Ron Riggio

Scarpino:Today is Thursday, July 22, 2021.  My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, IUPUI and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence also at IUPUI.  I have the privilege to be interviewing Ronald Riggio at the Kravis Center in Claremont, California.  This interview is a joint venture undertaken on behalf of The Tobias Center and The International Leadership Association.  We will provide a link to Professor Riggio’s biographical information and a link to his full-length CV with the transcript of this interview.  So, for present purposes, I will provide an abbreviated overview of Ronald Riggio’s career.  He earned his PhD in Social Personality Psychology in 1981 at the University of California Riverside and his master’s degree in Psychology at the University of California Riverside in 1979.  He earned his BS with Honors in Psychology at Santa Clara University in 1977.  Ronald Riggio has had the equivalent of two careers.  His first career was in psychology.  From 1982-1996, he was on the faculty of California State University Fullerton where he advanced through the ranks from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor.  From 1990-1996, he was Professor of Psychology and Coordinator of Emphasis in Industrial Organizational Psychology at California State Fullerton.  He began the equivalent of his second career in 1996 when he accepted employment at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California.  From 1996-2010, he was the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology, Director of the Kravis Leadership Institute, and Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Claremont McKenna College.  In 2010, he stepped down as Director of the Kravis Leadership Institute.  From 2010 to the present, he continued to serve as the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Claremont McKenna College.  We will be talking more about Professor Riggio’s publications.  So for the present purposes, I will note that his publications reflect the emphasis of his two careers.  Since moving to Claremont McKenna in 1996, he has produced a large and influential body of scholarship on leadership.  He has also impacted the field of leadership studies by serving on numerous editorial review boards for scholarly journals and as an ad hoc reviewer for dozens of journals, academic and trade presses, and the National Science Foundation, and National Institute of Mental Health.  Ronald Riggio also held a few leadership positions at Claremont McKenna.  He was Chair of the Psychology Department from 2000-2001 where he led his department through an external evaluation and strategic planning process.  He was Associate Dean of the Faculty from 2013-2016 responsible for oversight of faculty research and scholarly activities.  Professor Riggio also held several leadership positions in professional organizations in his field.  For example, he was elected President of the Western Psychological Association in 2007, 2010, and served on the Board of Directors of the International Leadership Association from 2005-2009.  He has been awarded numerous grants to support his research, with two of the most recent being Early to Midlife Predictors of Leader Development from the Army Research Institute from 2017-2020 and Early Life Predictors of Adult Success from the WK Kellogg Foundation grant from 2016-2017.  He has won numerous awards and recognitions for his scholarship on leadership.  The award and recognition that brings us together today is the International Leadership Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award which he received in 2020.  As I said before I turned the recorders on, I am now going to ask your permission to record this interview, to transcribe the interview, to deposit the recording in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives where they may be used by patrons including posting of all or part the recording and transcription to the website of the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives, and to deposit the recording and transcription with the International Leadership Association and the Tobias Center where all or part may be posted to those organization’s websites. 

Riggio:Yes, I agree.  Soft ‘g’ on Riggio. 

Scarpino:I am sorry. 

Riggio:That is okay.  That is alright.  It is common. 

Scarpino:We will get it right.  Riggio, we got it.   I am going to start by explaining for you and for, particularly, anyone who uses this interview that I am going to begin with a few basic demographic questions, then I am going to shift to some bigger picture questions about leadership.  After we do that, I am going to talk to you about your youth, young adulthood, and your education.  Once we have done that, we will work more or less chronologically through your career with plenty of discussion about leadership.  In the interest of transparency, I will also tell you that the Tobias Center has some standard leadership questions that help give continuity to the interviews and so I will work those in.  And, of course, part of the fun of doing this is you do not always know where it is going to end up. 

Riggio:Yes, sure. 

Scarpino:We will go on a journey together here. 

Riggio:This is fine. 

Scarpino:So I am going to get started and I am going to begin with your childhood and ask you just a few basic questions before we get too complicated. 

Riggio:Sure. 

Scarpino:When and where were you born? 

Riggio:I was born in Oceanside, California, Camp Pendleton actually.  My father was a Navy doctor and stationed at Camp Pendleton, and that is where I was born.  He is still – well, he is retired, but he is still a doctor. 

Scarpino:And when were you born? 

Riggio:I was born in 1995, August 16. 

Scarpino:So you have some experience with leadership if your father was in the military.  

Riggio:Well, he was in the military, and he had an interesting thing.  It was the Korean War, but he was stationed here.  So, they were bringing patients and he was at the hospital there.  He contracted tuberculosis and he ended up in a TB ward in San Diego.  In Balboa Park, there was a TB ward.  So, he was not – he was in the TB ward when I was born, so my mother gave birth to me.  I have an older brother.  So she had the two babies.  He is in isolation for 18 months.  He got out of the military because he sort of blamed them for the fact that he contracted it.  Anyway, so he got out of the military and went into private practice then. 

Scarpino:Where did you grow up? 

Riggio:We moved around a lot in those early years, but always in Southern California.  So, I really did most of my growing up in Whittier, California, which is just about 20 miles away, and did all my schooling there in Whittier.  I have been kind of a native Californian.  I mean all my jobs have been in California, so I have never really left the state. 

Scarpino:Like a surfer? 

Riggio:I never surfed.  I have never surfed.  I used to go to the beach all the time.  I am paying the price now.  I got cataracts because we never wore sunglasses.  But I mean you see it is like this.  It is sunny every day here. 

Scarpino:It is beautiful.  Did you have any brothers and sisters?  

Riggio:Yes, I have an older brother and a younger sister.  My dad being an MD, of course, his belief was that college was not four years.  College was four years and a professional degree or graduate degree.  And I think he probably wanted us all to be doctors like him.  He was an anesthesiologist.  None of us really made that level.  My older brother became a dentist, but about midway through his career, he transitioned to kind of running the business of dentistry.  My sister became a librarian, and I went into psychology so none of us ended up as medical doctors, although my brother went eight plus. 

Scarpino:I was going to say you are a doctor, but I hope you are not operating on anybody. 

Riggio:No, no.  Of course. 

Scarpino:I was going to ask you what your father did, and you have talked about that.  What did your mother do? 

Riggio:My mother was in nursing school and that is how they met.  He was at Creighton in Omaha.  And she left and became a full-time homemaker.  So I grew up in one of the Ozzie and Harriet kind of families with two parents who were married for 60 years, and mom was stay-at-home mom who shuttled us to school, made our lunches, did all that kind of stuff.  My dad went to work at the hospital.  It was three miles away from our house.  And you know it was pretty much like Ozzie and Harriet. 

Scarpino:Well with three kids I am sure she worked hard. 

Riggio:Yes.  Oh, she worked hard, yes.  She was amazing.  She was.  And then all the other kids in the neighborhood – actually, that neighborhood was very close and so I still see the kids from the neighborhood all grown up and retired now.   

Scarpino:What was your mother’s name before she married your dad? 

Riggio:My mother’s name was Rosemary Velder, V E L D E R, and they got married relatively young.  My brother was born when my father was still in medical school. 

Scarpino:Good heavens. 

Riggio:And then, of course, he is in the hospital, she has got two babies.  My sister was kind of a mistake a few years later.  Actually, my father still – so, in 1960 when I was five, we moved to Whittier, and he still lives in the house there. 

Scarpino:Good for him. 

Riggio:So, 60 years he has been living there. 

Scarpino:Before I actually deal with the actual bigger picture questions, I am going to ask you a question to give some context to the rest of this interview. 

Riggio:Sure. 

Scarpino:You are the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Claremont McKenna, and you spent several years as Director of the Kravis Institute, so who was Henry R. Kravis? 

Riggio:Okay, so Henry Kravis is an alumnus of the college.  He came here because his cousin, George Roberts, who was a year-older first cousin was here, found this place, Claremont McKenna College.  It was a small, little – did not look anything like what you are seeing here.  It was really a startup college.  And they both were into finance, and Henry and George Roberts worked with a guy named Jerome Kohlberg at Bear Stearns.  They pioneered the leverage buyout.  And so they formed a group called KKR, which is still in existence, and they have been highly successful.  They are both billionaires.  If you remember, there was a movie and a book called Barbarians at the Gate, and that is KKR. 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:They were the ones that won the RJR Nabisco takeover.  So, in a sense – and the interesting thing is Henry was very hands on, particularly in the early stages of this institute, and chaired our board.  I would meet with him regularly.  He would come to our board meetings.  He was very interested in leadership.  He loves this college.  He built the building we are sitting in and a number of other things. 

Scarpino:It is nice to have friends like that, is it not? 

Riggio:Yes.  And then Roberts, who was also an alumnus of the college, down there you can see the gigantic gym.  It is over there.  And that is Roberts, and then attached here to Kravis Hall are Roberts Halls.  So the partners are actually connected here on the campus. 

Scarpino:And I will say because nobody is going to see this visually, we are looking out the window at a beautiful campus and off to my left out the window is a mountain range.  I mean this is a stunning setting. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:Why is his name on your endowed professorship in the Kravis Leadership Institute? 

Riggio:He endowed the professorship before the institute, and the first person to hold the Kravis chair that I hold was Martin Chemers, Marty Chemers, who is a leadership scholar who worked with Fred Fiedler.  And I knew Marty, and actually Marty was my go-to leadership guy.  So when I was a social psychologist dabbling in leadership, when I really needed a speaker – I first met Marty because I met his wife at a conference, and he was still at the University of Utah.  And then, you know, I would have him come out occasionally or we would meet at conferences and give talk, and he would give a talk at Fullerton.  Then he told me he moved to Claremont, and he said I have got the best job in the world.  And he was telling me about it and the next thing I know I had him come over and speak a few times, and he said he was starting an institute.  Then one day he calls me and says are you interested in my job.  And I said you told me it was the best job in the world, and he said well, for a number of reasons I am leaving.  I am moving.  The job is open, and you should apply for it.  And I kind of talked to him a little bit and I said well, you know, I am not really a leadership guy.  And he said but you are a good psychologist, and the position is in the psychology department, and so he says throw your hat in the ring and see what happens.  It was intensely competitive.  I mean because Henry was such a major donor to the college, they really wanted to please him, so the President of the college chaired the search committee. 

Scarpino:Good heavens. 

Riggio:Susan Murphy, who was my associate director and was the interim director when Marty left – so she was the interim director as an assistant professor, which was a heavy load for her – she was on the search committee.  And they were casting the net widely.  I will not say who were in the pool, but a very famous retired general was in the pool.  They were looking cross disciplinarily, but they figured it was going to go in psychology.  It was kind of a who’s who.  Later on, I found out who the other candidates were.  And I think I sort of got it kind of partly through attrition and partly because the psychology department was not sure about the leadership emphasis.  So the idea was let us get somebody who is a psychologist first and a leadership guy second rather than somebody who is going to take the leadership thing … 

Scarpino:Or if this thing does not work out, they still can do something with you. 

Riggio:Exactly, exactly.  

Scarpino:I have been in that position. 

Riggio:Which was actually the reason I got the job at Fullerton.  So, at Fullerton, they wanted to start an emphasis in I-O psychology, but they were not sure that was going to start either.  And so being a social psychologist who taught I-O psychology, they went for me.  And so it was that same thing.  In case the I-O fails, our fallback is he will be a social psychologist.  Here, it was in case the institute fails, he can fall back into psychology. 

Scarpino:For the sake of the recorder, can you say what I-O psychology is? 

Riggio:Yes, industrial and organizational psychology. 

Scarpino:Okay. 

Riggio:It was sort of interesting because both times I got positions that drove my career, so I was really a social personality psychologist and the position said we want to start an emphasis in industrial-organizational psychology.  I do not know if I am jumping maybe too far ahead. 

Scarpino:No, it is okay.  I can work with it. 

Riggio:Okay. 

Scarpino:I can work with it. 

Riggio:So what happened was they said well, we do not have anything.  We have an undergraduate class but what will you do?  And I said well, I will teach that I-O psychology class.  I will look at some other classes.  They had a master’s degree.  Cal State stops at a master’s, but they wanted a master’s in general experimental psychology, but we could have emphases, so I started an I-O psychology emphasis.  So I taught a few other seminars, but the big thing was I said that if you are going to work in I-O psychology, you need internships.  You need work experience because you have got to bridge to the world of work.  So I was really successful with that internship program.  That was one of the things that really took off because most students want to get a job when they graduate.  So I was able to get a lot of internships in southern California because the defense industry was still big here.  They have all moved to Texas and other places now.  But I had regular internships at Hughes Aircraft, at Rockwell, and then I had a lot of internships in things like city government.  And actually Johnson & Johnson had a factory here for vision and they were the biggest employer in Claremont at the time, and the HR director would hire my interns when I was at Fullerton. 

Scarpino:I am going to say because I also have run an intern program – I do not do it now – but for about 30 years, it is a lot more work than you just made it sound like. 

Riggio:No, it is a lot of work. 

Scarpino:You are arranging, you are engaging in liaison, you are supervising.  All the things, personnel.  All the things that go into keeping a program like that going, particularly as diverse as the one you just mentioned. 

Riggio:Yes.  So, it was good.  But it bridged here because they said what would you do?  So now I am Director of the Research Institute, and I was asked to do it by Marty Chemers because I kept in regular contact with him.  Remember the institute was only a year old when he left and it was just getting off the ground, and I found in the files that he left me, like a blueprint for different programs and things like that.  But none of it had ever existed and so Susan and I – and it was really a partnership – Susan Murphy and I could have been more co-directors although her term is associate director because she was an assistant professor, and I was already top rank.  But we worked together on those things, and she had ideas and I had ideas.  But they said what two things would you focus on?  I said internships.  This college has no internships to speak of except for accounting, and the second thing is if we are a real research institute, we need more than just me and Susan here.  And I said I want a post-doc program.  And so we started hiring post-doctoral scholars, and when it really took off was when Bruce Avolio was the director of the Nebraska Lincoln, University of Nebraska.  It was called originally the Gallup Leadership Center.  We had an exchange program, so I would send him CGU post-docs and he would send me Nebraska.  So we had a whole series of very successful post-docs, and some of those post-docs are now faculty, a couple of them at the Claremont colleges, but a lot of them have gone on to other places.  So those were the two real drivers.  The internships have transformed this college because there were essentially no internships.  At one point, Susan and I ran the whole internship program. 

Scarpino:For the entire college? 

Riggio:For the entire college, and summer internships were credit.  So we were reading like 30 and 40 each term papers for the interns across all, but the common theme was leadership.  Now, they have an internship center.  We have hundreds of interns every summer.  Now remember our college is only 1400 students. 

Scarpino:Right, it is a small liberal arts college.  An elite small liberal arts college. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:I have another contextual question about you and your career.  You have produced a large, influential body of scholarship on leadership that has given you significant international standing in the field of leadership studies, but from looking at your record, you have also continued to perform significant service to your department, the university, and your profession.  So we are going to talk about your scholarship and your career as the interview unfolds, but here is the question I have for now.  Why have you continued to shoulder a heavy burden of service on top of your high level of commitment to success in the areas of research and publication? 

Riggio:My wife would say it is because I have trouble saying no. 

Scarpino:There is always that. 

Riggio:And it is true.  It is sort of funny because here I am a psychologist, right, a personality psychologist, and I never took the big five myself.  I administer it in research.  The big five is the core personality dimensions. 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:I always thought that I was kind of conscientious and it turned out when I finally took it, and took it as objectively as I could, because as a psychologist you sort of know what you are measuring, and I was not that high on conscientiousness.  I was very high on agreeableness.  So she is right.  I have trouble saying no. 

Scarpino:Well, I am glad you said yes to this. 

Riggio:Yes.  You know, I think the thing is this, and I used to fight this at Fullerton a little bit, because whenever anybody goes up for promotion – and I am actually doing two reviews of people who are going up for full professors – and they all say the same thing.  There is scholarship, there is teaching, and service.  And it is always the two big ones are scholarship and teaching, and if it is a teaching university, teaching comes first, and if it is a big university, an R1, then scholarship comes first.  But everybody gives short shrift to the service thing.  And I remember at Fullerton it was only 10.  They actually gave a percentage.  I think it was only 10% of your file.  Yet there were so many committees.  We actually had a committee on committees at Fullerton.  That is how bureaucratic that CSU is.  And so I really embrace that you have to do all those things.  And I think what happened, I went to Santa Clara – you said that – and it was a liberal arts college.  I went in the ‘70s when it was a liberal liberal arts, I mean anything goes kind of thing.  There were very few general ed requirements and you could sort of do whatever you wanted.  I never appreciated the liberal arts and then I ended up in the UC system and then in the Cal State system, and got that whole thing, which they are very different systems.  One is really R1 and the other one is teaching the masses, the Cal State, and I came back here, and I went oh my god.  I missed it.  I did not understand how valuable a liberal arts education is until I came here.  And I know it is the model.  I know it is the model.  Now, I have taught in all the systems, and I taught in the UC, too.  And they have their function and their purpose, but the best model is really the liberal arts model.  And Fullerton was good because they tried to infuse it with the liberal arts.  So, where was I headed on that? 

Scarpino:I am going to come back to the liberal arts in a minute. 

Riggio:So, if you are in that, you are in a liberal arts environment in a small college, you have got to do service and you have got to do all of these things.  Then the other thing, too, is what is exciting in the profession is the professional service.  I often thought about that, and I thought if I added up the hours I spend in professional service …  Now, the other track is I have done some consulting work.  Over the years, I have done more or less of it.  I did take a break for a while, and I did full-time consulting and only taught part time at Fullerton while I was there.  If I would add up the hours of service and put that into consulting work, I would be pretty wealthy.  But you make these choices.  But I really do value the service.  And I think mentoring scholars at other places or evaluating them, serving on editorial boards, I think that is just part of the profession and you have to do it. 

Scarpino:You also found the time and the commitment to render service to the International Leadership Association.  Among other things, you were or are a scholarship member interest group, education member interest group, so how and why did you become involved with ILA? 

Riggio:That was actually Susan Murphy who said there is this new organization, the ILA, let us go to it.  We were going to the Academy of Management.  I go to SIOP, which is the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, which was a division of the American Psychological Association, but they kind of are independent.  And I remember going to ILA and being a little bit disappointed at the quality of scholarship, and I think one of the reasons I got so involved was trying to up the scholarship game and bring more scholars in.  And so then they made me head of the scholarship group which is the typical thing.  It is like the military, if you do more, they give you more responsibility.  But I found, and I am a big advocate, I am a big ambassador for ILA.  A lot of my real hardcore scholar friends think it is too soft and all that, but I kind of tell them you have got to go here because these are the people who are reading your work and applying it.  And some of the students are the ones who are going to get a degree specifically in leadership, not in organizational behavior with an emphasis in leadership or I-O psychology.  They are really deeply into the leadership world.  And so I said these are your customers, so you need to bridge with them. 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:And I find the ILA great because I meet people I would not meet otherwise. 

Scarpino:That is one thing that strikes me about their meetings is it brings groups of people together who otherwise might not be there. 

Riggio:Exactly, exactly.  And it should be much bigger.  When I was on the board, I would chastise them regularly about if we really are serving our mission of changing leadership worldwide, there should be thousands, tens of thousands of members.  It should be bigger than the Academy of Management, but it is still relatively small. 

Scarpino:Another kind of contextual question.  Claremont McKenna is an elite undergraduate college, so given the reputation that you have developed as a scholar of leadership, you must have had offers and invitations to accept positions at research one schools or where you could have worked with doctoral students and devoted your career to research and publication with little or no teaching, so what has motivated you or attracted you to stay at Claremont McKenna college? 

Riggio:I mean I think part of it is California.  My family is here and all that, and it is hard to leave California once you are here. 

Scarpino:It is lovely. 

Riggio:So, it would have to be in a nice place.  And I remember one of the places I got offered (27:44) and said were you interested in the University of Tulsa, and I went California, Oklahoma; Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I am not going to do that. 

Scarpino:I have been there.  I taught at Oklahoma State a year. 

Riggio:Oh okay.  So you look at those kinds of things.  You know I thought about that.  Early in my career, I thought Fullerton was a steppingstone.  I wanted to get back into the university.  My first job was at the University of California, and I wanted to get back to the UC, and so I thought Cal State was a steppingstone.  But I was at that point in my career where I had just gotten tenure and so there is a lot of assistant professor jobs but not that many associate professor jobs.  And so it was hard to move from there.  Coming here, yes, I got offers and then when I went into the Dean’s office, I got lots of offers.  And actually, what I would do was send my colleagues to those or refer my colleagues to those.  So Susan Murphy, the last two jobs she got were headhunters who came to me and I said you do not want me, you want Susan Murphy.  And she went to James Madison.  She is on the board at ILA.  And now she is at Edinboro (?? Should be Edinburgh??) running their leadership program. 

Scarpino:In Scotland? 

Riggio:What is that? 

Scarpino:Edinboro in Scotland? 

Riggio:Yes, in Scotland.  And she created a good leadership program at James Madison, left and create the one at Edinburgh.  She is amazing.  I kind of pushed her out the door, too.  I said this is holding you back here. 

Scarpino:Your CV lists the classes that you teach and have taught here; Seminar in Leadership, Organizational Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Cognition and Communication, Civic Leadership, Leadership in the Sciences, Practicum in Organizational Intervention, Foundations of Leadership, Leadership, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley.  Do you like to teach? 

Riggio:Yes.  You know, I do.  I mean I think my passion is really research and I love involving the students in research, and we have really bright undergrads.  We have continued with – I joke with Dig Day, our director.  I said we need more adult supervision because we have three core faculty members, we have Sherylle Tan who is a PhD and does research, but she is staff.  So, I said we have to bring the post-docs back because we need more of them.  And we used to have a lot of CGU graduate students but many of them want to go into consulting and they are not really on the academic track.  So, my real passion is research, but I try to dovetail it with teaching in that, you know, we produced Stefanie Johnson who is becoming famous in leadership world who was an undergrad here and worked here.  We were in another location, but she worked in the Kravis Institute on research and now is a renowned leadership scholar.  Chris Reina who is at Virginia Commonwealth was an undergrad here.  So I am kind of doing that R1 stuff at the liberal arts level. 

Scarpino:With undergraduates. 

Riggio:Yes, with undergrads and then boosting them forward or the post-docs.  Our post-docs have gone on to good careers, too.  So, I still feel like I am teaching in a broad way when I am doing research and mentoring, but yes, I found that out that research is my passion.  Teaching is sort of a second passion, but I do miss teaching.  I am going to be on sabbatical in the fall.  I will be ready to come back in the spring.  I would never go on a year sabbatical because it just does not make sense for me to do that. 

Scarpino:Well, we kind of teach all the time, don’t we? 

Riggio:Yes.  So, I am on sabbatical, but I am going to still teach in our Silicon Valley program because there is nobody else to do it. 

Scarpino:So now I am going to actually do what I said I was going to do and ask you some bigger picture questions. 

Riggio:Okay. 

Scarpino:It is going to take me a minute to set this one up. 

Riggio:Sure. 

Scarpino:And I think you know all the players.  So in October 2011, I had the pleasure of interviewing Manfred Kets de Vries.  We were at  the International Leadership Association meeting in London, and I had read an article that he published in 1994 entitled “The Leadership Mystique.”  It appeared in the Academy of Management Executive, volume 8, 1994, if anybody wants to look it up.  But one of the things that struck me about that piece that he wrote was the following, and I am going to read a short quote to you.  It really captured my attention at the time.  He said, “All of us possess some kind of inner theatre and are strongly motivated by a specific inner script.  Over time, through interactions with caretakers, teachers, and other influential people, this inner theatre develops.  Our inner theatre in which the patterns that underly our character come into play influences our behavior throughout our lives and plays an essential role in the molding of leaders.”  So here is the question:  Using his term inner theatre, can you tell me about your own inner theatre? 

