This interview took place on Saturday, November 9 and Sunday, November 10, 2024, at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association in downtown Chicago, Illinois.
Learn more about David DayDavid V. Day
Scarpino: Today is Saturday, November 9, 2024. My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University, Indianapolis, and Director of Oral History for the Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, also at IU Indianapolis. Today I have the privilege to be interviewing David Day at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association, which is taking place in the Hilton Hotel located in downtown Chicago, Illinois. This interview is part of a joint venture undertaken by the Tobias Leadership Center and the International Leadership Association.
Also in the room is Amy Kamwendo, Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, Associate Director. In the interest of full disclosure, I note that, as part of my background research, I talked to two of your professional colleagues: Michelle Hammond and Nathan Hiller. On behalf of Michelle Hammond, I’m going to add a note of explanation. She was out of the country, took a while to connect with her, and when I did the internet connection in her hotel was intermittent to terrible, so, we had a short Zoom meeting and then she was kind enough to send me stuff, but she just wanted you to know that it wasn’t short by design.
So, David Day holds a PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from the University of Akron in 1989, and a master’s from the same institution awarded in 1987. He earned his BA with a major in Psychology in 1983 from Baldwin-Wallace College, a private, liberal arts college in Berea, Ohio. Between 1988 and 2006, he held academic positions at Louisiana State University and Pennsylvania State University. During this time, he advanced through the ranks from assistant to associate to full professor. In 1998-99, while on sabbatical at Penn State, he was Visiting Research Scientist, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, NC. After 2006, his career took an international turn. From 2006 to 2008, he was Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University. From 2008 to 2016, Winthrop Professor and Woodside Chair in Leadership and Management, University of Western Australia Business School, located in Perth. His most recent position, from 2017 to the present, Claremont McKenna College, where he is a Professor of Psychological Science, Academic Director of the Kravis Leadership Institute, Steven L. Eggert Professor of Leadership, George R. Roberts Research Fellow. And just to add, for anybody who might be interested, I also interviewed Professor Day’s colleague, Richard (SIC) Riggio, at the Kravis Center at Claremont McKenna College, in July 2021.
Day: Ron Riggio. I thought you said Richard, it’s Ron Riggio.
Scarpino: Ron, Ron, yeah... July 2021. I’ll note that in 2024 Claremont McKenna College was among the 25 inaugural recipients of the Carnegie Foundation Elective Classification for Leadership for Public Purpose - a recognition of the college’s commitment to addressing complex social issues and advancing a deeper understanding of leadership as a public good, and that you were a campus leader in developing that initiative.
Professor Day’s areas of expertise include: leader and leadership development; identity processes in leadership and organizations; and leadership capacity in individuals, groups and organizations.
Professor Day is an internationally recognized scholar, with a large body of refereed scholarship from 1988 to the present that includes journal articles, book chapters, and books. Among his most recent publications is, book, Developing Leaders and Leadership: Principles, Practices, and Processes. (2024). And a Journal article: David Day and Laura Dannhäuser, “Reconsidering Leadership Development: From Programs to Developmental Systems” in the journal Behavioral Sciences, 14, 2024.
Google Scholar lists 37,167 citations to his body of scholarship. He has earned numerous awards and recognitions. A few of the most recent include this Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association in 2024; Eminent Scholar Award, Academy of Management Network of Leadership Scholars, 2024; National Advisory Committee Member, Carnegie Foundation Inaugural Elective Classification for Leadership for Public Purpose; Consulting Editor (2021- 2024) for the journal American Psychologist; Best paper award (2011) for Leadership Quarterly, an article entitled “Longitudinal Tests of an Integrative Model of Leader Development: Charting and Understanding Developmental Trajectories.”
Professor Day is also the recipient of a significant number of grants. Among the recent include: Australian Research Council, two major grants, between 2010 and 2014; and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, a significant grant, that was from 1998 to 2003. The recognition that brings us here today is the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the International Leadership Association in 2024.
Now, with all that said, I’m going to ask your permission to do a number of things, so, if we ever lose the forms, we’ve got you on record as agreeing to do this. I’m asking for your permission to record this interview, to have the interview transcribed, to deposit the recording and the transcription in the IU, Indianapolis, Special Collections and Archives where they may be used by patrons, including posting all or part of the recording and transcription to the website of the IU Special Collections and Archives. Also, to deposit the recording and transcription with the International Leadership Association and the Tobias Center where they may be used by patrons with the understanding that all or part may be posted to those organizations’ web sites. Do I have your permission to do all of that?
Day: You have my permission.
Scarpino: Thank you. I’m going to start by saying, for your sake and for the sake of anyone using this interview, that I’m going to begin by asking you some basic demographic questions. Then we’re going to talk bigger picture questions about leadership, and then we will work our way more or less chronologically through your career, with lots of discussion about leadership. The Tobias Center has some standard leadership questions that we’ve been using for years, and I’ll salt some of those in. What that does is give some continuity between the fifty-two people or so we’ve interviewed so far. Part of the fun of doing this is that we know where we’re starting, but I honestly can’t tell you where we’re going to end up. So, let’s get started with basic demographic questions. When and where were you born?
Day: I was born in Albany, New York, February 20, 1956.
Scarpino: Where did you grow up?
Day: Grew up mostly on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio, but the family moved around a little bit. Started on the east side of Ohio, moved to Louisville, Kentucky, then moved to Fairview Park, which is on the west side of Cleveland, which is where I went through my junior high/high school years before going off to college.
Scarpino: Cleveland was kind of a gritty deindustrializing city in those days, wasn’t it?
Day: Oh yeah, the motto then was Cleveland, you have to be tough.
Scarpino: I’ve been there off and on over the years. Do you have any brothers or sisters?
Day: I have one younger brother, who is two years younger than me.
Scarpino: What did your father do? What was his name and what did he do?
Day: Donald J. Day. He worked as kind of a mid-level manager. At the time it was in transportation management, is what it was called. I think today it would be called logistics. So, it was back in the days prior to all the regulations that were in place... maybe I got this wrong, maybe it was when it was regulated, before it was deregulated, that he would do a lot of the booking of transportation of goods nationally and internationally.
Scarpino: Semi-trucks, trains, airplanes, that kind of thing?
Day: All of that, yeah, mostly trains and ships. I don’t think that they shipped a lot of things by plane. He worked for Glidden-Durkee Company, which was kind of paints and food products.
Scarpino: And the name of the company is?
Day: Glidden - G-L-I-D-D-E-N or O-N, and Durkee – D-U-R-K-E-E. I have no idea if there’s some...
Scarpino: I’m sure the transcriber will be blessing your name for doing that. Alright, what about your mother?
Day: My mother was an elementary school teacher. She taught mainly kindergarten, first grade, second grade, primary school teacher. And I think that was a major influence on my orientation toward education, jumping out a little bit.
Scarpino: She worked while you were growing up?
Day: Yeah, yeah. Both of my parents worked growing up, and so a dual career family, which was not completely unusual but not completely the norm back in the day.
Scarpino: What was your mother’s name?
Day: Evelyn Kay Day, or Evelyn Vaughan – V-A-U-G-H-A-N Day. Vaughan is my middle name.
Scarpino: As you look back on growing up with your parents, mostly in Cleveland but some other places, how would you assess the impact that your parents had on shaping the adult that you became?
Day: That’s a very psychotherapeutic question. My major influence of the two parents was my mother. I mean, got me into books, got me into reading at a very young age. I was very oriented toward school and scholastic achievement, and I think that was the major influence in my life. I think my brother was more influenced by my father. My brother went into business. He became general manager of a number of hotel properties. So, there was kind of that, I won’t say bifurcation, but it was a different role model for each one of us that I think shaped where we’ve become, where we went and how we’ve become the adults we are.
Scarpino: When you were growing up and moving into your middle school and teenage years, did you think ‘I want to be a teacher.’
Day: Yes, I did, and I actually thought for a while that I would like to be like my mother, an elementary school teacher, a primary school teacher. So yeah, that was probably some of the earliest identity thoughts that I had around careers.
Scarpino: I was chuckling, but not at you. I taught elementary school for one day.
Day: Probably right.
Scarpino: We talked about your education, and I note that you dropped out of college your sophomore year.
Day: Yeah.
Scarpino: Two questions, one is just to get oriented, what year was your sophomore year? And number two, what college did you drop out of?
Day: I graduated from high school in 1974, and I went to Ohio State, and I was there for two years with the aspiration of going to physical therapy school. Physical therapy is an allied health profession: two years pre-professional, two years professional. So, you go two years and do your general education requirements and then you have to apply to a professional school, and I didn’t get in. Of course, my grades were really good the first year I was in college, and then all kinds of other diversions entered into my life and the grades started to slip, and that was a major part of not getting into PT school. And it was also the case, it was a pretty naïve decision because I only applied to one school. So, I’m not sure if there was any unconscious bias in that at all. But my parents were not happy with me, especially my father. I had a lot of struggles with him over the years, very dominant kind of personality. He didn’t like that I didn’t get into the school that I applied to. He didn’t like that my grades were slipping and said, “We made the decision, your mother and I, that we are not going to pay for your college going forward.” They had asked me what I was interested in, and I said, “I think zoology might be an interesting field and it might lead into like medical school or something.” And my father was not the most, he had a master’s degree, an MBA, but this kind of puts it in perspective, he’s like, “I’m not sending you to no damn college to learn how to run a zoo.”
Scarpino: You grew up and you developed a career and you became a teacher; did that life experience that you had help you understand and deal with your own students, particularly if they were struggling?
Day: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, it created the kind of empathy that when students aren’t getting it, for whatever reason, that any kind of support or scaffolding that I can offer, I’m much more amenable to do that. I mean, the more I had taught at like at Penn State or LSU, there’s just so many students and it’s really hard to have that kind of individual touch with so many undergraduates. Where I’m at now, at Claremont McKenna, I mean it's a very selective undergraduate college; we select fewer than ten percent of the applicants. Some still do struggle because it’s a major transition being away from home for the first time, dealing with things like roommates and personal care and all of this on your own in the era of social media, pervasive social media and everything. But, yeah, I’m much more able to reach out and interact at a place like Claremont McKenna than I ever was at Penn State or LSU. And also, my orientation was a little bit different. At those two big public land grant universities, I was really more oriented toward the doctoral students and the graduate program than the undergraduate.
Scarpino: You weren’t standing in front of 200 freshmen or anything.
Day: I was, but I wasn’t an advisor to any of them. I didn’t really have much personal interaction. The students don’t really use office hours the way they should be used.
Scarpino: No, they don’t.
Day: So, I didn’t really see a lot of them outside of the classroom. And it was hard, obviously, to get to know the names of 200 people in an Intro to IO Psychology class.
Scarpino: I understand. You dropped out of college for the reasons you just explained, and then you went to work as an unskilled laborer at the Ford Motor Company’s Cleveland Engine and Casting plant from 1976 to 1983.
Day: Oh, yeah.
Scarpino: I shoveled chicken manure, so, I mean I had experiences with work that I don’t want to repeat either.
Day: It shapes your character in myriad ways.
Scarpino: What kind of work did you do there?
Day: For a while I was an inspector on the engine assembly line. So, that was just making decisions about whether everything was assembled on the engine appropriately. And then I was in different stations at different times. But what happened is that there was a downturn in the economy, you get bumped from kind of a prime position, like a quality control inspector, to an actual assembler or a person on the line. I then worked as somebody who...
Scarpino: This is a moving assembly line?
Day: This is a moving assembly line making Ford V-6 and V-8 engines, at the time, 305 engines and the V-6 truck engines. And what I was doing on the line there was a clutch assembly worker, which you would have a clutch housing that had to sit over the flywheel and then you use a hydraulic gun to put in the screws to hold the clutch assembly to the engine block.
Scarpino: Two things; for the benefit of people who don’t know what a clutch is, they go in cars with standard transmissions. But, more to the point, how did a young man with no work experience end up as an inspector?
Day: I had some college, right? So, there were a lot of people at Ford who didn’t graduate high school. So, it was one of those that, you know, the standards were a little bit different in terms of going into a place like Ford Motor Company where people really didn’t have much of any education. If I had some and was fairly articulate, that put me at the top of the heap.
Scarpino: And that was before American car companies like Ford were really competing with the Japanese.
Day: It was when it was starting, so, yeah, there was a lot of anti-Japanese car sentiment around the plant. You wouldn’t dare drive one on the lot, let me just put it that way.
Scarpino: You weren’t driving a Toyota.
Day: No, I was not driving a Toyota, trust me or Honda or anything else. I have since then, but not. So, what happened, let me tell you, was that, again, another reduction in force and they go by seniority. I got bumped from the engine plant to the Cleveland Casting plant, which is a foundry, which basically melts iron to make the parts that go on the engines for Ford products. One of the jobs that I had there was a metal crane operator. I would sit in this little cabin on a hydraulic hoist with a monorail track up above with a bucket in front of me that I would park under a huge cupola that melted iron and pour the iron into the bucket, and then take that bucket around on the monorail and pour it into smaller buckets that would then be poured into the molds to create the parts.
Scarpino: Sounds both dangerous and really hot.
Day: Both of those. And, you know, a primary lesson in physics, which I was never very good at, if there’s any moisture in that bucket, when you pour that molten iron into it, boom. Yeah, so, it was always exciting because you always hoped the guys back in the repair shop were able to dry out that bucket completely before you parked it under a huge -- I mean, these things were multiple stories tall, and you had to operate something that actually poured hot molten iron into a smaller container. And, if they didn’t do their job and there’s any moisture left on in there, it was always exciting.
Scarpino: Was that a hard job to master?
Day: It was more of a terrifying job to master because if you make a mistake and you miss that bucket, that iron is all over everywhere. And, you know, people die doing that job. I never had an accident, but some have had one of the cords that the carrier was on break, and just the whole thing fell in on them, and they died. So, it was dirty, dangerous, nasty work, but it defines me as an individual to say, yeah, I didn’t do military service but I did industrial service working on the assembly line for eight and a half years. I did other...
Scarpino: Unless a military person is in combat, that’s about as dangerous as you can get.
Day: Yeah, absolutely, a lot of, big respect. I did a number of jobs, all of them were pretty brutal.
Scarpino: As you look back on those years that you spent at Ford Motor Company that you just described, what did you take away from that experience that impacted your life and your career moving forward?
Day: Well, there’s now an area of study in industrial organizational psychology around abusive supervision. So, abusive supervision was something I experienced firsthand because these four-minute general foremen were like something out of a neanderthal playbook. They were not enlightened or relational leaders at all.
Scarpino: That’s a very polite way to put it.
Day: This was when Ford had this whole Quality is Job One movement, and they would have these what they called quality circles, which they’re trying to emulate from the Japanese about putting production workers more into solving problems, you know, that they were directly involved with because they had the most information. Well, it turned into a real political -- I tried to get into a quality circle, couldn’t do it. It was too political. I didn’t have the seniority, and it was really controlled a lot by the union. So, it was all the union bros who got into the quality circles because you got paid for basically sitting around and bullshitting with each other. But we would have these quality meetings when the line went down for whatever reason happened, and the foreman would shuffle us all into a big office space or the conference room and we would talk about things that were related to the quality of the work that we’re doing. And I remember I had the audacity once to ask when the foreman said, “What other things could be improved?” And I had pointed out, this is actually the general foreman, not the foreman, that we had something like four or five...
Scarpino: The general foreman is the guy in charge.
Day: Yeah, the general foreman is the person who is in charge of the foremen. And the general foreman reports to the plant superintendent. So, I had the audacity -- because we had gone through a number of foremen, they kept getting rotated, and the foreman would come in, really didn’t know the line, didn’t know the people, didn’t know what we were capable of. And I said, you know, “Over the last six weeks we’ve had five different foremen. Can we get more continuity, it would be really helpful.” Do you know what he said to me? “You know what, Dave, just shut up and do your job.” Quality is Job One.
Scarpino: Certain leadership styles.
Day: Yeah, there you go. I mean it was much later that abusive supervision became a thing. But it was one of my first experiences with people in leadership roles that were less than supportive, let’s put it that way.
Scarpino: In those days when you were there on the line, was the Ford workforce largely white?
Day: No. Not at all. I mean, Ford always had a diversified workforce. And when I was there, there was also a noticeable percentage of women as well, and that was relatively new.
Scarpino: On the line?
Day: On the line in various capacities. So, yeah, that was a newer facet of diversity, but there’s always been African-Americans and Hispanic individuals who gravitated to the auto industry because they really weren’t into education. And the thing that -- you know, a union job, UAW 1250, a union job provides the pay and benefits that lift people out of being in lower class situations into middle class. They could afford a house. They could afford a car. They could afford to send their kids to college. And that’s what most of these people were really all about, was lifting themselves out of where they came from to something that was better.
Scarpino: These are also the people that got hurt when Ford ships its jobs overseas and deindustrializes itself.
Day: Absolutely, and what really got me started thinking, there was a saying at Ford, it’s 30 and out. You have to put in 30 years and then you can retire with a pension. And people would walk around and say, “I only got 19 more years to go.” Oh my god, oh good lord.
Scarpino: Your experience as an unskilled worker at Ford Motor Company, what impact did that have on the way you understood leadership as you moved forward with your life and your career?
Day: Yeah, it’s back to the notion of -- I had some really poor leadership role models in the foremen and the general foreman in the industrial context. But these guys weren’t educated either, right? They basically had made the decision to move from labor to management. One of the things that was very clear is that there’s a huge divide between labor and management in these kinds of unionized industrial contexts. So, it also opened my eyes around union leadership, which I maybe went in a little bit idealistic but came out much more clear-eyed that the union has got as many problems, if not more so, than does management. I really wasn’t thinking about leadership at that time.
