Dr. Hannes Leroy - Walking Our Evidence-Based Talk

Dr. Hannes Leroy is interested in authentic leadership and how to develop it. That interest includes not only a passionate and critical view of the concept of authenticity but his past work also includes a better understanding of its unique outcomes (e.g., safety, error hiding and work engagement), antecedents (e.g., mindfulness training), and similarities and differences from related concepts (i.e., leader behavioral integrity, leader communication transparency). On the development side he is passionate about authenticity both in terms of developing leaders to use their unique or authentic self as a source of their leadership strength as well as the idea of real (i.e., actually moving the needle) leadership development.

Dr. Hannes Leroy's Scholarship

• Google Scholar

A Quote 

• "Academics have lamented that practitioners do not always adopt scientific evidence in practice, yet while academics preach evidence-based management (EBM), they do not always practice it." - Leroy et al. 

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Article: Walking Our Evidence-Based Talk: The Case of Leadership Development in Business Schools by Leroy et al.
• Article: Advancing Leadership Education and Development: Integrating Adult Learning Theory by Allen, Rosch, and Riggio
• Hannes' Ted Talk: I was never trained for this! 
• Conference: New Directions in Leadership Research Conference
• Group: The League of Leadership
• Award: Evidence-Based Leadership Development Program Award

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in the study, practice, and teaching of leadership. 

My Approach to Hosting

• The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are important views to be aware of. Nothing can replace your own research and exploration.

Connect with Scott Allen

• Website

♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!
⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.
➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.
📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.
🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Transcript

Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00  
Okay, everybody. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are in the world. Thanks as always for checking into the Phronesis podcast practical wisdom for leaders today, I have Dr. Hennis Leroy. And he is interested in authentic leadership and how to develop it. And that interest includes not only a passionate and critical view of the concept of authenticity but his past work also includes a better understanding of its unique outcomes, like safety, error hiding and work engagement, the antecedents, mindfulness training, and similarities and differences from related concepts like leader behavioral integrity, leader communication, transparency. On the development side, he is passionate about authenticity, both in terms of developing leaders to use their unique or authentic self as a source of their leadership strength, as well as the idea of real, actually moving the needle of leadership development. And I absolutely love that. He is at the Rotterdam School of Management. And I am so excited about this conversation. You have written an article, and this article with a number of colleagues really caught my attention. And for listeners, this is called "Walking our Evidence-Based Talk: The Case of Leadership Development in Business Schools." I have a passion for this topic. I was so excited to see this article, I thought a couple of years ago, maybe it's a couple of years ago, Dave Rosch and Ron Riggio, and I had put together an article in the Journal of Management Education. And really, I think for that we looked at maybe, maybe it was, quote, unquote, the top 25 colleges of business, their mission and vision and value statements, and everyone's developing leaders, everyone's developing leaders, but are weak. So before we jump into that, what else do people need to know about you, sir?

Hannes Leroy  2:01  
So much to say; I mean, I try to not only talk about leadership and leadership development, I try to do it and develop executives worldwide. And I try to lead myself because I'm the director of the Rasmus Center for Leadership. And I'm also involved in something we've jokingly started calling the League of leadership, which is this consortium of business schools worldwide, it was dedicated to enhancing the credibility of leadership developments as a big, hairy, audacious goal, one of the personal goals that I'm working towards, you know, this is one of those will I achieve it in my lifetime goals? Can we actually certify the profession? I have a TED talk on this where I say, imagine for a moment that people put LDR in front of their name, the same way that Dr stands for doctor or ing stands for an engineer. And that LDR actually means something that people are certified and well-developed for the job that they have to do. Because when I walk into a room full of surgeons and I ask who was trained for the job, everybody raises their hands. No, and we certify engineers, doctors, educators, psychotherapists, you name it; pretty much any profession out there is certified. And leaders are not. So yeah, this is one of my passions, one of my pet projects, but I guess this is something we'll also talk about in this podcast. Okay,