Riggio:Okay. 

Scarpino:Now, that should be a softball for a psychologist. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  So for the, sort of from the development standpoint? 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:So I think a lot of – so I think my career has been this.  It has been I have worked with really good people, and I have had good mentors and I have had really great students.  And I do not – it is sort of like sometimes you are the driver of a program, a project, an initiative or whatever, and other times you are the support.  You are the follower, right? 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:And I think that very often what I do in my career is I switch those roles.  Sometimes I am leading and sometimes I am supporting, you know I am following the other people.  And so all the work I have done that has gotten the most notice has been collaborative for the most part.  I got to know Bernie Bass because I asked him to give a keynote.  Actually, he and Fred Fiedler did keynote together at the Western Psychological Association. 

Scarpino:That must have been like pulling the control rods out of a nuclear power plant.   

Riggio:It was wonderful because … 

Scarpino:I know Fred Fiedler.  I interviewed him. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  And Bernie – okay, so here they were, and I decided rather than me introduce them, I asked them to introduce each other.  And it was hilarious.  It was like a scene from Grumpy Old Men, do you remember that? 

Scarpino:I do. 

Riggio:So Bernie starts introducing Fred and saying this is the greatest scholar in leadership, and Fred would go ‘you talking about yourself?’  And it was just a wonderful experience, and I clicked a lot with Bernie, and I said we have an academic slot on our advisory board, why don’t you take that?  And then he asked me to come on board on the Transformational Leadership book which he could not revise because he was working on the Handbook. 

Scarpino:Right.  The Handbook of Leadership? 

Riggio:Handbook of Leadership, and that was sucking up all of his time and he was doing other things, too.  And he said you take it and run with it.  And I thought – so I do not mean to stray too far from your question, but it was sort of this opportunity came up to work with him and he sort of empowered me.  And I knew Transformational Leadership because I was interested in the charismatic element of it, but he sort of persuaded me over and I had become a big sort of, kind of carrying the torch a little bit for him.  But it was real because of our relationship. 

Scarpino:So let’s clarify which torch you are carrying. 

Riggio:Oh, for Transformational Leadership. 

Scarpino:Okay, alright. 

Riggio:Because it is still very popular, but Bernie is not around anymore.  You know that kind of thing. 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:The followership thing.  I think I told you this story when we were talking before, but Mary Uhl-Bien and I at this conference were on a panel and the question came up of why do we not give more attention to followers.  And I said yes, and I said we need to put our money where our mouth is.  Shortly thereafter Ira Chaleff says I would like to put on a conference on followership.  I do not have the money.  I said I have the money.  I can put it where my mouth was at that previous thing. 

Scarpino:Because you were then? 

Riggio:I was here, yes. 

Scarpino:And it was in 2008? 

Riggio:That was 2007. 

Scarpino:I have got it later on. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  And Jean Lipman-Blumen was interested in followership, too. 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:But she was doing it from that toxic leadership perspective.  So the three of us had this good meeting over at the Drucker School.  I said yes, I am all on board on this, and I will go get the followership people.  And so I remember having to persuade Robert Kelley to come because he said I do not want to do that anymore.  I kind of did that.  I said no, no, come back and revisit it.  And we had this great conference and produced that edited volume. 

Scarpino:So I am going to ask you to name the edited volume. 

Riggio:The Art of Followership. 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:So, you know, I was not into followership per se.  I had not done any – I mean obviously you do leadership, you study followers.  You use them often as the measures, the MLQ, the multifactor leadership questionnaire that measures transformational leadership.  You have to have the subordinates fill it out, so you have to have the followers fill it out. 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:But I had not really focused on that, and so very often what happens is these other people persuade me to get excited about it and I do.  And so that is how that happened.  So these streams of research are often, sometimes they are driven by me.  I want to do this, but very often there are other people saying come on and join, and maybe it goes back to that agreeableness thing.  I am always saying yes. 

Scarpino:But isn’t it nice to be in an environment where your conversations and interactions suggest interesting things to do? 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  And that is why leadership is so fascinating to me and why I feel like I fell into it.  I just reposted a blog post I did is “Why you shouldn’t follow your passion” and that was just kind of provocative, but the idea is everybody looks for their passion and I think it is the other way around.  The passion will find you or you will find each other when you get there.  Not that I am not happy when I do the nonverbal communication stuff and some of the other things that I have done, but this is really what turns me on because it is so complex.  We have so much to do and leadership is such an enormous part of our lives, but also part of the problem in our lives is the fact that we do not have good – we generally have – I mean I agree with Robert Hogan who says that three-quarters of leaders or two-thirds of leaders are essentially incompetent and he can provide evidence for that because they do not last very long in their positions. 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:And I sort of think that that is true, that leaders do not – people who are in leadership positions do not give enough attention to what they are doing.  They just sort of go at and do not do it as well as they could. 

Scarpino:Do you think the problem is that they do not pay enough attention?  They are not well trained?  Expectations are not clear? 

Riggio:Yes.  I think it is all those things.  I think it is that the good ones do.  The good leaders I know, they care about their leadership development.  They continue to work at it.  They know they are not good enough.  That is the humility factor.  But a lot of them think they know it all and others are just clueless.  I mean because if you think about it, what happens?  You stick around long enough, you get promoted.  

Scarpino:That is right. 

Riggio:I mean it is kind of the Peter principle in kind of a weird way where we honor people for seniority and often the people who are more senior probably should have, if they were really good, they should have moved on already.  And so they get put into leadership positions and they do not really know what they are doing. 

Scarpino:Okay.  So now I am going to circle back.  I started by asking you about the inner theatre. 

Riggio:Yes, the theatre. 

Scarpino:But I am going to run with some of these themes that you just brought up, so I am not dropping them. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  I mean, I can go back to that because now an ‘aha’ just came in, is if you are going to use the theatre metaphor, is I feel I am like an actor. 

Scarpino:And you are good at it, by the way, I will say sitting across the table from you. 

Riggio:Well if people present me with an interesting script and I think it is good then I am going to run with it and I am going to do it.  So I mean maybe that metaphor, which I would have never in a million years used that metaphor for myself because I would probably be a horrible actor, but it makes sense that what I have done is people bring me ideas and scripts and often it is their idea and I say yes, I am in with you.  I can support you. 

Scarpino:So can you talk a little bit about the early experiences as you were growing up, individuals who helped shape your character, helped shape the professional you have become? 

Riggio:Yes.  So, you know it is funny.  I do not have that one sort of mentor.  I went to all Catholic parochial schools and Catholic education and Catholic high school, and I said the last place I want to go is to a Catholic college, and there was a guy who came on the college day – you know when the colleges all visit – and he persuaded me to apply at Santa Clara.  It was kind of my safety school.  I ended up going to my safety school, and that is where I met people.  So that first guy actually got me into Santa Clara.  I took all my classes from him.  His name was Charles Lampkin.  He was a jazz musician.  He played with Billie Holiday.  He played with all kinds of people.  His son was in the Miles Davis quartet or whatever. 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:And Lampkin taught history of jazz and ethnic studies, African American guy, and he is the one who persuaded me to get there, so when I got there and loved it so much, I took all of his history jazz courses and everything, and he was great.  He was an ordained minister, jazz musician, professor.  Cool. 

Scarpino:Did his musical ability rub off on you? 

Riggio:No.  No, but my interest in music rubbed off on my sister who is a professional musician, and I am going to go see her play tonight.  So, yes, it was in college where I thought I was going to go pre-med.  I decided that really probably was not where I was going to go, but I wanted to stay in the college of sciences, and psychology at Santa Clara was in the college of sciences.  I was wandering around the building saying what am I going to major in.  Fell into the psychology department, loved they were sort of – there was a Rogerian guy, so he really understood my problem. 

Scarpino:So tell the recorder what a Rogerian guy is. 

Riggio:Yes, a Rogerian psychologist basically reflects everything back to you.  So you are having trouble finding your major, well, tell me more about that.  So anyway, I really got to know the faculty.  It was a very small place and there were not a lot of psychology majors, and as I studied psychology, I realized the coin of the realm is research.  That is what psychology is all about, doing research, so I took as much research methodology as I could and all that.  I worked with the faculty members.  I remember telling one of my faculty members you better publish more or you are not going to get tenure and let’s get this stuff out and not just do the research.  Let’s publish it and all that kind of stuff.  I met a sociology professor and she connected me with her husband who was teaching at Stanford.  We had an exchange program so I actually got to take a class at Stanford on sociological research methods.  And that shaped me.  That is where I got my thirst for research and they helped me – the husband and wife – helped me get a research position and I started doing research in a medical environment, which got me my first job eventually.  I think that is how I got into that.  My first job was UC San Francisco in the health psychology program, and I was running a research grant on stress coping.  So those faculty, not any one of them, but I like got pieces of mentorship from each of them.  And my other love is film making. 

Scarpino:Oh. 

Riggio:And because it was such a liberal arts college, I took every film making and video production class.  Video was still reel-to-reel new then. 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:And my film teacher was very influential, and I remember thinking I could go two directions.  And I remember having this conversation with him and I said, you know, I could go into film, go to film school and graduate, but I could go into psychology and I could become a professor or something like that.  And I said and I decided that film making was too risky.  And he goes you think psychology is not risky? 

Scarpino:Getting an academic job. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  So I said well, somebody has got to get the academic jobs.  So then I ended up going to graduate school in psych instead of going to film school. 

Scarpino:Uh.  As you were growing up attending high school and then undergraduate, were there any events that played an important role in shaping the person, the leader you became, scholar? 

Riggio:Well I think the reason I transitioned into I-O psychology, into the studying of psychology work is because I started working at a very young age.  So my father was like you need to work, you need to get a job, a part-time job.  You need to experience that.  And so my brother when he turned 16, he got a job as a bus boy at a restaurant.  And I remember he called, I am 15 and he calls me up on New Year’s Eve and their dishwashers at the restaurant had walked off on New Year’s Eve, and he says get all your friends together and get over here because we need dishwashers. 

Scarpino:And wash dishes on New Year’s Eve. 

Riggio:And so we did.  And we did not get home until three in the morning because there were so many dishes that needed washed.  And so I started working.  And so I worked there and then I worked myself up to where I was running the kitchen at like 18.  The chef basically did everything but I ran, you know, I was the cook.  I did everything.  And I loved that.  I loved being in charge and being able to bring in my own assistants and everything.  And I always worked except for maybe my freshman year in college I did not have a job, but every other.  I always had part-time jobs and so I would study the world of work and go why do they do it this way.  I worked in a factory, and I would say to this guy I could run this factory better than the owner of this factory because he does not get it.  He is not in touch with his employees, he does not know how to maximize human resources.  So I remember thinking wow, and then I kind of filed all that away and went into this social psychology path.  But when I got back into studying the world of work, it was like all that work experience – and I am always using examples in my class of jobs I have had. 

Scarpino:So when you were a young man, 18, whatever you were, 19, 20 and you are thinking like this, did you ever look around and say other people do not think this way? 

Riggio:I do not think – I do not think, well I mean I saw that other people did not think that way, but I just sort of thought they just do not know any better.  So I mean I guess my thing is I have kind of always been the student and observer and observe what is going on and say well cannot we do it better; cannot we make this work?  And that is the way I would approach it.  I mean I remember all my jobs I would think of systematic ways to be more productive or whatever, so it was kind of a natural fit to go into the sort of the I-O psychology world.  And you know the work I did in nonverbal communication was incredibly labor intensive because we were videotaping segments of people expressing emotions and then editing.  I mean I spent hundreds of hours editing video tapes, getting them ready for research work. 

Scarpino:So just to clarify for people who might use this, you were using tape, so did that mean that you were editing in a studio? 

Riggio:I was editing in a studio. 

Scarpino:Actually when they talk about cutting the tape … 

Riggio:Well, no, then it was electronic.  But when I was filmmaking, yes, I cut by hand. 

Scarpino:I participated in that one time, and it is hard. 

Riggio:Yes, it is hard.  And editing, even with the automatic editing, when you are taking small excerpts and thousands of them, because the idea was when you do nonverbal communication, you have trials.  You have hundreds of trials of people trying, you know, what expression is this person. 

Scarpino:So do you go on site to watch people engage? 

Riggio:No, we did it in laboratories. 

Scarpino:In a laboratory. 

Riggio:We did do some field stuff, but most of it was laboratory studies.  So we set people up.  My dissertation was on deception, verbal and nonverbal cues of deception, and so we had people lie and tell the truth on camera.  And then we had people watch it and they had to determine whether they were lying or telling the truth.  Then we coded for everything they did how much eye contact, how many times they smiled, every head movement.  Intense stuff.  So I was working in the factory of nonverbal communication research and then training undergrad research assistants to do that.  So I was in this factory of … 

Scarpino:So remind people who might use this, where were you when you in the factory? 

Riggio:I was in graduate school. 

Scarpino:Okay. 

Riggio:And doing nonverbal communication research which was incredibly labor intensive. 

Scarpino:So I am going to put some information in the record and then I am going to ask you some more questions.  So looking at your publications on your really long and impressive CV, I want to ask you something upfront and I am going to remind anyone using this interview that you earned your PhD at UC Riverside in 1981, you published in professional and refereed journals at an impressive rate.  I counted them up on your CV.  You published 86 single or co-authored articles between 1980 and 2020.  If I missed one, I am sorry.  And up to 2003, you were publishing journal articles at a steady rate on subjects such as nonverbal expressiveness, nonverbal cues, social skills, personality and communication.  In 2003, you published two articles on leadership and leadership then becomes an important topic in the journal articles you published after 2003.  There is a similar pattern among the 25 authored and edited books, 42 book chapters that appear between 1986 and 2021.  For example, in 2002, you published two book chapters on leadership and leadership has remained an important focus of book chapters since then.  So now the questions, but that is context.  What accounted for the shift in your scholarly focus from subjects such as nonverbal expressiveness and nonverbal cues to leadership that begins to appear in your publications in 2002-2003? 

Riggio:Yes, so part of it, again, use that actor metaphor.  The script changed.  And it took a while.  I came here in ’96 and I was not publishing. 

Scarpino:Yes, I noticed the lag time and that is normal. 

Riggio:And the lag time was gearing up to do leadership.  Now, I was dabbling so some of that 2003 work was actually work I had done at Fullerton, data I had collected at Fullerton, and kind of back-shelved because it was not, my primary focus was the nonverbal communication stuff, so these were the things that you kind of go ‘I will get to that, I will get to that.’  And everything I did back then was videotaped so it was like you could store it and it had a pretty good shelf life.  Then you would go back and study it.  But I jumped more into the leadership world and started doing that work.  So the big thing was the job change then required me – I required myself to change and become a leadership scholar.  And I tried to keep my hand in the nonverbal stuff so I still do a little bit of that, but I do not collect the data because it is just way too labor intensive. 

Scarpino:So is there a connection between your interest and expertise in areas such as nonverbal communication, nonverbal cues, social skills, personality and communication, and your scholarship on leadership? 

Riggio:There is. 

Scarpino:How do they fit together? 

Riggio:So the connection, and the connection actually goes kind of to Bernie Bass.  So when we were studying nonverbal expressiveness, that lead us naturally to the idea of charisma, and so I published some papers and did some work on what we call personal charisma.  Now at that time, it was divorced from – I mean we were not looking at leadership.  We were looking at people who kind of light up the room, people who you think are charismatic.  You know we all have friends that are kind of like that, right?  I mean like take Oprah Winfrey.  I mean she is not a leader really.  She is an entertainer or talk show host or whatever, but she often when they ask for charismatic women celebrities, she tops the list.   

Scarpino:I imagine she would light up any room she walked into. 

Riggio:Yeah.  No, absolutely.  So we were studying that phenomenon.  And as I researched that, the only people who were looking at charisma were people who were looking at charismatic leadership; Bob House, Bernie Bass, Bass doing it subsumed in transformational leadership.  So I started reading that literature and I started reading that very early when I was in graduate school, so I knew all that literature. 

Scarpino:Okay. 

Riggio:And got to know Jay Conger’s work a little bit later.  Now, Jay and I are the same age, but he went and worked for a while before he went back to graduate school, so he was putting out stuff on charismatic leadership while I was still studying personal charisma and we were parallel lines but in different areas.  Now we are colleagues.  He is right next door to me.  And so I knew that that part of the leadership literature so that was the natural transition, and I am still interested in more fully bridging those two, but in some of the research that I have done in the last 10 or 12 years, I have pulled those together.  So, for example, this is like my favorite finding because it just makes so much sense.  So early on in leadership, there was a focus on the trait approach, you know, personality, does personality predict leadership?  Now that is dangerous because it is sort of like personality is sort of inborn and that is sort of saying leaders are born not made.  We know leaders are mostly made because it is a very complex role you have to play.  The social psychologist, you know, it is a role.  That is what it is.  So, the research that I found is we did some longitudinal research.  We had personality measures on these kids when they were 17.  Kids, they are 42 now.  We did leadership measures when they were adults and in between, we had them fill out a measure that I created of social skills, so interpersonal skills which includes both nonverbal and also … 

Scarpino:And this is a self-assessment of those, correct? 

Riggio:Self-assessment of those, right.  And what we found was yes, of course, personality does predict leadership at significant but not overwhelming levels, and one of the ones that predicts leadership is extraversion.  This is a well-known finding, for 100 years almost.  But when we put social skills in the equation, the relationship between extraversion and effective leadership completely disappeared.  So, in other words, you can be an extravert but if you are not a skilled communicator, you are not going to be an effective leader. 

Scarpino:So by social skills, are you talking just about communication? 

Riggio:Communication skills, right. 

Scarpino:Okay. 

Riggio:So I just did a backflip over that.   It is embedded in a paper that has a whole lot of stuff, but it is this one little finding.  But it argues for what I believe is that, yes, we have these traits, we have these predispositions, but we have to channel them, and we have to develop them.  And so extraverts who develop their social skills, and extraverts tend to have more – there is a correlation – they tend to have more social skills than introverts because they get more practice, right?   

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:But it is not extraversion driving it.  It is the social skills.  I mean extraversion helps, it gives you a slight advantage, but if you do not develop that, and I think that is like a metaphor for leadership.  You may have potential and people may say oh, I feel you would be a great leader so why do you not going into, why do you not go to West Point or whatever?  And that helps.  But if you do not develop it, and it is continual development.  You have got to continue to get better because it is really hard to lead, and as you go up the chain of command and go to higher and higher leadership positions, it is more complex, and it is more taxing, and you have got to continue to develop. 

Scarpino:So how does a leader who knows that he or she should do this continue to develop? 

Riggio:I think they have to have the mind of a student.  They have to say I can learn more, I need to get better.  You know, we have an advisory board and most of them are alums or parents of students who are accomplished leaders, C-suite level people.  And they are all pretty good as leaders, and one of the reasons they want to be on our board is because they want to talk to the leadership scholars.  It is like they have still got that, you know, they are still students of leadership.  And one who chaired our board for a while, he is like my prototype.  I say why do you come hang out with us?  Your time is so valuable.  He is a major CEO.  And he says because you guys are doing the research.  I want a leg up.  I want to find out what is going on.  That is consistent with that idea that is becoming really popular, the humility.  It is not that these leaders are humble in the kind of stereotypic sense.  They are humble in that they know their limitations and they know that they can get better.  And that is why humility in a high-level leader is so critically important. 

Scarpino:So do you think knowing your own limitations is an important quality of an effective leader? 

Riggio:I think they absolutely have to know that.  Because then they have to know when to go to get the assistance.  I mean a big issue – we can see this in the pandemic and the whole thing, and I am going to dump on, I am glad the Trump administration is over – but a leader who thinks he knows it all is a real problem because we know that they do not know it all.  And so you have to consult with people, and you have to take that information in. 

Scarpino:So an effective leader surrounds himself or herself with people who can supplement, reinforce? 

Riggio:Supplement and challenge him, too, right? 

Scarpino:Challenge, yes. 

Riggio:So that is critically important.  You have got to be challenged.  I mean most of the advancements that I did when I was directing this place were my staff, my colleagues, saying you know I do not think you are going down the right path.  I think you should be doing this.  And I go yeah, let us do that.  I mean, persuade me to do that, and they did.  We have great programs that we began.  Now internship I drove, but a lot of the other programs that we do, my colleagues came up with those programs.  We have a student group called SOURCE.   It is an acronym that they created.  They have been in operation, I think they did their 15th year anniversary.  It is a completely student-run organization, and what they do is they consult with the local nonprofits and help them solve their problems.  And they have survived 15 years even though the entire personnel turns over every four years.  And we still cannot figure out how they do that.  We need to study them more intensely.  But they are a great organization.  I am on a couple of nonprofit boards in the community.  They go do you think we could get sourced.  Our institute funds them, so yes, we probably could get them to latch on. 

Scarpino:So they want sourced instead of you? 

Riggio:Well, they do.  Yes, yes.  I think they want us both.  (Laughter.) 

Scarpino:I am kidding. 

Riggio:But the interesting thing about the SOURCE group is one of the nonprofits I brought them, I brought the director and he made a pitch, and they said no, you are too small.  We do not take you on.  So we got turned down it, which shows how independent those students are, right, because their faculty member is sitting their sponsoring this guy and they said no, no.  You guys do not qualify. 

Scarpino:So academics often evaluate scholarship by the degree to which publications add knowledge to the field.  So what I want to do is ask you to self-assess your own publications, and as you look back on the body, tremendous body, of scholarship you have created related to leadership, which two or three pieces do you think made the most significant contribution to knowledge in your field? 

Riggio:Yes.  I mean the most cited is the book with Bass, I mean the Transformational Leadership book is highly cited, and it is kind of funny because it is a second edition of a book that he wrote.  But it is more of a ‘here is transformational leadership, here is an overview, here is the research’ and people use it than to do their own research.  So in terms of breaking new ground and impact, it is really a summary of everybody else’s work. 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:But that clearly gets a million hits.  I mean, it is just unbelievable.  I think some of the work that I have done is like that.  I think the most significant stuff is embedded, like the one I just told you about, that skills are driving leadership not traits.  Which if you really think about it, that just makes sense.  It just has to be. 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:And this I got from my mentor, Howard Friedman, who was a nonverbal researcher.  He said that skills are the manifestation of traits.  And if you think about behavior, which is what psychologists study, traits are way back here and the skills are what bridges to the behavior.  So I think that work, and I have done a number of kind of things around that, around social skills.  So I think those have been the most impactful.  There is still not, you know, I created this self-report social skills inventory with the idea that somebody would come up with something much better that would be performance based, that would be more like a kind of an interactive video test, and nobody has come up with it.  So it is still kind of the default instrument for assessing that, and it is still relatively unknown.  So I think that has had a big impact.  And that bridges the two. 

Scarpino:That body of research is relatively unknown? 

Riggio:Yes.  I think that there is not a lot of people doing that kind of research.  So usually I get requests to do a book chapter. I am doing one right now on – and actually it is more complex than that.  So we are arguing that certain skills have a curvilinear relationship.  So think of it this way:  when it comes to nonverbal communication, the basics are you can encode.  This is communication language.  You can express something.  I can express to you, and you could pick up the emotion or not.  Part of it is my skill in expressing that emotion.  If I am trying to motivate you, you know, I might be trying to be positive and I may come off as negative.  I am your boss, so I am trying to motivate you, but you think I am beating you down.  Well I am not doing a good job of communicating.  And then on the other side is your sensitivity, your ability to decode.  Well one of the things we are finding is having too much – and I am working on a chapter right now – too much may be a bad thing.  So, in other words, if you are hypersensitive, every time you feel an emotion, it triggers what we call emotional contagion process, and now I cannot operate because I am picking up on everybody’s anxiety in the room.  On the flip side, you get a Robin Williams type, always expressing the emotion and cannot shut it off.  And so anyway, so that is kind of one of the things we are working on.  And maybe these things are really curvilinear.  Skills have to be balanced, and so that is the paper I am working on right now.  So I think the skill stuff is a big contribution.  I think the other things that I do is, and the edited book series in our conference is breaking new ground but not me breaking the new ground, bringing people together to break the new ground. 