Scarpino: I was thinking more as you look back on it.
Day: Yeah, as I Iook back on it, I mean it was really this notion that I could see how people could really muck up systems in ways that made them less than either as efficient or as effective as they could be. You know, so people getting in the way of the processes, and the people who held formal authority, how much power they had that could be abused. So, it was really kind of the dark side of leadership that I still kind of think about when I think about those days.
Scarpino: You finished your BA part-time at Baldwin Wallace College, which, as I said, is a small liberal arts college in Berea, Ohio.
Day: It’s now Baldwin Wallace University.
Scarpino: Is it? Where is Berea, Ohio, in the state?
Day: Yeah, well, it’s a suburb of Cleveland.
Scarpino: Ok, so it’s up in the north near the lake.
Day: Northeast part of Ohio.
Scarpino: Why did you pick a liberal arts college?
Day: One, it was close. And, you know, I was going back to college, I mean, for a number of years I didn’t even think about education. It was kind of like Bueller Ferris’s day off. I was working this job where I was getting more money than my mother who had been a primary education teacher for 20 years at that time, and I was making more money than her right out of the bat. She went through the roof when she saw my first paycheck. The thing about being an auto worker, once you punched out, you didn’t take any homework home with you. It was basically your free time. Single. Lots of money. I think there’s a Jimmy Buffet song that said, “I made enough money to buy Miami, but I pissed it away so fast.”
Scarpino: So, there was some of that.
Day: There was some of that, absolutely. But after about three or four years, I’m like, is this my future? Is this it? And the whole realization that people were walking around saying, you know, it’s only 20 more years till I can retire. And I’m like, I know what it’s like to really hate your job and hate going into work. I really had to force myself to do it many days. So, it’s like there’s got to be something better than that. I said, I want to go back and I want to finish my education at least. And psychology sounded like a reasonable option to take, not rigorous like physics or calculus or anything like that. So, I did.
Scarpino: Not a lot of math in those days.
Day: Not a lot of math in those days, right. So, you know, some statistics but it wasn’t that heavy. What they did offer in the psychology curriculum was a course on industrial organizational psychology, which is pretty unusual for a small liberal arts college to have that. So, I was going back one course a quarter through the Ford tuition reimbursement program, and this is something that also illustrates Ford’s values, Henry Ford’s values around education and an educated workforce. You could go back and take a course in anything. I could have taken a course in western dance or Western African dance or whatever, as long as it was from an accredited college or university. There were limits on it; it was only one per quarter or one per semester. So, when I went back as a psych major, I saw on the catalog this course on industrial organizational psychology. I’m like, I’ve never heard of that, that sounds kind of interesting. And then I took the course and I’m like, oh my god, there’s a whole field of psychology applied to work.
Scarpino: At some point when you were doing this, you were a young man with pockets full of money and living fancy free, and now you’re taking this course, did it ever occur to you that most people don’t do this?
Day: No, it didn’t. Maybe it was because it was one of these just assumptions that I had that people always wanted to better themselves, partly it was an influence from my mother who was always about education, very much valued education. So, no, I didn’t really think about that. But I definitely was different from the typical student at BW. It’s residential, but there’s also a significant number of commuters. There’s some that were older. But during this time I had gotten married as well and started a family. So, I was way different than the typical BW undergraduate. They didn’t know what to make of me because, for some of these courses I had been moved to the midnight shift. So, I’d go in at 11:30 and work till like 6:30, maybe 7:30, eight hours whatever plus lunch, and then go to class at 8 o’clock. So, I’d come in, I would shower, but I’d been up all night working the line. And, you know, these kids had been up all night doing other things.
Scarpino: It was beer and not grades.
Day: I think so. I didn’t have the typical college experience. And I think one of things that I like so much about where I am now and working with these undergraduate students is like I can kind of live those days vicariously that I missed when I was that age.
Scarpino: Most people who will look at this in the future are not going to be in your field. For the sake of anybody who listens to this or uses the transcript in the future, could you explain what IO psychology is?
Day: Sure. It’s an acronym for Industrial Organizational Psychology. It’s really psychology applied to work. In Europe it’s called Work Psychology. It’s really this notion of understanding the employee experience in organizations of all kinds. IO psychologists get involved in consulting. There’s a lot of them that go into human resource management, talent management and development in organizations. And they study a lot of different things; that’s how I also got into leadership because my graduate advisor was studying leadership. But they study a lot of things like performance, predicting job performance; what are the kinds of things that can help predict performance with the guise of helping to then enhance job performance among employees. Things like motivation and engagement, job satisfaction, attitudes around the job. All of those things are aspects of the IO psychology scholarly domain.
Scarpino: How does the scholar understand employee experience? And I’m assuming that most of your professional colleagues didn’t work on the line somewhere.
Day: They had a job at Starbucks. You kind of touched a nerve there, because a lot of my colleagues have never really had a job other than a summer job. They would go right from high school, into college, into graduate school, find IO Psychology, then go out and become a professor of IO Psychology, never work a damn day in their lives. So, there’s actually a poem from this poet, Philip Levine. He was the poet laureate of the U.S. for a while. I actually had a chance to meet him later on when he was giving a reading.
Scarpino: Poet laureate under which president, do you remember?
Day: Oh, gosh.
Scarpino: It’s ok if you don’t, we can look it up.
Day: I think it was Clinton.
Scarpino: Ok.
Day: But he had a similar experience. I had breakfast with him at Ole Miss University, and he was there. I went to his reading at Square Books in Oxford, and then I went down to breakfast because I was there for a conference, and there he was. I just came up and introduced myself. I knew his work because he was a poet who had also been an auto worker in Detroit and talked a lot about that experience through his poetry. And he has a poem, and he has a volume of poems called “What Work Is.” And I always start my IO courses for the semester showing a video of him reading that poem. I’m paraphrasing what he says, “You know what work is. If not, forget you.” And that’s kind of how I feel about people who claim to be IO psychologists who’ve never worked a day in their lives.
Scarpino: When you play this recording for your students in your IO class, do you ever look at their faces and they wonder what you’re doing?
Day: Well, remember I’m a liberal arts college, right? And I kind of paraphrase this like, “Look, there’s a lot out there about work. You know, you think about what’s in a lot of music, especially music from Appalachia talking about the mines and the mining experience. You look at, you know, what’s on TV and The Office, it’s all about work, right? And it’s also in the arts and humanities and there are some poets who’ve also tried to capture the experience of the worker in their poems. And I just want to share this with you because this course is really oriented around what work is.” And one of the texts that I use in that course is Studs Terkel’s book, Working, which is, as a historian, you know...
Scarpino: I’m surprised it’s still in print.
Day: It is, it is still in print, and that’s one of the assigned texts. And we don’t read every interview in that book, but we read a good portion of them to give them an understanding of kind of the historical perspective on work. I frame it as kind of, we’re going to study the arc, or the trajectory of what it was like in the mid-to-late 20th Century into what it is now, and then what we anticipate in the future of work going forward, which is changing so dramatically with things like artificial intelligence and large natural language models and so forth. So, they kind of know what they’re in for when they come to this class, and that it’s not just going to be studying how managers can squeeze more productivity out of their employees.
Scarpino: Given that we’re probably on the cusp of the impact that artificial intelligence that’s going to have on our lives and on our world, do students worry about their future?
Day: I think students of every generation worry about their future. I mean, one of the things we try to unpack is, how is it going to change work? And it’s not that work is going to go away completely and everything’s going to be turned over to robots, I don’t believe so. I just think that to add value in the workplace you’re going to have to use these tools, and these tools are way more advanced than they’ve ever been before to help you become more efficient and effective in the work that you do. Now, some jobs will go away. But these are probably not the jobs that had a lot of meaning to them. The question is, what do you do with the people who have lost those jobs and maybe don’t have other skills? We see this, this has already happened in the auto industry. It’s like, you hear about let’s bring back the auto industry, let’s bring back the steel industry. Even if we did that, the number of jobs would be so few compared to what it was like in the latter part of the 20th Century; that it’s not going to make that big of a dent in unemployment.
Scarpino: I had a chance to take a bunch of academics to USX roller mill. And the thing that struck me was there was nobody there. Very few employees. It’s almost all automated. Alright, so, you took a class in IO Psychology that opened your life to a future career in psychology. I asked you to explain that, but -- so, you’re a young man, you take this class, what was there about that class that got you interested and committed to psychology as you pursued your graduate degrees? You’ve got a master’s, you’ve got a PhD.
Day: I mean, it was this notion of somebody gets it out there, right? Somebody actually studies work and finds value in doing that. So, I was really interested in cognitive psychology, but that’s much more of a basic experimental approach really without any kind of context to it. But the work thing is all about applying principles of human behavior in organizational context. And that was just fascinating to me, and helped me understand all of the problems, or at least many of the problems that I was seeing around the plant. And it’s like, oh, these people are so -- their job satisfaction is so poor, I wonder why? And it’s like, well, they don’t have any control on what they do.
Scarpino: As you think about that experience you had with Ford, do you think that Ford, in particular, and the American industry, in general, have learned anything about human relations and human management and so on? Is the problem, the kinds of things you experienced still prevalent?
Day: It’s hard for me to say because I’m not on the floor anymore, praise the lord. But there was a number of initiatives to try to learn some of the principles from Japanese manufacturing, which has a much more human focus perspective on it. It values the worker more than the traditional model in the U.S., which was still at that time a version of Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Basically, people were...
Scarpino: Early 20th Century scientific management expert, just for the benefit of the recorder here.
Day: Yeah, it’s time and motion studies. I mean, I still remember people in management coming around with stopwatches, you know, timing how long it took you to do your cycle of work, always looking for ways to reduce the time so they could speed up the line.
Scarpino: Did you ever think when you were doing that, or when you reflected back, that the people in the line were as much interchangeable parts as the stuff you were putting in the cars?
Day: Oh, I’ve seen people... I saw people go down on the line, either they would have a stroke or a heart attack or just have an injury. And the thing that the supervisors are all -- “get a body, get a body over here,” you know, get a body over here, that’s how they thought about us. Because, I mean, the worst thing that could happen is the line stops.
Scarpino: That’s true. I found a number of biographical statements about you, but one...
Day: Interesting.
Scarpino: They’re out there. You should Google yourself.
Day: Okay, scared to.
Scarpino: I just pulled a line out, it said, “Dave is fond of saying that a liberal arts education saved his life, which partly explains his current position at Claremont McKenna.” We talked a little bit about why liberal arts, but how did a liberal arts education save your life?
Day: Well, I mean, you know, compare it to the public university system like Ohio State when you’d walk into introductory classes and there would be 300 of your fellow students there.
Scarpino: I had 500 one time.
Day: You got a professor way down there. This was in the days there was no PowerPoint, you know, it was a chalk board, maybe slides, maybe transparencies that they use. Totally impersonal. I remember trying to -- I was in a chemistry class and I was trying to meet with the professor because I was struggling. Professor wouldn’t meet with me. “Go talk to the TA.” The TA was like less than empathetic, let’s just say. And, so, you just get frustrated and you kind of withdraw, and that’s what happened. Well, with a liberal arts education, instead of a class of 300, you’re in maybe a class of 20. That’s kind of a large class in the liberal arts environment. And the professor knows you, makes a point to know you. The good ones that I experienced at Baldwin Wallace made a point to get to know what my story was, and what I was doing. I had a couple of mentors in the psyche department, but one of the more pivotal influences on me and my later professional self was somebody in the English Department when I took a course on Expository Writing. And, you know, learning to write in that particular style about explaining things clearly and precisely really served me well later on in my academic career and writing in all of those boring scientific articles.
Scarpino: Well, there’s a form to those. My son is a scientist. I don’t think his work is boring, but I don’t understand it either.
Day: What field, if you don’t mind me asking you?
Scarpino: Sure, he’s a biologist, in AI, director of a program in AI, neither of which I understand.
Day: Cool. Very cool.
Scarpino: I want to talk a little bit about leadership because that’s what we’re all about here. I want to remind you that I talked to Michelle Hammond, and she talked about your early work on a Ford Motor Company assembly line which we’ve talked about.
Day: I harangue all my students about those stories.
Scarpino: You impressed her. I mean, I’m sorry that our connection broke down, but the part of the conversation I had with her was quite interesting. One of things I always ask people when I talk to them about someone I’m going to interview is, I say, “What would you want to ask this person if you were doing the interview instead of me?” And so she said, “Ask him how he got from the assembly line to the study of leadership, about that trajectory. How did that happen?” Can you talk about that?
Day: Yeah, well, it didn’t almost happen because when I graduated from Baldwin Wallace there was an economic decline. I was out of work. I’ve been unemployed so many times, you know, that’s the nature of auto working, right? Fortunately, the union builds in a lot of safety nets because I was, at that point, married and had a young daughter. So, you would get unemployment and then Ford would offer what was called Supplemental Unemployment Benefits that would bring you up to 90 percent of your salary. I mean, it was great. I thank the unions for that because I don’t know what would have happened to us if that wasn’t there. So, when I graduated, I couldn’t even conceptualize this notion of me being a professor. To me it was like the -- it was just the dream job. And, in many ways it still is because what are you missing on the assembly line? You’re missing autonomy. You have no control over your time. You have no decisions that you can really make about how the work gets done. You’ve got to punch in at the this time; you’ve got to punch out at that time, so there’s no autonomy. There’s no life of the mind. It’s all physical labor. The conditions are horrible. There is really no opportunity for learning anything. And what’s the complete opposite of that? It’s being a professor. But it was also the case that being a professor would involve probably four or five years in graduate school, and I had a family to feed. So, I applied to be a patrolman in my local community in Broadview Heights, Ohio.
Scarpino: This was a police officer.
Day: A police officer, and this is on the southeast side of Cleveland, out towards Akron, which is where I was living at that time. I had family who lived in that area, and that’s one of the reasons why I was there. So, I applied for this patrolman’s job. I took the written test, passed it. I took the physical agility test, and I passed it. I even took the personality test and passed it. I had the papers to start in a few weeks to go to the police academy to learn to become a police officer, which to this day, frightens the hell out of me to think about me with a gun, you know, packing iron seven days a week. But what happened was, and this is kind of an ironical twist because it relates to IO, it was just a few days before I was set to go to the academy that I received a registered letter that said that the whole list of people who were being offered positions was on hold because someone had sued the city claiming that there was adverse impact in the physical abilities test, the physical agilities test. So, that was one of the things is part of IO psychology, it’s the whole legal issues around employment, hiring, and those. I didn’t know what adverse impact was at the time; I learned it when I went to graduate school. So, this was my path forward to the career that I, you know, not necessarily really wanted, but it was one that would have a lot more security than an auto worker. It does have some psychology in it, obviously, but it wasn’t meant to be. So, I took the GRE just like, ok, I’ve got to pivot to something else.
Scarpino: Graduate Record Exam, yeah.
Day: Graduate Record Exam, and I did a lot better than I thought I would ever do. So, I applied to a few schools. One was Kent State University in Cognitive Psychology. The other one was the University of Akron in Industrial Organizational Psychology. So, I was still having this kind of like back and forth between cognitive basic, IO applied. And I went to the interview, and both places offered me admission and some sort of graduate stipend. So, it was looking like something might come of this. So, I went to Kent State and talked to the people in their Cognitive Psychology area and the graduate students, and it was a good conversation. But when I was leaving, I asked the person who would be my advisor, “So, where do the graduates of this program go?” And they were like, “Hey, didn’t someone go to this lab over... didn’t someone do a post-doc?” There was like a lot of hemming and hawing. And then I went to Akron and I talked to someone who would eventually become my advisor who was a Carnegie Mellon graduate. He had actually had classes with Herbert Simon who was a Nobel Laureate in economics. But he was clearly someone who was very well versed in cognitive psychology, but he was really looking at it from an applied lens, in particular around understanding people’s leadership perceptions and how they categorize people as leaders or not, and for what particular reasons. And this was Bob Lord. And I just was -- it was one of those, this is the guy. This is something that I think it’s a perfect match of like the cognitive aspects that are attractive to me with something that’s applied to work in organizations.
Scarpino: You used the term ‘cognitive psychology’ a bunch of times. Given that anybody who uses this is probably not going to know what that is. Could you do the quick elevator version of what cognitive psychology is?
Day: Yeah, well, cognitive psychology is really about people’s -- now it’s become very heavily neuro influenced, brain influenced, but this was before the influences around, you know, what we are doing today with things like functional mental residence imaging, looking at maps of the brain and stuff. It’s really trying to understand the processes that people use to make decisions in their lives, to understand the world around them. And it’s a very basic approach in psychology that is grounded in experimental methods. So, cognitive psychology is a classic laboratory experiment where people would come in, you would give them certain stimuli and see how it affects their responses. Those experiments are usually designed around some theory that you want to test. There’s a lot of ways that the data are gathered. One of the most prominent ones were reaction times. The quicker you responded to a stimulus as saying it belonged in this group versus that group, the stronger the inference we could draw that that’s a strong connection in your mental map of whatever the context is that’s being studied.
Scarpino: Okay. I talked to Nathan Hiller, as I said when I introduced this session, and he told me about the distinction that you make between leader development and leadership development.
Day: Got a lot of miles out that one.
