, you know, the issues here with fires in California. I've had my brother lost his house, my best friend lost his ranch. You know, that both of those stood for decades. I mean, one case a century without a fire, you know. So I look around and I'm pessimistic. But we're all in this together. We're on this one little planet and so at some point, it's either we fix it or we don't. And if we don't, then The end of the human rights. I mean as we help you look around the world and look at these problems and realize that you don't solve problems without a constituency that's willing to do it. Right. And maybe the lack of that constituency is a failure of leadership, but there are not leaders who are willing to stand up and say, we got to do this. Yeah. And even if it hurts. No. I mean, I think there's plenty of leaders who see it and, you know, but yeah, they're unwilling to put their whole career on the line. To do it, you know, they they lacked the courtage of doing it. I mean, look at what's her name, the young Scandinavian girl. Yes. You know, and she's had death threats, and she's had all these kinds of things that she's a child. I mean, she shouldn't have to, you know, but she's she's embraced this. I mean, if world leaders had the courage that she had, So as you consider your own career, what are you proud of Stef? What gives you the greatest sense of accomplishment? It's the students who have got on to good things. I mean, that's that's like I teared up. I think of that. You know you know. When I think about and, you know, it's an academic, you know, you love when they follow your footsteps. So I think of Stephanie, you know, I call my other daughter, you know,'s last name Johnson. Yeah you know and Chris Rina, even some of the post docs who have gone on and then our undergrads who go into different kinds of careers. I mean, I love now Linked in. I love because I connect with students. They often connect when they graduate. And then all of a sudden I see yesterday, I saw somebody with SD and I went, Well, at least you went into psychology, you should have got a PhD, but SD and that's great, you know. No, I mean, that's what gives me the thrill, you know, that kind of stuff. So would you consider your own career, you have any regrets? There anything you would have changed? I think the big regret is, you know, is what we were talking about. If you could go back if I could go back to graduate school with the knowledge I had now, I might have been able to have a, you know, a really significant impact, but you don't learn how to have an impact until later on. You know, I got asked years ago to do in a last lecture, what were the lessons I learned? And, you know, and then I put it out on my blog, you know, and I said, God, I hope young academics will look at this and learn something from it and be able to advance your careers more quickly because of it. So what were the biggest lessons that you embedded in that? Oh, gosh, I have to think about it. I mean, one of the things was be brave, you know, go up and, you know, because I don't know how many times I saw Bern Bassett conferences, but I was too intimidated to go up and excuse myself. I I'll go ahead and do this renew the end. When I first started teaching public history, I took several of my students to the, you know, state National Conference and we were going home in the car and I said, so what happened would you do? And they said, well, we saw so and so, was it really famous and I said, Well, did you talk to her? They said, No, we just saw her. I was, you know, you just saw Bernie Bass. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you know, and so that was one of them, you know, the other was you know, there was a thing if you want to make a name, you've really got to drill down into something and think about that, think about the impact of what you do. Everything take everything takes way longer than you think it's going to take, you know. So I don't know. Oh, you know, there's a lot about collaboration, about the benefits of collaboration. Do you can consider yourself a work in progress? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think so. I mean, it's kind of hard as you get you know as you get older, you start to think, you know, how much more. But you know, I mean, I learned something every day and I'm always kind of amazed at the things that I learn, you know. And I just wish I mean, sometimes I wish there were more hours in the day for me to learn more. You know, I get the journal issued table of contents now electronically and they come up. Almost daily and I go, I have time to read all this stuff, you know, So you know, everybody's like listening to podcasts. I don't have a commute. I live 2 miles away. When I had a commute, I would I would be than I used to have a long commute and I would I would be thriving on podcast. They didn't have those back then. I listened to books on tape and then realized I zoned out too much and I'd be pushing the rewind button too much. So What are you presently working on? So many things. I have I have a I do this like old school. I showed you in my office and prove it to you, but I I have stickies on my monitor. Because I have I think there's there was 19, there's 24 things I'm working on. And I keep that there so that I can go down the checklist and and I consider it like juggling. How do you keep all the balls in the air without dropping them? And that's how I do it, I look and I go, Okay, which of these projects need attention? You've got a stick I assume a state of the art computer. But your prompts are sticky notes. Stick because they're there and I have to look at them all the time as opposed to the sticky notes. I know we