Scarpino:Are you talking about the conference here at the Kravis Institute? 

Riggio:Yes.  We call it Kravis-de Roulet.  So Vincent de Roulet was an alum, might have predated Henry Kravis, who passed away very early, and his family wanted to give some money in his honor.  And I think it was the widow who said ‘well, I do not know where to put the money, but I know Henry Kravis and put it wherever Henry Kravis was.’  So they steered it into this conference, so it is called the Kravis-de Roulet Conference Series.  And that is where we do the followership conference.  The very first one we did was, and this is how I made connections with both the leadership scholars, but we did it on multiple intelligences.  And so we had the intelligence people, Robert Sternberg, and the emotional intelligence people, Salovey and Mayer, the guys that really did the EQ stuff.  And then we brought Fiedler out, Bass, and in fact, that talk piggybacked on the conference.  I was hosting the Western Psychological Association Conference the week after we had our conference, back to back conferences with lots of people.  So I took Fred and Bernie to that conference.  I said stay for a week, come to another conference.  But that really started a lot of things.  So Robert Sternberg who was an intelligence researcher who has done a lot of stuff, got leadership fever and started publishing on leadership from coming here because I remember him saying why do you want me at a leadership conference.  I said I want your intelligence stuff to bridge with the leadership stuff, and he took off in that direction, too. 

Scarpino:And he got the bug. 

Riggio:Yes, he got the bug.  So, I think a lot of what I do, I sort of think of myself as kind of a connector and promoter of cutting edge ideas and cutting edge thinkers.  I am the PT Barnum of ... 

Scarpino:I am not going to run with that one. 

Riggio:No.  

Scarpino:But if you are a connector and promoter, and I have looked at your record enough to know you are pretty good at it, to be successful at it, it takes more than just the willingness to do it. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:You have to have the ability to identify good people, good ideas, put good people and good ideas together. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:Do you think that that is one of your qualities? 

Riggio:Yes, but I think it is a research task.  So you see who is publishing, you network, you talk to people.  You rely on other people, too.  Who should I invite for this?  And kind of the persuasion skills a little bit.  The Robert Kelley thing.  So Robert Kelley wrote that piece, you know, in praise of followership.  It was in Harvard Business Review, a very famous piece. 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:And he went down that path.  And at the time, followers was a dirty word.  Nobody wanted to be a follower.  And he got that pushback.  Well, he transformed that into studying what he called star performers because followers sounds … star performer, right?  So when I called him up and said we want you to come to this conference.  I mean I think I emailed him and he said I am not interested and I called, so let me talk to you.  And he said you know, I got such backlash from that and I have kind of gone in a different direction or whatever.  And so I said just come and just do rethinking; what were you thinking?  What were you thinking then and what are you thinking now?  And that is what piece he wrote.  And he came to the conference, and he had a really good time because there were people here like Ira who were really into followership, and they thought he was like a god.  But, you know, it was a small group.  He went to ILA the next year or two years after that and he said I want to take you out to dinner.  He goes I want to thank you.  And that just meant so much to me.  He said that was so good for me, what you did.  And I said, you know, I just knew you needed to be there, that is all.  I did not know it was going to have that affect.  So, anyway, so that I think is just knowing how to bring people together.  We had some amazing conferences.  I mean we had one on sports leadership.  We never produced a book out of this because it was mostly, they were mostly practitioners which they have a hard time writing.  And we actually did two of them.  But we had some really famous sports psychologists.  We had Don Newcome who was a Dodgers pitcher. 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:And what we were looking at was – Jack Kemp was here – we looked at people who had been in sports careers who then had to transition.  Pat Haden, who was a Rams quarterback and is a venture capitalist in LA, one of the richest guys in LA.  And then went back to his career and was the athletic director for University of Southern California, USC.  And he was great.  He went to my rival high school.  My high school played football against his high school, so we had a good time.  So the great thing about that is you just get to bring amazing people together that you would never think.  We had Reg Jackson here, and Reggie, you know, I thought big star, what is he going to say?  And he said that everything he learned about leadership he learned from his grandmother and from male mentors.  To hear that, and so many people – and Pat Haden said I thought I knew leadership.  I thought I learned leadership from sports.  He goes where I really learned leadership when I had kids. 

Scarpino:That is an interesting observation. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  And it is true.  I mean it changes your whole perception when you have kids. 

Scarpino:It certainly does.  So one of the developments in leadership is something that you have been talking about which is a growing understanding of the importance of followership and the interaction between leaders and followers.  And you played a key role as you have noted in raising the importance of followership.  In 2008, you published a co-edited volume with Jean Lipman-Blumen, Ira Chaleff titled The Art of Followership:  How Great Followers Create Leaders and Organizations.  We already talked about both Chaleff and Lipman-Blumen, so I will let it stand in the record.  And anyone who listens to this might want to know that you also wrote a co-authored piece in 2014 called “Followership theory:  A Review and research agenda” that is in The Leadership Quarterly, so people can look that up if they want to. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:So what I would like you to do is explain how The Art of Followership: How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations come about? 

Riggio:So it came about, and I think I already mentioned this. 

Scarpino:Let us get it in one place. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  But Jean had written The Allure of Toxic Leaders, and what is really interesting about that book is it does not, you know, most books on toxic leaders talk about the bad qualities.  You know Hitler was this kind of person and his mother and da da da.  She said why do people follow these people.  That was her interesting thing.  And she said it is really about the followers.  It is not about the leaders.  Why do they hold these people up and let them continue to be bad, to be toxic?  And so that opened my eyes a little bit and then she introduced me to Ira.  So he just happened to come out here to visit Jean because he realized that connection and his courageous followership – The Courageous Follower book is a big deal.   

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:And so he asked would I be interested, and I said absolutely.  I have been wanting to do this.  The time is right.  You are here.  With you two, we cannot go wrong.  And so they brought some people to the table.  I brought some people to the table.  We had, god we had a group in here.  We had Barbara Kellerman, we had Georgia Sorenson here.  A lot of them did not end up in the book.  Barbara did not end up in the book because she was writing her own book on followership, but she was here and spoke.  And Kelley as I mentioned.  And we had all these people, and people I did not even know and one guy John Howell, who I realized was doing some research followership, but I knew about his research on leader development which I thought was really interesting.  And he and I have been buddies ever since.  So we just put it on, and we just brought it together.  And it was sort of an interesting thing because everybody for the first – it was a two-day conference – and all the way through the first day through morning until lunch time, everybody kept saying I hate that term follower.  We need to come up with another term and that just kept … And I remember standing up at lunch and we had it in our athenaeum over here, and I said alright let us just stop this and let us just use the term follower, like shut up.  And my message was if we build it, they will come, so I mean I think the one thing I have done is – and Ira would totally back this.  I mean he was not going to change the term.  I remember Jean wanted constituents, and I said no.  Constituents has political flavor.  And then somebody else said collaborators.  I said that sounds like World War II, you know, collaborating with the enemy.  And I just said let us just use the term and it will catch on, which it does, and it did.  And I figured it would.  If you use the term enough, I mean we know this from political work. 

Scarpino:Right.  But it also makes sense and people know what it means. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  Well the problem is the pejorative associations associated with the followers.  So what happened – okay, this is a funny story because what happened while we were putting on the conference and were promoting the conference, it got a lot of press because everybody is doing leadership conferences and Business Week called up and they are journalists.  They called up Ira separately and they called me separately, and they said so you guys are doing the first conference on followership, and we want to know more about this.  And then her question was define follower.  And we both were like deer in the headlights. 

Scarpino:Well, it is also the right question, is it not? 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  But Ira was a deer in the headlights, too, because he had already been interviewed by her and she said yes, I asked your collaborator Chaleff, and he could not define it either.  So when they did the story in Business Week, they illustrated it with a mother duckling with the ducks behind and I thought that is exactly not what we were trying to do.  So I just thought that was a funny story and it was mostly because we were not savvy in dealing, you know, we did not anticipate that we were going to get asked to define that.  And had we been given the time and not being interviewed, we would have probably been able to give a decent definition. 

Scarpino:Right.  

Riggio:But it was funny that neither of us did it. 

Scarpino:So how do you define it now? 

Riggio:So I mean I do not think I define it in kind of the dictionary term, but what I try to do is tell people that leadership is not something that leaders do.  Leadership is what leaders and followers do together, and so there is no leadership without followers.  And that they have to work together, that they play – and as the social psychologist in me says leadership is just a role and being a good member, team member, follower is a role, and you play that.  And there is another role which is Ira’s thing, the disrupter, but he calls it intelligent disobedience in his other book, that person who pushes the boundaries.  And then there is the person who says screw you guys.  I do not want to play with you and that person is an isolate.  And I worked in a factory with this guy who was a total isolate.  He would not interact with anybody.  He ate his lunch at the dirty, instead of the lunchroom, he ate it at his dirty machine over there.  And he is like my prototype of the isolate because I never knew the guy’s name. 

Scarpino:What factory did you work in? 

Riggio:I worked in a spring factory in Santa Fe Springs, which is weird.  They made springs and metal parts for the defense industry, and it was dirty, grimy work. 

Scarpino:So as a young man, you were a factory worker? 

Riggio:I was for summers.  It was my summer in high school and then first summer of college. 

Scarpino:Okay, alright.  How did that influence the trajectory of your life? 

Riggio:I learned a lot.  I learned about working in a factory.  I learned a lot about how do you get productivity.  I learned about rate setting the first week because they were about ready to kill me, the employees, because I was going like this and I was, you know, and then it was getting pushed to the next guy and he is going what the hell, slow down.  And I said why slow down?  These things are due.  They have due dates.  Ignore the due dates.  We never make the due dates.  And stupid me, they actually took me out back and told me because I did not slow down.  I slowed a little bit, but they said slow down or we are going to get you out of here. 

Scarpino:Well, that was an interesting introduction to the world of work on the line, was it not? 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  I learned.  So when I read about rate setting in my I-O textbook, yes, I have experienced that. 

Scarpino:The title of the book The Art of Followership:  How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations, what are great followers? 

Riggio:Yes.  So the great followers are I think in there in terms of Ira’s model.  Barbara Kellerman has her model.  I think – that subtitle was put in by the publisher, so that really was not ours.  And the Art of Followership, that was them, and that was Josie Bass.  And the previous book I did was The Practice of Leadership, Conger and Riggio and we wanted to call it Best Practices in Leadership and the publisher said we are not because everybody puts out best practices.  Well that book got totally ignored, and if we would have put Best Practices on there, I think it would have gotten attention because the title matters.  Anyway, so the subtitle, I think the subtitle of Ira’s book says it all and the subtitle is Standing Up For and To Your Leaders.  And that means when your leader is on the right path, you stand up for them.  You help them.  You achieve the goals, you promote the cause.  When your leader is on the wrong path, you have to have the courage, the courageous follower, to stand up to the leader.  And Jean’s book is all about why did not people stand up to Hitler?  I mean some did.  They tried to bomb him, but they did not succeed.  But most of them did not, and why do people not stand up to tyrants?  Why do people not stand up even to regular leaders when they are about to do something wrong?  There was a conference here that I attended when I was still at Fullerton on Applied Social Psychology, and it was related to errors.  And they had the woman who had studied plane crashes, and she talked about this phenomenon where in the cockpit somebody knew they were about to crash into the side of a mountain, but did not, because of the hierarchy, did not voice it to the captain because you do not do that, and flew into the side of a mountain. 

Scarpino:Yes.  Alright, so –  

Riggio:I know I kind of go off on tangents. 

Scarpino:No, no.  This is the way it is supposed to work. 

Riggio:Okay. 

Scarpino:And my job is to bring us back to the work for a while.  If I was just going down this list asking you questions, it would be boring and stupid.  It would be like I was giving you a PhD oral exam, and we are not doing that here. 

Riggio:Yes, yes, okay. 

Scarpino:So in 2009, you published a co-edited volume titled Leadership in the Liberal Arts:  Achieving the Promise of a Liberal Education.  Your co-authors were J. Thomas Wren and Michael A. Genovese.  Wren is a professor of Leadership Studies and interim Dean of the Jepson School of Leadership, and Genovese holds the Loyola Chair of Leadership Studies, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Institute of Leadership Studies at Loyola Marymount.  I would like you to talk about how you view the relationship between leadership and liberal arts. 

Riggio:Liberal arts, okay.   So that was a project.  We got funded through the Keck Foundation, and it was a three university, Richmond, Loyola, and us.  It helped that one of our trustees is the head of the Keck Foundation. 

Scarpino:Of which foundation? 

Riggio:The  Keck Foundation. 

Scarpino:Okay. 

Riggio:He is basically the Keck family.  I think that helped us get attention.  The Keck, at that time, was funding leadership, though.  And what we wanted to do was break new ground in teaching about leadership across the disciplines.  And so each of us took – so we had this grant, and we had these successively larger conferences.  We had three.  The first one was very small, invited only.  The second one we started opening it up to ILA members and all that.  The second one we had here.  And then the third one we had at Richmond, and it got bigger. 

Scarpino:That is the University of Richmond? 

Riggio:University of Richmond, yes.  So what the grant was was for each of us to take an area and develop leadership in that area where leadership is not found a lot. 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:So Richmond took leadership in the arts, we took leadership in the sciences, and they took, I think, leadership in government, in the political arena because that is kind of what their center did.   

Scarpino:And they are? 

Riggio:Genovese and Loyola. 

Scarpino:Okay, right. 

Riggio:So it was really interesting because I had responsibility for leadership in the sciences, and we created courses around this.  So we created a course called Leadership in the Sciences, and I had no idea when we started that how broad that could be because if you think about it and you can see it now in the pandemic very clearly, scientists are leaders.  Fauci is one of the most admired leaders in the country today.  Now leader not in a traditional sense because he does not actually hold a leadership position per se. 

Scarpino:But do you have to hold a leadership position to be a leader? 

Riggio:No.  That’s the point.  That was the point.  But we – when we taught this course it just exploded into scientists as leaders and scientific ideas as leaders.  So Darwin being a leader in the evolutionary theory.  So that was one thing.  Then we had some students from – we have a Keck Graduate Institute, which is around … 

Scarpino:Here at Claremont McKenna? 

Riggio:It is our seventh college.  And KGI offers a degree in business and science, and pretty much a lot of their funding comes from big drug companies.  A lot of those students want to go into that industry or develop medical technology, stuff like that.  So we had those students.  So there is leadership there.  Leadership in those organizations that do science.  And then we had a philosopher who had been the ethics officer for National Science Foundation, and he is still on our faculty here, and he talked about ethics in science.  And we had this class where the four of us, a chemist, a psychologist, philosopher, and a business guy whose over in the science drug world, and the four of us taught this class together.  It was crazy.  I mean we learned so much but mostly what we learned was how little we knew and how much we still had to learn.  So what we did is we pulled all that together and asked people to write chapters that were relevant to the book or to the topic, you know, leadership and bringing liberal arts and leadership together.  And so that is kind of what the book was.  My thing – and Tom Renn was our head editor.  I don't know if you know Tom.  He is a historian and Tom is a very critical editor.  And he did not like my way of simplifying things but what I said is what are we doing and how can we evaluate success.  And so I took it from Ben Franklin’s saying that to be healthy, wealthy, and wise, and I said that is what we are trying to do with college students.  We are trying to teach them to be healthy, meaning have a healthy outlook on life, you know, sort of psychologically healthy and, of course, you want them to live long lives.  Wealthy because that is one of the ways we measure the success of the college.  We look at the, you know, that is one of the big indicators is – that is why the tech schools, Cal Tech and MIT, are always at the top because their graduates earn more money than everybody else, and our sister college Harvey Mudd. 

Scarpino:So they can donate more when they are off in their careers. 

Riggio:Yes, sure.  But the real emphasis is on whys and what does wisdom mean, and so that was my point is that really what we do at a liberal arts college.  And if you think about what we do with leaders and leaders in organizations, we want them to be healthy in terms of have a healthy organization and treat people well, we want them to make a profit which is the wealth, but we want them to advance understanding, you know advance things, at least in the tech professions and in science and in those disciplines. 

Scarpino:So could you drill down a little bit more on this idea of the liberal arts?  What makes it worthwhile in leadership studies or as the practice of leadership? 

Riggio:Oh, okay, yes.  So we did another book and one of the most fun things that we did – and I have a chapter in this other book and it is called Future of Leadership Development – and it was Georgia Sorenson, Joanne Ciulla, and I wrote it … 

Scarpino:Oh boy, that is a team. 

Riggio:Yes, a challenging team.  Joanne said she had never collaborated with anybody.  She had never co-authored with anybody. 

Scarpino:I have interviewed both of them, and Georgia is deceased now. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  But it was awesome because we had to find common ground between the three ways.  So what we said was what should a leadership studies curriculum from a liberal arts look like.  And we had some real heated discussions about this.  And what we came away with, I think, defines the liberal arts is critical thinking.  So you need to have critical thinking.  You need to have an ethics component.  Obviously Joanne’s influence, but none of us dissented.  You need to understand the breadth of disciplines.  So you need to understand a little bit how different disciplines approach problems, which I found out when I had to guest lecture in a historian who was teaching in our leadership sequence.  He had a leadership World War II course, and I came in and started talking about charismatic leadership and contrasting Churchill and he was shocked.  He said you are talking about the people.  I go, well, I am a psychologist.  That is what I do.  And that is not the historical approach. 

Scarpino:Well. 

Riggio:I mean but he is about context, right. 

Scarpino:Right, big picture. 

Riggio:And it was big picture.  And here I am drilling into their heads.  But it was like he was so shocked, but he was oh, go on.  So that part, understanding the disciplines.  What else?  I should review the chapter.  But basically, we put together the components of – oh, and then experiential.   

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:You have got to be out in the field and bring the field experiences.  So we actually created this chapter that is our agreed upon curriculum for a liberal arts training with a leadership emphasis.  And Drucker was a big advocate of leadership arts as management. 

Scarpino:Philip Drucker? 

Riggio:Peter Drucker, yes. 

Scarpino:Peter Drucker, I am sorry.  Yes, yes. 

Riggio:Yes, Peter Drucker.  And Peter Drucker was a big promoter of the liberal arts, and he thought the liberal arts was the foundation for good management.  And when he talked management, he was really talking about leadership.  I mean he did not like the term leader for obvious reasons.  He got out of Nazi Germany.  I mean he got out long before, but he did not want to go back.  So when he talks about a really good manager, he is talking about leadership.  He said one time in front of my – I had him speak in a class – and the students asked him for his definition of leadership and he said, “Well Professor Riggio should know this.  I don’t believe in leadership.”  And by the end one of the students asked him after he went on his monologue, by then he is completely deaf.  Anyway, at the end someone said well how do you define management.  And what was so funny was in our classroom we had come up with our class’s definition of leadership.  It was almost word for word what Peter said for management. 

Scarpino:So one of the things that I have wondered a lot about, and I am a historian, I obviously work in the liberal arts, is that if Drucker was well aware of what he thought was the important contribution to the liberal arts to leadership and leadership studies, what happened to that as the field developed?  I mean, in a sense you are like Star Trek.  You are boldly going where no man has gone before because it is not really at the heart of most leadership studies. 

Riggio:No, no, no.  But it should be.  And most people who get it, who understand the liberal arts and understand leadership, like Joanne and Georgia and me, get that.  And so that is like duh.  Because what is the liberal arts?  The liberal arts is trying to teach people how to think critically and intelligently and how to act on that knowledge.  And this college is great because they talk about focused liberal arts.  We do not just do liberal arts for navel-gazing. 

Scarpino:It is not like far out. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  Pomona, they have to do a little more of that.  But it is like how is this going to serve me as I go forward.  And Henry Kravis was very big on this.  He said I do not want necessarily people working at KKR or going to Wall Street or whatever.  He goes I understand that you do that, but what I would like you guys to do is – and that is why we came up with this Kravis Prize where we honored nonprofit organizations that were really changing the world and we did it for 10 or 11 years and then it kind of got stale and so he stopped funding that.  He decided to put the money into the college for the students to have that, so we fund them to go work for these big nonprofits that are really changing the world, and we provide a stipend and travel funds and stuff for them.  That is what Henry did with his money.  But his thing was I want them to be able to be engaged citizens and give back.  So Henry Kravis, the corporate raider, he sees very eye-to-eye with us.  It is sort of funny because the more liberal Pitzer students, whenever Henry Kravis comes to speak on campus, there are sometimes protests because he is this captain of industry kind of thing.  He owns all these companies, but he gets it.  He gets that they need to think about giving back.  They need to, you know, he would be a big advocate of work in the Peace Corp or doing things like that, but also go into business and be successful and be both. 

Scarpino:So do you think that one of the outcomes of a liberal arts education or integrating liberal arts into leadership studies is creating engaged citizenry? 

Riggio:Yes.  That is exactly what I would say.  And in fact, I had to say that because when I came here The Leadership Institute was the new institute on the block.  We have a whole bunch of research institutes here.  And they were very skeptical of it.  And they were a little bit skeptical of Henry Kravis who was then a relatively young, but very wealthy donor and you do not let the donor tell us what to do kind of thing. 

Scarpino:Right.  That is the classic do not let the donor drive. 

Riggio:Yes.  So I come on campus and some of my colleagues here come up to me and say do you really think you can teach leadership.  And I remember one guy said well, the motto of your college is preparing leaders.  And I said so it is on your college.  Regardless of what I believe, you guys must believe it because you are here teaching, and I threw it back on him.  But the other thing I said is I think leadership is a charged term, and they said well, you want everybody to be a leader.  I said, you know what; and I used that term, I said we want them to be citizens and we want them to be engaged and exemplary citizens.  And that is what we are doing.  We are doing citizenship, but we call it leadership. 

Scarpino:So rule number 2 or whatever of doing oral history is do not lead the witness, but I am going to kind of violate that. 

Riggio:No but you used the same term that I used. 

Scarpino:No, no, no.  I am going to kind of violate that by suggesting something and getting you to respond to it. 

Riggio:Yes, yes. 

Scarpino:So as I am listening to you talk about leaders and followers and thinking about the material that I have read and the other people that I have interviewed, I mean is it reasonable to think of leadership and followership as existing on some kind of a continuum?  I mean sometimes leaders are followers and sometimes followers rise to leadership. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:They are not separate categories; leader, follower which is the way it tends to appear. 

Riggio:Yes, no.  No.  So I actually have a diagram, like a talk I give, and it is like a Venn diagram, and it comes together, and it is leader qualities and follower qualities.  And the idea is that there is so much overlap.  So you want initiative, and you want them to have confidence, and you need all those kinds of things, and you can think of the overlap.  But what is unique?  Well, unique – and I don't know, I call it obedience, but it is not real obedience in like blind obedience – but followers need to be obedient.  I mean they need to follow, right? 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:And leaders have certain things they need to do.  They need to sort of like begin with a vision or be the placeholder of the vision.  Now, the followers can contribute to the vision, but the leader should embody the vision.  So there are those unique elements, but for the most part most of the things that we admire in leaders are the same things we would admire and want to foster in followers. 

Scarpino:But sometimes followers become leaders. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:And sometimes, very often unless you are the Pope or somebody, leaders also are followers. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  And there is a great chapter in the Art of Followership, Jim Maroosis who is a really interesting guy and he thinks in – he is trained in the classics – but Jim Maroosis titled his little brief chapter “Reciprocal Following.”  So, in another words, he says that leaders are always following.  They are following the purpose.  They are following the mission.  In a practical sense, they have to follow, if they are in a publicly traded, they have to follow the board and the board’s advice. 