Scarpino: Yeah, but I’m going to follow up on what he said to me and ask you talk about leadership and leader development, and start by asking, how do you understand leader development?
Day: Sure.
Scarpino: How do you explain leader development?
Day: Yeah, and let me just say that this really came about because of the sabbatical that it did at the Center for Creative Leadership.
Scarpino: And he was one of your students, right?
Day: He was one of my students. Michelle was a graduate student at Penn State as well. Both of them are grad students at Penn State. I was actually Nathan’s advisor. I wasn’t Michelle’s advisor, but we worked together on a book and some other projects. So, when I did the sabbatical at the Center for Creative Leadership, it was clear to me that there was a lot of investments being made in individual people in their development, but it doesn’t mean inevitably that better leadership will result. Because the leadership is in the application of what people are internalizing and learning and practicing and growing in terms of their skills. And, yet, the whole field was talking about leadership development, leadership development, that we need more programs to do leadership development. Well, you’re really not doing leadership development because that’s downstream. You’re developing individual leaders with the hope and the prayer, the wing and the prayer of them applying what they’ve learned through their development processes to make themselves and others around them more effective in leadership roles and processes. One of the things was also this notion of levels of analysis. This was something that was part of what I was studying in other ways and reading about in other ways in terms of the relationship between individuals and collectives. At the individual level is leader development; you’re developing individual leaders with the targeted outcome of making them more effective in leadership roles and processes. But there’s two stages to that. And this is kind of formative in what has happened later in terms of what we think develops more proximately in leader development and what comes later with practice and over time. Leadership development is really about developing a collective, a group, a team to build certain leadership approaches that they can then use to address adaptive challenges in their shared work. But the leadership doesn’t reside in any one leader. With leader development it’s really thought that it’s an intrapersonal or human capital issue. It’s your knowledge, skills and abilities that you’ve acquired. With leadership development, it’s really much more where leadership resides is not in you, or not in me, it’s between you and me. It’s the relationship between us.
Scarpino: It’s the collective, the group, the organization.
Day: Yeah. This is why social network analysis has become so important to me in understanding these processes, because they study the interrelationships among people in groups, and it’s really this notion of how does social capital develop among a group of people rather than human capital. And the social capital is really the resources that reside in the links between people who are engaged in some sort of shared work. That’s a very academic explanation.
Scarpino: And you’re an academic.
Day: There you go.
Scarpino: Leader is individual; leadership is collective.
Day: Yeah.
Scarpino: Not everybody who’s a scholar of leadership looks at the world that way.
Day: Not yet.
Scarpino: That’s a positive way to look at it. When you talk to your colleagues, give papers, publish, send out articles to journals or whatever, do you get pushback on that notion of leadership as a collective activity as opposed to what other scholars would argue it is?
Day: Well, pushback is a nice was of saying you get a bucket full of crap from reviewers no matter what you send out. But this dissension between leader development and leadership development has now been in the literature going on 25 years. So, it’s become more widely accepted, which is why I say I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that distinction. But it’s also, the way I would describe it, is when you talk about leader development, you’re talking about developing an individual leader who would then, as a leader, provide input into some system to bring about leadership. Whereas, when you’re talking about the collective...
Scarpino: Or he or she exercises leadership.
Day: Well, right, exactly, that’s the input that there’s an exercise of leadership in some sort of interpersonal context, which is an input into the performance or whatever, wherever it’s being applied in the leadership domain. Whereas, with leadership development, it’s a collective capacity that is not an input; it’s drawn from the group. It’s drawn from the group as a way to then respond to an adaptive challenge that they’re facing. So, when you think about what does leadership look like in a group of people, it could look a lot of different ways. And there’s been more work talking about things like shared leadership, or distributed leadership. And it could look just like plain old regular leader-centric leadership, because you could have a group of people and the way that they do leadership is the leader tells them what to do, right? That’s one model. But a more complex model is the type of leadership is actually something that the group develops amongst itself. And that’s more likely to happen when everybody is on equal footing. There is no designated leader in the group. And you get a lot of project teams, task teams in organizations these days, cross-functional teams where people will come together and there’s really no one designated leader. So, how do they figure out how to do leadership in those particular cases? A part of the process should be developing their capacity as a collective to be effective in leadership roles or processes.
Scarpino: How does that work in a hierarchical organization, say, like the military?
Day: Well, the military is an interesting example.
Scarpino: When they talk about leadership all the time.
Day: Well, yeah, they live leadership all the time, and they’re really quite open to learning more about leadership. But it’s not just a command-and-control kind of environment because what they realize in this day and age, with so many different missions that the military is responsible for, that often what happens on the ground is that somebody who is a first lieutenant or a captain or somebody in a lower ranking position has to figure out an effective leadership model perhaps in a cultural environment that they’ve never experienced before. And they can’t be on the phone talking to the colonel or the general all the time saying, “Hey what should I do now? Because, it’s like, oh, we’ve got a bunch of people on horses riding into camp and they’re armed, what do we do?”
Scarpino: That’s the leader. But what about leadership?
Day: Yeah. Well, the leadership is also the case that who has the most relevant information boots on the ground. And oftentimes it’s not somebody in a leadership position who may be removed from what’s actually happening in the moment. You’ve got people who are non-commissioned officers, they’re enlisted people, and they need to take on some leadership responsibility collectively to figure out what to do. Because it’s not, you know, even though there’s a hierarchy there, the person who has the most seniority or the highest rank may not have the best information. This is where, it’s not that collective leadership is developed on the fly then; it needs to be developed in advance so when something happens that there is some crisis, for example, or some new information, or some threatening event that’s occurring that somebody in the lowest rank is aware of, how do they martial the forces of the collective to respond to that? And if the person who is in a formal leadership role hasn’t paid attention to developing that collective capacity in advance, you just can’t draw it forth when it’s needed. It needs to be created ahead of time. Because if it’s not, then you fall back to the command-and-control, and what you lose is any advantage of time. Because then you have to go through the chain of command to get this information to someone who will then make a decision, then it comes back down. And even militaries are saying, we can’t, in this kind of dynamic environment that we’re in now, we have to be able to move a lot quicker, and we have to trust people at lower-level ranks to exercise the kind of leadership that’s created as part of a collective.
Scarpino: Even in that hierarchical situation things like collective capacity matter.
Day: Yeah. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Scarpino: And your story is what we’re interested in.
Day: Thank you.
Scarpino: To get this in one place, why is the idea of leadership capacity of the collective an important part of understanding leadership?
Day: I think the key word in this is ‘complexity.’
Scarpino: Right.
DAY. Complexity. I think we are...
Scarpino: Tell me about complexity.
Day: Okay. I think we in today’s world, I think many leaders are reaching their limits in terms of what they can understand and create when it comes to leadership because the challenges have become so complex that it’s beyond any one person to really be able to create the kinds of solutions that will be effective. So, people have to work together in order to solve such problems. And there’s research in the area of knowledge production in science that have looked at the changes in authorship in research articles and patents over time. And they found - this is published in Science, I can’t remember the authors right off the top of my head – that over time there’s been a significant trend from solo contributors to teams in knowledge production, published research and patents. And not only has there been this trend from individuals to collectives - what I would call collectives which are really just teams of people working together - that those collective pieces that are published have significantly higher impact factors than those by solo authors, indicating that -- the impact factor, for those of you who may not be familiar with that, is really how influential a published article is by virtue of how many times its cited by other authors in that field. So, the impact factors for collectively published, collectively-authored published work was found to be significantly higher over time than sole-authored work over time. So, there’s been this move I think in areas where there’s a lot of complexity to build things like interdisciplinary teams, trans-disciplinary teams, things where people who have different perspectives on a problem can work together. But that’s, in and of itself, a problem and a challenge.
Scarpino: I was going to say it’s harder than it sounds.
Day: Exactly. Exactly. And, so, because the world is becoming increasingly complex, we need to have ways to bring people together to create a capacity for leadership to adapt to things that they never potentially experienced before. And here, let me say one of -- I wouldn’t even call him a colleague, he’s more of an esteemed organizational scholar by the name of Carl Wyche, would say that a lot of what we had done in the past was training people to respond to particular problems with skills that we knew that would be helpful. It was really kind of a déjà vu kind of world where we could anticipate the problems, we’ll give you the tools, you apply them when you see this problem. So, the world is changing. It’s no longer déjà vu world; it’s a vujà dé world. I’ve never been here before. I have no idea what’s going to happen to me next. I have no idea who to turn to for help. What do you do when you experience the vujà dé world?
Scarpino: We can’t obviously just give them a bucket of tools, so what are we going to do?
Day: That’s where the collective capacity in leadership comes in. You’ve got to build that ahead of time, that people can recognize they’re in the shit, and nobody has ever experienced it before, and we have to collectively learn our way out of this experience.
Scarpino: Higher education, advanced degrees are mostly subject specific. The way you make your name for yourself as a doctoral student is to find a tiny piece of something and develop it into your dissertation, you know, a tiny piece that nobody has ever worked on before. How do you get people who are trained in those kinds of systems to think collectively, and act and work collectively?
Day: I don’t know. But I can tell you maybe, you know, that’s, maybe that’s becoming obsolete, that the training in those kind of very siloed disciplinary functions is the way forward. And I can give you an example of what we’re doing at Claremont McKenna. We started a Department of Integrated Sciences. So, we don’t have a Chemistry Department, we don’t have a Biology Department, we don’t have a Physics Department. But we have chemists, we have biologists, we have physics in this Department of Integrated Sciences, and the curriculum is all problem-centered. So, it’s around the brain, it’s around the planet, and it’s around a third one that I can’t remember. So, what students do – and here’s an example I just learned here, because the president of the college was speaking at something around leadership for public purpose yesterday – that some of our students were involved in a problem around water security. Big issue, right?
Scarpino: That being the security of potable water and its availability, yeah.
Day: Yep. So, if you pose the problem being how can you prevent serious threats to the security of a water system, for example in the municipality, what would you need to learn? Well, you’d need to learn a lot about biology, you’d need to learn about chemistry, you’d need to learn a lot about other things that I have no experience in, but it’s this kind of -- and the way that our students are doing it is in teams. You know, this is the collective approach to that. And, so, they’re learning about water security while also integrating some of these really basic science aspects of it, but focus on a particular problem that needs to be examined and advised, and it has real world implications. So, the students had created this whole literature review and prospectus on enhancing water security in local municipalities. And then the college took them to the San Bernadino Water Authority and had them present it to the San Bernadino Water Authority about what they had learned about...
Scarpino: That’s the treatment plant.
Day: That’s the treatment plant in San Bernadino County in California. And, when they were done with that and done with the Q&A, the plant superintendent said these kids know more about water security than my staff.
Scarpino: That’s a little chilling, isn’t it?
Day: That’s true, I hadn’t thought about that. It doesn’t make me feel so secure now, but... How do we educate young people? And maybe this whole notion of the individual heroic scholar in a particular discipline, maybe that time has passed. I mean, it’s not that these people have all become obsolete. We clearly need to help them work together more collectively, but that’s a very difficult thing to do. And maybe a way forward is providing a lot more examples of how to work in teams when you’re in high school and college, so that when you go out into the world of work, you know how to build a team, you know how to lead a team, whether you’re a scientist, whether you’re a manager. I mean I think that differentiates a lot of people in their careers. I talked to our students at the Kravis Leadership Institute about this all the time. When they’re so focused on, you know, their econometrics class and how they’re going to estimate derivatives and all these things, it’s like, “You know what? You’re going to get pretty soon out in your career in finance, for example, you’re not going to be doing this. You’re going to be responsible for people who are doing this so you’ve got to understand it, but 90% of your problems are going to be people problems, and that’s where leadership comes in.” And that’s why we get a lot of our students who are econ majors, who are finance majors, who want to learn about leadership because they realize they will really be responsible for leading teams, building teams, and they want to get a head start on getting some insights on how to do that.
Scarpino: So, the leadership institute really draws from across the campus, right?
Day: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Claremont McKenna is part of the Claremont Colleges. There’s five different colleges. They each have a different kind of focus. Ours is really around economics and political science. So, we get students who are numbers people for the most part. Even though we’re liberal arts, we do get some arts and humanities folks, but the vast majority of them are the ones who want to come in and learn about economics and government, and are pretty financially savvy. We don’t get a lot of students who are kind of stats phobic people because they know how to work the numbers.
Scarpino: I’m stats phobic. One more question from Nathan Hiller and then I’m going to talk to you about leadership specifically. He told me more than once that you don’t subscribe to a single model or theory of leadership. And, of course, we know many scholars do embrace a single model or theory. Why do you think in your career it’s best not to subscribe to a single model or theory of leadership?
Day: I’ve seen how unhelpful it is. People develop and publish a theory and then it’s almost like they build the moat around it, and they protect it from all threats to the ends of the earth. I think leadership is inherently eclectic, and leadership is inherently dynamic. People have said, “Well, leadership really isn’t scientific because you guys can’t even define it in a way that people agree to.” And that’s true, too.
Scarpino: It is true, yes.
Day: So, if you can’t define leadership, how do you think there’s one model that captures it? I think that’s kind of ridiculous, and it becomes more of this kind of academic turf wars than anything else. I’ve tried to stay out of that. I try to draw from where I see helpful aspects of different theories and use that as a way to inform. What I’m really more interested in now is how does that inform developmental processes? I think in the past there was this kind of misconception that if we just found the right leadership theory then we could just go train everybody on it and our problem would be solved. And I think that’s pretty damn naïve.
Scarpino: I mean, I always wondered how do we know which one’s right, you know?
Day: Well, you know, there is a scientific method, but there’s always going to be null hypotheses that are supported in all of this stuff. When you’re testing scientific theories, it’s not like you’re done; it’s something that’s a continuous cycle of testing and revising and retesting. The same applies to leadership. This whole notion of fighting about which theory of leadership is right, for one, nobody in practice gives a crap about that. They just want to know how to become better leaders; how to create better leadership. I think focusing on just one theory is too limited and limiting in that regard. So, take what we know from theories that have empirical support, how does that inform this whole notion of development? Because that’s been something that’s been missing in leader and leadership development for a lot of times. It was really more about the leadership part of it, not about the development part of it. And that goes back to kind of the silos. There’s this whole developmental psychology, adult development literature, then there’s this whole leadership and organizations literature, and there’s like no bridge between them.
Scarpino: Well, and each of those areas has its own collection of silos as well.
Day: There you go, there you go.
Scarpino: We have, over the years, had some standard leadership questions. As the field has changed, I’ve modified a few of them, but I’m going to drop some of these in here. I’m telling you this so that whoever listens will know what we’re doing here. I’ll just start with some basic questions. How do you define or explain leadership?
Day: I told you, I can’t define it.
Scarpino: Well, give it a try.
Day: All right, here’s the closest, when people ask me: What’s your definition of leadership? I would say it’s hard to pinpoint in words and it doesn’t do it justice, but what I default to is what I’ve learned from some colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership who talk about this notion of direction, alignment and commitment. I like it. It’s a very functional ontology of leadership because it doesn’t have to come from a person. So, their approach is anyone or anything that helps to provide direction, create alignment and build commitment among people, is leadership. So, you could have leadership that is embedded in how a particular task is structured. You don’t have a leader to help you perform that task because the leadership, the direction that you need for that, or the commitment you want in order to perform the task, is somehow already embedded in the task itself. I think this could become more and more important as we move forward technology around artificial intelligence.
Scarpino: Artificial intelligence can exercise leadership?
Day: There’s the whole Turing test that I’m not sure if it will -- I think it could if you define it that way. Anyone or anything that provides direction, alignment or commitment could be said to be engaging in leadership. So, yeah, from that perspective, I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but, yeah, I think AI could be our next leader.
Scarpino: I think I saw that movie at 3 o’clock in the morning one night. All right, so, you talked about things, anything that provides direction, alignment or commitment. Name a thing that can do that. We’ve mentioned artificial intelligence, but...
Day: There are a lot of aids, for example, in completing a task that could provide direction for you. I’m trying to talk and think at the same time, it’s not working well. But, is something that you see in a YouTube video that provides direction on how to complete a task actually engaging in leadership? I don’t know, that’s an interesting question, and it’s kind of related back to that AI thing. But there may be...
Scarpino: That’s kind of where I was pushing with this, because in a world of AI and YouTube and all sorts of digital tools that have no human fingerprints on them, how does this stack up?
Day: I think other examples are things that are in the structure that people are working within. A good example is an assembly line; is there leadership on the assembly line? Very primitive forms of it, but everything is so structured that you don’t need to provide direction. The direction is already provided in how the task is organized to begin with. It’s a line, because everything has to fit together in a sequential manner in order to create the product, but it falls apart with the commitment piece. But I think that’s also indicative of leadership is not an either or thing, it’s on a continuum. And where there are all three of those aspects of direction, alignment, commitment, there’s probably stronger leadership at play than if just one or two of them are evident.
Scarpino: We’ve sort of talked at this, but how do you understand the relationship between leaders and leadership?
Day: Well, I think leaders can provide leadership, but it doesn’t mean if you’re developing a leader that better leadership will inevitably result because that involves the appropriate application of what you learned in some sort of leadership development program. And there may be a lot of reasons why you can’t exercise leadership. One quote that I think illustrates this, and illustrates a lot of the problems with what are called leader development programs or leadership development programs, and that is sending a changed person back into an unchanged system is an exercise in futility. I think people can learn all kinds of things about how to be a leader, then they go back to their work and there is a boss who’s unsupportive, there are people who report to you that are not committed to helping make you successful, and the system is really the obstacle to more effective leadership occurring, not what any one individual has gained in terms of a human capital advantage by going through a program.