do have sticky notes on the screen, but they'll get covered by something else. So these never get covered. I have a lot of my sticky notes are on the file cabinets to the right side of my computer. Yeah. Professionally, who do you look up to? Who inspires you? Or inspire you? Yeah. I mean, I think they're really, you know, I think there's I think it goes both ways. I think I get inspired by the well known people. You know, but I think I also get inspired by people who you know, our peers or lower level. I think I get inspired by when I see like what our students do when they graduate or even what our students do sometimes when they're here. I mean, I don't have any problem finding like that source of inspiration in just about anybody. I did two this week, I did two reviews of people going up for tenure. One person, I was really surprised at all she had done because I didn't recognize her name. I actually met her at academy last live Academy. And I think that's how she got my name or whatever. And I was really impressed with what she had done, but I didn't look if I if I just looked at her scholarship, I wouldn't have seen all the other things that are in her CV. You know, so that was inspirational. So yeah. I mean, I think I get I find it everywhere, you know. So what do you hope your legacy will be? You know, I don't I think I think the legacy is, you know, being a professor, I think the legacy is really the students. I I kind of like this. One guy told me years ago, he just recently retired and I didn't really collaborate with him. He he was a reviewer of my textbook. But he said pots. You hear that this was yo, the industrial organizational sit. He said, You're the nicest person in Cop. He goes, You are really a pleasure to talk to you because you're so you're so nice and you're so and you seem to be genuinely interested in people, and he said, and you don't put on errors and all that sort of stuff. I really took that as a compliment because all my life, I felt like I was way too nice, and I told you I had to develop my strategy for not being walked on. But I think if people I think that connector thing, if people go, Oh, yeah, that's the guy who used to bring people together at the conference and then they would publish the book or they would, you know, or this was the guy that sort of inspired me to keep working in this area. So I think that more so than my own work, you know, I mean, you know, I think it's more about, did I help everybody else move forward? That would be more important. I'm looking at a list of like six of the articles that you've written out of dozens that I pulled out because they were going to prompt me to talk about some of the things that you've done in your views on leadership. So I was intrigued by a piece that you wrote co wrote with Thompson D Thompson in Oh, 2110. Yeah. Yeah. I I should've looked up the first. Yeah. Yeah. It's in the consulting psychology journal. Right. Right. 2010. It's called introduction. Well. Right Dale Dt It's called measuring character and leadership. Yeah. Yeah. And we talked a little bit about that, but Yeah. How do you measure character? Well, I mean, you know, we developed a measure of it. And, you know, and it was less than, you know, It was it was good, but it was disappointing. So what I tried to do, and in fact, some philosophers here in the department said, you can't do this. I said, well, I want to measure cardinal virtues. I want to measure, you know, and and but the way we have to do it is we have to have followers rate their leaders, and, you know, does your does your leader have fortitude? Do they press ahead? You know, they will they do the right thing, stand up for the right thing? Prudence, do they really listen to you and take into account your what you got to say? Do they temper them set temperance? Do they regulate their they don't fly the handle? So, you know, we asked them things like that. Like I'm just saying right now. You know, we gave them descriptors of items that were descriptors of their leader's behavior that would be related to the cardinal virtues. I really do believe that that is the way people become good leaders is they have to be temperate. They have to be they have to have fortitude to be courage the courageous follower Yes leader. And they have to listen to people and take in what you know, I think that you can go back to Aristotle and you can get a very good idea of what a good leader is from the ethical idea, philosophical idea. And that's what that was about. And that's I published that instrument, the the validation of that instrument in that in that thing, and then that's Dale and I were the guest editors. So that was the piece we wrote that introduced. So you published a piece in looking through my bifocals here. It's called who emerges as the leader. M analysis individual differences as predictors of leadership emergence, personality and individual differences. I remember I said always one my lessons was it always takes longer than you think? Yeah. What year was that published in 2014 or something? Yeah. And it was in the journal of leadership and organizational studies and in volume 18, which I think is 2014. I I didn't put the date. Okay. Blank. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. P. So okay. So that was 2014 we started that project for Berdie Bass Fest Trift. Oh, my goodness. In 2001. So So what we did was, you know, he did some early work on L ear Emergency. Yeah. You know, because Babel hypothesis, you talk more. And we were we started that met analysis then and we didn't finish it until then. We didn't get it done for the 2001. So when you talk about individual differences as predictors of leader emergence. Personality and individual differences? Yeah. Skills. So is that what is that what personality means a skills the individual differences skills. So so we looked at everything that people had looked at that you measure through the way you measure personality, you know, like, do they have the these traits? Do they have these skills? Do they have these tendencies, these attitudes, you know, and looked across that did analysis of that and what? What were the factors that seem to relate to leader emergence. And it's like it's it's no different than what Bernie came up with. That was the idea we were going to re validate what Bernie did because males get select, they emerge more as leaders, wealthy people emerge more as leaders, extroverts emerge more as leaders, you know, all those kind of things. So you can't make somebody a male who's not. You can't make somebody you can help them. But if you a woman, we know this from other people's research, you got to act like a man and act like a woman. You got to do two things. Do you do you tell your female students that if you want to be successful as a leader, you better develop some male characteristics. I don't think I say that. I don't think I I think with the ideas you present this idea that and this is Alice Agle's idea of there's agentic behavior, which is more associated with males, you know, the task, and there's relationship, you call it communal kind of things that are more associated with women. We know that successful leaders have to be both agentic and communal. You know, the difference is, women really have to be agentic in a very careful way where men can be much more rude about it. And they have to also be communal, but not overly communal to where they're going to do like Hillary Clinton, you're too emotional and you can't be a lead. So the burden of being successful leader is much heavier on on. Absolutely. Absolutely, it's much harder for women. I mean, no doubt. Can you tell your students that? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, That's we women lead a man in leadership. So do you no, no. I I mean, no, no. Do you think that there's been changes? I mean, you've been the fields for a long time. It's been changes, but it's still really difficult, you know? I mean, And sometimes I had to come to this awareness, you know, I mean, Susan's quite a bit younger, but when I first moved here, my daughter was she was born in my youngest who was born in 2000, right? So she I would bring her to work and, you know, in the carrier and put her under the my desk and, you know, and then she's toddling down. And, you know, Susan Murphy later had her kids, and she said, I can't do that. I can't bring my kids to work because it, you know, what would people think? You know, you got male privilege, you know, that was the I did it and I knew I know. And that was I mean, to have that thrown in my face was going, Yeah, you know, I I don't get male privilege as well as I thought I did, you know. So do you think that male privilege plays a role in leadership? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, male privilege gs men leg up and women have it much harder. White privilege? White privilege, absolutely, you know? I mean, you know, I mean, I was a beneficiary of that. So what does a field that is still heavily influenced by white males? What what does it do about male privilege? Well, you don't white I I've run into this on the ILA and actually on this committee because I told you I was on the committee and often they would say, you know, you've got too many white males that you're honoring, you know, I mean, you've interviewed them all, right? So you know how many white males compared to non white. Very few people of color on that list. Yeah. And I think I've been interviewed all the ones that are allowed. Yeah. And I said to them, what do you want me to do? What or the committee, what you want us to do? Because you want us to have the luminaries, but because of all of these issues, we're to white privilege at all, the white males have made the marks. And so do we just now ignore and what we've tried to do is provide that balance. The future, I think, is going to be the opposite. Bernie actually added is a great thing. They asked him in 1970 to predict what manage they didn't use leadership what management would look like in 2000. And man, he hit a lot of things. He said we'll be using computers on a daily basis. You know, they asked him to go forward at his Fsrift, go forward to 2034, or whatever the year would the same distance. Okay. And he said most women in high level or most leaders in high level positions will be women 2034. And he used the research to support that. He said they're better at it. They've got the more communal stuff, and that's what's going to be more important in the future. And, you know, I've always said I hope I'm around to be able to test it because he says there I won't be around to test it, but you know, so I hope that things will change. And I see that. I mean, most of in fact, I think all the committee no. 70% of the committees I'm on are women of dissertations. So that's. And do you think the that's the direction the field just headed in? I think so. And and they're good at it. So three more questions. You wrote a piece 2015. You co author was Sage Sage, SAGD? Car. He's a student. Okay. Yeah. One of your students? Yeah. And you told me actually that you do co author with your students? Yeah. Yeah. So. So 2015, and the piece is called Incorporating soft skills into the collaborative problem solving equation. I appeared in industrial and organizational psychology. Yeah. All right. So for people begin, we're not in your field, what are soft skills? Yeah. So