Scarpino:Public opinion if you are a politician. 

Riggio:Public opinion right, right.  The customers.  I mean the funders.  So his argument is that it is reciprocal following and that it is really leaders who are doing following.  They are just following kind of different things.  So, yes, they are integrated and I think that – it is sort of interesting.  So when you get this award in the normal … 

Scarpino:The ILA award? 

Riggio:The ILA award.  In the non-pandemic circumstances, you have got to give a little presentation, right? 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:And so when I thought about it, that was what my presentation was about and it was called “Sometimes you lead, and sometimes you follow.”  And it was what I started off when you asked about my research interests, and I say sometimes I am following somebody else’s idea.  I am just a follower, and they are leading, and other times I am leading, and I am asking them to follow me.  And that was the same as when I was the director.  Sometimes I am following my associate director or my staff or you know.  The reason I am on this one nonprofit here in the city which is kind of a mover and shaker here in the city of Claremont is my former assistant, the one who provided clerical support for us Pam who has been long retired, asked me to join this board.  And now she is president and I am vice president, and I said it is just like when I was director, you were bossing me around.  And now you are bossing me around again.  And it is true.  She created our logo, she came up with ideas, but she was the lowest person on the totem pole. 

Scarpino:But is not one of the qualities of effective leadership to identify the strengths of other people and encourage them to run with it? 

Riggio:Absolutely.  Yes, absolutely.  Empowerment. 

Scarpino:That is what you did. 

Riggio:That is what empowerment is about.  Yes.  And if people challenge you, and sometimes, you know, I mean I got challenged by a staff person who said I could run this place better than you.  And I was sort of shook.  I had like a crisis of kind of confidence, so I went home, and I thought what am I doing wrong.  And then I called him back in and I said let us talk about this and what is really going on because you know that is not going to happen, right?  So what is really going on?  And it came down to the fact that he thought I was centralizing things too much and it was not empowering him enough.  And so I said what is it really about.  And he said it was the budget.  He goes I have to ask you for everything.  And I said I will give you your own budget, and I go you have complete control over the budget.  What do you need?  Let us now negotiate what your budget should be.  A couple people said I was crazy.  Why are you giving a staff person budget?  I still had to sign the papers because of the way the bureaucracy works.  And he did a great job with it, and I knew he would.  I just did not see it until he brought it up.  And, you know, he had other issues.  He had issues with my style and everything else, but it was a learning experience for me.  I had to rethink how I was doing things.  I had to get better at what I was doing.  And I think our relationship improved.  He ended up going somewhere else, but I think he now kind of appreciates. 

Scarpino:But part of leadership is to recognize those things. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  You have to. 

Scarpino:So I am going to circle back to something you talked about earlier when we started down this path and you mentioned ethics several times. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:So talk a little bit about – we will come back to leaders in a minute – but talk a little bit about the kind of ethical training that should be a part of leadership studies and what you do here. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  So we have a required course in ethics.  I would love it to be one that we kind of constructed, and at times we have had that and faculty turnover and all that.  I am working on bringing that guy with the NSF connection.  Is it NSF or NIH?  Anyway, he has that.  He is a practical philosopher so he really gets it, and I am trying to bring him back to create a class and maybe he will do it now that he has been up in the ranks.  So we do not do it as well as I would like to.  I would like to have it focus on leadership ethics, but we do require them to have an ethics course.  But I think we build that into every course.  I don't think there is a course here where we do not talk about ethics and usually at a deep level because it is so critically important.  I mean leaders, depending on the leadership position, they have an incredible amount of power.  I mean look at the past presidential administration and you saw them – you saw Trump stretching the Presidential powers to its limits with the support of the followers.  And going into areas that no other President had ever gone in, and ethics is, you know, shorthand common sense is doing the right thing. 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:Or simple, you know, Joanne would shoot me because there is lots of complexity, but it is about doing the right thing and thinking about the greater good of the constituents, of the people who are involved in it.  And we got to get that into people’s heads, and I worry about that.  We have had, you know, you always have students who walk that ethical tightrope.  We do not have very much cheating here but at the University of California, they cheat like professionals.  We do not have much cheating.  But when it surfaces, you try to get them to reflect on what are you doing, who are you cheating?  You are cheating yourself, that kind of thing.  We have had a few little ethical issues that would come up and we try to use them as learning experiences.  But it is so critically important. 

Scarpino:So if you are a leader, right, and you are thinking of ethical behavior, you have an ethical obligation to the organization or institution for which you work. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:One presumes you have an ethical obligation to those persons who are your followers, your employees, whoever is in your unit or whatever, and depending on the kind of leadership you are and the kind of organization you are in, you have some ethical responsibility to your constituents or your customers or whatever.  So how do you balance that because they may conflict? 

Riggio:Yes.  This comes up a lot. 

Scarpino:I mean what is good for the company may not be good for the employees or the customers. 

Riggio:Yes, yes, and obviously when I teach I-O psychology this comes up.  I teach organizational psychology, this always comes up and we talk about triple bottom line, that kind of thing.  We talk – I usually show … 

Scarpino:Okay, so tell us what a triple bottom line is. 

Riggio:Oh exactly.  So the idea, the bottom line for many businesses is profits and the triple bottom line is profits but people as you just suggested, all  the constituents, and planet, you know, and the idea of not raping the planet, not causing lasting damage which is a big issue now with global warming. 

Scarpino:Absolutely. 

Riggio:So we have got to think about that.  And I remember one time, we have a lot of students who are Econ majors, but it is really more like an undergraduate business degree that they get because they take accounting and they take other things.  And when I talked to them about triple bottom line in my class and he started laughing and he said you are kidding, are you not?  He goes it is only profit.  I mean profit is the only thing that matters.  And you know what was so funny?  He came back to me the next semester and said you know you were right.  He goes I did an internship, and he goes I see what you are saying.  But I used to show – oh gosh,  what was her name – Colleen, she was the President of Southwest Airlines.  She is retired now.  And she talks about her – and she says first are our employees, second are our customers, and third are our shareholders.  And she talks about it that way, which is very, very different than you hear in traditional business circles.  And then she justifies it.  And I always used to show that clip to them and say what we are doing in I-O psychology is we are teaching you to be leaders, but we are also teaching you to be employees, be followers, and how to treat each other in such a way that you maximize both the leader and the workforce.  And so it makes sense that your first attention should be to the people who are doing the work. 

Scarpino:So I am going to pick up on something you just mentioned because I think that these interviews and the work we do should have a connection to the world we live in.  You mentioned global warming, climate change. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:A:  Is that partly the result of a failure of leadership? 

Riggio:Yes, I mean I think it is – see now as a social psychologist, I think in deeper kinds of ways.  I think about the, you know, there is a thing in social psychology called the commons dilemma.  And actually the guy was doing a visiting sabbatical year, the guy who kind of came up with that, Julian Edney, and I remember sitting as a graduate student having – never took a class from him, but I had deep conversations with him about the commons dilemma.  And he has this simple commons dilemma thing.  He puts – the best way to do it is with candies.  Hershey’s Kisses, you put them in a bowl and people can take so many out of the bowl and it gets replenished at a certain rate.  That is what the commons dilemma is.  And what happens is people’s greed, they take all the candy before the replenishment comes, and the idea is that grazing, you know, everybody wants to graze their cattle on the village green. 

Scarpino:I mean there is that classic, you know, they tried to do the commons. 

Riggio:Right.  So in social psychology, we talk about that in terms of sort of satisfying your own needs and not thinking about your neighbors.  If we talk about conflicts and we talk about the divisiveness in the US today, I always turn it in-group/out-group bias and look at some of the very classic Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment where he took campers and he turned them against each other by just simply creating two groups and having them compete.  So I think about those problems from that very basic how do we – how do we put on hold the dark forces of being human beings and promote the positive aspects of doing things collectively, you know, sacrificing so that other people can have some.  The commons dilemma idea:  How do we not take so much out of the pot?  The problem is we give in so easily to the dark side.  And almost every time you see a horrible despotic toxic leader, they know very well how to manipulate the dark side of humanity.  They know very well how to create in-groups and out-groups. 

Scarpino:So I do not really want to make the interviews I do political, but you mentioned Donald Trump and he was the leader, and he still is. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:And he filled the need in a certain segment of the population that were his followers. 

Riggio:Right.  And Jean talks about this well in her Toxic Leadership book, Jean Lipman-Blumen, that there is this – we cannot help it.  We go for that alpha male or alpha leader, you know, the strong man leader.  May be sexist, but the term is sexist in and of itself, so it is usually a strong man leader, the alpha male in the troupe of gorillas or whatever.  And it does not always have to be sexist because there are alpha females, too, but anyway.  But this idea of being protected, we want to be protected from harm.  And there is that.  The father figure kind of urge that comes out.  The evolutionary, so I am not really that steep into evolutionary psychology, but I read some of it and it is part of our DNA, and we have to fight against it.  And that is why we have this sort of traditional views of leadership, and they hold so strongly because it is in our DNA.  We are looking for that alpha male to tell us what to do and then we want to blindly follow. 

Scarpino:But … 

Riggio:All the cult leaders do that. 

Scarpino:But maybe, I mean, could one conclude from what we have been talking about that the success of a person who falls into that category, whether it is the cult leader or the politician, is that either accidentally or by virtue of their own intelligence and insight, they figure out what it is that the followers want and give it to them. 

Riggio:Yes, absolutely. 

Scarpino:I mean unless you are just holding a machine gun on somebody, you have got to persuade people to come with you. 

Riggio:Absolutely.  And that is the dark side of charisma.   So they have some sort of initial appeal.  They are able to play to that.  I mean look at Jim Jones, the People’s Temple thing.  Jim Jones … 

Scarpino:He started in Indianapolis by the way. 

Riggio:Yeah, no, I know.  I have done a lot of reading about Jim Jones because I was in the Bay area when they made him Director of Housing which I thought was ridiculous.  I mean first, he is a religious leader, and he is like a startup religious leader.  Religion and politics should not have been mixing, and particularly in San Francisco, in the 1970s. 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:But Jim Jones, what did he have them start calling him?  Father. 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:Now, did he know all this?  Maybe, maybe not.  There is this thing that maybe he was actually CIA trained and all this.  But the deal was, what did they do?  You isolate people.  You cut them off from their families.  Now they are dependent on the father, the leader, and anybody who dissents is a bad guy, outgroup member. 

Scarpino:That is how basic training works. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  Right.  And look, the military does that and uses those same principles for a purpose because they want to get obedient followers for a war where you have to be obedient or people will run willy-nilly across a battlefield. 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:It is this balance of yes, we need a certain amount of obedience, but we, you know, as followers.  So now I am talking about the followers.  But you also have a point where you say I am not going to be obedient anymore.  I am going to stand up to you and I am going to say because we are doing the wrong thing.  We have got to stop this. 

Scarpino:Right. 

Riggio:So I, you know, I mean solving problems like that, but we got to – so part of it is sort of greed and self-interest.  Part of it is that our group deserves it.  A big thing, too, reactant psychological.  I mean I am drawing from my roots of social psychology. 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:The whole thing right now with the vaccine, there was a thing, I just heard it the other day.  They interviewed a guy, he is sick in the hospital with COVID, and they said well when you get out would you take a vaccine if you, you know.  Well, you are not going to shove the vaccine down my throat.   

Scarpino:But is it not possible that this controversy around the vaccine, in particularly people who are arguing against it, that part of it is political opportunism? 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:You have got an issue that you can run with.  It will get you a lot of constituents. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  Oh absolutely.  It has been politicized.  I mean that is why they are doing it.  And then another psychological – rationalization.  They are rationalizing it away.  My stepdaughter will not get vaccinated. 

Scarpino:I am going to respect time here, and we are at a good breaking point, but we were talking about ethics and so that we wrap this up with that focus, what is it that you want the future leaders that you are training here … 

Riggio:In the ethics world. 

Scarpino:… to know about ethics?  What do you want them to carry away from here? 

Riggio:So I think what all of you can do – and I think it is tied very closely to critical thinking – so you have to develop ways for them to think about what they are doing and at look at it from different perspectives.  So I do an exercise and I do this in my foundations class, but I do it with the Silicon Valley Program.  So these are kids that are all working full time internships then on the weekend they are doing full time classwork.  It is a very demanding program.  And it is an ethics exercise.  And it starts off and there is the exploding car thing, so it is a scenario hydrogen car, and you are working for the company, and they could fix this, but they are covering up.  And they can generally do the right thing when it is they are working in an exploding car company.  And then I can shift it to another thing and actually Joanne Ciulla has one called Corneas in the Congo.  Do you buy these black market transplant organs that came from China in prison goulong (sp?? 1:59:30) kind of things, anyway.  And they get it.  Most of the time they go, yeah, well if I was really working there I might be concerned about my job, but if push came to shove, yes, I know what the right thing is.  Then I switch it to something on campus.  Okay, you are going to go in the dining hall, you know your friend does not have a dining meal plan because he does not have the money and he is pounding on the door at the back because the person is not watching the door.  Do you open the door and let him in?  And what happens?   

Scarpino:Most people say yes. 

Riggio:Yes.  Most people say yes.  And then we talk about it, and they will rationalize and justify.  And I say you just stole $15 from the food service.  How can you live with that?  Well, you know.  And I hope that some day they will think about that.  That some day they will go back and say that was wrong to do.  And I am sure they have done something like it. 

Scarpino:Everybody has. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  But I hope that they will look at it and go – because I did it.  I mean I did stuff like that when I was in college.  But I hope that with age and wisdom they look at it and go should not do that anymore.  I should not do that stuff anymore. 

Scarpino:So is the trick to teaching ethics to get people, I mean they ought to know about Corneas in the Congo and all that stuff, but to get them to see that it applies to my life in the world in which I live and the job in which I hold, and it is hard? 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  I think you do that, you know, and a lot of that, I mean I don't know.  I am not an ethicist and I do not know all this.  I know they use all these little things. 

Scarpino:But very few people are, but we still have to do it. 

Riggio:Yes, yes, yes.  But the issue like so what are the things, you know they call it the smell test or would your mother be proud of you if you were doing it.  Any of those little – I am thinking of the word – you know those little tricks that you can use. 

Scarpino:Yes. 

Riggio:Heuristics.  Those little heuristics.  If it works then apply it.  I mean I sort of do that one.  My mother has passed away, but I think what would my mother think if I did this, if she knew I was doing this.  Sometimes it helps you from doing things. 

Scarpino:So at this point I am going to thank you.  We have been going for two hours and two minutes, and it is long enough.  I have got about a similar amount for tomorrow, which we are getting together at 1:30 right? 

Riggio:Yes.  Is that what we are doing tomorrow? 

Scarpino:Okay, so I am going to shut off the recorder so that we are not recording anymore. 

Riggio:Sure.  And I do not envy you having to decipher all of this because I have this going off on tangent thing. 

Scarpino:Well I actually do not have to decipher it because in effect what we do and when we are doing oral history is I am obviously very interested in what you have to say and most of the people that you name if they are still alive, I have interviewed them, the leaders. 

Riggio:Yes, I know you have been in this. 

Scarpino:I have been doing this for a long time.  But oral history is like source material.  I would assume, because we now have a pretty large library of interviews with not only folks like you, but I interview people in Indianapolis.  There is this organization called the Keppra Institute and it basically started off as an African-American couple who were looking for a way to get their teenage sons into school instead of hanging out on the street.  So they are my age African-American people that I have interviewed.  You are creating – you are recording people’s memories which are different than what they publish. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:I am going to do it, but I have not yet asked you very much about what you have published. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:I am trying to figure out who is the guy that published this stuff. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:And so it is like source material.  It is like raw material for people to use, but if you do not go out there and collect it, it is not going to be there. 

Riggio:Yes, yes. 

Scarpino:And the ILA apparently thinks that this is a good thing to do.  I actually do not know those folks very well.  I mean I know them on sight to say hi and all that stuff. 

Riggio:Are you talking about like Cyn Cherrey and that group? 

Scarpino:Yes, I know her, but you know she is not my drinking buddy, that kind of thing. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:They appear to realize that this has value up to a point. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:In other words, they will also do interviews.  They have got somebody who does sort of quick and dirty 20 minutes and that is fine, and I do something different.  I really try to develop the context of the person’s ideas and thinking. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  You know it is funny.  We used to have an online journal that we kind of published here at the Institute because we had a person who wanted to do that and so she did it for a while, and she was the editor of it.  And whenever a leadership scholar would come, we would interview them or have the students interview them.  And Bernie Bass came and then he passed away shortly after that.  And that one piece, that interview with him, got more hits than everything else we had published combined. 

Scarpino:Yes.  And what I am doing is not the kind of thing – it is a little beyond the Tobias Center’s website, ILA’s website... 

Riggio:No, it is not like that where it is out on the web. 

Scarpino:Not too many people are going to go looking.  But we will transcribe and the transcriptions are searchable which is why you will not see it for a while because it will go to the transcriber who puts it in line with all the other stuff she has got to do and then it comes back and I have a graduate student compare the audio to the written part to make sure that the transcriber just did not fall asleep or write down like I had happen one time diseased instead of deceased. 

Riggio:Yes. 

Scarpino:So by the time we finally produce a product, which it will be a while, it will be back here in transcription and then we have got … 

Riggio:I appreciate the methodology and all that, and this is kind of interesting and fun and a learning experience for me. 

Scarpino:And I will say that why I keep doing this is because I get a chance to meet the most interesting people that I would never meet in the normal rhythm of my life. 

Riggio:Well we talked about that.  So I was on the board and actually was the chair of this committee that awarded this for a while, I think when it started.  And so all those early people were ones that I had on my list, Cyn was keeping a list, and other people were keeping a list, and I was going we have so many people.  And then she says not too many, and that was how we started that. 

Scarpino:Well I actually went back when I started this and got the earlier awardees who were still alive and that I could get to. 

Riggio:Yes, that was after. 

Scarpino:So I mean I interviewed James Macgregor Burns. 

Riggio:Yes, yes, I know.  You told me that. 

Scarpino:And I wish I could do it over. 

Riggio:He was too busy right? 

Scarpino:Well I think I told you when we were on Zoom that I had four hours prepared, he said I am going to give you one session which became two hours and 15 minutes or whatever, and you see what I have got here.  Well I am cut in – and he told me when I walked in the door – so I had to cut four hours’ worth of stuff into two in my head while I am talking to him. 

Riggio:It is too bad because I did not have that many – I had a lot more conversations with Bernie than I do with Jim, but I would have liked to have those conversations. 

Scarpino:He was a really interesting guy and a nice man. 

Riggio:He is super, yes.  Most of our times were he was catching up on what Bernie was doing and Bernie was saying how is Jim.   

Scarpino:When we were done, he hugged me when I left.  And I never saw him again, just that one time period we corresponded a little bit. 

Riggio:Yes, he was a very nice man. 

Scarpino:Very nice man.  So thank you.  I know you have things to do. 

Riggio:Yes, yes.  That is alright. 

Scarpino:Oh, this is still recording. 

​​END OF INTERVIEW​ 

Scarpino: Today is July 23, 2021, and I am Philip Scarpino from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and I am here in California talking to Ronald Riggio.

 Riggio:      Riggio, soft g.

Scarpino: Sorry.

Riggio:      I have had it pronounced a number of different ways.

Scarpino: Riggio.

Riggio:      Riggio.

Scarpino: And this is the second session with Ron Riggio, and the first one will be filed separately at the IUPUI Archives and Special Collections.  So where we left off yesterday is at a logical point where we were talking about liberal arts and leadership, and I was going to transition into specific questions about you and leadership and so that is what we are going to do now.

 Riggio:      Okay.

Scarpino: But before I do that, if overnight or anything, did you think of something you wanted to say that I did not give you a chance to say?

Riggio:      No.  I think we covered a lot.

Scarpino: So first question is how do you define leadership?  How do we know it when we see it?

Riggio:      Well, okay, so a long time ago when I wrote my industrial-organizational psychology textbook, you have to define things and you have to put them in the, you know, and I said it is sort of ability to move people toward some goals.  And then I think I expanded it in future years to energize and direct people toward goals.  But I think most of us who are studying leadership now realize that leadership is kind of an interaction.  Leadership occurs when leaders and followers come together and work together for some specific goal, and then, of course, that occurs in context.  So the old you have to consider all three of those.  So I think that is the way I would define it.  It is when leaders and followers come together and try to achieve some kind of goals or some kind of ends.

Scarpino: Okay.  What criteria do you use to define successful leadership?

Riggio:      So for successful leadership, one of the things that I talk about is what is your stated goal?  What is your objective?  And typically you are talking about shared goals, so what does the leader want and expect to happen, what do the followers want and expect to happen?  If it is in an organization, what is the organization’s goals?  And so all of those things have to meld together.  And then some way of measuring the accomplishment of it, but I would argue that not just goal attainment but the quality of the interaction between leaders and followers.  So I think one of the things when we talk about how do we, in research, how do we measure leadership outcomes.  You look at do they achieve the goals, the concrete goals.  So if it is in manufacturing or something, that is a pretty easy thing to measure.  But then also assessing the process, so are they satisfied?  Are the members satisfied with the leadership and with the process?  And so I think that is important.  And then yesterday we were talking about ethics, and I think you also have to incorporate that.  So I think there is sort of at least three ways to look at how do people feel about the process, what are the outcomes, and did they achieve what they had intended to achieve and is it a good thing.  Is it the right thing to do?

Scarpino: So if a leader is in an organization whether it is a factory or a university or whatever, if that organization does not achieve its goals, is that a fault of leadership?  Does that mean the leader is doing a bad job?

Riggio:      Well it would be the fault of the – of that process.  So if we look at leadership not as the leader making this happen.  I mean I think in traditional sense, we think about the leader as kind of the lever, and the leader does something and then it impacts the followers.  But in reality, the leaders and followers are working together toward something so it could be, to use a sports metaphor, it could be the followers who dropped the ball or it could be the leader who drops the ball.

Scarpino: Well usually what happens in sports is if the followers as the players drop the ball, literally or figuratively, the coach gets fired.

Riggio:      Yes, oh absolutely.  Right, right.  And that is part of that leader centric bias that we have.  They look to the leader, and it is more of a western phenomenon.  So Susan Murphy when she was here, we had a post doc from Turkey, and they did a really interesting study.  So she wanted us to help subsidize her trip back home to Turkey in the summer.  And I said alright we will do that, but you have got to do some research.  You give us something. 

Scarpino: You have to sing for your dinner.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  So we had done a study here – Susan had done a study here – where they presented people with scenarios of leaders in groups succeeding or failing.  And then the outcome was how much responsibility went to the leader and how much responsibility went to the team members.  And here with the American students, and then she went to Turkey for Turkish students, the American students gave the lion’s share of the responsibility, the benefit or the blame, to the leader.  But the Turkish students said no.  They gave most of the responsibility to the collective, to the team.  Now they are a much more collectivistic society.  We are much more individualistic.  And so that can affect how we sort of perceive the outcomes, and as you suggest why do they fire the coach?   Well because he is the leader.  We are leader centric.  But in reality, we have to take into account all of these other things.  We really cannot measure leadership success without taking into account the process, how do the people feel who were involved in it, how do the other stakeholders feel about it?  Gosh, how many robo calls have I gotten in the last week?  And some of those people are trying to rip you off, right?  Now if you just measure success it is how much money did they steal from people or did they finagle out of people?

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      But that is a poor measure of success because they are ripping people off.  The people who are probably doing the job hate it because it is working in some boiler room somewhere.  So I would say that is not a good example of success, yet the guy that owns the company or whatever, the entity, is probably really happy with their performance.