Scarpino: What do we do about that?
Day: Well, change the system. I think change the system. Well, how? My cheeky response is, well, first we get rid of HR. But the more serious answer is redesigning work. I think we have an opportunity to redesign work in ways that we know make it more leadership saturated. And that could be a substitute for leadership, which is something that was studied a long time ago, which may re-emerge, which is designing the work itself maybe you don’t need leaders to help provide direction, alignment, commitment because it’s coming from the work itself. It’s already something that we know how to go forward in doing, if there’s an alignment among people in the interdependencies that they are engaged with in their shared work and they’re all committed to providing a high-level kind of product. But the system is one that is built around this notion of sending people away from their work in order to develop. I think changing the system means using ongoing experiences and ongoing work as part of the developmental practices in the organization. But most organizations don’t do it that way because they either offload it to a consultancy, or they offload it to HR or talent management, and then it becomes this notion that other people are responsible for your development, I think, when changing the system really means that people need to have greater ownership of their development as leaders with the support of the leaders within that system. But there’s also obstacles there because a lot of leaders get threatened when they think that someone may become a leader – and isn’t that their job? But there are examples where that’s kind of been flattened and people are working more collaboratively in a shared capacity to enact leadership. But it's the exception rather than the rule.
Scarpino: You would see a function of a leader to try to foster that kind of engagement among the followers.
Day: Yeah, well, we’re all leaders and we’re all followers. We make that distinction but...
Scarpino: Maybe at different times, but...
Day: Right, it’s dynamics. Sometimes, some people are more engaged being leaders, others more engaged being followers. But, no matter, you could point to the highest levels at any organization, they’ve got to be followers at some point. But this is my grand scheme of things. The utopian organization is when people who are more line managers, part of their responsibility is people development. Too often, they’re so wrapped up in the technology, or the technological problems that they face as leaders at lower levels, that they feel that they’re either not competent or they don’t have the necessary resources to help develop others, so it becomes a problem of some other function in the organization.
Scarpino: So, people who address leadership, scholars who publish on the subject, make a distinction between leadership and management.
Day: Yes.
Scarpino: Some people do but not everyone.
Day: Yes.
Scarpino: How do you explain management?
Day: Sure, well, management I think is working within the status quo in order to make things more efficient. It’s not really about change. And I think leadership is inherently about change. So, leadership, then, is really about kind of rocking the boat to bring about necessary changes in a system that can create direction, alignment, commitment, if you want to all that leadership, in more effective ways. So, leadership is really, you know, I hate that whole distinction about doing things right vs. the right thing to do and all that kind of stuff; but, management, we all know examples of people who are exceptional managers and terrible leaders. They know how to follow the protocol, they know how to work within the status quo, but they can’t change a damn thing. We also know people who are just so change-focused that they lose sight of the fact that they also have to be good managers. Both are really needed. They’re needed at different times maybe in the lifespan of an organization, to know when it is you need to step up and implement changes, and that’s really a leadership task more than a management task.
Scarpino: If we look at leaders as individuals, then effective leaders also have to understand how to manage?
Day: Well, yeah, I think so in most organizations. There may be some social movement leaders who are just the visionary, charismatic type, and they delegate all the management to people who support them. We won’t name names, but, for the most part, in work organizations people should know how to manage, and they should know how to lead, and they should know when the times are appropriate for each one of those approaches.
Scarpino: Do you consider yourself to be a leader?
Day: Ahhh... you know...
Scarpino: And I’m not looking for modesty here.
Day: No, no, no, I didn’t, because I can tell you, most of my career was spent as an academic looking to publish the next article. If there’s any kind of leadership in that it’s more like intellectual leadership. But that has...
Scarpino: And you are in fact an intellectual leader in the field, so I’ll say that.
Day: But it’s not the typical kind of leadership that you would think with the exception of since 2017 when I’ve become the academic director at the Kravis Leadership Institute. And one of things that I helped orchestrate was a whole change in terms of how we do development among students at time at Claremont McKenna, and particularly in the Kravis Institute, in terms of designing and developing and implementing a developmental system, a leader developmental system. We don’t call it a ‘program,’ it’s a system that has a number of components to it. So, it has been a journey, to quote all the Ozzies, “It’s been a journey.” But let me tell you how I see the connection to leadership, because one of the components, one of the key components of the system is a competency model that we developed, and I was pretty jaded about competency models before I came into this role. But, through discussions with various stakeholders around the campus and tying it into the narrative that the president of the college was putting out around what it is that we want to develop in our students, because part of our mission at Claremont McKenna is developing responsible leaders and leadership. It’s a competency model around courage, creativity and collaboration; learning to lead courageously, lead creatively, lead collaboratively, which taken together are the markers of responsible leadership. And then, underneath them, there’s -- that’s the tip of the iceberg -- there’s a lot underneath that that can be tracked to actual small behaviors that students can do to change higher level competencies over time. But here’s where the leadership part comes in, is that there was a lot of push-back from all parts of campus on this for a lot of reasons. One, faculty just like to make trouble and fight about things...
Scarpino: They surely do.
Day: And if they didn’t have a say in this, it’s like, “Well, who are you telling me what our…” So, we just kept pushing this model. We’re developing more things around it, more assessments around it. It’s part of a broader system that students live with for three or four years while they’re in college. It’s starting to get a lot of credibility, but one of the biggest breakthroughs was to hear the president of the college talk about our leadership competency model, which he never did before. Our leadership, the CMC Competency Model around these three C’s of courage, creativity and collaboration.
Scarpino: Did you play a role in pushing him in that direction?
Day: Oh, yeah, I’ve been pushing him, and he’s pushed back for a lot of years.
Scarpino: Well, they get paid to do that.
Day: Yeah, well, I mean, he wouldn’t talk about that as being...
Scarpino: I started out asking you about yourself, and I’m going to come back to it, because you’re teaching in a leadership program. Do you think of yourself or see yourself as a model, or role model, in any way for your students? Or are you one of the ones that talks and doesn’t do that you were talking about before?
Day: I think that’s certainly the case. There’s a saying in academia, you study what you suck at. And I think that’s pretty much defined how I got interested in leadership, because I never really thought I was any good at it. I’m still questioning that. However, one of the things that I study as part of all of this is leader identity, and how that’s important in the developmental processes. Do you think of yourself as a leader? If you’re more likely to think of yourself, you’re more likely to allocate resources toward your own bespoke development. So, I would say for the most part, for most of my life I really never thought of myself as a leader. Once I’ve started getting into developing these kinds of models around self views of leadership, including leader identity, that stands alongside knowledge, skills and abilities as the proximal indicators to use in the study and the development of leaders -- if I didn’t internalize leader identity to some extent, I would be a huge hypocrite, and I don’t like hypocrites.
Scarpino: I’m trying to imagine being a student in your program, or in your classes. I mean, surely, they look at you as the guy who’s putting the points on the horizon towards which they’re marching, that’s what leaders do.
Day: Yeah, when you put it that way, I can see what you’re saying. But it’s also the case that the students tend to associate leaders with people who have run things, who’ve been in a business, who’s been a CEO, that’s a leader, or someone who has started a tech company, that’s a leader. One of the things I try to impress upon them is that these people may be leaders, but they don’t really understand leadership. They understand what industry they’re in. They understand how to get -- and I don’t usually say this to the students because I think they would think I was nuts, but I look at something like Shakespeare -- where am I going with this? We know that there are Shakespearean scholars who study the texts and are super well-informed about the origins of those texts, the underlying meanings of those texts, and they write their own papers about these things. Do they perform Shakespeare? They do not, for the most part. And you have the Shakespearean actors who can go out there and act these various parts and have really no understanding of any of the underlying meanings on all this. But then there are some who are both the scholars and the performers; people like Richard Burton, and John Gielgud, and some of these classic Shakespearean actors who are also Shakespearean scholars. I think the combination of those two things made them world class.
Scarpino: Are you a scholar and a performer?
Day: I’m not, well, I’m a performer in the classroom. I’m a huge introvert, believe it or not.
Scarpino: I’m finding that hard to believe.
Day: Yeah, well, I am, maybe, but the way I look at it is I am more of the leadership scholar with a tiny bit of the practitioner. There are a lot more who are really big practitioners with maybe a tiny bit of the scholar. The students that I work with, I try to impress upon them that understanding the scholarship behind leadership studies and leadership development will make you a better leader by virtue of your leadership performances later in your life.
Scarpino: Again, one of our questions that we’ve asked over the years: Do you think of leadership as a cultural construction? That is, leaders and leadership grow out of a cultural context in which they’re a part.
Day: Yeah, but we also know from the GLOBE studies, you know. This is...
Scarpino: I’m going to come back -- I’m going to go to the GLOBE in a minute.
Day: Ok.
Scarpino: That’s next.
Day: Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness. Bob House’s group from Wharton, they’ve done across all of these different societies and all of these different levels within society. I mean, what their takeaway from all this is, there are some cultural universals when it comes to leadership, and there are some that are culturally specific, and don’t ask me the difference because I can’t remember.
Scarpino: No, but I’m actually asking what you think about this. In other words, if you’re talking to your students or whatever, thinking about leadership and the origins of leadership is – I mean you talk a lot about science, I know you’re talking about social science, but is leadership a cultural construction? Is it something that grows out of the culture of which the human beings are a part?
Day: I think it has to. And I would go back to my own particular experiences in Australia, which is a very low power distance country. You know, you don’t want...
Scarpino: Tell me about low power distance, I don’t know what that means.
Day: Low power distance is that it’s very egalitarian. You don’t want to be the tall poppy, you get your head chopped off, right? So, this whole notion of trying to differentiate yourself from your peers to be better than them, i.e. more leader-like than them, is not going to be well received. They actually have a term for it here and it’s got profanity in it, I’ll see what I can say. One of the worst things you can be called in Australia is a FIGJAM. A FIGJAM. A bloody FIGJAM. The FIGJAM stands for ‘f... I’m good, just ask me.’ And they hate FIGJAMs. So, it’s an interesting leadership conundrum because a lot of leadership studies is talking about how do you differentiate yourself from others in a work setting that will make you more leader-like in order to be a better leader. But in Australia trying to do that is really something that is frowned up. I had a Woodside Chair of Leadership and Management, which is a big energy company based in Australia. My partner at the time, she worked as the director for talent and development at Wesfarmers, which is a huge conglomerate in Australia, over 250,000 people, and you know Australia is pretty small in terms of population, so a lot of people -- In both of those organizations and everyone that I was aware of, CEOs all flew coach. Not only did they not have their plane, they didn’t fly first class – they fly coach. And that’s because they knew that if they were differentiating themselves by sitting at the front of the plane, that’s not a very good look. Can you imagine CEOs in this country flying coach? I mean, there are some that have done that, but, they’re the, again, the exception rather than the rule. So, leadership has to look different in that kind of culture than it does in the U.S., but we know U.S. is a very diverse culture, and certainly northeast Ohio is very different than southern California, trust me. In Southern California, it is all about me. It is all about differentiating me from everybody else. It is ‘brand me.’ It’s FIGJAM central.
Scarpino: Do you think that there are certain qualities of effective leaders that transcend individual cultures? In other words, there are qualities that you expect to find associated with successful leaders no matter where they are.
Day: I would say yeah. But, I say the yeah with an asterisk that I’m not familiar with all of the cultural norms around the world.
Scarpino: That’s perfectly fine, but, I mean, what would you think some of those qualities would be?
Day: Well, I think one of the ones that’s really overlooked is this notion of listening, and learning to listen, and learning how to listen actively, and how to use active listening as a way to get a better understanding of people’s sensemaking of their experiences. So, which is why I teach a seminar in leader develop at Claremont McKenna, and we spend at least a class or two talking about developing active listening skills. We read and we watch videos from Carl Rogers, who is the counseling psychologist who developed this whole person-oriented therapy based on unconditional positive regard and active listening. So, I’m a firm believer in active listening. I also think the other piece of this that I think is a critically important tool is to be able to give feedback in ways that minimize the kinds of defensiveness and deflection that usually happens when you give feedback. And, also to think about feedback as not just giving people negative feedback, but also learning how to give positive feedback.
Scarpino: That’s the part we usually forget, isn’t it?
Day: It is, it is. So, it’s really not the traits so much because you can be an effective leader regardless of what your personality profile is, but it’s going to be easier if you’re an extrovert relative to being an introvert. You’re going to have to work harder as an introvert to put yourself out there, but the same kind of skills apply. But when you think about it, the extrovert is going to have a stretch assignment about being a listener, and the introvert may have the stretch assignment of giving objective feedback to people. It’s just a different challenge.
Scarpino: Do you have students actively practice the listening and the feedback with each other?
Day: Yeah, sure. But the more important thing, I mean, we do role modeling and things in class, but the more important thing is this notion of taking it out into what I call the gym of life, you know, what’s going on in their everyday experiences. And let me give you the backstory of why this is a gym, rather than something else. I think a lot of leader development...
Scarpino: You’re talking like the gymnasium.
Day: Like the gymnasium of life. Yeah, what you’re embedded in every day.
Scarpino: Just making sure the recorder understands it.
Day: Thank you. I think a lot of people think about leader development programs as a ticket to an amusement park. You go, and you go on a lot of really cool rides, you have fun with your friends, it’s exhilarating, it’s something that’s very memorable. You leave after the day like, whoa, that was great, I’m done developing for the next -- I’m done with my development for the next year. It’s not a ticket to an amusement park. It’s more like a gym membership, and your gym is not an actual physical space, it’s what your -- this is water, this is the water you’re embedded in every day. Your apparatus in the gym are all the people that you interact with on a daily basis. And, so, with gym memberships we know, one, a lot of people buy them and don’t use them. We know that people who do buy them and use them sometimes don’t use them appropriately because they’re just there to socialize, not really to work and to sweat. But if you think about actually working out, it’s stretching your capabilities beyond where you are presently, not to the breaking point, but to build the kind of aerobic capacity, the muscle mass that will bring about the kind of body image that you want, or the kind of health status that you want. It’s the same with leadership; you’ve got to be stretching yourself a little bit every day in terms of what you do in order to change your leadership capacity over time. But where you work out is your everyday life when you’re with your mates, when you’re in class, when you are part of a club or an organization; those are all great opportunities to practice your leadership. And I think this is something we’ve been exploring empirically to understand what’s the impact of curricular versus co-curricular or extracurricular activities in a residential college. And I think the co-curricular, the things that happen outside of the classroom, are more indicative of leadership potential, or more of a catalyst for strengthening leadership potential going forward than what happens in the actual curricular or classroom space. And the exciting thing is we may have some data that actually shows that.
Scarpino: You provide your students with these co-curricular activities.
Day: Well, yeah, I mean, for example, you join the debating club. That’s a co-curricular activity, right? There’s a lot of self-selection. We have eleven research institutes and centers on campus, one being the Kravis Leadership Institute. And students apply for these jobs, and they are jobs, they become student employees of the institute or the center. You join an athletic team. You become a peer counselor in our care center. All of these are not-for-credit activities that’s part of a residential college experience.
Scarpino: But does the program itself have a co-curricular requirement, like an internship or something where you have to get out there and get your hands dirty?
Day: The program itself is co-curricular. There’s no credit for being a student at Kravis Leadership Institute. But what they do with that, yeah, they go out and they do study abroad, they do internships. All of those things are part of the larger package that comes with the high-price Claremont McKenna tag.
Scarpino: Oh. As your own career developed, who inspired you?
Day: Bob Lord, Robert Lord, who was, you know, we used to call back in the day “the lord and master.”
Scarpino: To his face?
Day: No, but I do now, but he gives me, he’s such a gentle humane soul, but he still gives me the evil eye sometimes when I call him the lord and master. I mean, he was hugely influential in terms of developing me as a scholar. My first publication back in 1988 in the Journal of Management came from a paper that I originally wrote in his class. It was foundational for the dissertation I ended up doing in executive leadership. So, he was hugely influential. Another hugely influential in my early career status was a guy named Art Bedeian, Arthur Bedeian. He was a professor, very distinguished professor in the business school at LSU. And here’s how he was influential – is that, he invited me to come over to the business school – I was in psychology at LSU – invited me to come over to the business school and present a paper, and I did. He sat in the back of the room and it looked like he was grading papers the whole time, didn’t look like he was paying attention. I was a little miffed. But I did it and I went back to my office, and a couple of days later I got a phone call - this is like pre-email – so, I got a phone call...
Scarpino: There was life before email, wasn’t there?
Day: There was life before email, maybe there will be life after email, I don’t know. He called me up and said, “Hey, I was really interested in what you were talking about.” And I was like, “Yeah, sure, Art, you weren’t even paying attention.” He’s like, “I have this dataset of nurses, and I’ve been working on it and I just can’t get anything out of it. Would you be interested in collaborating with me, and looking to see...?” I’m like, “What? Sure.” It turned into, like, three publications.
Scarpino: He was trying you out.
Day: You know, looking back on it...
Scarpino: I’ve done that.
Day: Yeah, and so we did. We worked together. We put together some theories that we tested with the data that he had, we published it in good places, we’ve collaborated since then. And he’s always taken an active role, he’s always taken an active interest in my career. And up until fairly recently - he must be in his 80s now, I believe he’s still alive – he would always send me a note on my birthday. I’m like in my 60s now and I’m getting this note saying, “Hey, happy birthday youngster.” Pretty cool.