soft skills are the things we've been talking about that lead to charisma, that ability to manage relationships, the people skills. So people skills probably gives you an idea, how do you relate to people and all that. We know that's important. And leaders say, I got to work on my soft skills as the hard skills and the decision making, the number crunching, all that kind of stuff. Business schools mostly teach the art skills. They don't spend much time teaching the soft skills. We have a piece I just did with Scott Allen and Dave Rosh, where we're saying that very few MBA programs are really giving serious attention to leadership. Usually, it's one course. They don't really do intense leader development. And we had the reviewers savaged us. They said, How do you know that? You've been to every business school? Well, my business school, you know, we Yeah, this guy's objective, right? But we eventually got got it into print.

Description of the video:

So again, talking about leadership, and if we just focus on the United States, what do you consider to be the most serious leadership challenges that American society faces in the president? Okay. I think the biggest challenge here right now is the divisiveness of society that's becoming ever more, you know, us versus them. And we can't get anything done because of that. And, you know, and that just kills me, you know, that we can't we can't agree on pandemic. We can't agree on global warming. But do you think that maybe that divisiveness where we can't agree on the pandemic of, you know, global warming, in some ways, is a failure of leadership or nurtured by, Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, it is. They're only a is. It is. I mean, I think with the last administration, we took many, many steps backwards last US Presidential Administration. I mean, because he fostered that, you know? I mean, Look. But in fairness, he wasn't the only one? No. He had a lot of he had a lot of help. No. He had a lot of He had a lot of help just like we've been talking about, it's the enables. And in fact, Barbara Kellerman forthcoming book is called the enables. And it's specifically about it's not about Donald Trump, it's about the people around Donald Tm reading that book. Yeah. Yeah. I got to read it. So as you consider the leadership challenges we face in the present, what gives you faith? What gives you hope? I almost I'm starting to lose hope. I'm hoping that that maybe we can help in a small way and maybe we can overcome these problems. We know how to do it. We know how to bring divided groups together. It goes back to I mentioned Sharif and his Robbers Cave experiment. He had them work on what he called super ordinate goals. We have superordinate goals, get rid of the pandemic. Stop global warming, you know, save the planet. It's how do we get people to buy into those shared super ordinances. So, you know, again, for the record here if anybody is reading this, I mean, I'm an academic myself, but I think there's a tendency among academics to say, you know, I'll do the research in the publication, but it's not my job to move it off off the campus. No. I mean, it is our job because we're leadership people, right? I mean, so you know, and I've been in groups over the years, and this is actually one of the most fortunate thing of So a group was thrown together, usually sit cherries at these things and ILA is involved. But I got invited a long time ago, and that's where I spent a lot of time of Gem and Blument it was the Desmond 22 after he won the Nobel Prize and he was going to put the money into a leadership center, and so we were called up to Seattle to kind of brainstorm. How could we do this? I thought Gene came with a great idea and we kind of talked about it. Of making that South African center a place where a world leaders would have to come without their entourage and sit down at a table with a facilitator and talk to one another without all the enablers. And they turned it down. They didn't want to go down that path. But I think we need something like that. I think we need to have world leaders behind closed doors, but with experts helping them come up with strategies that will solve these global problems. I, I think that's how it's going to happen. We probably have the start of the technology to do that. But we have no cloud. And you think that there are some problems like climate change that we've been talking about that may almost be without solution because of issues later. Oh, that's what the pessimism part of me says, Yeah, I don't think we're going to stop it until it's too late. And so I don't have a very optimistic outlook for the future. And I'll tell you, you know, the last couple of years of these record temperatures and things like that and, you know, the issues here with fires in California. I've had my brother lost his house, my best friend lost his ranch. You know, that both of those stood for decades. I mean, one case a century without a fire, you know. So I look around and I'm pessimistic. But we're all in this together. We're on this one little planet and so at some point, it's either we fix it or we don't. And if we don't, then The end of the human rights. I mean as we help you look around the world and look at these problems and realize that you don't solve problems without a constituency that's willing to do it. Right. And maybe the lack of that constituency is a failure of leadership, but there are not leaders who are willing to stand up and say, we got to do this. Yeah. And even if it hurts. No. I mean, I think there's plenty of leaders who see it and, you know, but yeah, they're unwilling to put their whole career on the line. To do it, you know, they