Scarpino: Sure.  If you measure success in the amount of money he earns, he is probably quite happy.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  So I think it is much more complex than that.  It is interesting and I will kind of jump into some research.  So I took that idea.  So someone said you have been doing research on followership, we want to put on a session at a conference, I think this was the Academy of Management, on new approaches to thinking about followership.  And I started thinking about it and I said okay, what have we, you know, we have kind of left followers out of the equation.  And so I came up with this idea of what I call shared leader-follower outcomes.  And the idea is that we have been looking too much at that leader as the lever and then followers as the outcome.  And I thought about in I-O psychology, we measure kind of bottom line variables.  We measure productivity or performance; however you want to talk about that.  We measure the quality of the thing.  We look at things like attendance, absenteeism, and turnover.  So these are the outcomes that are studied in most of management research and I-O psychology research, and then we look at satisfaction.  So are the team members happy, are they happy in what they are doing.  And I thought wait a minute, that leaves the leader out of the equation.  So the shared leader-follower outcomes that we are talking about, and I gave them different names, and so instead of quality I call it professionalism.  Do they do this quality work, do both the leaders and followers see themselves as professionals who are doing exemplary work of some kind?  If leaders and followers are working together, is there synergy?  So we use the term synergy.  For the attendance variable, we talked about we call it presence, and presence is the idea of not just are you physically there if we are counting heads, but you are ready to work and you are fully present.  And what was the other one?  Chemistry.  So the satisfaction is, is there chemistry?  Is there chemistry among leaders and followers?  So we are actually doing that research right now.  We have developed a measure that assesses that.

Scarpino: So you are using a survey to gather this information?

Riggio:      Yes.  We have got some pilot data that shows that the measure kind of does seem to get at these four dimensions, these four sort of substitute dimensions.  We have not gotten any further than that.  Part of it was COVID sort of shut it down.

Scarpino: So is we the Kravis Institute?

Riggio:      No, it is actually I am working with some guys at the business school at Cal State Fullerton. 

Scarpino: Oh.

Riggio:      And it is interesting.  It basically goes back to my past.  These guys are all way younger.  They were not there when I was there.  But my colleague, Tom Mays, introduced me to these guys and I started working with them.  So I have a number of different teams that I work with and that is my team over there.

Scarpino: So as you are talking about followers, I thought back, I had a flashback for a minute, to an experience that I had as a leader decades ago when I was a platoon leader in the armored cavalry, and they used to tell us, “Remember Lieutenant, you are responsible for everything that your men do or fail to do.”  What do you think about that model of leadership?

Riggio:      Yes.  Well, I mean I think that is the idea of the shared, and it is that old sort of Truman thing, you know, the buck stops here.  Because of by virtue of their position, yes, the leaders do have to take some responsibility, and particularly in our culture.  So that is why the coach says I knew I was going to get fired.  Now was it right?  I mean go back to the Mets when they first began as an expansion team and they had Casey Stengel who was supposed to be a great manager, but they performed poorly because he was dealing with poor talent.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      But I am sure that there is no surprise when that manager gets fired.  But that is a weakness in how we evaluate outcomes.

Scarpino: That is where I was going with this.

Riggio:      Yes.  If you really look at it, so if you were going to do this well you would say what is the level of talent, what is the expectation?  Now Marty Chemers when he was here, he did a really interesting study of our intercollegiate teams.  And he wanted to look at, assess the leaders, and he did it in a couple of interesting ways.  But assess the leaders and see if the leader really did have an effect on the outcome of the sport.  So what he used as the outcome measure is they do these preseason polls, so before the season begins all the coaches say who they think is going to come in first.  So that was his measure.  Well, the measure was not that.  The measure was did they exceed or did they go below what the collective preseason poll was.  And then what was interesting was he asked the team members who is the leader.  And sometimes they said it was the coach, but sometimes they said it was the team captains, sometimes they said it was this player.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      And he measured the confidence and optimism of those people who were identified as leaders, and that actually predicted performance.

Scarpino: Huh.

Riggio:      And so his confidence and optimism, he called it mettle, leaders who have this mettle, M-E-T-T-L-E.

Scarpino: So the higher the optimism and confidence …

Riggio:      The better the team performed.

Scarpino: … the better the team was going to do.

Riggio:      Yes, yes, which kind of makes sense.  I mean who is going to follow a pessimistic leader?  And the confidence was really kind of a self-efficacy I know we can do it.  And that makes sense.

Scarpino: So do you think that leadership is situational?

Riggio:      I mean the situation comes into play, and so definitely you have to take that into account, too.  And that is kind of where we were going with the sports thing.  So situational, if we are talking about a sports team, the situation becomes what is the situation in which they are playing.  The situation could be how many players are injured or on the injured list.  The situation could be the other teams, the talent of the other teams and the effectiveness of the other teams.  So if you are in a weak league versus a strong league, your performance is going to be affected by that.  So yes, you do have to take into account the situation.

Scarpino: Do you think that leadership is a cultural construction?

Riggio:      I think it is a social construction.

Scarpino: Okay.

Riggio:      And I think it is culturally …

Scarpino: Okay, make the distinction.

Riggio:      So the social construction is that we identify people as leaders, and that Jim Meindl thing of the romance of leadership, that we are sort of in love with leaders.  The interesting thing I think about Americans is we do put our leaders up on pedestals, but we also enjoy watching them fall off the pedestal.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      Something happened to me at the ILA.  I don't know if you were at the Washington, D.C. ILA.  This was many years ago, probably early 2000s.

Scarpino: No.  No, I would not have been there.

Riggio:      The next year it was going to be in Amsterdam.  Did you go to that one?

Scarpino: I did go to Amsterdam.

Riggio:      Okay, so it was the year before Amsterdam.  So here was the scenario.  This is like embedded in my memory.  So we are in D.C., and we are going to go to the Dutch Embassy on the other side of town, and they are going to do a big ole thing to try to get everybody to come to Amsterdam.  They put us on buses to shuttle us to the Dutch Embassy, but it was around sundown, and they decided to sort of take the swing around the Mall, around the National Mall.  And I got on a bus and I met these Italian guys from Italy and they were behind me and there were some South Africans over here, and then some African leadership scholars.  And I looked around and said I am one of the few Americans on this bus.  It just happens that ILA is mostly Americans, but I ended up on this bus not knowing anybody.  I went by myself.  And as we are going through the Mall and the Washington Monument and then we go by the Lincoln Memorial, one of the – I think it was the South African – said you know you Americans with your distaste for kings and queens and royalty sure built some incredible monuments to your presidents.  And it struck me just how leader centric we are that we build these big monuments.  And think about it, too, none of those presidents lasted more than eight years.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      You know it is not like the Queen of England who has a 60-year reign or whatever it is, 70-year reign, I guess.  So we really are kind of in love with leaders, and I am leading us down some path that you asked me.

Scarpino: No, this works.  I asked you if leadership was a cultural construction and you said no you thought it was more of a social one but social and cultural are connected.

Riggio:      So the social construction is we put this label on it and everything transforms.  I mean think about this.  You get appointed to a position, I make you dean of the college, and everything changes because we do recognize that status.  That is why I think social psychology is such great training for leadership because so much of it is a social construction.  The fact that we identify leaders, we give them authority, and in fact Stanley Milgram, social psychologist, kind of proved this because he went around and just put on a security guard uniform and started bossing people around just to see if they would follow what he was doing.  And his famous shock experiments.  The experiment of wearing the white lab coat is the authority and people do horrible things because the authority tells them to do it.  There are actually really no strings attached to those subjects, those participants in the Milgram shock experiments.  They just fall into the role of being a sort of obedient follower, and his studies were of the obedience process.

Scarpino: So social, cultural construction, if that is the case than – as we have been talking here, you mentioned several different countries around the world and places you have been and so on.  Considering leadership is a cultural and social construction, then does effective leadership vary from culture to culture, society to society?

Riggio:      Yes, I think it does.  But I think what happens is we all sort of agree on the outcomes.  So I mean if you think about a politician in a democracy, the bottom line measure of success is do you get re-elected or do you continue your position?  The win-loss record for the coach.  It is the bottom line.  But there is so much more in terms of nuances, and so if we talk about sort of American Presidents, there is a whole slew of presidential scholars and they spend their whole careers trying to evaluate the contributions, what did this President do – the ones who are studying from a leadership perspective.  So there is a lot of complexity in there, but we sort of default to this sort of bottom line of do you get elected.  And I think that is the same for all democracies.  But there are subtle cultural differences in terms of what do people appreciate.

Scarpino: So thinking in terms of leadership studies or the study of leaders, are there qualities of effective leadership that are constant across cultures?  Whether you are the leader in India or South Africa or the United States?

Riggio:      Well, you know, I think we have to go look at the globe studies where they studied all these societies and countries across the world, and using a common measure and finding that, yes, in general most people do have a sense of what like charisma is and they do sort of value charismatic leadership.  Now there may be subtle differences in how they define charisma, but everybody seems to have some form of that, and a number of other kinds of things.  But then there are subtle shadings, so some countries reject more paternalistic leaders and other countries embrace the more paternalistic.

Scarpino: So if we look at historical figures like Stalin, Genghis Khan, Idi Amin, on the one hand they were pretty good at what they did.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: It was not very nice but are they effective leaders even though?

Riggio:      Yes.  But that is the big issue that comes, and we kind of talked about this yesterday when we were talking about ethics and so you say, okay, are they effective?  Well they are effective just like the boiler room guy who says yes, we made a lot of money, but we ripped a lot of people off.  I mean Enron.  Enron was a very successful company until they got found out.  But that is not, that is not – that is only one very, very limited way of looking at success.  And success is that greater thing that we talked about, the ethical thing.  What is the impact on the followers?  What is the impact on all the customers and other stakeholders?  What is the impact on the planet?  That kind of thing, so they were not good leaders.  They were effective.  And we have to differentiate that.  Effective and good are not the same.

Scarpino: So the United States is becoming a multicultural society and, in fact, we have.  We had huge, millions of immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century and we continue to have millions of immigrants and so on and so forth.

Riggio:      It is crazy, right, because that, I mean Native Americans are a tiny, tiny percent of the population.  They have been decimated essentially so everybody is an immigrant except for the Native American.

Scarpino: And that is what I tell my students that every human being here was an immigrant at one time.

Riggio:      Yes, from 1600 forward and why we have such an issue with immigrants is unbelievably weird.  It is just unfathomable.  And, again, I turn to social psychology and I say okay, we are in the group now, we are the daughters of the American Revolution.  Their big thing is can you trace your ancestry back to the Mayflower.  That is a whole big thing.  Well, they are just a group of immigrants.

Scarpino: My mother can do that by the way.

Riggio:      And my mother-in-law has been trying to do it.  But the thing is, what are you doing?  You are sort of saying well we are the pure immigrant.  And that is a horrible thing.  Right away we start to give in to that dark side of our nature and say that we are better because we were here earlier than these people who came later.

Scarpino: So is one of the challenges of leadership A) not giving in to your own dark side, but B) not play into that in your followers?

Riggio:      Yes.  It is relatively easy to be a bad leader.  It is much harder to be a good leader.  Part of the reason it is easy to be a bad leader is we know certain things will happen.  If you can find a common thread or a common enemy, that pulls your team together, and you can do that.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      Now, on a positive side, and I think all these things, these sorts of political, social political processes are kind of curvilinear.  They are inverted U shape.  If you do not have any common enemy and you are in business, a for-profit business, you have got to have somebody that you are fighting against.  So we are Company ABC, and we are better than Company XYZ and our products are better and all that kind of stuff, and so that competition motivates people.  But if we start to vilify them, start doing dirty dealings or whatever, so you can do that all the time and I think one of the things that we see is when we sort of follow bad leaders – and we talked about this yesterday – you see that pattern that we saw in those cult leaders of identifying the enemy.  It is almost impossible to – in fact, I think it is impossible to find a bad leader like a cult leader, a dictator or whatever, who did not create an enemy that was attacking us to pull people together, to pull the supporters together.

Scarpino: Yes.

Riggio:      And you see that.  I mean why did Jim Jones move to Guyana was because he said well, the government is cracking down on us.  They were cracking down on him but for his followers it is like they are going to drag you into jail or do whatever, and he told them stuff like that.  And it is the same thing with Hitler well, the Jews are our enemy and anybody who is not like us, who is not the Aryan race, are the enemy.  And so you are going to see that all the time when you have bad leadership.

Scarpino: Do you talk about those kinds of things or do people who teach leadership talk about those kinds of things?

Riggio:      Oh yes, all the time.  All the time.  So I start off like when I do foundations of leadership, I start off and I talk about what are the questions associated with leadership.  So the first one we think is are leaders born or made, and then we talk about that.  And what I want them to see is that we can study this stuff, because a lot of times they have no idea what leadership is all about, and we preach that from a social scientific point of view because we are all psychologists here.  And then eventually I get to the, as I call it, the Hitler question, so the dark side.  And there is sort of common sense versions of leadership and one of the common sense things about leadership is that it is just effectiveness and if you are effective then you are a good leader.  And they all say well, Hitler was effective.  He almost took over the world.  No, he was effective, but he was not good.  He is not a good leader.  And then you get into the ethics and all that.

Scarpino: Do you think that leadership is at least in part a gendered construction?

Riggio:      Well there are those classic studies think leader, think male.  So, yes.  I mean it is tinged with that and what we are trying to do is move away from that idea.  But we cannot.  It is like we give in to those primitive aspects.  Why have we never had a woman president?  Well, kind of, maybe they are not strong enough.  Look at what they did to Hillary Clinton.  They said maybe she is too emotional.  Just playing right into the stereotype, the worst sexist stereotypes of women, that they are too emotional to lead. 

Scarpino: She, in part, kind of took the beating for going first.

Riggio:      Yes, oh yes.

Scarpino: Sort of Jackie Robinson.

Riggio:      Oh yes, absolutely.  And history might put her in a Jackie Robinson kind of position.  I don't know.  But you know what?  Jackie Robinson succeeded, too, so we also like success, so our heroes – so if Jackie Robinson would have been a lousy player, he would not have the stature and everything that we have now.  Hillary probably is going to always have that issue that she lost.  I mean people forgot Geraldine Ferraro.

Scarpino: And she was a controversial high profile figure to begin with.  So if leadership is at least partially a culture construction and it is partly a gendered construction, then what does that say about what should be the content of leadership training programs?

Riggio:      Well I think a big part of it is to talk about – is to understand these processes and rethink about what we really want in our leaders.  Do we want leaders who are strong men?  Do we want leaders who are going to build the relationship?  Do we want leaders who take credit for things and do not give credit to the followers?  I mean I think if you actually talk to students and say what do you really want, they do sort of want the much more relationship building, the things that are more stereotypically sort of feminine in that kind of think leader, think male thing.  But the default if they do not engage their brains is to go get the strong man.  And we know this from a lot of studies.  We did a study where we had groups come together.  We measured everything we could think of in terms of personality, their skills, their all kinds of things, and then we put them into groups, and they had to pick a leader.  So they voted on who the leader was, and the two best predictors were not any of the personality variables and all those kinds of things.  The two best predictors were 1) were they male because these were mixed sex groups; second, who talked the most.  Now, we even measured what was the content of what they were saying, and so we had sort of like they were helping, the content was focused on the task, they were doing positive things or were they just jabbering?  And it was the jabbering.  Now Bernie Bass in I think 1950-something called that the babble hypothesis, the idea that just the person who speaks the most.  And we see this like in juries when you do jury selection, the person who speaks up the most is most likely to get elected the foreperson of the jury.

Scarpino: So how does that influence the way you teach leadership because you know that?

Riggio:      That is how.  I let them know this stuff.  You sort of hold up a mirror to them and say people behave this way and they default into these kinds of things.  Now you know my colleague Cheryl Tan who teaches Women in Leadership and has a reasonable minority of the class are males that take Women in Leadership, which is good, I am sure she is much more confrontational and has to be much more confrontational because of the topic.  I am a little confrontational about rethink the way you think about leadership, but I think that is a big part of the (inaudible).

Scarpino: So knowing what you know and that is there is an implicit bias that favors males over females in leadership and I did not look up the names of your students, but I am assuming that this is a progressive university, and you have males and females in somewhat equal proportion in your leadership classes …

Riggio:      Yes, pretty much equal proportions, probably slightly more women.

Scarpino: … how do you deal with the subject with your female students knowing the world that they are headed into?

Riggio:      I think they already see it.  These are pretty educated people when they get here, and I think they see it.  And I think what you try to get them to do is they see some of it but pull the whole curtain back so they can really.  I am not super confrontative, but in that intro to leadership thing, one of my questions is who is better, men or women leaders.

Scarpino: Oh (chuckles).

Riggio:      So I do it on purpose.  I have are they born or made, was Hitler a good leader, and on that one then I stop and I say okay, who has more leadership potential by virtue, and then I talk about group differences.  Because you do not want them to think you are saying all men or all women, you have to talk about – I throw in a little statistics, I talk about normally distributed, all qualities are normally distributed, and if the men are higher or the women are higher it is just that slight shifting of the normal curve because most of them have had stats, so I kind of throw that back.  And then I say well, what do we mean by this, and so then there is the well-known study of transformational leadership that says that women tend to be more transformational than men, and if we use transformational leadership as exemplary leadership then that supports that women have more potential.  And, in fact, you can look at LMX or you can look at some other relationship oriented theories.

Scarpino: LMX?

Riggio:      A Leader Member Exchange theory, which basically is about do you have the capacity to build relationships, and women do have a capacity to build relationships.  And we have shifted.  There is a greater desire to have a leader who is relationship oriented than just task oriented.  I think if we go back probably 50-60 years, they just expected the leader to be task oriented and did not expect them to care much about the relationship, but times have changed, and people work in teams and relationships matter much more.

Scarpino: So I am going to set up my next question with an anecdote and this is either going to work or it is not.

Riggio:      Sure, alright.

Scarpino: And I am sure you will see where I am going with this, but when I was a kid like middle school, teenager, or whatever, I grew up in New England and it gets cold there and so we played hockey on the farm ponds.  First you have to clean them off then you go out and play.  And then my youngest son was a hockey player, and he was good.  He played on two state championship teams and la-di-da.  But as I thought about that, he is better than me no doubt about it, but no matter how much coaching or training either one of us, neither one of us was ever going to end up in the National Hockey League.  So of all the tens of thousands of kids who play hockey and I have gotten a chance to be all over the Midwest and Canada with my son and there are thousands of them who do this, there are only a few who are going to end up being Maurice Richard or Mario Lemieux.  And they worked hard to get where they were, but they also built on a level of talent that was born into them that other people do not have.  So here is the question:  Is leadership training at all like my experience with hockey?  That is that most people can benefit from the education and the training they will receive in leadership studies programs, yet some are born with the intelligence and personal qualities and drive and ability that sets them apart from others?

Riggio:      Yes, I would think …

Scarpino: And I know that is kind of risky for you because you have a roomful of students.

Riggio:      No, no, no.  So I would think that the sort of talent part, the talent part of leadership is relatively small compared to the talent part of being a professional athlete.  Being a professional athlete, you really do have to have some physical qualities and characteristics.  The physical qualities and characteristics that would make you a successful leader are biases.  The idea that the taller person gets elected over the shorter person, that kind of thing.  So I would argue that the vast majority of what makes someone a truly effective leader is developed over time so there is very little that is inborn that gives that person such a strong advantage, and it is because sports have this big physical element and so if you are really small …

Scarpino: Maybe I should have picked violin playing or something.

Riggio:      Yes, if you are really small, you are not going to be a professional athlete.  I mean there are very few diminutive people who are professional athletes because it is about power and size and weight and all that kind of stuff.  So that analogy, I think, works to a certain extent, but it falls short in that there is way more of the born in being a successful athlete than being a successful leader.  And I know that leadership is developed.  Just like everything.  Just like we become better professionals at what we do through practice and training and development.

Scarpino: That is true.

Riggio:      If you go back in time and you think about the first professional paper you wrote or the first research project or whatever …

Scarpino: I hope it never sees the light of day ever again.

Riggio:      Right.  You look back and you go oh my gosh!  If I could go back in time, wow I would have this huge advantage.  Well, what is the advantage?  You are the same person, but the advantage is all that learning, and I think that is the analogy.  The analogy is if you could go back in time with the talents you have now.  So if you take a Barack Obama or somebody like that, a leader who was really effective, and if you took Barack Obama right now and you rewound him with everything he knows, now he is that community organizer, he would be like stellar.  He would be like he would never make a mistake.

Scarpino: In the United States and around the world, we had lots of leaders and some of them were quite good before we had leadership training programs.

Riggio:      Yes, oh yes, yes.

Scarpino: And I do not mean this in any way to sound confrontational, but knowing that, what is the value added of leadership training programs?

Riggio:      I think the value added is that it is fantastically complex to be an effective leader.  And so a lot of these leaders that are successful, you can see the flaws in what they do.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      We watched the thing on Queen Elizabeth, the Crown.  The Crown.  We watched that show.

Scarpino: The Crown.

Riggio:      And you can see that she makes mistakes, and she develops, and she learns from it.  Now, if she had formal training or mentoring, and she did get mentoring because Winston Churchill was the first Prime Minister and he kind of took her under his wing because he knew she was green and all this kind of stuff.  So I think what happens, what I think leadership training is trying to do or leadership development programs is trying to speed up the process because you will learn it.  You will learn it from mentors, you will learn it through social learning, observational learning, you will use other people as role models or mentoring.  So I think people do it, but I think the idea with leadership training and development programs is you are trying to accelerate that learning and get people to be far ahead of the curve so that when they go out, they hit the ground running.

I just heard we have a student who was one of my favorites when he was here, but he was kind of like the guy, you know, he would do anything.  If you needed him to clean the room, he would clean the room, and just great.  And if I would have said leadership potential, he is average.  He was not a start kind of leadership.  He was not a big leader in school or whatever.  Well, he is COO of a major company.  I just heard it on the radio about a big initiative they are doing, and he is 12-14 years out and he is a multimillionaire because he created this company that he runs now.  And I remember him, we had him come and talk when he was just relatively out but starting to be successful, and the things he said were almost embarrassing because they were so naïve.  He said oh man, leading people, managing people sucks.

Scarpino: That is what he learned at one of the best leadership programs.  (Laughing.)

Riggio:      And I went do not say that!  And I said oh my gosh, I am almost embarrassed that he said that.  But when I last saw him, he goes you know, that was my reaction to the fact that it really is hard to do it, and you have to deal with all the crap of people, of human relationships.  And he is much more sophisticated now because he has been doing it.  I think, though, probably if he had not been here and picked some of it up by osmosis or whatever, he would have been even worse off, and he probably would not be as successful as he is today.  And I think that we could probably take just about any student who was kind of paying attention and you would see that same issue that early on it is rough, but they get better at it.

Scarpino: Well I mean it is almost always a challenge to go from the academy to the world where you are the person.

Riggio:      Oh yes, yes.

Scarpino: And it is not writing a term paper or standing up in front of the class and giving a report or having an internship.

Riggio:      But you know that is another thing, too, the power of the role.  When I see him now, he looks like an executive.  He has got that, he can carry himself in that way, and I think that is the power of the role and the responsibilities and they shape you.  Those kinds of things shape you.

Scarpino: Do you think that there are some people who, when they are put in those positions of responsibility and authority, that they do not measure up because the authority part goes to their head and they forget the responsibility?

Riggio:      Oh yes.  Oh absolutely.  I worry about that all the time.  I see students here sometimes who do things and you go why are you doing that.  What you are doing is really, I don't know, primitive.  You are falling back on that well because I think I know what I am doing I should be in charge, that kind of thing.  And you go god, I hope that does not manifest itself later.

Scarpino: So do leadership programs talk about the responsibility and humility of having all that authority?