Scarpino: That’s what good people do. Arthur Bedeian, you said, e-d-i-a-n?
Day: Yeah, B-E-D-E-I-A-N, it’s Armenian.
Scarpino: Yeah. So, you mentioned Robert Lord. For the benefit of anybody who’s listening to this, could you give a quick summary of who this man is?
Day: He came out of Carnegie Mellon. He was somebody who was really more cognitive psychologist, but he was also interested in organizational applications. The only job he could get coming out of graduate school was at the University of Akron. It’s not exactly an elite graduate institution. And he thought he would be there maybe for a few years and then move on. Well, he ended up being there over 30 years. There was a group, a small group of IO people, at that time who had really built a program that became world class for a lot of different reasons. But one of those reasons was each of the faculty had kind of a different focus area of specially, and they worked very well together. Bob was one of the youngest at the time when I joined the program as a doctoral student, but he was always accessible. His door was always open. He never turned you away if you came to him with a question, especially if you came to him with a research question and wanted to talk about it. So, he was modeling this notion of openness, accessibility, curiosity, all of these things that just kind of helped me gravitate to him as someone who I wanted to work with. Part of it, you want to talk about family origins, he was so different from my father. He’s a different kind of -- he’s about ten years older than me, almost exactly ten years older than me, and so maybe more like a big brother, but I really more identify with him more as like a second father, parental, academic father figure, which he kind of is I guess.
Scarpino: His presence at University of Akron, and other colleagues there, really made that a significant place to study.
Day: Yeah, it did, around organizational IO psychology.
Scarpino: We want to get this clear in the record because somebody might not initially think of the University of Akron as the place to be, and I don’t mean that in any offensive way, but this was an important place to be and it was these faculty members who made it that way.
Day: Exactly, yeah, and it shows from where their graduates went. A lot of them went into top-tier business schools and psychology departments. A lot of them went into all kinds of different interesting consulting and industry kinds of jobs. The credo, if you would, of IO psychology is it’s a scientist-practitioner model. So, in most programs there’s usually an asymmetry. It’s usually more about developing the scientists who go out and become professors; others are more about developing the practitioners who go out and do work in industry and in consulting and other places. This was really a balanced program. When I was there, it was about 50-50 in terms of those who were interested in academic careers and those who are interested in industry careers.
Scarpino: I’m going to ask you a few more questions and then we’ll wrap up because I’m going to limit it to the two hours that we agreed tom and I didn’t start this thing right away so we’re getting close. I asked you who inspired you. Who helped you? Did you have mentors, any individuals that you didn’t mention, people who really made a difference, or maybe engaged role models?
Day: Well, I mean, clearly Art was somebody who helped me because it helped me get published. He shared his dataset with me. It set a foundation for me on my academic career that helped me get the position at Penn State, which was really a top tier, and still is a top tier IO graduate program. I think the people who helped me along the way, even though they may not have known they were helping me, some of them might have, were my senior colleagues at Penn State in the psychology department. We had some pretty well-known people there at the time, one of which was Frank Landy, who was very well-known, very eminent IO psychologist who was kind of the keystone person in the program at the time. I mean, Frank really ran the program. He was someone who was -- I mean, he had his own center, and he was a rainmaker. He could go out into any organization and, man, you’d better sit on your wallet because you’re not going to have anything in it if he has his way. And he was really good at that.
Scarpino: That’s an important quality for somebody who is a director, is to figure out where the money is and get it.
Day: And he was brilliant at doing that, which brought in a lot of projects. I mean, this was not grant money, per se. I mean some of it was, but a lot of it was project money, which involved me in terms of working on these kinds of funded projects through his center that he had founded. And that gave me insights into how that whole thing works. I won’t say that I’m anywhere near -- nobody is near as good as Frank in terms of being a rainmaker, but I learned how that process worked and what he was trying to accomplish by doing it; not just getting the money, but how did all these projects fit together in some sort of coherent and cohesive research program.
Scarpino: Do you mentor other people? Are you a mentor?
Day: I would say yeah, but I would not come up to any of them and say, “I’m your mentor.” That’s not going to work, right? No, I mean...
Scarpino: A lot of times they don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m asking you how you view yourself and your career and your professional life.
Day: You talked to two of them. Michelle is a great example. She was not my advisee at Penn State, she worked with a different faculty member.
Scarpino: Michelle Hammond.
Day: Michelle Hammond, yeah, she was Michelle Harrison at the time. She still tells me she has a lot of resentment that I left Penn State before she graduated and went to Singapore.
Scarpino: She did tell me that you left before she graduated, yes.
Day: But, I saw the potential in her which is why I invited her on the book project with Stan Halpin, who is the chief of the Leader Development Unit at the Army Research Institute in Fort Leavenworth. And that was that 2009 book about an integrative model of leader development, which has been pretty well received and, I think, influential in helping to advance the scholarship around leader development. She was a pretty untested green graduate student, but I had had her in a class and I knew she could write. I knew she was a clear thinker. And third, I needed help on this book. So, I invited her...
Scarpino: A clear-thinking good writer...
Day: Yeah, so I invited her in to collaborate. And she delivered, boom, boom, boom. We went out to ARI in Fort Leavenworth and presented out there.
Scarpino: ARI is?
Day: Army Research Institute.
Scarpino: Okay.
Day: Army Research Institute.
Scarpino: And that’s Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Day: Yeah, Fort Leavenworth, oh yeah, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Scarpino: End of the world.
Day: Whoo boy, you can’t just happen by it.
Scarpino: It’s a nice place, I’m sure.
Day: Well, you know, it’s an influential place as well.
Scarpino: Absolutely.
Day: I learned a lot about the Army doctrine around leader development and came away really impressed with everything that they do. The Army has a motto: Every day we grow leaders and train soldiers, or, maybe it’s train soldiers and grow leaders. But it’s still a very impressive mission. Anyway, I digress. Michelle is certainly someone who, and we’ve since published another article in Human Resource Management Review that has received a lot of citations, and so I helped, I mentored her in kind of an unofficial way. She was not a typical, she was not an advisee. She was not somebody who, you know, I was grading her qualifying exams or anything like that. But we built a working relationship when she was a graduate student and I was a more senior academic at that time. So, for sure, her. There’s another one who is now a post-doc with us at Kravis Leadership Institute, and this is Laura Dannhäuser. You mentioned her name, we published a paper very recently. She wins the award for tenacity in wanting to work with me, because she’s German, and I was at UWA, but I accepted the position at Claremont McKenna, and it’s an undergraduate liberal arts place, no graduate programs. She reached out to me and said, “I’m really interested in your work. I’m really interested in this whole leader development and leadership development. I really want to work with you. Is there any way that this is possible that I could come to the University of Western Australia and work with you to get my PhD?” And I was like, “No, there’s no possibility, because I’m leaving.” And, she goes, “Well, where are you going? Maybe I can apply to the graduate...” I said, “There’s no graduate program. I’m going to an undergraduate liberal arts college, there’s no graduate program, except, you know, as part of the consortium, there is this graduate university across the street called Claremont Graduate University.”
Scarpino: Did you tell her about that?
Day: I did, that’s pretty much all I told her about it. It’s like, “There’s Claremont Graduate University, it’s part of a consortium. I have the authority to supervise students who are in the doctoral programs at CGU, but that’s about the best I can offer, and I have no sway on their admissions processes or anything else.” She goes, “Fine, thank you very much.” Hung up, or signed off on her email. Next thing I know, “I’m coming to Claremont. I got admitted. Not only did I get admitted at CGU, they gave me an amazing package of incentives, you know, stipends and things to support my graduate education, and I designated you to be my advisor.” So, I became mentor de facto simply because she chased me around the world to the ends of the earth in Southern California to come and work for me. And we worked together for four years to get her through her PhD program, and then from a confluence of influences we had an opening as a post-doc, and she was invited to apply, and we hired her as a post-doc. Then continuing to mentor her as she’s developing her own independent program of research around dynamic authenticity in leadership to help launch her career, whether it’s in academia or industry. I can’t say that one was intentional.
Scarpino: But you did identify her as somebody with persistence and talent.
Day: Oh, yeah, well yeah. I didn’t know much about the talent because she had sent me -- she had had a master’s degree in HR from an unnamed university in the U.K., and she sent it to me, and it was like a qualitative study based on two participants. And I’m like, this is not my bailiwick right here, you know, so I was unsure about her talent, but her tenacity, her persistence was evident. And I’m still to this day not really sure why she wanted to work with me out of all the scholars around the world to do that, but she did, she made it happen, and we continue to work together. And she’s here, by the way, so you can see her.
Scarpino: At this conference?
Day: At this conference, yeah.
Scarpino: I’m looking to see where we are, because I didn’t start the timer right away. We’re approaching two hours.
Day: Yeah, it’s 12:15. I’m starting to feel the fade a little bit.
Scarpino: As am I, so I’m going to ask you one more question and we’ll wrap this up. I’m thinking about you telling me about your students, about Michelle Hammond and so on, do you think that a quality of successful leaders, you think about leaders putting together their teams, is the ability to pick out the shiny noses, to pick out the people who stand out, like she did, is that a talent that serves leaders well?
Day: No, I think it’s really more about being able to identify the hidden potential in people. The shiny stars get a lot of, you know, more than their fair share of the resources. And entire organizations develop the leader development programs around the so-called ‘high potentials.’ What we know from the research, they’re not very good at identifying high potentials, and I don’t claim to have any real insight into identifying high-potential people, either. But I will work with people to try to enhance their potential, some of which may be not evident immediately. In the academic realm, one of those aspects is in writing. There’s a lot of students who have, let’s just say, misconceptions about what writing really is. They think that they write it and they turn it in and it’s done, and it’s like, no. So, that’s a commitment to help shape people’s writing to get it to a professional level. Then, by the way, I never thought I’d be someone who writes papers for a living, because I hated to do it as a student.
Scarpino: I’m going to, while these recordings are still running, thank you for sitting with me this morning, and we’re going to meet again tomorrow.
Day: Yeah, 9 o’clock.
Scarpino: 9 o’clock, yeah.
Day: I’m going to a show over at Buddy Guy’s tonight, so if I’m a little droopy first thing on Sunday morning...
Scarpino: Well, when we get done, I’m getting in a car and driving five hours back to Indianapolis. So all right, let me turn these things off so we’re not just – come on, just a minute, let me make sure we’ve got it off.
Scarpino: The recorders are on so we’re live, and I will set this up much more briefly than I did last time. Today is Sunday, November 10th. This is the second oral history with David Day. There is a rather substantial biographical sketch with the first interview that we did recently. Once again, we are both at the International Leadership Association annual meeting in Chicago at the downtown Hilton. With that said, I will remind the recorder and anybody who jumps into this thing in the middle that we had begun talking about – or through some of the leadership questions that we use with everybody we interview, which up to this point is more than fifty people. The last question that I asked you was about networks, and I asked you if networks play a role in development of successful leaders, and we talked about that. What I don’t think I asked you is, do networks play a role in leadership as described in your scholarship? In other words, do you write about that?
Day: The answer is yes. Chapter 7 in my book is all about network approaches to leadership development. So, it’s kind of a perimeter on social network analysis and also, then, extrapolates out to how can this help us understand how a collective capacity for leadership develops?
Scarpino: You said ‘my book.’ Given that you are the author of multiple books, just clarify which one you are referring to.
Day: My most recent book, which was published in 2024, it’s called Developing Leaders and Leadership: Principles, Practices and Processes.
Scarpino: I’m sure when I introduced you, I mentioned the number of books that you published, but we just want to be clear about that. One of the things I always ask people when I talk to them is about literature in the field, and not like comprehensive exams or something, but can you recommend, to anybody who listens to this, a few publications that you believe would benefit individuals who want to understand leadership or maybe want to become better leaders? What are the few things off the top of your reading list?
Day: Well, one of the ones that was highly influential still, to me, is Karl Weick’s work. Karl Weick is an organizational scholar from the University of Michigan, and written a number of things around sensemaking. He has a book around sensemaking in organizations. One of his classic articles that was early 1990s was published in Administrative Science Quarterly called “A Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations,” and it was a case study of the Mann Gulch fire disaster in Montana” in 1949, I think.
Scarpino: Mann Gulch.
Day: Mann Gulch, yeah.
Scarpino: I know about that.
Day: Yeah. And it was a brilliant case study. First of all, he lays out what happens in a very compelling way to make the case. And then he analyzes it step-by-step around how this shows how a group of people can get in over their head. And even though they had a formal leader, if the formal leader doesn’t really understand what’s happening, and even if that leader does, trying to communicate it to a group of people who’ve never experienced something like a wildfire, which is what that was about, that blew up, that became monstrous in a matter of minutes, and how to deal with that was a beautiful exercise of understanding how teams can fail when they’re faced with something they’ve never experienced before even if the leader of that team has experienced something like that before.
Scarpino: And the author’s name?
Day: Karl Weick – W-E-I-C-K.
Scarpino: Your transcriber will...
Day: Karl with a K.
Scarpino: Good. Yeah, that Mann Gulch, in the interest of full disclosure, I fought fire for the Forest Service when I was a young man, so everybody who does that knows about Mann Gulch and what went wrong there.
Day: Yeah. It was written up in a beautiful book called “Young Men and Fire.”
Scarpino: I read it.
Day: By Norman Maclean, who was a professor of literature at University of Chicago. And I actually got to meet his son, John Maclean, in Colorado Springs shortly after he published a book about something very similar that happened in Colorado with a group of young people in a fire that blows up and unfortunately results in loss of life because of a collapse of sensemaking again.
Scarpino: That’s interesting. If I had to guess where you were going to go with that, I wouldn’t have done that. It just so happens that I know something about it and it’s a perfect example. Any other publications that come to mind that you would suggest that somebody have a look at?
Day: Well, there’s another one by, I can’t remember the individual’s first name, but his last name is Hutchins. And it’s a book called Cognition in the Wild. It was about a number of different things, but one of the basic premises of this book was how people make decisions in naturalistic contexts. One of the case studies he uses is the Navy and how ships, thousands of sailors on these ships, a few people in command. But how does a ship actually get into port? And what’s involved in that? And then the naturalistic decision-making processes involved in that is really, really fascinating. So, I recommend it because a lot of what we know about cognition is really from experimental psychology and micro-cognition kind of experimental research. This was one that took a focus on really how cognition happens among a group of people in naturalistic settings.
Scarpino: And by naturalistic settings you just mean the world at large?
Day: Sure, I mean, the title of his book is Cognition in the Wild. So, it’s really, how does cognition happen in real world terms?
Scarpino: Outside the lab where the variables are not all under control.
Day: Exactly right.
Scarpino: At least we hope they are.
Day: Yeah, right, I mean, that’s what the beauty of experimental research is, you have a lot of control over what kinds of effects are happening which allows you to study things very closely and many causal attributions, but it also loses in terms of the kind of generalized ability to external real-world kind of situations.
Scarpino: Is there anything that you’d put on that list, recommend to somebody?
Day: I’m sure there’s a bunch, but nothing really leaps to mind right now.
Scarpino: I’m going to ask you a related question. You’ve been doing this for a long time, a distinguished scholar of leadership, but as your career was developing and so on and so forth, were there one or two things that you read that really had an impact on you and the way you see the world? Your disciplinary world, not the flowers in the garden or whatever.
Day: Yeah, sure. Well, Karl Weick’s work is right up there, and this whole collapse of sensemaking was very instrumental in that as well. Another one, and it goes back to something my major advisor Bob Lord published back in the ‘80s, and it was really about how personality and leadership are related. For a lot of years, personality, individual human personality wasn’t given much credence because, one, there’s so many traits out there; it’s really hard to identify which traits are appropriate for which set of analyses. But, there was the advent of, one, the Big Five personality taxonomy. So, people have forwarded this notion that there are five factors that can describe human personality, maybe not in a complete fashion, but in extraordinary detail. Consciousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, neuroticism, extroversion, are those five factors. And another advent that has happened was this methodological technique called meta-analysis. I was in graduate school when meta-analysis started arriving on the scene as a way to make sense of relationships among variables across studies. A meta-analysis is a study of studies. The advantage of doing a meta-analysis is that it allows you to control for things across studies, most importantly sample size. Because sampling error in studies had really been overlooked. We kind of, as a field, thought that a study based on a hundred people had the same value as, say, a study on ten-thousand people. And we now know that’s not the case because you want studies to be as representative of the population as possible. And what meta-analysis allows you to do is to basically adjust effect sizes across studies based on the number of people in that particular study, with the thinking being the larger the sample, the more representative it is of the population.
Scarpino: It also allows you to put together, stitch together a bigger picture from all that literature that tends to look at narrow slices.
Day: Exactly. It’s a perfect example of, you know, for a long time people thought there really was no relationship between personality and leadership in terms of how people see and make sense of other leaders because the individual studies were all over. Sometimes there was an affect, sometimes there wasn’t an affect. Overall, people were like, well when you do a narrative review of all these studies you come away thinking, well, there is no consistent picture here. But that was much more of a qualitative take on all of these individual studies, and it didn’t take into account this notion of some studies are more representative of the effect than others. And meta-analysis allowed us to quantitatively review this literature, correct for sampling error issues and then come to some aggregate sense of what’s the relationship between X and Y. In this case, what’s the relationship between a person’s personality and how they see leadership – or, the personality of a leader and the effectiveness or the emergence of that person as a leader.