they lacked the courtage of doing it. I mean, look at what's her name, the young Scandinavian girl. Yes. You know, and she's had death threats, and she's had all these kinds of things that she's a child. I mean, she shouldn't have to, you know, but she's she's embraced this. I mean, if world leaders had the courage that she had, So as you consider your own career, what are you proud of Stef? What gives you the greatest sense of accomplishment? It's the students who have got on to good things. I mean, that's that's like I teared up. I think of that. You know you know. When I think about and, you know, it's an academic, you know, you love when they follow your footsteps. So I think of Stephanie, you know, I call my other daughter, you know,'s last name Johnson. Yeah you know and Chris Rina, even some of the post docs who have gone on and then our undergrads who go into different kinds of careers. I mean, I love now Linked in. I love because I connect with students. They often connect when they graduate. And then all of a sudden I see yesterday, I saw somebody with SD and I went, Well, at least you went into psychology, you should have got a PhD, but SD and that's great, you know. No, I mean, that's what gives me the thrill, you know, that kind of stuff. So would you consider your own career, you have any regrets? There anything you would have changed? I think the big regret is, you know, is what we were talking about. If you could go back if I could go back to graduate school with the knowledge I had now, I might have been able to have a, you know, a really significant impact, but you don't learn how to have an impact until later on. You know, I got asked years ago to do in a last lecture, what were the lessons I learned? And, you know, and then I put it out on my blog, you know, and I said, God, I hope young academics will look at this and learn something from it and be able to advance your careers more quickly because of it. So what were the biggest lessons that you embedded in that? Oh, gosh, I have to think about it. I mean, one of the things was be brave, you know, go up and, you know, because I don't know how many times I saw Bern Bassett conferences, but I was too intimidated to go up and excuse myself. I I'll go ahead and do this renew the end. When I first started teaching public history, I took several of my students to the, you know, state National Conference and we were going home in the car and I said, so what happened would you do? And they said, well, we saw so and so, was it really famous and I said, Well, did you talk to her? They said, No, we just saw her. I was, you know, you just saw Bernie Bass. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you know, and so that was one of them, you know, the other was you know, there was a thing if you want to make a name, you've really got to drill down into something and think about that, think about the impact of what you do. Everything take everything takes way longer than you think it's going to take, you know. So I don't know. Oh, you know, there's a lot about collaboration, about the benefits of collaboration. Do you can consider yourself a work in progress? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think so. I mean, it's kind of hard as you get you know as you get older, you start to think, you know, how much more. But you know, I mean, I learned something every day and I'm always kind of amazed at the things that I learn, you know. And I just wish I mean, sometimes I wish there were more hours in the day for me to learn more. You know, I get the journal issued table of contents now electronically and they come up. Almost daily and I go, I have time to read all this stuff, you know, So you know, everybody's like listening to podcasts. I don't have a commute. I live 2 miles away. When I had a commute, I would I would be than I used to have a long commute and I would I would be thriving on podcast. They didn't have those back then. I listened to books on tape and then realized I zoned out too much and I'd be pushing the rewind button too much. So What are you presently working on? So many things. I have I have a I do this like old school. I showed you in my office and prove it to you, but I I have stickies on my monitor. Because I have I think there's there was 19, there's 24 things I'm working on. And I keep that there so that I can go down the checklist and and I consider it like juggling. How do you keep all the balls in the air without dropping them? And that's how I do it, I look and I go, Okay, which of these projects need attention? You've got a stick I assume a state of the art computer. But your prompts are sticky notes. Stick because they're there and I have to look at them all the time as opposed to the sticky notes. I know we do have sticky notes on the screen, but they'll get covered by something else. So these never get covered. I have a lot of my sticky notes are on the file cabinets to the right side of my computer. Yeah. Professionally, who do you look up to? Who inspires you? Or inspire you? Yeah. I mean, I think they're really, you know, I think there's I think it goes both ways. I think I get inspired by the well known people. You know, but I think I also get inspired by people who you know, our peers or lower level. I think I get inspired by when I see like what our students do when they graduate or even what our students do sometimes when they're here. I mean, I don't have any problem finding like that source of inspiration in just about anybody. I did two this week, I did two reviews of people going up for tenure. One person, I was really surprised at all she had done because I didn't recognize her name. I actually met her at academy last