Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

The website for Sam’s research with the Australian Leadership Index is https://australianleadershipindex.org. You can subscribe to their newsletter there, too.

Lynn’s research is online, too, at https://cnu.edu/las. The group’s e-mail address is ldsp-survey@cnu.edu.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5)
• Jilly Truit murder mysteries by Beverley McLachlin:
  • Full Disclosure – https://amzn.to/46TxW6Q (paperback) https://amzn.to/46VDL3Q (audiobook)
  • Denial – https://amzn.to/46YCbhs (paperback) https://amzn.to/3GJc0AA (audiobook)
• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Dr. S. Lynn Shollen is Associate Professor of Leadership Studies and department chair in the Department of Leadership and American Studies at Christopher Newport University, a public liberal arts institution in Newport News, Virginia, in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Higher Education Policy and Administration. Her research interests include identity and the faculty to administrator transition, identity and perceptions of leadership, leadership identities construction, and teaching about women and leadership.

Dr Sam Wilson Senior Lecturer in Leadership in the Department of Management and Marketing at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. He is also co-director of the Thriving in Society 4.0 program of the Social Innovation Research Institute and Deputy Director of the Social Psychology of Innovation Research Group, also at Swinburne. He earned his PhD from the University of Melbourne in experimental social psychology. His research interests span psychological studies of the future self to large, national studies of community beliefs about leadership for the greater good in the government, public, private and not-for-profit sectors.

Transcript
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Unknown Speaker 0:08
Hi, I’m Maureen Metcalf, CEO of the innovative leadership institute, with me today are two leadership experts, Lynn scholin And Sam Wilson. Dr S Lynn scholin is the Associate Professor of Leadership Studies and the department chair and the Department of leadership and American Studies at Christopher Newport University. And Dr Sam Wilson is a senior lecturer in leadership in the Department of Management and Marketing at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Lynn, why don’t you kick us off with your top six findings, both what they are and a little bit about what they mean to you Sure. And I selected findings from our results that I thought would be the most relevant and interesting to this particular audience. One of the general findings is surprising, or not surprising in the United States, less than a third of the sample believe that leaders within the United States are leading effectively. So less than a third, and that’s leadership in general, not a particular person or sector, while more than half of the participants, about 60% believe that leaders within the US are not as effective as leaders were 20 years ago. So taken together, these results are indicating skepticism about the current state of leadership effectiveness in the United States, although not necessarily widespread skepticism. We aren’t focusing on specific leaders or leadership, but we do get an overall perception that leader effectiveness is not so great and that it’s declined over the last 20 years. That’s telling. It is telling. And we’re, you know, we’re going to dig in here a little bit to sector, which gives us a little more insight if we take the data down a little bit in level. So about 50% of the sample believe that leaders in certain sectors are ineffective, and those sectors are education, religion and the environment, with 56% even a little bit more, perceiving that leaders in national politics are ineffective. So we have this perception of leader effectiveness low across several really key institutions and sectors within the United States. Again, it’s not surprising, just given the division between the two political parties in the US, irrespective of which side you’re on, because people aren’t crossing the aisle much. There’s a perception of divisiveness and inability to execute. That perception is just infiltrating various key institutions and sectors, even if it’s originating potentially in a political or national politics sector. I wonder how much the national political behavior is infiltrating companies? It’s a great question, and we do ask about corporate sector as well. That didn’t show up as strongly as those other sectors did. When you have that larger, overarching narrative that the general public is paying attention to, you need to ask the question of, what’s the trickle down effect? Some of our next steps are to get a little deeper into that data, to figure out how perceptions might differ across identities. So let’s jump into the next finding sure this is also related to followers perceptions about how leaders are doing and also gives us some insight to what they’re looking for in leaders and so especially the folks in your audience who are practitioners or leadership developers who help other people become more effective leaders, these are really useful findings for them. So three fourths of the sample, so about 74% perceive that today’s leaders in the United States are removed from the experiences of ordinary everyday people like they just don’t understand what life is like for ordinary everyday people. And the twist on this is about the same amount, 75%