Riggio:      I think that we do.  I think that is what we are trying to do with the ethics course, with some of the things that we talk about in terms of, you know, and I think that is where the followership piece comes in, too, is you have to realize these are not people you are just – these are not pawns on a chessboard.  These are human beings, and you have to have a relationship with them, and if you have a good relationship with them, you will do a lot better than if you just sort of use your authority and boss them around.

Scarpino: So I am going to continue on this theme, but I am going to talk about you.

Riggio:      Sure, okay.

Scarpino: And, again, I will disclose because we are on a separate day and a different recording that I talked to your friend and colleague Kevin Lowe who is now in Sydney, professor of leadership in the Business School at the University of Sydney.  He told me on Zoom that one of the things that makes you stand out in the area of leadership studies is your commitment to, and these are his words, cradle to grave perspective on leadership.  He said you adhere to a model of leadership education across the life cycle of an individual’s career.  So that is what he said.  Now I am going to ask you is that accurate?

Riggio:      Yes.  Well I think both in terms of scholarship, definitely.  We are the only group that has studied leadership from birth forward essentially.  I can tell you a little bit more about that database.  So I think that is true.  I think I told you something yesterday that many of our sort of famous leaders that have come here to speak at our conferences – these are not the scholars, these are the sports figures, the economists – that they talk about the role of parenting, and I think that we realize that the role of parenting is very important.

Scarpino: Their parents, not …

Riggio:      Their parents – both.  Remember I said Pat Haden said he learned more about leadership from being a parent.

Scarpino: Yes, you did.

Riggio:      So I think you learn it from both sides.  So your first leader role models are your parents and your first potential for leader development comes from your parents and then your siblings and all that.  And Susan Murphy is big on this.  One of the things that we did is when we were here together we said we cannot do everything.  There are only two faculty members here, so what should we do?  We need to specialize. And we had external reviews and people said you have got to get known for something.  And I said what do we care about.  Our kids here are unlike IUPUI.  They are 18-21.  There is no, almost no nontraditional students.  They stand out like a sore thumb if there are, when there are.  And I said they are still developing as adults when they come here.  Some of them are 17 when they come here.  What we should specialize in is the development of young leaders and we should really do that.  And she was interested in that even more so than I was, and she had a program for high school leaders.  She started doing a leader development program with the middle school here, 7th grade and 8th graders, where our students were the teachers of this program.  So we went into the middle school in Claremont and sort of practicing what we were kind of studying, too.  So, yes, that is one of the things that we have become known for.  What is interesting is those are not our most popular papers, our most popular publications because nobody else is doing it, so they do not get cited a lot.  But I think later on down the line that research will be important because we are looking at what is the cradle crucible of leadership.

Scarpino: That is one of either advantages or disadvantages of being a humanist is we do not usually count citations.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: So I could not tell you how many people have cited my work.  I have no idea.

Riggio:      Yes.  So, yes, I think we do that, and I think the other thing, too, is just like we were talking about, I mean I really, and this is something I wish the college would pay more attention to.  So they said what is the mission of this institute.  What is the mission of the leadership institute and how could you sell it and align it with the college’s mission?  And I said we do leadership development here with as many of our students as want the leadership development.  I think Henry Kravis for a while was pushing us to impact everybody, but you just cannot do that because some students do not want it.  So Dave as the new director, David Day, has said well, we are going to really put a lot of resources into leader development, but they have got to show that they want it.  So they have to make a long commitment and then we put the resources into them.  So we have executive coaches, real executive coaches.

Scarpino: For your students?

Riggio:      For our students, right.  Anyone who wants one.  Anyone who wants a professional mentor from our alumni or board, we provide that and believe me, the coaches cost a lot of money to do that.  But if you make that commitment on your part as the student, we will give you professional development at a very high level.  So one of the things that I have kind of encouraged the college, but I have not been very successful is why not leadership for life.  Why not have programs for the alums where they could come back and continue their leadership development while they have these great resources?  I mean we have Jay Conger here who gets paid a lot of money to go speak.  We have David Day who is the leading expert in leadership development from a theoretical perspective.  We should leverage that.  The college should leverage that.

Scarpino: And they are in the business school?

Riggio:      We do not have a business school.  Is that what you are saying?

Scarpino: Yes.  I should have done my homework.  So, where are they in the school?  You named these two people.

Riggio:      Oh, they are right up here in the Kravis Institute.  Jay is right next to me and then Dave is right here.

Scarpino: Okay, alright.

Riggio:      So we are the faculty in the leadership institute.  I am sorry, I should have made that clear.  But that idea, and it is like a win-win for the college because if you engage them, and I got this idea because we have an advisory board and they are mostly alums, and one of them who was the president of a motion picture studio, and he said I went to Harvard to get a leadership development certificate or a senior leadership thing.  Paid $10,000.  Why am I not paying that to my alma mater?  And I said yes, why aren’t you?  Now, the Harvard can run through things that we cannot do, but why not do that?  Why not have kind of a continuing leadership development program?  I mean it would not have to be – I am not talking about bringing everybody back to campus, but now with Zoom and everything, we could do that.  And I think that everybody would benefit.  That would be such a win-win.  But I do not think the college wants to put the resources.

Scarpino: So, at this point A) you have a commitment to lifelong learning when it comes to leaders and leadership, but B) your contribution is undergraduate education at this point?

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  That is it.

Scarpino: Do you consider yourself to be a leader?

Riggio:      So, yes, I figured you were going to go there at some point.

Scarpino: I had to wait.  I had to lead up to it.

Riggio:      No, no.  So it is sort of funny.  So I came here.  I was recruited as the director.  Now I had been in sort of director positions.  I ran a master’s program.  They considered me the equivalent of a department chair because I was invited to the department chair.  This was at Fullerton which is a huge university.  But I never would have ever labeled myself as a leader, and when I came here I still did not even though I was the Director.  Director of a research institute, you do not think of that as a high level leadership position, not even in the same way as a department chair.  But I got asked that day, people would say okay Mr. Leadership Institute Director, what kind of leader are you.  And at first, I was shocked that somebody asked me that because I just did not see myself as a leader.  And then at some point I had that aha experience of yes, I guess I am a leader because when I define it, I say anybody can be a leader.

Scarpino: Well, that is why I asked you to do all that defining before I asked you that question.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  And so I just, I sort of embraced it and then the other thing I said is well, if I am going to practice what I am preaching, I need to work on my own leader development.  And I think that is where I came to transformational leadership via a mentor, Bernie Bass who was on our board, and I started seriously investigating it and working with him and thinking about it.  And I thought that is a great model for me to follow, so how am I doing in each of the transformational leadership components.  Am I inspiring the people that I am working with?  Am I developing the relationship?  Do I really understand them?  These are the components of transformational leadership.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      Do I embody the mission of the – do I sort of represent the mission of the place?  That kind of thing.  And you think about even simple things.  So when I was director and it was a different era, suit and tie.

Scarpino: Yes.

Riggio:      This is how I show up now.

Scarpino: I do not think my suit and tie fits anymore.  That used to be the uniform.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  And so I just started doing things differently.  And started working on my own development and I think I am still sort of trying to develop, and I have a different kind of role now.  My big thing in the last, I don't know, five or six years I guess maybe when I turned 60.  I don't know when it happened.  At some point you say, wow, I do not have a lot of career left.  You are climbing up that mountain of promotion and all that and then all of a sudden you go woah, it is going to end pretty soon.  And I think my whole thing now has been, and I was inspired by this in psychology, too, of giving it away.  Giving away psychology.  So there was a president of the American Psychological Association, and I am blanking on his name, but his thing was when he was APA president was giving away psychology.  We have got to get it out into the public world.  And I blog for Psychology Today magazine.  I consider that an avenue for this.  But I am really working on that.  Now, what is so funny is way back, gosh 1986, I put together a panel called Giving Away Social Psychology and on it I had Phil Zimbardo who you may know that name.  He is a big deal.  He did the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Scarpino: I have heard of that.

Riggio:      Yes.  And I had Bob Cialdini who has written one of the best selling books called Influence and it is about sales tactics and things like that.  And I had this all-star panel and I quoted that APA president and Zimbardo turned to me and said yes, that guy said we are going to give away psychology and then he went into his lab and he never came out again.  And it was like wow, I got the backhand from one of the masters in the thing.  But he, in his talk, really inspired me because he said you know and he brought out where he had been like trashed in the National Inquirer and some of these rags and he said you know what I learned is though, any publicity is better.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      It does not matter if it is bad publicity.  He said you want to get it out there because you have got to take the good with the bad.  And he has had a huge impact because he gets listened to.  He does TED talks.  He has been on talk shows, that kind of thing.  Now I do not aspire to that kind of thing, but I really want to get the good stuff out there.  So I think my role now as a leader is that, is I see my role in the broader community of sort of getting this information out there.

Scarpino: What do you think your strengths are as a leader?  What are you good at?

Riggio:      You know, I think the biggest strength that I have is I really try to kind of empower the people, and sort of delegate.  And I think the issue, and I often talk to students, I say delegating is one of the most complex things you can do.  And I am not a fly fisherman, but I assume it is like flyfishing.  You have got to just give them enough to where they take it but not too much.  Or like fishing, you give them a line but if you try to jerk them in too fast you break the line.  So you have to be very careful because you have got to provide support because the other thing is you can unload your own work on somebody else, and that is not good delegation.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      So I think I am pretty good at that, of like trying to get people to stretch but sort of being there as the safety net for them.

Scarpino: What do you think your shortcomings are as a leader?

Riggio:      I think my shortcomings are in the like kind of what I talked about, my agreeableness, that I am too nice sometimes.  And so I even had to develop my own strategy for being too nice, and it is the Sicilian part of me.  This is really bad.

Scarpino: You are not talking about shooting people, are you?

Riggio:      Well, no.  Here is the thing.  It is I give you two chances.  So I will turn the cheek and I will turn the other cheek, but the third time you are in trouble.  And now you are dead to me.  I am not going to work with you anymore.  So usually I am really forgiving when sort of people fall short, but if they do it too many times then, you know, and that is my way of keeping myself from becoming too easily manipulated, too soft on people.  But there is a point where I just sort of cut you off and say I am sorry.  And I have actually done that with some of the post docs.  I have given them opportunities.  And sometimes the junior faculty members.  And one case, someone I mentored did not get tenure and it was like I am not working with you anymore because you are not putting the time in to do this.  No more sacrificing of me for you.  You do not get any more of my time.

Scarpino: It is hard to do, is it not?

Riggio:      Yes, it is.  It is hard.  It is hard.  In the relationship study, you are always working on that.

Scarpino: So I am going to ask you a question that is one of our Tobias Center standard leadership questions and asking this question of an academic, at first it is going to seem a little silly, but the question is – it is two parts – and the first part is do you think leaders should read?

Riggio:      Do I think leaders should …

Scarpino: Read.  Read like books, magazine.

Riggio:      Oh, oh.  Leaders read.  Do I think they read?

Scarpino: Do you think they should?

Riggio:      Oh, I think they absolutely should.  That is the liberal arts thing.  I mean you can see leadership in everything.  We have, one of our best professors I wish he would teach it more, he does leadership through literature and film.  Nick Warner and he wins the teaching awards all the time.  And he stopped doing that course because he has his other interests.  He does Russian novels, and he does a bunch of things.  But he really sees it.  I have learned so much from Nick in terms of – we did a paper together on Italian – I got invited to do an Italian American leadership paper for a special issue of a journal and I got Nick on board because I said first off, I am not – I am Italian American but third generation. 

Scarpino: As am I.

Riggio:      But I needed him, and we did it through films.  So what we did was I did the sort of sociological stuff of what really were the immigrants, Italian American immigrants, and why did they develop this special kind of leadership.  And then he showed how that was portrayed in films.  And so our paper is, you know, comes up with The Godfather because the godfather embodies both why did the godfather exist or why did the mafia exist.  It is because of the Italian Americans being sort of ostracized, not being cut off from mainstream leadership and so they learned to do it themselves.

Scarpino: There was a godfather in the Italian neighborhood that my grandparents grew up in in Pittsburgh.  If you wanted a favor, you went to see the ward boss.

Riggio:      And initially they were benevolent people.  They called them papas.  They were the papas.  And then eventually the ones, the mafia, went to the dark side.

Scarpino: So what two or three books or articles would you recommend that somebody read?

Riggio:      Oh, well see I do two things.  I say what are you probably going to read, and that is going to be the more popular books.  But those are the ones the scholars sort of turn their nose up to, so I think you should read both.  So I think that actually Dave Day and John Antonakis have an edited textbook called The Nature of Leadership, and I think people should read that.  It is a challenge.  I have assigned it in a PhD.  I teach sort of a condensed PhD class at Benedictine University, and I assign that, and the students there who are serious accomplished people going back to get their PhD go that is a really good textbook. They get into it.  My students, it is like woah, it is over their heads, the 20-year-olds.  So I think you need to read the real leadership literature.  I think that when it comes to classics, I think you need to learn the technique of how do you read that so that you can decipher the leadership content.  And then you could go to almost any classic book and you could see leadership in there.  So there is not one that sort of stands out.  I am trying to think which one.  Now, I do have a film prototype that I use, and I find it the best film for getting them to really think about leadership and it is 12 Angry Men, the original 12 Angry Men.

Scarpino: Oh my goodness, yes.

Riggio:      Because they have to construct the leadership.

Scarpino: Yes.

Riggio:      And so you have to look at it through that and there is no identifiable leader, and in fact, the person in there who is the identifiable, the sole identifiable leader is the foreperson, the foreman, who abdicates pretty much.  But there are other ones, like for cultural – I am not answering your book question, but I think you could take any classic book, or you could take Shakespeare plays and you will see the leadership in there.  So I would rather teach them the process and then say take the book you like.  If it is Lord of the Rings, look at the leadership.

Scarpino: So do you think you have to help people see that?

Riggio:      Yes, I think that you have to help them see the methodology, and I think we do that in a lot of, like that is an assignment in a lot of my classes is taking or right now I am doing summer internships and they go what will I do a term paper about.  I said look at it through the lens of leadership.  So you could study the leader that is leading you.  You could study the CEO of the company if you have enough experience.  Or you could study the process of leadership in your team.  I do not care but just apply the lens of leadership to what you are doing and you will have your paper.

Scarpino: So you are working on a project with Kevin Lowe, at least that is what he told me.

Riggio:      Yes, a bunch of things.

Scarpino: Well, let me see if I can get the right one.

Riggio:      Okay.

Scarpino: So he told me that the joint project that he specifically wanted to tell me about, he said it was in developmental stages and the focus is on leadership, charm, and savoir faire.

Riggio:      Oh, okay.

Scarpino: And he told me that his contribution is charm and yours is savoir faire.

Riggio:      Was savoir faire.

Scarpino: And so we kept chatting because at first, I thought he was kind of pulling my leg, but he told me that you had even developed a measure of savoir faire.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: So anybody who uses this I am going to note that in 2020 you coedited with Leslie Eaton and David Funder a chapter in a book called “Skill in Social Settings:  The Essence of Savoir Faire” and it is in an edited volume by Kostic and Sternberg called Social Intelligence and Nonverbal Communication.

Riggio:      Right.

Scarpino: So if somebody wants to follow up, they can.  So how do you define savoir faire?

Riggio:      So savoir faire.

Scarpino: What is it?

Riggio:      So actually that was David Funder who coined that term.  So what that was – so I have this and we talked about it yesterday, social skills inventory, and it measures nonverbal skills and it also measures what I call verbal social skills.  So nonverbal skill, the most well-known one is what they call decoding skill or emotional sensitivity, so can I read your emotions.  Social sensitivity is can I read the social situation.  Can I walk into a room and through both the emotional side, I am expecting a party but this is a funeral?  And then the social side is do I know how to behave, and that is where the savoir faire comes in.  So savoir faire translates to knowing how to be or knowing how to do, and so a couple of the subscales in there – David Funder was using the whole instrument – but a couple of the subscales kept predicting social success.  He was doing beeper studies back then.  This is really old data.  That was one of the hardest papers for us to publish.  It took us about 15 years to publish that paper.

Scarpino: You mean to get it accepted somewhere?

Riggio:      To get it accepted somewhere.  He did that research more than 20 years ago and then we started going through.  It has a big database.  So his beeper studies where the students wore beepers and when they got beeped, they had to write down what they were doing, and then he had measured everything on them, personality measures, my social skills.  And he goes your measure is predicting everything.  And I said well what do you think it is.  And he said it is that social knowing how.  And he said it is savoir faire.  And I went oh man, we are going to have trouble getting this published, which we did, because people disagree is that savoir faire, which is the same problem I had with charisma when we talked about personal charisma.  They said because everybody thinks they know what charisma is and so whenever you take something that everybody thinks they see it …

Scarpino: Thinks they know.

Riggio:      … and then try to codify it then you are going to get pushback.  The very first paper I did with Howard Friedman where we put charisma in, the editor after they had accepted the paper made us take out charisma.  They just redlined it back in the day when you used to get the galleries, and they took it all out.  And at the last minute, we put it in the last paragraph.  We put it back in the last paragraph.  We put it in there.  And then we published a paper where we actually said personal charisma, and then it has gone forward.  Now, a lot of people do not know that and have not accepted our kind of definition of it, but that is what the savoir faire thing is.  So what it seems to be is that ability to sort of read the situation and then enact.  It is kind of like sophisticated social role playing.  What we are finding is that the measure of savior faire predicts leadership all over the place.  That is the one, remember I told you where we measured extroversion and then social skills?

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      It is extroversion through savoir faire.  But I call it social skill because the savoir faire – savoir faire is …

Scarpino: Are you still finding resistance to that term?

Riggio:      We had to put it in a chapter.

Scarpino: I was thinking at your point in your career you could say just about anything.

Riggio:      So the scale – a long time ago I got tired of sending the scale out and there is a company, scale publisher called Consulting Psych Press, they publish the Myers-Briggs and all this.

Scarpino: I know what that is.

Riggio:      And so I put it with them.  You get a little royalty.  But I did not realize that that was going to be a barrier, though, like a student is not going to be able to pay for it.  So I kind of regret that I did it.  It is now with a group called Mind Garden and the president of Mind Garden who is a psychologist said we cannot use that term savoir faire.  It will never sell.  And he says why don’t we call it core social intelligence, and I am kind of resistant to that, but it is the best measure that I have ever seen of core social intelligence.  It really does assess that, and it is self-reporting.  It looks like a personality scale, but it is an assessment.

Scarpino: So why do you think the resistance?

Riggio:      Well I think when you have a term that people think they know what it means, so I think that is the resistance.  And I am at the stage now where I do not care anymore.  I do not have to …

Scarpino: They are not going to deny you tenure.

Riggio:      Yes.  I am not going to be denied tenure.  If scholars want to scoff at me or whatever, I do not care anymore.  And the other thing, too, I do not know if I told you the joke.  I have told this to somebody, and I do not know if we mentioned it yesterday.  I still care about where I publish.  We got something in the Journal of Applied Psychology which is one of the top journals in our field and I was really as happy as could be.  But Joanne Ciulla said something when she won her – she said I publish promiscuously, which is great because you are going to say what do you mean?  And what she means is she does not care anymore if it is in a high visibility place or a low visibility place.  She said I just want to get this stuff out because I am near the tail end of my career, and that has been like a mantra.  So I went back to David (inaudible), we got that rejected from so many journals.  Part of the reason why it is so long, that timeline, is we just got rejected and we threw it on a back shelf, and we did not get back to it.  And it was only through me keeping it, saying every five years let us try it again David.  David, I think he is probably emeritus now.  He is one of the top personality psychologists.  I really admire him a lot.  So he called it savoir faire.  I went with it.

Scarpino: So when I talked to you on Zoom, you described yourself as a connector.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.

Scarpino: Why?

Riggio:      Well because I think the resources here, the conference and all that, allowed me to do that.  I really like that part.  I really like that we can invite people and I get to meet people.  Marty Chemers, when I asked him about the job, so I had the job and remember the institute did not really exist yet.  It was only paper.  And I said Marty what is this thing, I mean what are we going to do.  And he said, you know you could do whatever you want with this.  He goes you could hang out with James MacGregor Burns and John Gartner and bring them to campus and connect with them or you could be the series or you could continue to do your nonverbal stuff and do it in leadership.  He said you could do whatever you want.  And I remember him saying that and I am going yeah like I am going to be able to connect with Jim Burns and John Gartner.  Well I did connect with both of them.

Scarpino: You did.

Riggio:      I worked with Bernie Bass.  That part is delightful for me.  I got kind of slapped down by Phil Zimbardo on that panel.  I have worked with Phil.  We have done work together.  We have presented at conferences.  So I love that part.  I love the getting to meet these people who I admire and who I think, you know, and to work with them.  That is why I have my research teams, my collaborative teams, Kevin in Australia unfortunately.  That makes it hard for us to even find Zoom time to meet.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      I have got two groups at Fullerton.  I have the business school group that we were talking about.  We are doing the shared outcomes.  But I have the other group where they were developmental psychologists who started studying kids when they were one year of age, and they measure them every year.  And then I talked them into doing an adult assessment where we would focus on leadership, and I work with that group.  And we meet on a biweekly basis.  I have my colleagues here.  I have this group here.  I have got, you know, I have done stuff with Joanne.  I have mentioned Joanne and Georgia. 

Scarpino: Yes.  Joanne Ciulla and Georgia Sorenson.

Riggio:      So I love working with all these people.  Yes, Georgia.  And I still work with post docs, I work with Susan Murphy.  A couple of our post docs are over at CGU at the graduate university now.  They are faculty.

Scarpino: But is not having all those diverse connections one of the joys of being an academic?

Riggio:      Absolutely.  So that is why I am a connector because I like it.  I like doing it.

Scarpino: So I told you when we started that I was going to do a certain number then I was going to come back and ask you a little bit about your early life, and I am going to do that, just some quick answers.  You earned your Bachelor of Science in 1977 so I counted backwards and assumed you graduated from high school in about 1973.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: Okay.  Where did you go to high school?

Riggio:      I went to high school here locally at a Catholic high school.  It was called St. Paul High School.  The notable thing was it was a big football school.

Scarpino: Did you play football?

Riggio:      I did not play football, and there were reasons.  I wanted to play football, but I did not.  And I did a little basketball but mostly track is what I did.  And part of it is now I look at it fortunately because being a Catholic school, you had to give up your life to play football, and my classmates who played football, they have got lots of physical problems.  This was literally like, I mean they won the Southern California championship the year I graduated, my classmates did.  And it was a real commitment.  It was like being a professional athlete, so I did not do it.

Scarpino: When you were in high school, were there individuals you encountered or knew about that had any significant influence on the adult you became?

Riggio:      I think most of my – and we talked a little bit about this yesterday – I do not think there was one person that stood out.  I think it was more the experiences.  So I had the experience of watching coaches.  I had the experience of watching teachers.  And given that I am a teacher, that paid off.  I think when it comes to leadership, and I kind of mentioned this yesterday, I think the jobs I had made me think about, and I probably drifted into I-O psychology simply because I watched a lot of bad management practices.  And some good ones, too, but the bad ones stand out because you go I could fix that and I am 17.  Why cannot this guy fix it?

Scarpino: That is kind of interesting to think, though, that you were inspired by the bad ones to say I can do this.

Riggio:      Yes. 

Scarpino: I had a similar experience.  The first professional history conference I went to I was a very young graduate student and I listened to the papers and presentations, and I came away saying I can do that.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  I had that in graduate school, too.  So when I was looking at graduate programs, and I mentioned I worked with Howard Friedman, and he said I want to take you down to meet with one of my star graduate students.  So I went down and he was doing the videotaping, editing, and all this sort of stuff and I sat with him for a little bit, and I watched him, and I go you do not know anything about editing.  You do not know anything about videotaping.  And then we started talking about the research and the research design and I go you do not even know your own research design for the project.  And I had like an imposter syndrome going to these and getting turned down from graduate programs, and when I saw this is the guy he is holding up as a role model.  I do not mean to be mean to the guy, but he was still there when I graduated.