Scarpino: Do you ever think or hope that the work that you do will not only resonate with your scholarly peers and enhance your reputation and your standing in your university, but that it’ll have some applicability to the work of people who are leaders?
Day: Yes, certainly, because it goes back to the one of the fundamental tenants of industrial organizational psychology, which is a scientist-practitioner model. So I’ve been more big S, small P – big scientist, smaller practitioner. But, of course, what we do we hope shapes practice in some shape or form going forward. It’s certainly the case that I want people to think, especially around leader and leadership development, in different ways.
Scarpino: I think that I brought this subject up the last time we spoke but didn’t follow-up. There is a theme within some of the literature on leadership that in order to be leadership it has to do good in the world. We could talk a long time about what it means to do good, but, so, for example, people who are dictators or exploiters of their own people, you know, Idi Amin in Uganda; Augusto Pinochet in Chile; Victor Orban in Hungary, friend of our current president, or, maybe, yeah, soon to be president. Are people like these leaders the way you understand the term?
Day: It’s a great question and I get it all the time. When I do podcasts, when I do public talks, there’s always, so, “Was Hitler a great leader?” And you can cast that set of characters in...
Scarpino: I deliberately left him off the list but we can put them on there, yeah.
Day: Yeah, you could put him on there, but I get what you’re driving at. All of these authoritarian, dictatorial leaders who brought about a lot of havoc, a lot of damage, a lot of destruction in the world, were they great? Well, how do you define great? Great could be cast in moral and ethical terms; and in that case, no, I don’t think they were great leaders. Were they effective leaders? Well, they certainly had an effect on the world. And this is something that comes up with students, many of which say, “Well, what’s your purpose? What do you want to do?” “Well, I want to change the world. I want to have an impact on the world.” And then I point out and say, “Hitler changed the world. Hitler had an impact on the world. I don’t think you want to be Adolf Hitler, so, let’s be a little more specific here.”
Scarpino: Would you say that people like that, even if they’re doing despicable things, are exercising leadership?
Day: Absolutely. They rallied a body of people to support their principles, they manifested change, they were very effective at doing that, but their goals were not something that I would consider to be great.
Scarpino: Is demagoguery leadership?
Day: I think it can be a form of leadership, and it goes back to, you know, you talk about dominance, influence and dialogue, I mean, it’s very much based in dominance, and also in influence, in terms of getting people to buy into your demagoguery vision of the world or the country or whatever you’re pitching your shpiel. Could be in an organization, as well.
Scarpino: I mentioned several dictators that folks ought to recognize the names of, but does leadership happen in societies ruled by dictators?
Day: It depends on how you view leadership. Some people view leadership in very idealistic and virtuistic kind of ways, but we’ve established that there is no one definition of leadership. But something that cuts across a lot of approaches to leadership is this notion of power and influence. So, how do people use power and influence? I think people who are very effective in terms of gaining people to buy into a vision of the future, even if that vision is very self-serving, are exercising leadership. I know other authors who will say, “Well, it can’t really be leadership unless it has some virtuous, ethical component to it.” I don’t buy into that version of leadership because I think there’s a lot of examples of destructive leadership in societies, in organizations, large and small.
Scarpino: Mao Zedong, Chinese leader, dictator, father of Communist China, was astonishingly effective and astonishingly ruthless at the same time. Alright, I’m going to shift away from our standard questions and still talk to you about leadership. How do you assess the impact of leadership?
Day: Well, that’s an age-old question that has no pat answer, as you might imagine.
Scarpino: Well, that’s why I’m asking how you do it.
Day: I mean, people in corporate organizations or financial economic-driven organizations talk about return on investment for leadership development. You could talk about what’s the return on investment for leadership per se, and it’s difficult to establish because when you talk about what’s the effect of a CEO on organization performance? That’s been studied a number of times, and the answer varies depending on the author. Some would say, once you compare to the size of the organization, when you consider the industry, when you consider much more macro-institutional kind of factors, the effect of any one individual leader is pretty small. But I think there are others who say once you control for those things, once you take those things out of the equation, then an individual leader can have a demonstrable impact on the outcome of the organizations that they lead. Now it may not be a huge effect, but some people have argued that it could be as much as forty or fifty percent of the variance, or the variability, in organizational performance, depending on how you define organizational performance. And a lot of those outcomes are defined in financial terms.
Scarpino: Which would be true for a corporation or a business, but what about, say, a not-for-profit? And there are some big ones – Red Cross, maybe, comes to mind, there are plenty of others, Red Crescent.
Day: Well, what would be the relevant indicators of performance in those cases? And for a non-profit, it could be how much money are you able to bring in to fund your mission? And I think that who is the leader or who are on the leadership team can make an important difference? I’m working in a whole different area with another set of collaborators about what’s the impact of leadership in science? So, science, wow, that’s pretty vague. But the scientific process, one of the steps in that whole knowledge production chain is the dissemination of findings in journals. And we know from the literature on CEO effects that one way to study is through executive succession; looking at what happens when leaders change, and what is the relevant change in the outcomes that you are studying over time. One of the biggest confounds in the organization world is that usually leaders change when they start to muck things up, and things start going south. So, there’s a huge confound in that performance is actually dictating the change in leadership. Therefore, it’s kind of hard to understand what the true effect is because, if performance in an organization is starting to go south, starting to deteriorate, you bring in a new leader and it starts to improves, is it due to the leader? Is it just regression to the mean? Or what? So, with what we are studying are journal editors. What is the impact of a journal editor on the organizational outcomes? There are two things that make this something relevant to study. One is, journal editors have usually a defined term. It could be five years, it could be three years, it could be six years, but there’s a defined term of how long they’re going to be the CEO of their journal. They have a lot of CEO-like responsibilities. They appoint the editorial team on the journal, they publish a mission statement about how their editorial tenure is going to have an impact on whatever the field is that they’re studying, and what’s even better is we have a defined outcome of how important this particular organization is performing, and that’s through a journal impact factor. Journal impact factors are essentially how influential are the articles overall that are published during the tenure of an editor and the editorial team? That notion of impact factor is really how often other people cite articles that are published in that particular journal during that particular time. And, of course, there’s a lag time because the outgoing editor has articles that end up being published in the tenure of an incoming editor and likewise. So, controlling for all of that, it’s not a huge – we’ve found it’s not a huge effect, but there is an effect there of who is the editor, and that’s controlling for a lot of different things, like, the historical performance of the journal, the scientific reputation of the incoming editor based on their publications. Once you control for all of that, you still find a pretty robust effect of about ten percent or so of the effect of an editor on the impact factor of the journal. But one of the things that’s really fascinating is, when you start unpacking an effect size, a lot of it is driven by editors who destroy value rather than create value. When you estimate an effect, it’s not only just the good things that happen, it’s also what’s associated with the bad things that happen, like the drop in impact factor. And we find, almost more than not, that the effect size is driven by editors who come in and destroy value in their organizations demonstrated by a drop in impact factor over time.
Scarpino: Editors do, within some limits depending on the journal, have the ability to shape the literature of the field and the discourse around that literature because any journal that’s worth anything gets way more submissions than it can ever publish in anybody’s lifetime. So, the editor picks referees, reads the referee reports, makes decisions about what actually shows up in there. It’s not science. They may say it is, but, I mean, they’re making decisions on a variety of factors, not all of which are numerical variables.
Day: Yeah, the best journals accept fewer than ten percent of the submissions, and some way fewer than ten percent. And the impact of these decisions is not only on the field, but it has major implications for people’s careers as well.
Scarpino: It surely does.
Day: We’ve tried to make -- it’s unpublished, maybe it’s unpublishable, but we’ve tried to make the case that journal editors are like CEOs, and they’re running organizations, but these are organizations that are involved in the production of knowledge, and production of science knowledge. We’ve not had a lot of positive reception from, for example, people in the field of organizational strategy when we try to make that argument.
Scarpino: How do you understand the relationship between power and leadership?
Day: Cutting across a lot of definitions of leadership is this notion of power and influence. So, by virtue of being in a leadership position, you often have a lot of power over other people to make changes or to do your bidding. And I think a lot of the destructive aspects of leadership can be traced to abuses of power for personal means, whether it’s to enrich yourself, or for some other self-interested personal reason, that abuse of power is oftentimes where leadership goes awry. At a less individual level and more of a collective level, it’s really what’s the power that we have as a collective to make change in whatever domain we’re operating in. So the power is not invested any one individual there, it’s really the power of the collective to shape the environment. I mean, one of the things that I think is fundamental to that is this notion of agency, whether it’s individual agency or collective agency, to shape external factors. And that requires some sort of exercise of power. So, I think leadership and power are inherently intertwined. Some social psychologists would say, “Well, why do we call it leadership, it’s just power?” But I think leadership has more of an organizational resonance in terms of, you know, power in the name of what?
Scarpino: Power also implies, I think, that you force people to do things, they do things because they fear your power, they respect your power. But it occurred to me while you were talking, a couple of things: One is that effective leaders need to understand power, right? And, not that because you’re the CEO you have unlimited power, because people will not -- they may do what you say when you’re standing there looking at them, but what you need is, if you have an organization to run, is for people to function efficiently when you’re not standing there looking at them.
Day: Exactly. Exactly. And it’s also the case that people who are emergent leaders kind of have an epiphany when they realize, even if you’re in a leadership role and you tell people to do something, it doesn’t mean they’re going to do it. And, it’s like, “Come on, I’m the leader, I’m the CEO, I’m the boss, why aren’t you doing this?” Well, at best, we’re able to explain maybe thirty percent of the variance in outcomes related to individual or collective behavior. And it always comes back to, like, damn that free will, because people do or don’t do what you ask for a lot of reasons.
Scarpino: It’s hard to quantify free will.
Day: It’s one of those, it’s the ‘e’ at the end of the equation.
Scarpino: Do you think that one of the qualities of an effective leader is to know when it’s time to leave? And I don’t mean just when you’re doing a bad job, because then it is time to leave probably.
Day: Well, it is, and I think power is very addictive. And people hang around once their tenure as a formal leader is up because it is hard to let go of the power you had, especially in the case of organizations where you may care very much about the mission and the value and the people that are involved in an organization, but it does no one any great service if you do that. There’s always this kind of like looking over one’s shoulder from the past about what you’re doing now in the future. And there is research out there around founders of organizations who refuse to let go.
Scarpino: Henry Ford comes to mind.
Day: Yeah, the history is replete with a lot of examples of people who are so invested in the organizations that they created that they’re unwilling to trust future generations to carry on the mission without them looking over their shoulder, and that’s a very tough burden to carry.
Scarpino: Maybe one measure of the effectiveness of a leader is planning for continuity and change.
Day: Well, people talk about what’s a leader’s legacy? A legacy is really important, but it also means that you, at some point, you let go and let your legacy continue. And in large and small cases there are examples of people who still hang around and exercise voice that undermines what the current formal leader in an organization is allowed to do. And I’ve experienced that at KLI. We’ve had, we still have people on staff who are the former directors of the institute, and they’re there every day and they have their own opinions about what this institute should look like. And, so, not only are you trying to set a vision and carry forward to enact that vision, you’ve got to also convince the past that this future vision, even though they didn’t have that future vision, is where this institute needs to go.
Scarpino: Also, I mean knowing when to let go is important.
Day: Absolutely.
Scarpino: And let go means you walk away.
Day: I think, to me, that is what the ethical thing to do is.
Scarpino: You said KLI, that’s the Kravis Institute...
Day: I’m sorry, thank you.
Scarpino: That’s okay, I’m just thinking of somebody...
Day: Yeah, the Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College.
Scarpino: Okay, how do you understand the relationship between authority and leadership?
Day: Well, I think authority goes back to almost more management and formal power. One of the things that I hear from college students when I talk about leadership it’s like, “Well, leadership may be really important for me in the future, but not now because I don’t have a formal leadership position, and a formal leadership usually means you have some authority to exercise formal leadership over other people.” To me, the power of leadership, a lot of the power of leadership, resides in the informal, not the formal. So, you can look at any organizational chart and it will tell you who is in authority, who is in charge by virtue of title all the way down the list. But when you talk to people how things actually happen, that almost becomes irrelevant because the power of any organization is in the informal relationships and networks that evolve, not the formal organizational chart.
Scarpino: You can see it in a classroom, right, where eight or nine students will get together and say, let’s figure this out, let’s divide this up, we’ll get together in two days and, you know. And it works well when they figure out how to do that.
Day: You know, in any organization it’s a very easy, simple task to ask people: Are there people in your organization who are very influential who may not be in formal leadership roles? And the answer is invariably, yes, of course, I can point to this person, that person, who everybody looks to when we want to get things done. That’s leadership. So, a lot of the power of leadership resides in the informal, not the formal.
Scarpino: I asked you yesterday, I think I did, if you considered yourself to be a leader. Do you want to add anything to what you said? Given the way you’ve just explained things, I’m seeing aspects of your career that I would consider to be an exercise of leadership.
Day: Yeah, I don’t want to get into any kind of false humility or anything. I mean, I think in some areas, yes, when it comes down to working individual with emerging scholars for example about how to help them think about their careers, about what they want to do in terms of pursuing their particular research agendas and so forth. But being a professor is different than having a real job. I mean, this just happened recently, when a student who is in one of my classes approached me and said, “I want to interview you because I’m in a class where we have to interview leaders, and I see you as a leader and I want to learn more about your career and what you do, and I want to write up your perspectives on this.” And I was like, “Find somebody with a real job. Go over to the dining hall, talk to the supervisor over there. Ask them what they do. They have to put three meals a day in front of you all every day of the week during a semester, that’s a massive task.” And he kind of looked at me and he was like, “You’re right.” And he did, he went over and interviewed whoever the director of the dining hall operations were, and he said, “It was fascinating...” about how this person thought about leadership, the challenges of associating with a lot of leadership, and just the mission that they are charged with about providing three hot, quality meals a day to the student body of thirteen-hundred individuals plus staff and faculty.
Scarpino: As long as they put those meals out, the leadership and the work is sort of invisible.
Day: It is. He never thought about that. He just, you know, he goes to the dining hall every day, how did this happen? Well, it’s just there, this is water. Of course, there’s going to be food. Sometimes I can (inaudible) about how good the food is, but it’s there, and there are plenty of options, and I get to make choices around those options. But how does that all happen? Who decides what these options are? How do you source the ingredients that go into what are served in these different meals? And, to me, that was a huge win because I think he got a lot more insight into how leadership happens than if he had interviewed me.
Scarpino: And you got him to look at something that up until that point was nearly invisible in his life.
Day: Exactly.
Scarpino: As long as the food was there when he was hungry.
Day: Right. Exactly. There is a wonderful commencement speech by David Foster Wallace, who was a renowned writer, and he was a writer in residence at Pomona College, at one of our sister colleges, for a number of years. The theme of his talk was, ‘this is water,’ which is you’re a fish, you’re in water, and an older fish comes along and says, “How’s the water today, boys?” And the fish look at each other, the younger fish is like, “What’s water?” And it kind of illustrates the point that where is leadership? It’s like, this is water, it’s everywhere, you just have to pay closer attention to the water.
Scarpino: It’s really interesting as you talk to think about how the field of leadership studies has evolved. If we just start with James MacGregor Burns, which was a very qualitative look, I mean, I knew the man, he wasn’t my buddy but I interviewed him and read his book and love it, it’s very elegantly written, but, most of the literature in the field today is nothing like that. It’s much more quantitative and, you know...
Day: For good or bad, it’s the role of science, and we’re trying to find truths out there. And we have a lot more powerful tools at our disposal thanks to computing power and what goes along with that in terms of developing analytic approaches in a more quantitative fashion to help measure and associate things through different quantitative approaches. But it’s now coming full circle in terms of integrating the qualitative with the quantitative. I say this because we’re interviewing somebody for a position at CMC – Claremont McKenna College – in the psychology department for a quantitative psychology position. What this woman does is use text analysis in large language models to integrate with structural equation modeling. So, the texts are used to create latent variables in a quantitative way to study in these kinds of models that we’ve only been to deploy if we have some sort of numbers to start with. But, what is the what is the lingua-franca of everything that we do? It’s our language. And I don’t have the answer to this because I haven’t seen the job doc yet, but she’s doing her dissertation around taking texts and words and creating quantitative latent variables from that to study in structural equation models, which are basically path analytic models with latent constructs to understand how things relate to each other in a multi-variant sense.
Scarpino: As you’ve been talking, something kind of popped into my head. We’re both older than 30...
Day: Oh, yeah...
Scarpino: So, we both lived through a massive change in the work tools and the work environment in which professors and scholars function. And that is, number one, first of all, the advent of computers. My master’s thesis was done on punch cards.
Day: My first computer analyses were done with punch cards. Don’t drop the tray. Don’t drop the tray.
Scarpino: Yes. Or the reader printer chews one of them up and you’re being cursed out by thirty different languages from the people in line behind you. But all of us now have at our disposal, in my case over here, more computing power than probably was involved in sending the first rockets to the moon. How do you think that that has changed leadership?
Day: Well, it’s changed science in ways that...
Scarpino: It certainly has, and the humanities and life in general.
Day: Yeah, yeah. You know, the computing power is, it’s underestimated how that’s affected science, how that’s affected leadership. I think we now know things that in the past had been kind of discounted because the way that we were able to analyze them was so primitive that we couldn’t come to any kind of consensus or overarching understanding because the results were so variable. But now we can control for things. We can do things like meta-analyses that look at effect sizes across studies and control for various kinds of between-study effects or errors that allow us to come to some clearer understanding of what the true effect size is between people. Here’s another one where I think computing power has really changed what we know about things like development and leadership development. There was a paper published back in the ‘70s by a Lee Cronbach, who was an amazing psychometrician.