Unknown Speaker 3:50
believe that the best leaders understand the experiences of ordinary everyday people. So what we’re getting with this result is that the large majority of followers perceive that leaders in the US are not meeting the followers ideal of understanding the average person. Do you have a sense for what’s feeding that perception? We don’t, because it’s a really general look at the data, but I think we’re going to get a lot more insight into that when we start breaking it down by demographic. So let’s go to the next one. Then this finding is particularly interesting to me because, as I mentioned earlier, I study identity as related to leadership. So we asked folks how comfortable they would be with leaders who differ than them in certain identity categories, such as gender, race, sexual orientation and so on, and how willing they’d be to follow leaders who are different from them in those categories. This is also important, because we’re having a lot more kind of a re emphasis on identity politics here in the United States, about half of the respondents convey that they’re comfortable with a leader who’s different from them in the categories of gender, sex, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and income level with.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
A bit fewer saying they’re comfortable with people leaders who have different religious beliefs than they do, not quite as many, a little under 50% say they’re uncomfortable with a leader who differs from them on political views, which makes sense. The views are confirmed when we look at the data for followers actually willing to follow leaders who differ from them, and we get the same emphasis that they’re actually willing to follow about 50% or a little bit more someone who differs from them in these identities, not quite so much in the political views. That’s a bit more of a sticking point where only 34% would follow a leader who differs from them in political views. That seems dramatic to me, if a third of my followers will be less inclined to follow me because of my politics, it seems like we’re now getting to a point where it’s going to be tough to get the work done, and it could also depend on the context. If we’re talking about getting work done in a context where political views are highly salient or relevant, that might be a real little sticking point, but there might be context where it doesn’t matter as much. And so again, we’ve asked participants not to focus on national level politics, but we really don’t know how much they are thinking of that just as a background mental model. So then what is next? This question, this next result, gets to what followers are looking at in terms of what they want leaders to be paying attention to and what they want them to be doing stylistically. And so the most striking emphasis is that respondents or followers put so much emphasis on the importance for leaders at the both the national and the local level, so even the community levels to create an environment that supports diversity, that seemed to be widespread support for followers wanting to see that in action from leaders, and equally important to the followers was that leaders at both the national and local level seek to take care of the natural environment. So we’re seeing a lot of emphasis on not even really which sector you’re leading in followers want leaders to pay attention to what’s happening in our physical environment. I think it’s really important for folks who are stepping into leadership roles or already in leadership roles, to acknowledge that followers are looking for leaders to go beyond just what it takes to get the job done and perhaps even just the focus of the group or the organization. They’re really looking for leaders who care about being inclusive, who care about gathering diverse perspectives, and who care about taking care of the larger environment outside of that particular group or institution. This is so important as leaders and future leaders are listening to this information, to be thinking about if we influence, and that’s what leadership is, it’s important to understand what we do that gets in the way that we may not even be aware of, and what we do that really accelerates our influence. Yes, absolutely. And also to take into account that followers, they want to be seen as, as as the individuals that they are and they I think they want their identities to be recognized, and they want to hear perspectives from other people that may or may not differ than their own. There’s a lot of evidence now that shows cognitive diversity, diversity and backgrounds and experiences that come from all the different identities we bring to the table, adds value and creativity and innovation to our decisions, and followers are looking to see that happen when they’re working with leaders. So let’s move to the next one. Then sure this is the final one that I’ll talk about, because this is projecting us into the future. So we started with folks don’t seem to be thinking that leadership is overly effective here in the United States at the moment, and perhaps even less effective than it was 20 years ago. So then we asked respondents to project into the future and think, Well, what about our younger generations, and how are you feeling about them leading into the future? So just over a third of the respondents believe that people in today’s younger generations are motivated to lead. 37%