Scarpino: Well that says something.  So when you were in high school were you ever worried about being drafted?

Riggio:      Oh yes.  Oh yes, big time.

Scarpino: Were you in the lottery?

Riggio:      I was in the lottery.

Scarpino: What was your number?

Riggio:      My brother who was a year ahead of me, he was the last.  I missed it by one year, but I did have a draft card.  My story was this:  My mom was really great.  My mom was a stay-at-home mom, and she would do our laundry and everything.  And I went down and got my draft card, put it in my jeans in the rear pocket and that day, totally forgot about it, I decided I would wash my own jeans.  I am a man now.  And when I pulled the jeans out there was all these little bits of paper all over the place and I realized that my draft card had been in the pockets and so my draft card did not exist.  And when we went to college the big joke was – so the next year I am in college – and the people were saying I burned my draft card, and I said well, I laundered mine. 

Scarpino: I washed mine.  So when you were in high school headed into college what did you imagine or hope your future will hold?

Riggio:      Okay, so if I sort of skipped ahead, and again the social psychologist in me says this is how most people operate, you do not know a lot about employment, about different jobs.

Scarpino: No, you do not.

Riggio:      You know your parent’s job and I knew the restaurant and I knew the factory.  I did not want to work in the factory.  There was a guy who lost his fingers in the factory and I said what were you going to do before you worked in the factory, and he says I was going to dental school, like your brother who went to dental school.  And he goes I cannot do that now.  And I went I am not going to be in a factory.  I thought about if the celebrity chef thing was happening, I might be a chef because I was assistant chef.  I was running a kitchen.

Scarpino: You could do it.  You have the personality.

Riggio:      But at that time, being a chef was low prestige.  So doctor, my dad was an MD, so that was my default.  That was all of our defaults I think.  My brother went in pre-med.

Scarpino: But what you did do was go to Santa Clara University and major in psychology.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: And I am assuming that you started in about 1973.

Riggio:      Right.

Scarpino: So why psychology?  I mean you are a relatively young man.  You are 18 years old probably.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  I think I told you this that I started out, I was in the school of science.  Psychology was in the school of science.  I had been admitted to the school of science thinking I was going to go pre-med, and I remember I had a meeting with the Bio Chem professor, and she said you know I do not think you are a serious enough student.  I do not think you will pass my Bio Chem class.

Scarpino: Oh no.

Riggio:      And I started having this like imposter crisis of confidence, and then I met the psychology department and they seemed wonderful and nurturing, and so I thought I would be a psych major.  Once I got there, I realized I got to go to graduate school if I want to stay in.  I really – I really, so if you talk about role models, all of my psych faculty were positive role models for me.  They were not all like I want to be just like this guy.  They all had flaws in some way, but I would not mind being one of them.  And so I came to that realization, and I think I told you yesterday, my advisor, I was working with him on research and I said you got to publish this stuff.  You are not going to get tenure.  I remember having that conversation with him and he kind of laughed me off ‘oh, what do you know kid.’  He did not get tenure.

Scarpino: Because he did not publish.

Riggio:      Yes, he did not publish.  And you know what I said?  I am going to take his job.  And I almost did.  I interviewed for his job, and I missed it.  I came in second.  And one of my faculty members there said best thing that ever happened to you was you did not come back to Santa Clara.

Scarpino: Yes, sometimes it does not work out when people try to go home too soon.

Riggio:      Yes, and the other thing, too, is they were not as research serious as the place.  Actually, Cal State Fullerton was very research serious when I got there.

Scarpino: So you earned your BS and then you decided to enroll in a master’s program in psychology.

Riggio:      Yes, well I went straight to PhD. 

Scarpino: Right, so that is what I was going to ask you.

Riggio:      It was self-contained.

Scarpino: It was one of those deals where you are in the PhD program, they award you a master’s but also gives them a chance to …

Riggio:      Exactly.

Scarpino: If you are not quite cutting it.

Riggio:      If the master’s – it was not a badge of honor.

Scarpino: I mean my doctoral program was like that, too, and they did not tell people that.

Riggio:      Right.

Scarpino: But sometimes when it was clear that a person really was not going to be successful …

Riggio:      A terminal master’s.

Scarpino: … they award them a master’s degree and said you probably ought to find something else to do.

Riggio:      Yes.  They called it terminal master’s and it was like you are dead.

Scarpino: So you earned the PhD in 1981, UC Riverside, with an emphasis on social personality psychology.  So for people who are not in your field, which is almost everybody who will listen to this, could you briefly explain what social personality psychology is?

Riggio:      So it was a blend and it was partly driven by the fact that they had some personality psychologists and they had some social psychologists and that that division of psychology is combined.  So division 8 in the American Psychological Association is called Society for Personality and Social Psychology, SPSP.  Personality looks at individual differences.  Social psychology looks at the sort of social milieu that people are in and the social forces, the psychological forces, that cause people to act.  I have a good story about David Funder when I went to go visit him when Trump got elected.  I was asked to write a piece on Donald Trump when he was still one of many Republican candidates.  The book did not come out until after the election, but I was asked to write from a social personality perspective what I thought of Trump as a candidate.  And so I basically said social psychology would argue that this guy, Donald Trump, with his very strong, weird personality would become presidential because the demands of the role would cause him to become more presidential.  Personality psychology would say that this flawed personality, this grandiose narcissistic personality would continue and he would be, and then I talked about how he would be.  So is it social psychology prediction or personality prediction?  Well, guess which one came out?  The personality prediction.  I told David Funder this.  At the end you had to write a summary, and I said Dave, I want you to read the little summary here David.  And he said yes.  And he is a personality psychologist, and he goes I am really disappointed the personality won.  So that I think tells you the different, you know, social psychology for example in governing behavior is the power of the social forces that cause us to behave in similar ways.  Personality is about those intrinsic, those internal qualities and characters that drive our behavior sort of independent of the social circumstances, but the two interact so your personality comes into play.  And I talked about the finding that personality extroversion drives you to become more socially skilled, but it is really the skills that make you a great leader, not the personality.

Scarpino: But they work in tandem.

Riggio:      They work in tandem, yes.  I give long winded answers.

Scarpino: No, no.  Your answers are fine, and it is a lot more interesting to interview somebody who will talk than somebody where you have to be the dental student and pull teeth.  I was just trying to find my place here.  We were talking about charisma and nonverbal communication and I am going to admit that this question came to mind when I was talking to Kevin Lowe.

Riggio:      Okay.

Scarpino: So you have got charisma which you have talked about at some length and nonverbal communication that you have also talked about.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: And I admit I am not in your field so this question may be coming out of left field.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: To me, as a guy from the outside looking in, those two personality qualities or traits seem to be on different ends of the spectrum.

Riggio:      The charisma …

Scarpino: Charisma and nonverbal communication.

Riggio:      Well no.  Think of it this way.  So we see this person who walks in the door and we think charisma, or let us analyze Oprah because we know that everybody thinks that she is …

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      So what is Oprah doing that makes her so charismatic?  And, you know, I could get up and act it out or whatever, but I am not a very good actor.

Scarpino: And the tape recorder will not get it.

Riggio:      Yes, but I mean you could see her.  It is almost like the parodies of her.  So what does she do?  She says and today we are going to give gifts and you get a car and you get a car, and what is the nonverbal?  It is this tone of voice, this exciting, this exuberant personality.

Scarpino: Gestures.

Riggio:      And the gesturing.  She is larger than life because she is gesturing.  Those are the nonverbal cues that create the charisma.  So I wrote a book on this, so I will tell the non-charisma story, and it actually happened here in Claremont.  I was not yet here at Claremont, but I came here for a conference, and I particularly wanted to see this social psychologist who was very famous and was doing something on sort of conflict and politics in every day life.  Very famous, well published psychologist.  And I went to the talk and it was in one of these big lecture halls over at CGU, and he was the most – he was reading a paper in the most deadpan possible way and I was tired from whatever, must have stayed up late, and I was trying as hard as I could to listen to him and to make sense out of it.  And I think I nodded off.  At the end I felt like I did not get any of that because his style of delivery was in the monotone and all that.  Alright, I go back to Fullerton and one of my colleagues there said did you here so and so’s talk at the conference.  Was it not amazing?  And I am going what?  Were you at the conference?  And she says no I read the transcript of his talk.  So she read the transcript and she thought it was the most enlightening thing and I could not get to the transcript.  I could not get to the words he was saying because of his style.  So that is what non-charisma does.  So does that make sense?

Scarpino: Yes.

Riggio:      So charisma, a lot of charisma, now there is a famous study called the Dr. Fox Study, and it was a guy at Rand.

Scarpino: Fox?

Riggio:      Dr. Fox.  And they introduced Dr. Fox at different professional conferences as an expert in history or whatever.  He was an actor, and he created a script of gobbledygook using a lot of terms used by historians or neurobiologists or whatever.  And he gave a nonsensical talk and they had the crowd who were experts in the field rate it.  And the difference was sometimes he gave it in a very monotone way and sometimes he gave it in an exciting way.  And they rated the exciting talk as they learned an awful lot from that even though it was nonsense.  And these are professionals in the field.

Scarpino: Huh.

Riggio:      All style.  So charisma is the style.  But my model is you got to also have the substance.  So true charisma is the person who can do the style but also has the words and the understanding, the social part.  So it is not enough that I look like I am listening to you, I am actually actively listening to you.  So my argument is that the truly charismatic people are incredibly socially skilled both in terms of the nonverbal emotional elements but also in terms of their understanding of social interaction, of social roles, social norms.  They know how to behave.  They have savoir faire.

Scarpino: That is a quality that will help somebody become a successful leader.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: Can you teach that to somebody?

Riggio:      Yes, you can.  And John Antonakis has …

Scarpino: You can teach charisma?

Riggio:      John Antonakis has taught the nonverbals and I actually had two, I was an outside member on two dissertations where students did that.  And one we actually were filmed by that old show 20/20, remember the, like 60 Minutes.

Scarpino: Oh yes, yes, yes.

Riggio:      And they came out and they had us reconstruct her dissertation, which I was kind of like the main advisor on, although I was an outside member.  This was at UCR.  And it never aired.

Scarpino: California Riverside?

Riggio:      Yes, yes.

Scarpino: Okay.

Riggio:      They never aired the segment.  They wanted to slot it for Valentine’s Day, too.  I remember the producer.  They took, I mean we ran, originally it was six weeks, but we ran like a three-week, we redid it all and ran a training.  And I remember the producer.  So what we did was we videotaped people before and then we trained them for two or three weeks and then we videotaped them after.  And I remember there was this one striking woman, I think she was on the volleyball team or something, so she was tall and statuesque and attractive.  And when she showed up for the first videotaping session, she was in sweats and hair undone and all that.  When she showed it for the second one after we had trained her and everything, she has got makeup on, and she is all ready for the thing.  And he goes, well she is cheating.  You guys are cheating.  And I said we did not tell her to dress up.  She learned that.  And he said oh this is not charisma.  That is probably why it never aired.  But it was not dramatic.  And none of the results were, they were statistically significant because three to six weeks you are not going to be able to – you cannot turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

Scarpino: A silk purse, yes.

Riggio:      But you can develop these things, and you know what?  Every politician does it.

Scarpino: Yes.

Riggio:      They do.  I have seen them.  I remember we had – I told you we had Jack Kemp.  I saw Jack Kemp completely turn it on.  He is sitting there not doing anything, looking like he is about ready to nod off, and constituents come around and man, he is Mr. Charisma.

Scarpino: Right.  I have seen that happen.  So one of the research interests listed on your CV is early development of leadership and leadership development across the lifespan.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: I have mentioned that already.  So when you talk about early development of leadership, are you talking about qualities that are a part of a person’s personality that they are born with or early personality development in the form of leadership education or both?

Riggio:      Well, we are talking about both.  So we do look at both.  So I have two longitudinal databases.  The one that I mentioned, the Fullerton database, is developmental psychologists who started studying 1-year-olds and their parents.  When you are studying babies, you are studying the parents.  And they have measures on both parents.  This was way back, it started in the late seventies, so 1979.  And back then, most of the families were intact, so they have father’s measures, mother’s measures, and child measures, and they brought them into the lab.  They had the parents interact with the children.  They have 10,000 variables on these people because for the first four years they measured them every six months and after that once a year.  You know intense.  They did in-home observations.  These are graduate students measuring everything you could possibly imagine, and things like parents took the Big 5, the personality measure.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      The kids took it when they were 17.  And then what we have done, what I have contributed is we have done two assessments at 29 years of age and 38 years of age.  And we measure things like leadership.  Are they in leadership positions?  I have a self-report version of the transformational leadership measure that I created that we gave them.  My social skills, the skills instrument, everything we can think of.  We have everything.  Like we are doing a sports paper right now and it is just incredibly complex, but we know every sport they participated in in their life up to 17 years of age.  We know how many hours they spent, self-reported of course, but how many hours.  We know why they went into the sports.  Did dad push you in or did you show an interest?  We know how much they, you know, we can do it over time.  Did they go play in junior high?  Did they play baseball in senior high?  We have everything on them.

Scarpino: So the people that are in this study group, these are people who became successful athletes?

Riggio:      They are just regular people.

Scarpino: Just regular people …

Riggio:      They are just regular people.

Scarpino: … but you are looking at sports as one of the contributing factors of their development?

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  So there is a big belief that sports build leadership.  You know what?  There is main effect.  We cannot find a main effect.  So it has got to be much more complex than that, and it has got to be why did you go into sports.  Did you like it or not?  Were you motivated?  And did you have a mentor in it like you were saying?  Did you learn anything from it?  So we have got to tease those things out.  Doing this research is incredibly complex, but we have got so much data.

Scarpino: But what you have concluded so far is just the act of having been involved in sports does not really have a high correlation with leadership later in life?

Riggio:      No.  So now we are teasing the rest of it out.  And I tell my colleagues who are involved in this that is important.  This is where no results are important because everybody believes just play sports, you will become a leader.  No.  It has got to be a good experience.

Scarpino: So when you come up with a conclusion like that, and this is not the first time you have mentioned where something you studied goes against what people think, like charisma …

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: … do you get push back?  I mean most people would sort of knee jerk say yes, participation in sports as a youth is good for you and it will help you develop as a leader in the future.

Riggio:      Yes, but I think if I start talking to them about like well but what if your parents forced you to do it and you hated it.

Scarpino: Yes.

Riggio:      Or what if you had a really bad coach, and worse, you did not learn that he was a bad coach, you thought he was a great coach and you became like the toxic, in Jean’s model, of you enabled him to become toxic?

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      Which would be the – you know, what’s the name of the child molester at Penn State thing?  You know what I am talking about?

Scarpino: Sandusky.

Riggio:      Sandusky, right.  The bad followers looked the other way, and did Penn State build leaders?  Well, they believed they did. 

Scarpino: So what does that example, because most people have heard of it, tell you about leadership?  He is molesting children and boys for decades probably and apparently people in authority at least knew about it by rumor.

Riggio:      Yes, so it was failed leadership from the people who were in leadership positions, and it was a failure of followership for the people who saw it and did not report it and call him out.  They lacked the courage that Ira Chaleff talks about.

Scarpino: So in the time we have got left, I want to talk a little bit about leadership studies, and you have been doing this for a long time.  So as you look at the field of leadership studies, what stands out as positive developments since you entered the field formally in 1996?

Riggio:      Yes.  Well, positive developments is that it is getting a little more recognized as a legitimate thing to study.  I mean I think in 1996, leadership if you studied it and you were an organizational behavior person that was sort of okay, but you were still sort of fringy.  In the same way in political science, my understanding is people who study leadership in political science the way we do it, sort of leader, are on the fringe and they are not mainstream political scientists.  Same thing with history.  Historians study more of the contextual aspects of leadership.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      So it is a little more accepted.  I think we still have a long way to go.  I do not think we are a discipline.  I do not think we are a recognized discipline, which I found extraordinary.  One of the first things that the ILA, when I got on the ILA board, this might have even been before I was on the board …

(Phone rings.)

Scarpino: No, no.  We are not running out of time.

Riggio:      I forgot to turn my phone off, too.

Scarpino: I forgot to turn my phone off.

Riggio:      Mine just beeped.

Scarpino: And you would think a guy that had been doing it this long would have known to shut his phone off.

Riggio:      Me, too.  This was fun, but it was challenging.  So they put us on committees.  It was a meeting of ILA.  Maybe I was on the board.  And they said we have done a sort of self-study and there are certain things that we want to do, and we want to explore, one of the subcommittees was leadership studies as a discipline.  And who was on it?  Who got put on that out of the hat?  I do not know how they did it.  Me, Georgia Sorenson, James MacGregor Burns.

Scarpino: Pretty good trio.

Riggio:      Yes.  But at the time, nobody knows who I am, and I barely knew Georgia, but I definitely knew Jim Burns.  And I remember this because we are at the University of Maryland, we are having this meeting, and Georgia says work over there in that little office and she goes this is where Jim worked.  And I am going I am sitting at Jim Burns’ desk.  Now, he is not there because he is in Williamson.  But we are on the phone with him and stuff.  Anyway, so I said okay, how do I do this?  How do we look at it as a discipline?  So I actually did this.  I spoke to the Library of Congress, I talked to people who said how do we determine what an academic discipline is?  And I investigated all of this stuff and I remember talking to the head of cataloguing at the Library of Congress and she said you are right it should be.  So, here, I will give you an example.  If you write a book on leadership, it can end up in one of three areas.  It can end up in management, it can end up in military science, or it can end up in I think it is sociology.  So I told Jim Burns that his book, that leadership I believe was in management.  And he did not like that.  And I said to her do you get what I am coming from.  And she says you are right.  There should be a single category for leadership studies.  She said but it is not going to happen because it is too expensive for us.

Scarpino: Well that is probably true.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  So, anyway, so I took it as this mission of how can we make this into its own discipline.  How can we make leadership studies into its own discipline?  And people said come on, you know, it is partly there is the OB management kind of people, there are the few political scientists and all that, so I said yes, but you know what; what is a discipline?  Media studies is a discipline.  Well we were studying leadership before there were media except for print media.  There are a lot of what they call merging disciplines that are lesser known or more idiosyncratic than leadership.  So it is weird.  Anyway so where do we have to go?  We move forward, but we are still not a recognized emerging discipline.

Scarpino: Why do you think that is?

Riggio:      Well, if you look at what defines a discipline, we should be because one of the things where they define disciplines is do you have journals that publish specifically in that.  Well at the time there were only a couple, but there are a whole lot of leadership journals now, Leadership Quarterly being like a flagship.

Scarpino: At the risk of leading the witness, do you think that the failure of most universities to recognize it as a discipline as opposed to a subject that is taught maybe is because it is one of those things that everybody thinks they know?

Riggio:      I think so.  I think they think, or they think it is part of our discipline.

Scarpino: Oh.

Riggio:      You are just talking about a subset of my discipline as a political scientist, or even as a philosopher.  Oh, you are talking about leadership ethics.

Scarpino: Alright.

Riggio:      As opposed to regular ethics.

Scarpino: As you look at the field of leadership studies, the number of years you have been in it since 1996, what stands out as shortcomings or what do you think could be improved?

Riggio:      Oh, we do not have enough time. 

Scarpino: The four or five most important things.

Riggio:      No, I think the issue is, and I have actually written a chapter where I lay all this out, but I think the big thing is that we have lacked rigor.  And I think that holds us back.  But I think that is changing and I think that the programs are becoming more rigorous.

Scarpino: You mean rigor in terms of the content of the classes or the scholarship?

Riggio:      No, no.  In the content of what people have to learn to be a PhD, to have a doctorate or a master’s in leadership studies.

Scarpino: Okay.

Riggio:      And that is why I teach the one class at Benedictine and why I have been on dissertations and everything.  I am trying to help, from my little position, trying to help raise the rigor.  I sat on a dissertation, and I basically had to persuade the whole committee that you guys are making this too easy for this person, and not that I am a hard ass or anything like that, but I just said I would not give a doctorate to this person.  Now, the student was not happy with this, but in the end, she thanked me for it because she said I did a much more significant project because you dug in your heels.

Scarpino: How do you think leadership studies programs in the United States have done in terms of diversifying our student bodies?

Riggio:      In terms of diversifying them?

Scarpino: Diversifying our student bodies.

Riggio:      I think they have done a good job.  The programs I have seen tend to be very, very diverse and I think it is partly intentional because the people in leadership studies are very woke, very with it.  So they care about diversity, so I think that is a good thing.  And I think that people who want to study leadership are diverse, and so they come.  It crosses a lot of demographic lines and so you get a lot of diversity.  It may not cross a lot of political lines.  I mean I am not sure there are a lot of really conservative people, but there are some that are in leadership studies.  I know some of them.

Scarpino: Do you get students who are more conservative than the faculty in your classes?

Riggio:      Oh yes.  Oh, oh yes, here at CMC.  Remember William F. Buckley?  Now this goes back.  Our history is we were a very conservative college.  He said we were the second most conservative college in the country.  Now this was back when Buckley was a big deal.  This place has become much more, but it is still on the conservative side.  In the Claremont Colleges, we are considered the conservative one.

Scarpino: So I asked you as you think about the field of leadership studies and the years that you have been involved what stood out as positive.  Now, as you reflect on the field of leadership studies and compare the way it is now to the way it was when you entered, what discourages you?

Riggio:      I think that we have not moved faster than we have.  I mean a big thing is that we still do not really understand leadership very well despite all the research that is being done.

Scarpino: Why do you think that is?

Riggio:      It is too complex.  It is so complex that we are using kind of primitive methodology, relatively primitive methodology, to study it.  And we are limited by what we can measure and how we measure.

Scarpino: Okay, so you are going to get this question from the humanist who has trouble measuring with a foot-long ruler, do we have to be able to measure it to understand and appreciate it?

Riggio:      Not necessarily.  I mean, you know, so and again, I do have colleagues that I work with …

Scarpino: I am not making a criticism of the methodology.

Riggio:      No, no, no, no.  And I do have colleagues who approach it and like Nick, Nick does a great job of …

Scarpino: Nick?

Riggio:      Warner, the literature guy, and he is really a film studies literature guy.  And he does a great job, and he can capture it and he makes me see things in films that I would have completely missed because he has got such a trained eye.  So he has a methodology that I know nothing about and all that.  But from my perspective as a social scientist, we could do a lot better.  And, in fact, that is why I edited that book.  It is called What is Wrong with Leadership.  And what I did was I challenged my friends and colleagues to say how can we make it better.  What are our limitations?  And so we have a chapter on it is too male centric, we have a chapter on it is too sort of western centric, the way we study leadership, methodology.  You know Fran Yammarino who talks about we got to do levels of analysis; you cannot just study leaders and that people are embedded in teams and all that.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      So that was my contribution to – and I do not have a chapter in there and partly because mine was going to be how can we, liberal arts education, be better, but I did not think that was important enough in that book.

Scarpino: You mentioned leadership, western centric.  You have had a lot of experience in leadership studies and working with leaders.  Do you think that as leadership studies currently configured in the United States and maybe Western Europe, that it really is US and Western Europe centric?

Riggio:      Oh yes, oh yes.  And just like the fact that you could drop down in any city in the world and you would find a McDonald’s.

Scarpino: That is pretty true.

Riggio:      You could drop down in any leadership scholar’s office anywhere in the world and they will know the Western theories.  You know what I mean?

Scarpino: We talked earlier today and yesterday about the fact that leadership is in part a cultural construction.  So if you are living in Kenya or China or some place like that and you are interested in leadership, are you well served by reading and trying to adopt US and Western European models?

Riggio:      Well, you are well served by reading them.

Scarpino: Well, okay, reading is always good.