Scarpino: Cronbach...
Day: Cronbach, yeah. Students hear Cronbach because there’s Cronbach’s alpha. He was the one who invented this whole thing of internal reliability of instruments and how to estimate that. But he published a paper in Psychological Bulletin that said, how can we measure change, or should we? And his point was, there were so many biases in studying change over time that are associated, for example, with autocorrelation of variables over time, which was a big one, that it was really impossible to get an accurate understanding of how things change over time, and maybe we should reframe our questions differently because we don’t have the tools to basically get an accurate or true understanding of change. But what’s changed in that is how we now can model and estimate different change factors or models that control for a lot of the biases that Lee Cronbach talked about back in the 1970s. So, you think it’s what, fifty, sixty years ago; in the scale of human development, it's the blink of an eye. But we now have a lot of tools at our disposal thanks to all the advances in computing power that allow us to accurately estimate change models in very sophisticated ways. And yet there’s still a lot that we can do going forward that we haven’t even thought about in terms of the change models.
Scarpino: Leaders in the present function in an environment where change is constant and it accelerates. So, how do we, how do you train people to enter that kind of environment? Classrooms are controlled more or less, but...
Day: One of the things that I’m fond of quoting to students who talk about the future of work, the future of leadership, and they’re kind of sick of me reiterating this quote, but I think it’s important. It comes from Peter Drucker, who was kind of a management guru. He actually spent the last years of his career at Claremont Graduate University across the street from Claremont McKenna College, and he had said, “The only thing we know about the future, it’s going to be different.” There’s a session here, the last session is around the next 25 years of leadership, and I’m like, I don’t think you can really predict what the next 25 years are going to bring. How do you prepare people to deal with that? I would think it goes back to this issue of development rather than training. It goes back to being in a vujà de world, rather than a déjà vu world. You have to prepare people to learn their way out of the kinds of completely novel, unanticipated, unexpected things that they’re going to experience that they’ve never experienced before. So, it’s not about applying what you’ve learned in a training modality; it’s really about how do you bring your cognitive and emotional and other powers to bear with other people to learn your way out of things that have never been experienced before.
Scarpino: Part of being effective, then, is possessing the ability to deal with and make sense of and engage with unanticipated, unexpected, which happens all the time and we can’t control it and it doesn’t matter how many variables we have, it’s going to happen.
Day: Yeah. I think right there you’ve articulated why leader and leadership development are important, preparing people to deal with the unforeseen, the unexpected, the novel, the terrifying things that happen in the world that others have called kind of these black swan events, right? Everybody used to think all the swans were white until some bloke went to Australia and like, “Oh, my God, there are black swans!” So, what are the black swan events in our future, and we don’t know what these black swan events are going to be. How do we deal with them? You can’t train people to deal with black swan events, you have to take a different approach. And that’s, I think, the reason for development rather than training.
Scarpino: I asked you, as your career developed, who inspired you, but are there people that you look up to? I mean, they could be other scholars, but I’m assuming in a way that influenced you positively.
Day: Yeah, I think there are a lot of people in a lot of different domains who I look up to. I’ll pick one who is probably unexpected, and it kind of goes to something you talked about earlier around non-profits. You talked about people who are engaged in different initiatives that may not be on the radar of many people. And somebody who comes to mind is a woman named Wendy Lesser. Wendy Lessor is a professor of English at Cal Berkeley. She’s the editor of a journal called The Threepenny Review. It’s a non-profit periodical that publishes essays, fiction, poetry, but it’s basically an operation of the heart for her to run this journal. I call it a journal, but it’s really more of a periodical in the arts and humanities based on her passion around literature and reading. I admire her, and I am a patron, a longstanding donor. I enjoy correspondence with her. I’ve never met her, but it’s this organization that is non-profit. It’s a non-profit organization that allows the arts to continue. So, people will look at The New Yorker, they’ll look at other kinds of magazines and these are huge major operations with a lot of staff, but The Threepenny Review is something that brings a lot of joy to my life. I look forward to getting an issue every three months in a quarterly publication that has so many interesting perspectives reflected.
Scarpino: Is this something that you just stumbled across at one point? It doesn’t sound like something that was just sort of hanging out in one of your classrooms.
Day: It goes back to Mom, right? Mom was always, like, read, read everything, you know? Don’t just read things that you think you’re going to like. Don’t just read things that other people are reading. Find things and read them and decide for yourself what it means, if anything. So, it just happened, I don’t know when was the first time I picked up an issue of that periodical? I really can’t remember. But it's a broad sheet; it comes in kind of like a newspaper, you can fold it out. It’s really well laid out. There’s a lot of very interesting things presented in there. There’s the pros, that is really expository pros, I mean, I learn a lot about writing by reading what these professional writers put together. I stumbled across it in some form, in some shape, maybe I picked one up at a bookstore one time, I think, and read it, and I’m like, “This is a pretty cool little publication that a lot of people don’t know about.” And, over time it continued, and then I became a subscriber. And then I fortunately have matured into a level of my career where I can afford to send her a thousand bucks a year to help fund her operation. And to me it’s like, okay, I could send it to Red Cross. I could send it to a lot of places, but that thousand bucks I send her every year I know makes a difference because she tells me it makes a difference.
Scarpino: We’ve been talking about reading and things that people should read or could read. That leads me to one of the questions that we always ask about leadership, and I’m glad you kind of set it up: You think it’s important that leaders read?
Day: Absolutely. I think one of the things that leaders need to be is curious; you know, curious about how the world works, curious about cause and effect in different things, curious about other people’s perspectives. How do you get that if you don’t read is beyond me. And I won’t talk about any leaders, past, present or future, who clearly do not read, but I think this lack of curiosity about the world is reflected in the fact that they don’t read. You know, you can choose to read things that only support what you believe in, much like you could turn on the television and only watch certain shows that reinforce what you already believe in, but reading, I think, opens the world in so many different facets than television or the digital media can do. So, yeah, absolutely, leaders should read. It’s also the case that I think leaders should write as well. They should communicate, and the communication is not just a verbal communication, but one way to stay in touch with the people around you is to disseminate written communication, which is, I think, why a liberal arts education is also so valuable. Our students learn to write. When I was in big public universities, students would go out of their way to avoid classes that involved any kind of writing. You put yourself in a liberal arts college, you’re going to write, baby.
Scarpino: I’m retired now, but even at the entry freshman level history classes, they took written exams and did written papers, and a lot of grousing about it.
Day: Absolutely. And what’s a challenge going forward is now these large language models in artificial intelligence like ChatGPT where students can put in a prompt and all this text comes out. I tell them, you can take a shortcut like that, it’s not going to serve you well at the long run because the process of developing writing skills is going to be instrumental to your success, not just because of the product, but because of the reflection that goes into good writing as well.
Scarpino: Were there people who helped you along the way? Did you have mentors?
Day: Yeah, I mean, nobody does it alone. I talked about Bob Lord, I talked about Art Bedeian. There are a lot of people who have helped me understand leadership, for example, in ways that I had not appreciated. Another one who I would – he would laugh if I say he was a mentor, but is John Antonakis. He was a colleague. He’s younger than me. He likes to kid that I’m his adopted big brother. But I learned a lot from him because he is much more quantitatively sophisticated than I am. I like to kid him that he really should’ve become an economist because that’s how he thinks. But thinking like an economist and thinking about things like instrumental variables, thinking about things like endogeneity which is a term I had never heard of before…
Scarpino: I don’t know what that is, either, so I’m going to ask you.
Day: Endogeneity is basically what are external factors that affect the models you’re trying to estimate and how do you account for that? I mean, it’s huge in the world of economics and econometrics, but it’s not something that’s very popular or very standard in terms of psychology. And what he helped me understand is how many of the models and the empirical studies that are published in psychology are subject to endogeneity biases. So, we’re trying to get a truth as a scientist. Getting a truth means trying to rule out all of these unanticipated or extraneous kinds of biases that affect our understanding of truth quantitatively.
Scarpino: Is there anything that we do that isn’t affected by endogeneity?
Day: Well, we can try to control endogeneity effects, endogenous effects. And this is, again, something quantitatively that economists and econometrics can help us better do. He has brought a lot of that into, not just psychology, but into the leadership literature. Pissed off a lot of people because it basically pointed out that what they were doing was crap, because it’s harder to control for these endogenous effects, but there are ways of doing that. You may not always be able to do it, but understanding the sources of those confounds is really important.
SCARPINO Remind, just for the recording, who he is.
Day: John Antonakis is a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
Scarpino: Yeah, and he was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Day: That’s right, I forgot about that. He was also the editor of The Leadership Quarterly. I worked under his editorship as the associate editor for the yearly review that’s published in The Leadership Quarterly.
Scarpino: We’ll let the record show that he’s hydrating. All right, so, we talked about mentors and so on and so forth. Networks.
Day: Yeah.
Scarpino: Do networks play a role in the development of successful leaders?
Day: Absolutely.
Scarpino: Can you talk about that?
Day: Sure, I mean understanding networks is that we’re all embedded in networks. I think one of the major advances in science is helping to quantify that through different approaches in the broader field of social network analysis. And one of the things to clarify, when we talk about social networks, we’re not talking about networking, which is the events that introverts like me always hate. We’re going to a networking event... Oh, God, why? Again? This is really more about understanding the set of relationships that we’re all embedded in. Some of the power that’s come out of social networks and social network analysis is actually from sociology, not psychology. But it has shown to influence not only a lot about how we think, but it can shape things like our body size. They have quantitative data to show this over time. If you are in a network where a lot of people are overweight, you’re going more likely to be overweight yourself than if you’re in a network with a lot of people who are not overweight. How does that happen? Well, the explanation is it kind of sets a norm of what you think is normal; and that setpoint is something that is not necessarily imposed from above, it’s really imposed by ‘around’ and the people that you interact with on a daily basis. And that goes to drinking, it goes to eating, it goes to a lot of different things about what you consider to be normal is who you hang out with. So, again, Mom was right: Be careful what friends you choose because they’re going to influence you in a lot of ways, right?
Scarpino: My mother did say that in fact.
Day: My mother did, too. Networks are hugely important. Not only can we estimate that quantitatively, one of the advantages of social network analysis is that we can create pictures of this through sociograms. And we could actually see who is connected to who in some space, a bounded space where we say, okay, this the network that we’re interested in studying, what does it look like? And then we can actually get quantitative estimates of what those links mean in an aggregate or an individual sense. It’s a hugely powerful tool, and I think it will continue -- it started to shape a little bit about how we think about leadership. I think it has huge implications for leadership development. I have a whole chapter in my book published in 2024 called Developing Leaders and Leadership: Principles, Practices, and Processes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024 - a whole chapter about network approaches to leadership development.
Scarpino: I’m going to follow up on your last statement about your most recent book. Do networks play a role in leadership as described in your scholarship?
Day: Yeah, it does. I have been doing social network analysis. I’ve not published anything as yet that uses social network analysis tools. Part of it is because really, you know, access is always difficult in organizations. I did a project last summer with a large power company in Canada, but they wouldn’t allow me to publish what I found. They were more interested in, I mean, for a lot of... and this is the problem...
Scarpino: They were your client, and you were doing work for them.
Day: They’re a client, yeah, yeah, I was in a consulting gig, and one of the things that, you know, part of the negotiation, can I use the data that I collect in any kind of research publication? And they were like, “Oh, no,” because what I was looking at was the forty directors in this large power company who were one level below the executive team, which was a very small team of seven; the CEO, the COO and that group. But these directors are very powerful in their own right. They all have large teams underneath them. And the issue of interest was to what degree do they share resources among themselves. The resources were in the form of information, communication, expertise. It was a fascinating study, but I couldn’t publish it.
Scarpino: It must, though, have affected the way you understand leadership, and I assume that you’re not prohibited from talking about this in class.
Day: No, no, no, no. I can talk about... I can definitely talk about it. I’m being coy about identifying the organization.
Scarpino: I mean, the datasets were proprietary I assume, which is the problem.
Day: What they don’t want to see is, one, the data from their directors being published in a scientific journal where there may be some way of inferring what this organization was and then who the people were who were part of this study.
Scarpino: They’re a power company, so that’s their business.
Day: That’s the power...
Scarpino: Manufacture, transmission and sale?
Day: It’s a provincial power company in one of the provinces in Canada, so it’s really a public utility is what it is – and facing a lot of challenges about how do you move from traditional sources of power generation to the next generation of power generation, and what that means, and how do we go from the traditional to the future? It’s a really interesting mission that’s involved. One of the things is, what’s the world of nuclear in all of that? You and I are both of the age when we remember the concerts about no nukes, and remember things like...
Scarpino: Or Three Mile Island...
Day: Three Mile Island. I was in central Pennsylvania, and Harrisburg was right down the road, yeah. So, all of that kind of made the nuclear power industry collapse for a lot of good reasons at that time. Is now the time where we should be thinking about reintroducing nuclear power based on what we’ve learned about how to generate nuclear power, how to handle nuclear waste in ways that are more ethical and safer? There was an article in the organizational sciences, I think it was by Lesley Perreaux, is his name, around safety in the nuclear power industry. The takeaway from the article is that the engineers who were involved in nuclear power just looked at it as another way to boil water.
SCARINO: Right. And that’s what power plants do, they boil water.
Day: Yeah, but obviously there’s a lot of other things going on when you’re creating those kinds of reactions and handling the outcomes of those reactions in terms of the waste in a safe and ethical way. So, how did we get to nuclear power? I don’t know.
Scarpino: Well, we were talking about leadership and consequences and so on, and I was talking to you about networks and if networks play a role in your scholarship.
Day: Well, sure, I mean, one of the things that has changed in my lifetime in a big way is just the way that we collaborate. It used to be you had to be co-located to collaborate. If you wanted to collaborate with somebody who was not in your institution, you had to pick up the phone and call them. Not only was that not a very rich media, it was also an expensive media.
Scarpino: We used to have long distance charges, right?
Day: Exactly, remember those days?
Scarpino: I do, yes.
Day: You’d always get a tsk-tsk from your department chairs, like, “Look at your long-distance bill, what are you doing?” It’s like, “I’m trying to build collaborations here, right?” The advent of email changed things in a big way. And, then, remember the days when it was like, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to have a phone call where you can see the other person?”
Scarpino: Then we got Zoom.
Day: We got Zoom, we got Teams, we got all kinds of this rich media. And now I’m able to, and I have conversations at least once a month with colleagues that I’m working with in Tasmania of all places, you know. Tasmania – what’s in Tasmania? Well, it’s actually one of the states in Australia, but it’s an island off the coast of Australia south of Melbourne. Otherwise, these kinds of collaborations would be impossible.
Scarpino: Right.
Day: We used to have conferences as a way to facilitate these kinds of collaborations. And they still work that way because it’s always nice to be co-located with people and hash out ideas in person, but the world has changed and a lot of what we do and the networks that we’re embedded in now are way more global than they ever were before. From the side of science and knowledge production, that’s been a huge improvement over what was done historically.
Scarpino: We all recently went through the public health crisis associated with Covid, and it was that technology that made it possible to teach and collaborate. I virtually attended a conference in South Africa and gave a paper.
Day: Yeah, it was far from ideal, but the pivot to virtual classrooms was relatively seamless. It wasn’t perfect, and there was a lot of learning involved, but I did learn a lot as a professor and instructor that I still carry forward in my classes at CMC, Claremont McKenna College, now, one of which was one of the features of Zoom, which is what we use, was this thing called Breakout Rooms.
Scarpino: Yes.
Day: So, you have a class, okay, we have a class maybe of twenty students. And, it’s really damn boring for me to just talk to them over a computer for an hour and a half. But if I talk to them for maybe fifteen minutes and say, “Here’s something I want you all to discuss among yourselves” – and I have really great students so I can trust that they’re doing this – “I’m going to put you in Breakout Rooms. Discuss, come back, report back. And you’ve got fifteen minutes to do that.” And one of my rules is, I don’t just pop into these different rooms because I trust our students are really doing the work. I think popping in is really intrusive and disruptive to the conversation, so I don’t do it. But I use that now in classes, which is, “Okay we’ve talked about these ideas. I want you to talk amongst yourselves so you can go out on the patio here, you can go into this other room. We’ll have fifteen minutes, come back, report back.” It’s been amazingly effective, I think, in enhancing learning.
Scarpino: Yeah, I do that. It’s a lovely tool. You did mention your forthcoming book Developing Leaders and Leadership: Principles, Practices...
Day: It is not forthcoming, it’s published.
Scarpino: All right.
Day: Yes.
Scarpino: The publication is this year?
Day: 2024, yes.
Scarpino: People can read the book.
Day: People can read the book.
Scarpino: But, with that said, what are key principles that apply to both leaders and leadership... it’s called “Principles, Practices and Processes,” so...