Unknown Speaker 8:58
think that younger generations are motivated to lead, whereas about 35% believe the contrary, so there’s a little bit of ambiguity. The remaining third are not really sure enough to speculate. Folks aren’t really sure what to think in terms of the younger generation’s motivation to lead. So they represent a country divided about how motivated the younger generations are to lead the country into the future. And a really telling sign, and this is important, specifically for leadership educators and leadership developers, is that over half of the respondents, 57%

Unknown Speaker 9:30
believe the younger generations are not being equipped to lead. And that’s really telling for us. We do leadership education at Christopher Newport University, we have a strong program in leadership studies, but accessibility to those types of program and that types of education aren’t widespread, and so it’s kind of a call to action in terms of leadership education as well. That’s a really important point for any of us who plan to live well beyond retirement. We have to turn over leadership to our next generations.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
If the trends are accurate, many of us listening to this interview will be living to be 90 or well beyond. So it’s not just the millennials that will be leading. It’s those younger than that now that we have to equip them, because they will be running the country, whether or not we want them to. And the other is the perception of motivation, that each generation shows motivation differently. So it’ll be curious to see just how this unfolds. It is and Maureen, if I can tie in one more quick finding, because it’s relevant, 46% of the folks that we surveyed believe it’s too risky to be a leader in the current social climate in the United States. So we have almost half of folks saying, I’m not motivated to lead because it’s just too risky, and if our younger generations grow up with that same mentality, we’re going to be in trouble. So this is really a call to action for all of us to at least consider these findings and look at how we personally run our organizations. So Sam, let’s jump into yours at this point. Okay, sounds good. Thanks. Maureen, so I thought it might be helpful to preface my remarks, but just do a few comments about what we measure and how we measure, because that helps to explain some of our key findings. What we did in our work is that we measured perceptions as well as people’s expectations. So that helps us to understand the gap between how things seem to be and how things ought to be, and that’s quite useful, as I’ll come back to in a moment. The second point I’d make is that our model of leadership for the greater good sort of breaks the concept into three main sub concepts. We look at leadership for the greater good in terms of the types of value that is created. And here we look at social value or economic or environmental value. We also look at the idea about how value was created. So how ethical Are you in your conduct? How accountable are you and how transparent Are you? And finally, we look at for whom do you create value? And here is the idea, is for the self, for the other. And we have three types of indicators. Here we have the idea that you should be responsive to the people you serve. You should be responsive to society. And so further to Lynn’s point about diversity, you should be responsive and try to balance the needs of different groups in society. So with that said, I’ve got six findings that I’d like to share with you, and like Lynn, they do tend to build on each other. The first high level finding is that on balance, and this is from, by the way, from six quarters of data, and has really remained quite static. On balance, the Australian community doesn’t regard Australian institutions and organizations as showing leadership for the greater good. This means that although there are a small number of people who think that they do show leadership for the greater good, the vast majority don’t. And actually, what we find intriguing me is that our figures are very similar to Lynn’s, only about a third of the community. Thing is institutions across all sectors show leadership for the greater good. So there’s a broad sort of similarity there. I’ll move to the next one. So the overall finding that most Australians think that our organizations don’t show leadership for the greater good is interesting. It’s quite unhelpful as well. So we try and break this down to get us more vanilla sense of well, who are the worst offenders, if you like it, who are the best performers. And so it may come as no surprise to you, but we found that the government sector, which we measure as the local government, state governments and the federal government, are perceived as the worst performers. Most people think that they really don’t show any leadership for the greater good, and our figures are very similar to Jillian’s, actually, whereas a quarter of the population think that they do, overall, show leadership for the good, most people don’t think. Guess what? I just got my diabetes supplies delivered to my door, free shipping and everything. No way. Who’s making life that easy us. Med, they even helped with my insurance and sent the latest tech like a CGM, total game changer. That’s amazing. I’m checking them out now. Join the 1000s who trust us. Med, visit us. Med.com/easy,