live Academy. And I think that's how she got my name or whatever. And I was really impressed with what she had done, but I didn't look if I if I just looked at her scholarship, I wouldn't have seen all the other things that are in her CV. You know, so that was inspirational. So yeah. I mean, I think I get I find it everywhere, you know. So what do you hope your legacy will be? You know, I don't I think I think the legacy is, you know, being a professor, I think the legacy is really the students. I I kind of like this. One guy told me years ago, he just recently retired and I didn't really collaborate with him. He he was a reviewer of my textbook. But he said pots. You hear that this was yo, the industrial organizational sit. He said, You're the nicest person in Cop. He goes, You are really a pleasure to talk to you because you're so you're so nice and you're so and you seem to be genuinely interested in people, and he said, and you don't put on errors and all that sort of stuff. I really took that as a compliment because all my life, I felt like I was way too nice, and I told you I had to develop my strategy for not being walked on. But I think if people I think that connector thing, if people go, Oh, yeah, that's the guy who used to bring people together at the conference and then they would publish the book or they would, you know, or this was the guy that sort of inspired me to keep working in this area. So I think that more so than my own work, you know, I mean, you know, I think it's more about, did I help everybody else move forward? That would be more important. I'm looking at a list of like six of the articles that you've written out of dozens that I pulled out because they were going to prompt me to talk about some of the things that you've done in your views on leadership. So I was intrigued by a piece that you wrote co wrote with Thompson D Thompson in Oh, 2110. Yeah. Yeah. I I should've looked up the first. Yeah. Yeah. It's in the consulting psychology journal. Right. Right. 2010. It's called introduction. Well. Right Dale Dt It's called measuring character and leadership. Yeah. Yeah. And we talked a little bit about that, but Yeah. How do you measure character? Well, I mean, you know, we developed a measure of it. And, you know, and it was less than, you know, It was it was good, but it was disappointing. So what I tried to do, and in fact, some philosophers here in the department said, you can't do this. I said, well, I want to measure cardinal virtues. I want to measure, you know, and and but the way we have to do it is we have to have followers rate their leaders, and, you know, does your does your leader have fortitude? Do they press ahead? You know, they will they do the right thing, stand up for the right thing? Prudence, do they really listen to you and take into account your what you got to say? Do they temper them set temperance? Do they regulate their they don't fly the handle? So, you know, we asked them things like that. Like I'm just saying right now. You know, we gave them descriptors of items that were descriptors of their leader's behavior that would be related to the cardinal virtues. I really do believe that that is the way people become good leaders is they have to be temperate. They have to be they have to have fortitude to be courage the courageous follower Yes leader. And they have to listen to people and take in what you know, I think that you can go back to Aristotle and you can get a very good idea of what a good leader is from the ethical idea, philosophical idea. And that's what that was about. And that's I published that instrument, the the validation of that instrument in that in that thing, and then that's Dale and I were the guest editors. So that was the piece we wrote that introduced. So you published a piece in looking through my bifocals here. It's called who emerges as the leader. M analysis individual differences as predictors of leadership emergence, personality and individual differences. I remember I said always one my lessons was it always takes longer than you think? Yeah. What year was that published in 2014 or something? Yeah. And it was in the journal of leadership and organizational studies and in volume 18, which I think is 2014. I I didn't put the date. Okay. Blank. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. P. So okay. So that was 2014 we started that project for Berdie Bass Fest Trift. Oh, my goodness. In 2001. So So what we did was, you know, he did some early work on L ear Emergency. Yeah. You know, because Babel hypothesis, you talk more. And we were we started that met analysis then and we didn't finish it until then. We didn't get it done for the 2001. So when you talk about individual differences as predictors of leader emergence. Personality and individual differences? Yeah. Skills. So is that what is that what personality means a skills the individual differences skills. So so we looked at everything that people had looked at that you measure through the way you measure personality, you know, like, do they have the these traits? Do they have these skills? Do they have these tendencies, these attitudes, you know, and looked across that did analysis of that and what? What were the factors that seem to relate to leader emergence. And it's like it's it's no different than what Bernie came up with. That was the idea we were going to re validate what Bernie did because males get select, they emerge more as leaders, wealthy people emerge more as leaders, extroverts emerge more as leaders, you know, all those kind of things. So you can't make somebody a male who's not. You can't make somebody you can help them. But if you a woman, we know this from other people's