Day: Yeah, I mean, the book starts with something that was established in the Kravis Leadership Institute at the college that I had impact on developing, which were first principles of leader and leadership development. First principles and first principle thinking has been around in philosophy, for example, for not just decades but centuries, going back to some of the ancients who talked about what are some of the first principles on which any system resides. What are the basic assumptions or beliefs? The first first principle is that you cannot make anyone develop as a leader; they have to own their development. This is why we don’t send people to mandatory leadership development workshops or training or whatever. I think it’s a monumental waste of time and resources. So, people have to own their development, which means that they want to become better leaders. So, you have to own your development. The students who are in the Kravis Leadership Institute are there because that’s what they want to do. They want to learn more about leadership by doing either research or being involved in our institutional efforts, and are there to develop themselves and support others on their developmental journey. So, that’s the first principle. The second principle is that developing yourself as a leader takes dedicated work over a long period of time. There are these principles that I think are foundational to any system that’s involved in developing leaders and leadership. And that’s kind of the foundational setup of this book in terms of what are principles, practices and processes that are involved in development? It’s all grounded in the principles because I think a lot of what passes as leader or leadership development is basically unprincipled. It’s basically what will the market bear? What will people buy? And I think a lot of what’s out there to this day in the leadership development industry is ninety – for every dollar that’s spent, more than 90 cents of that is marketing, and relatively few pennies are actually related to the science and the underpinning in empirical evidence of what’s being offered.
Scarpino: I’m going to talk a little bit about your career trajectory, and then I’ve got a little bit of wrap-up here, so, we’re closing in on being done. You have a PhD in industrial organizational psychology from the University of Akron, which we talked about. You began your academic career in 1988. You were at Louisiana State from ’88 to ’91, Pennsylvania State from 1991 to 2006 where you advanced in the ranks from assistant to associate to full professor. And then you spent ’98-’99 as a visiting research scientist, you were on sabbatical at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. We can talk about this if we have time, but I’m interested in 2006 when your career started to move in an international direction. And, you were Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University; and I’m saying to the transcriber, spell it the way it’s here because this is British spelling. And then from 2008 to 2016 you were the Winthrop Professor and Woodside Chair in Leadership and Management, University of Western Australia Business School located in Perth. That’s a long time to be anywhere. Then, 2017, you returned to the U.S. at Claremont McKenna. So, why did you decide to accept a position as Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business in Singapore Management University where you were for two years?
Day: Sometimes I wonder. Well, there is an answer to that. I mean, I had just turned 50. I had been at Penn State for fifteen years. At 20 years, they give you a rocking chair, and I wasn’t quite ready to accept that gift. I had...
Scarpino: Mandatory retirement?
Day: No, not mandatory, it’s just kind of acknowledgement of your long service to the university. It’s an interesting choice of it being a rocking chair. Yeah, so, there were two things. It’s also the case that I had started to travel more internationally. Being a professor in psychology is not exactly the most lucrative of occupations, especially when you have a young family and you’ve got to pay for education and all these other things. I didn’t have a passport until I was 40. I grew up in the era when you could go to Mexico without a passport, you could go to Canada without a passport, you could go to the Caribbean without a passport.
Scarpino: You used to be able to get into Canada with your driver’s license.
Day: I know, yeah, exactly. I didn’t have a passport till I was 40. I then started to see more of the world and it kind of opened my eyes. It’s like, what would it be like to live outside of the U.S.? I was very much more nationalistic, I guess, then and thought proud to be an American, I don’t want to live anywhere else but America. But then, experience starts to change how you see the world. So, with this one thing, and I saw a lot of my colleagues who were really entrenched in their particular position in the university. I mean, to be a tenured full professor means, basically, nobody can mess with you. And a lot of people just kind of settle in to that. And I remember something my dad had told me a long time ago is that the only difference between a rut and a grave is its depth.
Scarpino: That’s a good one.
Day: It’s like I get it, I get it. So, an opportunity availed itself. International colleagues who are in industrial organizational psychology had moved to essentially what was a startup university in Singapore, which was this university called Singapore Management University, which is considered to be a private university funded by the Singapore government which only makes sense in Singapore, by the way, but it was a smaller -- I mean, how often do you get a chance to be part of a startup university?
Scarpino: Right. So that was part of the attraction, not just living in Singapore.
Day: Yeah, yeah, and in such a vibrant location in Southeast Asia, that was another attractor to me. It’s like it’s the gateway to Asia in Singapore. And a lot of things were emerging in the literature about China is going to be the next -- we all need to know more about China. We all need to know more about Southeast Asia because they’re going to be influencing the world in a lot of ways, including leadership and work.
Scarpino: And they teach in English, right?
Day: Yeah.
Scarpino: I have a friend who teaches in Singapore, she’s in my field, and the language is English. She’s Chinese but she teaches in English.
Day: Yeah. Most of the residents, most of the Singaporeans are bilingual, so they speak Mandarin and they speak English, and the joke among Singaporeans is, and we speak both of those languages poorly, which leads to something called ‘Singlish,’ which is English with a Mandarin kind of grammar, so all the words are all mixed up. But yeah, the primary language in Singapore is English. And that was kind of funny when I was moving there when people were asking like, “So, do you speak Singaporean?” I don’t know what that is, there is no Singaporean. And people would forward my mail to Singapore, Japan.
Scarpino: Oh, no.
Day: So, it was kind of funny in a not funny ha-ha way how people don’t really have this kind of global understanding of what the world is.
Scarpino: I want to talk to you for a minute about Western Australia, but, having spent a number of years outside the country teaching and I assume traveling and learning and engaging and so on, how does that influence your understanding of your own country when you turn around and look back? Or come back? Or think about…?
Day: When I came back after being an expat for ten years between Singapore and Australia, coming back to the States, I came back to Southern California where I had never lived before, and it was much more of a culture shock than I thought it would ever be having never lived in Southern California. And that’s the thing about a country like the U.S., is there an overarching culture? Maybe, but there’s a lot more dominant microcultures regionally than I understand before I left. And coming back to the U.S., it was another one of these I’m not in Kansas anymore, or I’m not in Ohio anymore. I’m in, not only California, I’m in, God forbid, Los Angeles. And that’s a whole other ball of wax right there.
Scarpino: From 2008 to 2016, you were the Winthrop Professor and Woodside Chair in Leadership and Management, University of Western Australia Business School located in Perth. Now I’m going to ask you a geographical question for the benefit of anybody who hasn’t studied geography, just tell us where Perth is, but mostly, what were you doing, what were you doing here and in that position?
Day: Perth is on the West Coast of Australia. Something that’s really interesting that people don’t realize is, one, Australia is the same geographical land-mass size as the U.S.
Scarpino: It’s huge.
Day: It’s huge, right? And where most people will think about Australia being Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, east coast, right? Perth is actually closer to Singapore than it is to Melbourne because of that land mass that you have to travel across.
Scarpino: Semi-tropical climate?
Day: I’m sorry?
Scarpino: Semi-tropical climate?
Day: Yeah, I mean, it’s very similar to Southern California kind of climate. And it’s right there on the Indian Ocean. In very many ways, it’s kind of like the beach café culture of Southern California in the ‘50s and ‘60s, which would say that they’re kind of like late bloomers. But it’s a lovely lifestyle. It’s a lovely place to be. It’s just far from everywhere.
Scarpino: What were you teaching or doing there for a long time?
Day: Well, one of the other things in academia that’s a plum position and a prize is to have a named chair in anything.
Scarpino: Right.
Day: So, I was going from being a professor to being a named chair, which is the Woodside Chair in Leadership and Management. Woodside is a major energy company based in Perth.
Scarpino: So, the money for that chair came from that...
Day: The money from the chair came from this organization called Woodside, and they were in petroleum and natural gas primarily. The CEO at the time was American. Woodside had never endowed anything like that. Woodside was never really involved in the educational community very much at all. And that it was pretty much the case in Australia, that there was not a lot of that kind of organizational, or even individual, philanthropy in education. So, this was the inaugural Woodside Chair position, and I had always wanted to lived in Australia. I mean, going back to when I was in state college, I would wear this big Ozzy duster, and the Crocodile Dundee hat around in the winter.
Scarpino: There’s somebody I haven’t thought about for a while, Crocodile Dundee.
Day: Yeah, so, I had always been kind of like intrigued by this concept of Australia. And here someone had reached out to me at a conference in South Australia and said, “We have this chair and we really think you would be the perfect person, would you consider it? Because I know you’ve only been in Singapore a couple of years.” And I was like, “Well, let’s talk.” And the dean at that time was amazing. I learned a lot about an amazing dean doesn’t have to be from academia, because she was from the consulting world. She was Western Australian, went to that university, but got her MBA at Stanford and had worked for Bain Consulting for a lot of years, was on the board of the UWA Business School. And then when that dean stepped down, the board asked her if she would consider it, and she took it on. Pissed off a lot of people because she’s not academia. But, man, she got research. Man, she knew how to generate funds.
Scarpino: That’s what you need.
Day: Exactly, she was an amazing dean – ‘amayzing dayn,’ Aussie speak. And that generated the position, that generated the interest in me. I said, “Well, let’s talk.” We first met in Singapore. She flew over with her associate dean to meet in Singapore just to kind of see if what she heard about me was right. They liked what they saw and they heard, and they brought me over. We were just treated like royalty. And it all happened. Let me tell you what’s interesting about the Australian system and how things can happen. When I got the letter of offer, everything was in order but there was nothing about tenure.
Scarpino: That’s kind of odd.
Day: That’s kind of a big deal for Americans, right? Learned it’s less of a big deal for Australians because they have many more rights to their jobs than we do, but tenure is still something that’s part of their system. They were working through a recruiting firm to identify somebody for this position. So, I was talking directly with the recruiter, not with the dean, and I said, “I’m looking at this offer sheet and it all looks great, but there’s nothing here about tenure, and I’m not going to go into a system without a tenured appointment for a lot of reasons.” And he goes, “Let me get back to you.” Within 24 hours, he came back with a new offer that had tenure in it. I didn’t have to go through any kind of internal processes or review, it was just like an executive decision and with tenure. So, all the planets aligned, and went to Perth, was there almost nine years. It was a great run.
Scarpino: Generally, what were you doing there?
Day: I was in the business school. One of the major changes from going from Penn State to Singapore was going from a college of liberal arts and psychology into a business school. So, teaching at Singapore was all undergraduate students. When I went to Perth, it was in the business school. It was teaching only MBA students, so not teaching undergraduate students. And it was such a great gig. I taught one class a year.
Scarpino: The rest of your time was for research or do what you will.
Day: Yeah.
Scarpino: Publish, I assume...
Day: Yeah, well, it was considered to be a research position. And what the dean wanted was to raise the research profile, the international research profile of the business school. So, this was kind of rocking the boat from a lot of the long-term Australians who were in the business school who published mainly in Australian journals, which were not really receiving a lot of international attention, and this dean wanted to put UWA Business School on the map internationally.
Scarpino: And you did that.
Day: I helped to do that.
Scarpino: No, I mean, I’ve read your stuff, I’m sure you didn’t do it alone, but you certainly did that.
Day: I helped to do that, and that was really my primary mission.
Scarpino: What did you take away from that experience at the University of Western Australia that influenced the rest of your career, which we’re now in 2024? Were there some takeaways other than you enjoyed the work?
Day: That’s an interesting question. I hadn’t really reflected on that, you know, what am I taking away from this whole experience.
Scarpino: When Claremont McKenna hired you, they thought they were getting something, and part of what they were getting...
Day: And then the whole person shows up.
Scarpino: No, I mean, part of what they were getting was all these years of experience in Australia. I mean, you were publishing and doing the things that you needed to do, but you brought a perspective to Claremont McKenna that was from outside the U.S.
Day: True, that is true.
Scarpino: You had a better understanding of the world than most of their students do.
Day: Well, yes and no. I mean, we have a good number of international students, and I continue to learn from them. Our students come from pretty privileged backgrounds, so they’ve done a lot of international travel. I had one, when we talk about things that really frighten you and are obstacles to your development, he talked about helicopter skiing and how afraid he was to get in, not the skiing down the mountain, it was getting in the helicopter to go to the top of the mountain. And it’s like, well, these are white people problems, aren’t they?
Scarpino: My helicopter problem was guns.
Day: What did I learn from that? Really, I think I learned a lot about cultural differences. One of the things in Australia was just we talked about low power distance. You don’t want to be seen as somebody who is full of themselves. That’s the worst thing you can be in Australia. How do you be a mate? I mean, they talk to you, “How you going, mate?” You know, it’s not, “How you doing, buddy?” It’s like, “How you going, mate?” And it’s really this notion of, no matter how you are positioned in an organization, at what level, you want to be a mate. You want to be one of the blokes. There’s a little bit of misogyny in all of that as well, and a lot of what passes for diversity initiatives in Australia when I was there was still trying to bring about more gender diversity.
Scarpino: I was going to say, so, if you’re a female colleague you’re not going to be one of the blokes ever.
Day: No, but you could still be a mate.
Scarpino: Okay, that’s true, yes.
Day: There was all that. And there were some things that emerged in the classroom where I was teaching MBA students and a number of them were parttime MBA, so they’re in organizations. They would bring language into the classroom like, “Well, I’m wondering how the girls think about this.” And, my first reaction was, hmmm, I don’t whether to bring this up or not, but I decided to take a stand and say, “It’s interesting your choice of words that talk about your colleagues, and you talk about your classmates as girls.” He goes, “Yeah, but I call them girls; we’re the boys, they’re the girls.” And so I looked to some of the women and said, “How do you feel about that?” They didn’t like it at all. And this was a major epiphany for this individual that he had been using this language that unintentionally had been perceived as derogatory to, not just his classmates, to his colleagues at work. But that was part of the culture in Australia, was to talk about the boys and the girls, and to be very casual and unintentionally putting people into categories that they didn’t feel comfortable being in, which is way more of an American position and way more now from what I know of a Southern California kind of thing. We all have now on our profiles have to use pronouns.
Scarpino: I refuse to do that, sorry.
Day: I know, I don’t do it either, but all of our students do it. A lot of the faculty do it. I was talking to somebody who teaches at West Virginia University, and she is someone who collaborates with one of my colleagues at Claremont. My colleague was talking about people on their team who identify as ‘they/them’ or not as ‘he’ or ‘she,’ and this woman scholar from West Virginia says, “I don’t know any they/thems.” And I think that kind of illustrates the insularity of Southern California as well.
Scarpino: One of the things that you did, that you brought to that experience, was an American perspective on leaders and leadership.
Day: Yeah.
Scarpino: And developing Australian university contexts. I’m going to be fair to you and to us and to the guy who wants to get in here and set up the room, and I’m going to ask you two final questions.
Day: Yeah.
Scarpino: And that means I’m going to skip a few things, but that’s okay, we’ve had a very fulsome, well, we’re closing in on an hour and 45 minutes; we actually went over two hours yesterday because I didn’t start this thing on time. So, two questions I always end with, and one is: Is there anything that you wanted to say that I didn’t give you a chance to say?
Day: Gosh, after four hours, Phil, I think I’ve said my piece fully. I can’t think of anything that I haven’t said about any of this. I think, we just touched on some of the international things at the end. I think probably the biggest surprise in my life, and it was probably one of the hardest things I ever did, was move to Singapore. Because moving from a huge research university in a small college town in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania to Singapore in a small startup university in a major Asian metropolis was much more of a challenge than I ever thought it would be. And there were many days that I really said, “I don’t know if I made the right choice or not.”
Scarpino: But at least in Singapore, I’m guessing you didn’t stand out, in other words...
Day: Oh, yes, I did.
Scarpino: I’m trying to ask, were there a lot of white people there?
Day: Well, there were, I mean Singapore is notorious for their orientation to talent, but I was always considered to be foreign talent. And, yeah, I did stand out. I was not Singaporean, I was not Asian. And, so, yeah, I did stand out. There was something else I was going to say about that, but I can’t remember what it was. Oh, yeah, I never was called by my full name by any students. I was never Professor Day, I was always ‘Prof.’ It’s just like, you’re just Prof. But one of the things that I learned about being in Singapore is how other cultures value education. To be a professor in Singapore was to be exalted. You were at the top of the heap. Actually, Singaporeans don’t much care for doctors because they...
Scarpino: It’s hard to come home after that, isn’t it?
Day: It’s hard to come home. Well, it was hard to go to Australia after that because Australians don’t really have a strong affinity to education and what they would call the “boffins” of the world because they think we’re all pointy-heady ivory tower types. But to be in Singapore and to be a professor was really an honor. And everyone treated you as somebody to be venerated.
Scarpino: Final question. I asked you if there was anything you wanted to say that I didn’t give you a chance to say. Is there anything I should have asked you that I just didn’t? I didn’t know enough to ask, or...
Day: I think maybe it’s like, what’s next, you know? Here I am receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Scarpino: I cut that in the interest of time, but let’s do that. Where do you see your career trajectory and your life going from here?
Day: Good question.
Scarpino: Or how do you hope it goes?
Day: I can tell you what the more immediate plans were. I signed the papers to retire from Claremont McKenna in 2027. I have no plans beyond that. But my directorship is over; two terms of five years each, it can’t be renewed. I don’t want to go back to a regular faculty position. I’m fortunate enough, knock wood, with Vanguard and other resources that I can retire with a reasonable nest egg. But what’s next? I don’t know. And maybe that’s been a major learning piece in my life; it’s like, I don’t have to know right now.
Scarpino: You probably don’t. For whatever it’s worth, from somebody who’s kind of been there, I think it is important to have a plan for something productive to do. So, all right, before I shut these recorders off, I want to thank you on behalf of myself, on behalf of the Tobias Leadership Center, Indiana University, on behalf of the International Leadership Association for being kind enough to sit with me for darn near four hours and share you story, which I found most interesting, and I can tell you how much I really appreciate your time.
Day: Thank you, Phil. It’s been a pleasure, and much more of a pleasure than I thought it would be.
Scarpino: Not as bad as going to the doctor.