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Unknown Speaker 15:00
Police and courts, etc, these are seen as showing on balance, leadership for the better good. We find these trends to be quite stable over time. So the public sector remains is viewed positively over the last year and a half, and the government sector is viewed as stubbornly bad. Basically, this sort of raises a bit something of a paradox here in that the public sector and the government institutions are connected. One creates the law so that one enacts them, really, and yet they’re seen remarkably different. So the paradox here is that whereas government are seen as self serving, the institutions they govern are seen as serving the public. So there’s a bit of a knotty little conundrum to try and unpack there. And another finding I’d like to share just moving on from that is that look looking at some of the indicators or drivers of leadership for the greater good. And I want to focus here on our findings for government institutions, unlike businesses and not for profit institutions and public sector organizations. People expect political leaders to actually almost do the impossible. We expect them to pursue social goals and environmental goals and economic goals, and we pursue expect them to focus equally on these things and pursue them with equal vigor. But of course, as we know from research looking at social enterprises, for example, it’s terribly hard to actually pursue these conflicting goals simultaneously. There are always trade offs and tensions and paradoxes that must be encountered and dealt with, and it’s not always easy to do so. So in that regard, I do have some sympathy for these leaders who face a somewhat impossible task. One thing I would say, too, I want to pick up on a point that Lynn mentioned about the environment we find as well that across all sectors, especially government, people expect the government to focus on leaders rather more generally, to focus on creating environmental value much more than they actually do. But here’s where it starts to get quite intriguing in terms of the government sector. I’ll just focus on that. It looks like the government sector is performing very badly in terms of their focus on the environment. And yes, and this is, this is a bit dispiriting when we look at the role of environmental concern in terms of being a driver for leadership, for the very good, it kind of drops out. So we find that people are concerned about the environment, but in terms of judging political leaders, they don’t really get punished for it, at least not yet. We say we care, but we don’t act. And that seems to be consistent with our in the US not voting leaders out. Yes, we see similar things here as well. Often the issue seems to be framed about the economic, short term economic cost, which seems to dominate the field in terms of honest judgments. The final point I want to share, in the interest of time Maureen, is about the key drivers of leadership for the very good. So the question here is, okay, so we see that the overall state of leadership seems to be bad, we expect much more than we actually are getting. But what can we do about it? This is for those who might practice leadership. What can my institution do to increase the sense among the community that we serve the greater good? And I’ll give you four findings that relate to each sector. So first of all, we find that for the government sector, the major driver here is being seen to behave ethically, followed closely by the need to be accountable for your actions and misdeeds, we see very similar patterns, actually, for the business sector as well as for the not for profit sector as well. And intriguing thing about this is that these are about how value was created. People are much more concerned about how you go about doing what you do. That seems to be the most dominant prevailing judgment about, are you serving the public interest? But when we look at the public sector organizations, we find that something slightly different. They can stand here. It’s not the type of value you create or how you create value, but rather it’s the question of For Whom are you creating value? And so for public sector organizations, being seen to be responsive to the people you serve, and being seen to care about the wider community and balancing needs of different groups in your community, these are the major drivers in that context. So we see here that there’s no simple story here. It doesn’t matter about the context you’re in and the institution you’re in and people’s expectations about what you’re supposed to do. It’s interesting to see how those differ. Do you have any clear sense of why that is. I have a few ideas. I mean, there’s often talk about different types of institutional logics and that and different goals that organizations perform. And of course, when you have different expectations about what different types of institutions should do, and we see they’re reflected in our data. So for example, we expect businesses to be more concerned with economic goals than, say, social goals or environmental goals, by virtue of being businesses. Having said that, in terms of showing a leadership for the greater good, businesses get no credit for pursuing economic goals. That’s just what they’re supposed to do. You don’t get credit for doing a job, but consistent with notions of shared value, for example, when businesses actually strive to pursue social goals and strive to create environmental value, then they do get some credit. Let’s move to your other findings. I’m just sensitive to time. There are many more findings besides, and we can actually drill down according to demographics as well. We have a great little filter function on our website, then the high level findings. So on balance, when we hold the mirror up to the community without really.