Riggio:      You may not be well served by adopting the models.  But you know what?  I do believe there are kind of universals.  And so the universals may have cultural shadings, but to be a good leader, you have got to be good at developing and maintaining relationships.  Now, what that means in Kenya versus the US may be very different.  But then the ethics overlay says that even in – I am just saying, I am in the very paternalistic authoritarian oriented country – even then with that cultural shading, you need to think about the relationship not just in terms of what it is going to provide for the leader, but also what it is going to provide for the follower.  And that is the ethical element.  So I would chastise that paternalistic authoritarian leadership scholar to be ware because your culture is going to put the weight of leadership on the leader and the leader is going to benefit from that and the follower is going to not be as well served.  And so the ethical element is how can you, in that culture, maintain those cultural nuances but also provide for both parties to flourish.

Scarpino: Both times that I taught in China, I do not teach leadership studies, but it comes up sometimes and I will talk to people about it to the degree that I have expertise, is that it seems to me that a lot of the leadership literature that we read and the scholars in US and Western Europe practice does not seem to fit so well in a totalitarian society.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: Is that a misreading of the situation?

Riggio:      No.  But I think that there are people, enlightened people, in that society that admire western democracies, right?

Scarpino: Yes.

Riggio:      Did I tell you?  I got invited to speak at a Latin American – it was leadership across Latin America, and it was in Quito in Ecuador.  And it was really interesting to me.  They had about 700 people participating from every country in Latin America.  I was really surprised to meet Cubans there because I thought, this was 15 years ago, how did they get out.  How did they get to come to this in that kind of society?  But they were from all over and they ranged from maybe undergrad students or maybe even junior college students to there was the Special Assistant to the President of Ecuador was in there.  I got to meet him.  And their hunger for leadership was unbelievable.  It was the most enthusiastic group I have ever spoken to.  And it was, compared to the other conferences I go to, compared to ILA, this was low SES conference.  I do not know what they charged the people, but it was a stretch for them.

Scarpino: SES?

Riggio:      Socioeconomic status.

Scarpino: Okay, alright, yes.

Riggio:      These people had no money, but their appetite, their hunger for knowing more about leadership was extraordinary.  And I said to them, gosh I wish you guys could come to the ILA.  And the guy that organized the conference said nobody here could afford to go to an ILA conference.

Scarpino: That is a problem with professional conferences in the US and Western Europe.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino: I am working toward a wrap up here.

Riggio:      I know.

Scarpino: If we go two hours and ten minutes or something?

Riggio:      I am fine with that.  I am giving you the long-winded answers.

Scarpino: No, no.  This is what you are supposed to do.  Again, talking about leadership, if we just focus on the United States, what do you consider to be the most serious leadership challenges that American society faces in the present?

Riggio:      Okay, I think the biggest challenge right now is the divisiveness of society that is becoming ever more us versus them, and we cannot get anything done because of that.  That just kills me that we cannot agree on a pandemic.  We cannot agree on global warming.

Scarpino: But do you think that maybe that divisiveness where we cannot agree on the pandemic or global warming in some ways is a failure of leadership?  Or nurtured by leaders for their own advantage?

Riggio:      Oh yes.  Oh, it is.  It is.  It is.  I think with the last administration, we took many, many steps backwards, the last US presidential administration because he fostered that.

Scarpino: But in fairness, he was not the only one.

Riggio:      No.

Scarpino: He had a lot of help.

Riggio:      He had a lot of help.  Just like we have been talking about, it is the enablers.  And, in fact, Barbara Kellerman’s forthcoming book is called The Enablers and it is specifically about, it is not about Donald Trump, it is about the people around Donald Trump and how they enabled him.

Scarpino: I am going to look forward to reading that book.

Riggio:      Yes.  I got to read it.

Scarpino: As you consider the leadership challenges we face in the present, what gives you faith?  What gives you hope?

Riggio:      I am starting to lose hope.  I am hoping that maybe we can help in a small way and maybe we can overcome these problems.  We know how to do it.  We know how to bring divided groups together.  It goes back to, I mentioned Sherif and his robber’s cave experiment, he had them work on what he called superordinate goals.  And we have superordinate goals:  Get rid of the pandemic, stop global warming, save the planet.  It is how do we get people to buy into those shared superordinate goals.

Scarpino: Again, for the record here if anybody is reading this, I am an academic myself, but I think there is a tendency among academics to say I will do the research and the publication, but it is not my job to move it off campus.

Riggio:      Yes.  No, I mean it is our job because we are leadership people.  And I have been in groups over the years, and this is actually one of the most fortunate things.  So a group was thrown together, usually Cyn Cherrey is at these things and ILA is involved, but I got invited a long time ago and it is where I spent a lot of time with Jean Lipman-Blumen, and it was the Desmond Tutu, after he won the Nobel Prize, and he was going to put the money into a leadership center, and so we were called up to Seattle to kind of brainstorm how could we do this.  And I thought Jean came up with a great idea and we kind of talked about it, of making that South African center a place where world leaders would have to come without their entourage and sit down at a table with a facilitator and talk to one another without all the enablers there.  And they turned it down.  They did not want to go down that path.  But I think we need something like that.  I think we need to have world leaders behind closed doors but with experts helping them come up with strategies that will solve these global problems.  I think that is how it has got to happen.  We probably have the start of the technology to do that, but we have no clout.

Scarpino: Do you think that there are some problems like climate change that we have been talking about that may almost be without solution because of issues of leadership?

Riggio:      The pessimism part of me says yes, I do not think we are going to stop it until it is too late, and so I do not have a very optimistic outlook for the future.  And I will tell you, the last couple of years of these record temperatures and things like that and the issues here with fires in California, I have had my brother lose his house, my best friend lost his ranch.

Scarpino: Gee.

Riggio:      Both of those stood for decades.  In one case, a century without a fire.  So I look around and I am pessimistic, but we are all in this together.  We are on this one little planet, so at some point, it is either we fix it or we do not.  And if we do not, then it is the end of the human race probably as we know it.

Scarpino: As you look around the world and look at these problems and realize that you do not solve problems without a constituency that is willing to do it, and that maybe the lack of that constituency is a failure of leadership, that there are not leaders who are willing to stand up and say we got to do this, even if it hurts.

Riggio:      I think there are plenty of leaders who see it, but they are unwilling to put their whole career on the line to do it.  They lack the courage of doing it.  I mean look at what is her name?  The young Scandinavian girl?

Scarpino: Yes.

Riggio:      And she has had death threats and she has had all these kinds of things and she is a child.  She should not have to, you know, but she has embraced this.  If world leaders had the courage that she had.

Scarpino: So as you consider your own career, what are you proudest of?  What gives you the greatest sense of accomplishment?

Riggio:      It is the students who have gone on to good things.  That is like, I am going to get teared up when I think of that. 

Scarpino: I understand.

Riggio:      When I think about, and as an academic, you love when they follow in your footsteps, so I think of Stephanie.  I would call her my other daughter.

Scarpino: Stephanie’s last name is?

Riggio:      Johnson.  And Chris Rayna and even some of the post docs who have gone on, and then our undergrads who go into different kinds of careers.  I love LinkedIn because I connect with students.  They often connect when they graduate and then all the sudden, I see – yesterday I saw somebody with PsyD and I went okay, at least you went into psychology.  You should have gotten a PhD, but PsyD and that is great.  That is what gives me the thrill, that kind of stuff.

Scarpino: As you consider your own career, do you have any regrets?  Is there anything you would have changed?

Riggio:      I think the big regret is what we were talking about.  If you could go back.  If I could go back to graduate school with the knowledge I have now, I might have been able to have a really significant impact, but you do not learn how to have an impact until later on.  I got asked years ago to do a last lecture, what were the lessons I learned.

Scarpino: Yes.

Riggio:      And then I put it out on my blog, and I said god I hope young academics will look at this and learn something from it and be able to advance their careers more quickly because of it.

Scarpino: So what were the biggest lessons that you embedded in that?

Riggio:      Oh gosh, I would have to think about it.  One of the things was be brave because I do not know how many times I saw Bernie Bass at conferences, but I was too intimidated to go up and introduce myself.

Scarpino: I will go ahead and do this.  We are near the end.  When I first started teaching public history, I took several of my students to the annual state and national conference and we were going home in the car, and I said do what happened; what did you do.  And they said well we saw so and so who was really famous, and I said did you talk to her.  They said no, we just saw her.  You just saw Bernie Bass.

Riggio:      I know.  Yes, yes.  So that was one of them.  The other was there was a thing if you want to make a name, you have really got to drill down into something and think about that, think about the impact of what you do.  One was everything takes way longer than you think it is going to take.  I don't know.  There was a lot about collaboration, about the benefits of collaboration.

Scarpino: Do you consider yourself a work in progress?

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  I mean, I think so.  I mean it is kind of hard as you get older.  You know this.  As you get older, you start to think how much more, but I learn something every day and I am always kind of amazed at the things that I learn.  And sometimes I wish there were more hours in the day for me to learn more.  I get the Journal issue table of contents now electronically and they come up almost daily and I go I do not have time to read all this stuff.  Everybody is listening to podcasts.  I do not have a commute.  I live two miles away.  When I had a commute, I would be – I used to have a long commute and I would be thriving on podcasts.  They did not have those back then.  I listened to books on tape and then realized I zoned out too much and then I would be pushing the rewind button too much.

Scarpino: What are you presently working on?

Riggio:      I have so many things working.  I do this, like old school.  I could show you my office and prove it to you, but I have stickies on my monitor because I have, I think it was 19, I think there are 24 things I am working on.  And I keep that there so I that can go down the checklist and I consider it like juggling.  How do you keep all the balls in the air without dropping them?  And that is how I do it.  I look and I go okay which of these projects need attention.

Scarpino: So you have got, I assume, a state of the art computer but your prompts are sticky notes?

Riggio:      Sticky notes, right.  Because they are there, and I have to look at them all the time as opposed to we do have sticky notes on the screen, but they will get covered by something else.  So these never get covered.  So I have a lot of sticky notes.

Scarpino: My sticky notes are on the file cabinets on the right side of my computer.  Professionally, who do you look up to?  Who inspires you or inspired you?

Riggio:      Oh man.  Yes, I think the really, I think it goes both ways.  I think I get inspired by the well-known people, but I think I also get inspired by people who are peers or lower level.  I think I get inspired when I see what our students do when they graduate or even what our students do sometimes when they are here.  I do not have any problem finding that source of inspiration in just about anybody.  This week, I did two reviews of people going up for tenure.  One person I was really surprised at all she had done because I did not recognize her name.  I actually met her at academy, last live academy, and I think that is how she got my name or whatever.  And I was really impressed with what she had done, but if I just looked at her scholarship, I would not have seen all the other things that are in her CV.  So that was inspirational.  So, yes, I find it everywhere.

Scarpino: What do you hope your legacy will be?

Riggio:      Oh, you know, I think, I think the legacy is, you know being a professor I think the legacy is really the students.  I kind of like this.  One guy told me years ago, he just recently retired, and I did not really collaborate with him.  He was a reviewer of my textbook.  But he said to me, this was CIOP, the industrial-organizational site, he said you are the nicest person in CIOP.  He goes you are really a pleasure to talk to because you are so nice and you seem to be genuinely interested people, and he said you do not put on airs and all that sort of stuff.  And I really took that as a compliment because all my life I felt like I was way too nice.  And I told you I had to develop my strategy for not being walked on.

Scarpino: Right.

Riggio:      But I think that connector thing, if people go oh yeah, that is the guy who used to bring people together at the conference and then they would publish the book.  Or this was the guy that sort of inspired me to keep working in this area.  So I think that more so than my own work.  I think it is more about did I help everybody else move forward.  That would be more important to me.

Scarpino: I am looking at a list of like six of the articles that you have written out of dozens that I pulled out because they were going to prompt me to talk about some of the things that you have done and your views on leadership.  I was intrigued by a piece that you co-wrote with Thompson, D. Thompson, in 2010.

Riggio:      Oh yes, yes.

Scarpino:I should have looked up the first name.  It is in the Consulting Psychology Journal in 2010 and it is called “Introduction.”

Riggio:      Right.  Dale, Dale Thompson.

Scarpino:It is called “Measuring Character in Leadership.”

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino:And we talked a little bit about that, but how do you measure character?

Riggio:      Well, you know, we developed a measure of it and it was less than satisfactory.  It was good, but it was disappointing.  So what I tried to do, and in fact, some philosophers here in the department said you cannot do this.  And I said well, I want to measure cardinal virtues.  I want to measure, but the way we have to do it is we have to have followers rate their leaders.  Does your leader have fortitude?  Do they press ahead?  Will they do the right thing? Stand up for the right thing?  Prudence, do they really listen to you and take into account what you have to say?  Do they temper themselves – temperance, do they regulate, they do not fly off the handle?  So we asked them things like that, like I am just saying right now.  We gave them descriptors of items that were descriptors of their leader’s behavior that would be related to these cardinal virtues.  And I really do believe that that is the way people become good leaders is they have to be temperate, they have to have fortitude and be courageous.  The courageous follower, courageous leader.

Scarpino:Yes.

Riggio:      And they have to listen to people and take in.  So I think that you can go back to Aristotle, and you can get a very good idea of what a good, good leader is from the ethical idea, the philosophical idea.  And that is what that was about, and I published that instrument, the validation of that instrument in that thing and then Dale and I were the guest editors so that was the piece we wrote that introduced.

Scarpino:So you published a piece in – looking through my bifocals here – it is called “Who Emerges as a Leader:  Meta-analysis of Individual Differences as Predictors of Leadership Emergence, Personality and Individual Differences.”

Riggio:      Oh yes, yes.  Remember I said one of my lessons was it always takes longer than you think?

Scarpino:Yes.

Riggio:      What year was that published?  I cannot remember, 2014 or something?

Scarpino:Yes, and it was in the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, volume 18 which I think is 2014.  I did not put the date.  It is blank.

Riggio:      Oh, okay.  Yes, yes.

Scarpino:I did not proofread this carefully enough.

Riggio:      Okay, so that was 2014.  We started that project for Bernie Bass’ FSTRF (sp?? 2:12:02) …

Scarpino:Oh my goodness.

Riggio:      … in 2001.  So what we did was, you know he did some early work on leader emergence, his Babylon (sp?? 2:12:12) hypothesis, you talked more, and we started that meta-analysis then and we did not finish it until then.  We did not get it done for the 2001.

Scarpino:So when you talk about individual differences as predictors of leader emergence, personality, and individual differences.

Riggio:      Yes, skills.

Scarpino:So is that what personality means?  Skills?

Riggio:      Well, the individual differences means skills.

Scarpino:Okay.

Riggio:      So we looked at everything that people had looked at that you measure through the way you measure personality, like do they have these traits, do they have these skills, do they have these tendencies, these attitudes.  And looked across that and did a meta-analysis of that and what were the factors that seemed to relate to leader emergence.  And it is no different than what Bernie came up with.  That was the idea.  We were going to re-validate what Bernie did because males get – they emerge more as leaders.  Wealthy people emerge more as leaders.  Extroverts emerge more as leaders.  All those kinds of things.

Scarpino:You cannot make somebody a male who is not.  Well, you can help them come out of their shell.

Riggio:      But if you are a woman, we know this from other people’s research, you got to act like a man and act like a woman.  You got to do two things.

Scarpino:Do you tell your female students that?  If you want to be successful as a leader you better develop some male characteristics.

Riggio:      I do not think I say that.  I do not think – I think the idea is you present this idea that, and this is Alice Eagly’s idea, of there is agentic behavior, which is more associated with males, you know, task.  And there is relationship.  She called it communal kinds of things that are more associated with women.  And we know that successful leaders have to be both agentic and communal.  The difference is women really have to be agentic in a very careful way where men can be much more rude about it, and they have to also be communal but not overly communal to where they are going to do like Hillary Clinton, you are too emotional and you cannot be a leader.

Scarpino:The burden of being a successful leader is much heavier on a female than on a male.

Riggio:      On women.  Absolutely, absolutely.  It is much harder for women.  No doubt about it.

Scarpino:Do you tell your students that?

Riggio:      Yes.  Oh yes.  That is why we have a woman in leadership – we do not have a man in leadership course.

Scarpino:No, no.

Riggio:      No, no, I know.

Scarpino:Do you think that there have been changes?  You have been in the field for a long time.

Riggio:      Oh, there have been changes.  There have been changes, but it is still really difficult.  And sometimes I had to come to this awareness.  Susan is quite a bit younger but when I first moved here, my daughter was born – my youngest was born in 2000.  I would bring her to work in the carrier and put her under my desk and then she is toddling down.  And Susan Murphy later had her kids and she said you know I cannot do that.  I cannot bring my kids to work because what would people think.  You got male privilege.  That was the …

Scarpino:I did it.  And I knew.

Riggio:      I know.  I mean to have that thrown in my face was going yeah, I do not get male privilege as well as I thought I did.

Scarpino:Do you think that male privilege plays a role in leadership?

Riggio:      Yes, absolutely.  I mean male privilege gives men a leg up and women have it much harder.

Scarpino:White privilege?

Riggio:      White privilege, absolutely.  I mean, I was a beneficiary of that.

Scarpino:What does a field that is still heavily influenced by white males, what does it do about male privilege and white privilege?

Riggio:      So I have run into this on the ILA and actually on this committee, because I told you I was on the committee, and often they would say you have got too many white males that you are honoring.  I mean you have interviewed them all, right, so you know how many white males compared to non-white.

Scarpino:Very few people of color on that list.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino:And I think I have interviewed all the ones that are alive.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  And I said to them what do you want me to do, the committee.  What do you want us to do?  Because you want us to have the luminaries but because of all of these issues, white privilege and all that, the white males have made the marks.  And so do we just now ignore?  And what we have tried to do is provide that balance.  The future, I think, is going to be the opposite.  And Bernie actually, he has a great thing.  They asked him in 1970 to predict what management – they did not use leadership – what management would look like in 2000, and man, he hit a lot of things.  He said we will be using computers on a daily basis.  They asked him to go forward at his FSTRF (sp?? 2:17:21) go forward to 2034 or whatever the year, the same distance.  And he said most leaders in high level positions will be women in 2034.  And he used the research to support that.  He said they are better at it.  They have got the more communal stuff and that is what is going to be more important in the future.  I have always said I hope I am around to be able to test it because he says there I will not be around to test it.  So I hope that things will change, and I see that.  In fact, I think all the committees – no, 70% of the committees I am on are women of dissertations so that is …

Scarpino:Huh.  And do you think that that is the direction the field is headed in?

Riggio:      I think so, and they are good at it.

Scarpino:Three more questions.

Riggio:      Sure.

Scarpino:You wrote a piece in 2015.  Your co-author was Saggi, S-A-G-G-I.

Riggio:      Oh, Karan.  He was a student.

Scarpino:Okay.  One of your students?

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino:And you told me actually that you do co-author with your students.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.

Scarpino:So in 2015 and the piece is called “Incorporating Soft Skills into the Collaborative Problem-Solving Equation.”  It appeared in Industrial and Organizational Psychology.  For people, again who are not in your field, what are soft skills?

Riggio:      Soft skills are the things we have been talking about that lead to charisma.  It is that ability to manage relationships, you know, the people skills.  Soft skills, people skills probably gives you an idea.  How do you relate to people and all that?  And we know that is important and leaders say, you know, I have got to work on my soft skills.  The hard skills are the decision making, the number crunching, all that kind of stuff.  Business schools mostly teach the hard skills.  They do not spend much time teaching the soft skills.  We have a piece I just did with Scott Allen and Dave Rausch where we are saying that very few MBA programs are really giving serious attention to leadership.  Usually it is one course.  They do not really do intense leader development.  And the reviewers savaged us.  They said how do you know that?  Have you been to every business school?  Well, my business school you know … And we went this guy is objective.  We eventually got it into print.

Scarpino:Two final questions and I ask everybody who I interview these questions.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino:Question number one, is there anything I should have asked you that I did not?

Riggio:      I think we covered a lot so I cannot think of anything that we did not cover.

Scarpino:Is there anything you wanted to say that I have not given you a chance to say?

Riggio:      No, I feel like we have said it.  I mean when you start saying, when I have to say I am sort of pessimistic about the future.  And I am like a real optimistic person, but I am really getting concerned about this and I think we need – and I will tell you, I will just say this:  The Trump administration was a shock to me.  I am not as liberal as my daughters, but I am pretty liberal, and the two great puzzlements I had in my own life looking at leaders was first one, Ronald Reagan, second Donald Trump getting elected President of the United States.  Now, Reagan historically a lot of people say he was a really good President and all that kind of stuff, but I think what I was so shocked at was what is this guy’s qualifications?  What were his qualifications?  Yes, he was Governor of California, but what were his qualifications to get to be Governor of California?  The guy was an actor.  Donald Trump, not even an actor.  So I am just being very blunt here when I look at – I wrote a piece in the CIOP newsletter and they said alright, you are a leadership guy, talk to me about – compare getting elected President to becoming a CEO.  And I said wow, that is out of left field, so I have got to kind of figure this out.  I happened to be on a plane right after the Kerry lost the election going to a conference in D.C. and who is sitting there?  The California Democrat brain trust.  It is right after the election, like the same week, and they are flying to D.C.  I talked to them.  I sat with General Wes Clark.  I was sitting right next to him.  I got upgraded to first class.  And they are all going to figure out what the hell happened.  How did we lose?  How did Bush get a second term?  And I was working on this piece and I said there is nothing.  The way we pick CEOs is what is their experience level, have they worked their way up or whatever, and the fact that Gore did not get elected and that Hillary did not get elected – well, I wrote it long before that.  But it just shows that there are no similarities.  We do not look at qualifications.  We do not look at this.  It is a popularity contest.  It is more complex than that.

Scarpino:But I mean certainly television and the media have pushed it in that direction.

Riggio:      Yes.

Scarpino:Jimmy Carter had almost no experience when he got elected.  He was Governor of Georgia.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  And it is more complex.  I mean there are more things.  The reason he got elected, probably the same reason that Reagan got elected.  They wanted something different.  They did not want somebody who was the D.C. mold, and Trump, too.  They wanted something different.  But when it comes down to it from a leadership capacity, you have got to have some talent in leading.  And I am sorry, Reagan had some because he was Governor of California.  Okay, I will give you that.  Trump had zero.  He did not even run a business where there were layers of subordinates.

Scarpino:Okay, so for a man who spent decades studying leaders and followers, he would not have been elected President if the followers had not pushed the button or whatever in the voting booth.

Riggio:      Oh absolutely.

Scarpino:How do you account for that?  That they hired somebody who clearly, at least in my opinion, was not qualified.

Riggio:      Yes, yes.  Well, what happened was they were looking for someone different.  The Republican machinery got behind him.  You remember that they thought he was a horrible candidate, and it became more about winning than about the quality of government.

Scarpino:So does that, and then I will make this the last question and we will wrap up, what does say that about leadership?

Riggio:      It says that, well very often we end up with the wrong people in leadership positions.  We give power to the wrong people.  I mean, I will tell you, look, I wrote a piece called like “Are Politicians Really Servants of the People” because that is what they call them.  They say we are a servant of the people.  They put special interests over the people, they put their own reelection over the people.  So, god, if I was in political science, I probably would have offed myself.  I mean if I was studying, no I mean really, in terms of it is so depressing that that is the case.

Scarpino:Well, we are going to end on that cheerful note.

Riggio:      I know I should not have.

Scarpino:No, no, that is fine.  This is perfectly fine, and it has been a real pleasure to talk to you.  I appreciate your time, and before I do turn these things off, I am going to thank you on behalf of myself and the Tobias Center, the International Leadership Association for giving us so much of your time.

Riggio:      Well, thank you.

Scarpino:You are welcome.

Riggio:And thank you for your time because this has been great.

END OF INTERVIEW