research, you got to act like a man and act like a woman. You got to do two things. Do you do you tell your female students that if you want to be successful as a leader, you better develop some male characteristics. I don't think I say that. I don't think I I think with the ideas you present this idea that and this is Alice Agle's idea of there's agentic behavior, which is more associated with males, you know, the task, and there's relationship, you call it communal kind of things that are more associated with women. We know that successful leaders have to be both agentic and communal. You know, the difference is, women really have to be agentic in a very careful way where men can be much more rude about it. And they have to also be communal, but not overly communal to where they're going to do like Hillary Clinton, you're too emotional and you can't be a lead. So the burden of being successful leader is much heavier on on. Absolutely. Absolutely, it's much harder for women. I mean, no doubt. Can you tell your students that? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, That's we women lead a man in leadership. So do you no, no. I I mean, no, no. Do you think that there's been changes? I mean, you've been the fields for a long time. It's been changes, but it's still really difficult, you know? I mean, And sometimes I had to come to this awareness, you know, I mean, Susan's quite a bit younger, but when I first moved here, my daughter was she was born in my youngest who was born in 2000, right? So she I would bring her to work and, you know, in the carrier and put her under the my desk and, you know, and then she's toddling down. And, you know, Susan Murphy later had her kids, and she said, I can't do that. I can't bring my kids to work because it, you know, what would people think? You know, you got male privilege, you know, that was the I did it and I knew I know. And that was I mean, to have that thrown in my face was going, Yeah, you know, I I don't get male privilege as well as I thought I did, you know. So do you think that male privilege plays a role in leadership? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, male privilege gs men leg up and women have it much harder. White privilege? White privilege, absolutely, you know? I mean, you know, I mean, I was a beneficiary of that. So what does a field that is still heavily influenced by white males? What what does it do about male privilege? Well, you don't white I I've run into this on the ILA and actually on this committee because I told you I was on the committee and often they would say, you know, you've got too many white males that you're honoring, you know, I mean, you've interviewed them all, right? So you know how many white males compared to non white. Very few people of color on that list. Yeah. And I think I've been interviewed all the ones that are allowed. Yeah. And I said to them, what do you want me to do? What or the committee, what you want us to do? Because you want us to have the luminaries, but because of all of these issues, we're to white privilege at all, the white males have made the marks. And so do we just now ignore and what we've tried to do is provide that balance. The future, I think, is going to be the opposite. Bernie actually added is a great thing. They asked him in 1970 to predict what manage they didn't use leadership what management would look like in 2000. And man, he hit a lot of things. He said we'll be using computers on a daily basis. You know, they asked him to go forward at his Fsrift, go forward to 2034, or whatever the year would the same distance. Okay. And he said most women in high level or most leaders in high level positions will be women 2034. And he used the research to support that. He said they're better at it. They've got the more communal stuff, and that's what's going to be more important in the future. And, you know, I've always said I hope I'm around to be able to test it because he says there I won't be around to test it, but you know, so I hope that things will change. And I see that. I mean, most of in fact, I think all the committee no. 70% of the committees I'm on are women of dissertations. So that's. And do you think the that's the direction the field just headed in? I think so. And and they're good at it. So three more questions. You wrote a piece 2015. You co author was Sage Sage, SAGD? Car. He's a student. Okay. Yeah. One of your students? Yeah. And you told me actually that you do co author with your students? Yeah. Yeah. So. So 2015, and the piece is called Incorporating soft skills into the collaborative problem solving equation. I appeared in industrial and organizational psychology. Yeah. All right. So for people begin, we're not in your field, what are soft skills? Yeah. So soft skills are the things we've been talking about that lead to charisma, that ability to manage relationships, the people skills. So people skills probably gives you an idea, how do you relate to people and all that. We know that's important. And leaders say, I got to work on my soft skills as the hard skills and the decision making, the number crunching, all that kind of stuff. Business schools mostly teach the art skills. They don't spend much time teaching the soft skills. We have a piece I just did with Scott Allen and Dave Rosh, where we're saying that very few MBA programs are really giving serious attention to leadership. Usually, it's one course. They don't really do intense leader development. And we had the reviewers savaged us. They said, How do you know that? You've been to every business school? Well, my business school, you know, we Yeah, this guy's objective, right? But we eventually got got it into print.