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Like what we see, but there is hope. What is the hope? It’s difficult to actually define leadership for the greater good. It’s such a slippery, strange, complex concept, but it’s pretty clear that people have a very clear idea about the types of value that we need to create, and the idea that really, we can’t just pursue single minded economic value at the expense of social and environmental we have to find a way of issuing these goals simultaneously, and you’ll get credit for it if you actually manage that. We also see people concerned about not just value creation, but also questions of distribution and fairness. So we see that you have to be seen, to show concern for the wider community, and you have to be responsive to people if you trip up, you have to be accountable. None of this is really news in some respects, but it makes it very clear about there are nine things you need to do within each sector. There are two or three things you should do first. So that’s helpful. If I were to go look at your website, I would see those nine things, and by sector, I would see the top areas. That’s all right. So one of the things that we were at pains to do Maureen is to make sure that these findings are locked behind pay walls. So what we’ve done is created this, this website the Australian leadership index.org, and that presents all of our findings, so we’re completely transparent. Every time we have our findings, they come through, we load them up, and we’ve created this interactive data portal where people can explore the findings from the high level work to the very granular detail, they can also create their own charts to explore the data for themselves. So we’re mindful that people have their own questions, and so we’ve created a tool that enables people to ask their own questions and answer them, and we think that’s quite unique, and that’s one of the things both you and Lynn have done, is created portals so that this information is shared. I can’t overstate the value of that. When we think our leaders aren’t getting the job done, it’s not helpful to say leaders aren’t getting the job done, but we’re not going to tell you what needs to get done exactly. Yeah, we have a few minutes left. Sam, can you take a couple of minutes and then Lynn, do the same to tell us how to get access to your information. Certainly. Warren, I’d be very happy to so people can visit Australian leadership index.org, and there they’ll find some general information about the surveys, a bunch of articles we’ve written that we share via a Creative Commons license, and they’ll see four main pages that break the data down in terms of the high level findings, down to their findings for each institution, they’ll also find something called a chart builder on the Australian leadership index.org website that enables them to say what I want to know about. It could be accountability or ethics, for example, and they can then filter down. So for example, a concern might be, what do people who lean left think, as opposed to leaning right? In each area, you have recommendations for how leaders might improve, because, again, it sounds like both you and Lynn have demonstrated that people are dissatisfied with the current leadership behavior. Yeah, that’s the next job. So all the information is there on on the dynaport, but we’re in the process of writing our first annual report to provide a plain language account of what we found and what we suggest. Lynn, can you tell our listeners how they would get access to your findings? Certainly. Maureen and we also, like Sam explained, we think it’s really important to have the data accessible to folks who are interested in leadership from a variety of different angles. We do have a website. The our project. Website is cnu.edu,

Unknown Speaker 23:24
forward slash L, A, S, forward slash the Las, standing for leadership Attitudes Survey and what folks will find there as the first round of data we collected, and also some narrative making sense of what those data points are saying, what we will have rolling out, hopefully, month by month, is that data broken down by demographics, so we can see how to make sense of the general data, looking more specifically into all the demographic categories that we’ve included in the survey. People can also contact the researchers, myself and my colleagues, Elizabeth ganyan and Kat Callahan, we have an email account at ldsp, Dash survey@cnu.edu

Unknown Speaker 24:09
and at that email we’re looking for feedback, questions, collaborations, requests, to utilize the data, anything that folks might want to get in contact with us about. One of the things I love, among many others, is that both of you are collaborating across the broader community to build on the information and continue to share it for our listeners. Thank you for joining us. Please do connect with both Sam and Lynn. Thank you for joining us, and we trust that you have found great value in this and will continue to listen and thank you to the international leadership association for hosting this interview series.

Unknown Speaker 24:59
Ta.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
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