Scott Allen  3:28  
so League of leadership, is that what you called it? Yeah, I could not agree more, I could not agree more. Again, you know, you are training a pilot, or you're training a surgeon, or you're training anyone who is certified in craft, again, to your point, a therapist, and we would not move into a process of having surgery done on ourselves if we aren't with someone who's had that level of training. But for some reason, in this role, I mean, it's kind of like parenting in a way, there isn't a certification for parenting, but a lot of people are in engaging in the role of parent. And it's hard. It's difficult. It's challenging, and there are a lot of people, hopefully, who are good people trying to do the work but not necessarily well prepared for the work. I mean, as you see it all the time, people might be handed a p&l, and their quality scores or their satisfaction scores, and told to go for it. And then they're off right, and leading quote, unquote,

Hannes Leroy  4:27  
yeah, it goes relatively unchecked. And I'm sure that parents and leaders have good intuitions, don't get me wrong. All right. But you know that that little bit of extra wisdom that you should have gotten, I mean, I can speak for myself. I've been thrown into leadership positions without adequate training. And I've definitely not been the best leader. I'm happy to admit my own mistakes and realize like this could have been prevented if somebody had told me what I now know.

Scott Allen  4:57  
To this article...I mean, what's absolutely fascinating to me is the industrial complex that is built around leadership and leader development. And both of us are a part of that. So I think we have to make sure that we situate this in very concrete ways. We're both doing work in organizations. But it is interesting. And this is how this paper that you've written just highlights the concept beautifully. That, you know, is this an evidence-based craft? So would you talk a little bit about the background, the history of this article, the team you put together because it's an incredible team, and how you were thinking about this as you started on this journey because it's just a great article, it just is? 

Hannes Leroy  5:41  
I'm happy you said that. So this article was written by this league of leadership. So that's where the name comes from. So, this is a group of people, all their friends at business schools worldwide. And these were all leadership scholars, who are well established, they've written, very impressive works came together, and we share this collective passion on like, it's not just enough to know, good or effective leadership, we know we have to know how to develop it. Kurt Lewin said if you really want to understand something, try to change it. And as much as we focused on leadership as a topic, we have less work on leadership development; there's an opportunity there to develop and grow that. And so we kind of collectively said, like, Yeah, let's enhance the credibility of leadership development, as we started talking, it's easy, right? It's easy for us to say, well, the consultants out there shouldn't be more evidence-based because leadership development looks a little bit like a "wild west," -  it seems right? Shoot, first ask questions later. And, you know, any, any type of potion couldn't be sold as the next best lead. And there's a lot of money involved in that, right? You can put stuff on the market and make a lot of money, claiming that it will develop leaders; I'm just saying there's no evidence to support it. And so it was easy for us to say, the consultants out there, but then where are we as universities as a whole? Because we get students for a significant period of time, at a crucial moment in their lives, we could really make a difference with Dewey. And do we have the evidence to support that we make a difference? And long story short, our analysis of that data shows we do some things, right? But we have a long way to go before we are similar to, like, a medical science that, like, can say like, yeah, no, you know, we give our students state of the art.

Scott Allen  7:38  
You're exactly right. I mean, I think it's very easy for us to look at consultants, but we're also doing the work. We also quote, unquote, and engage in developing leaders. I mean, that's what our schools of business say we do. So as you dig deeper, as you dig deeper into this evidence-based world, you found some pretty interesting, and in some cases, I mean, you framed it as an opportunity. It is really an opportunity. But it's also a little bit worrisome, wouldn't you agree?

Hannes Leroy  8:09  
Yeah, I'm a, I'm a glass half full kind of guy. Even though I realized, you know, by framing the title, as you know, are we walking or evidence-based talk? I, you know, we probably frame that more as like, you know, we have a problem. Every science evolves over time, right? To a point where it says, like, no, no, we need a better understanding. We need certification. And so we found as we dug deeper, like, we asked ourselves the question like, why, why aren't we already there? And then, you know, there's some really interesting, if you define leadership as every soft skill that may happen in your school or university, right, from communication skills to self-management, wellbeing to did you go, go, go, go, go? Yeah, that's hard; it's hard to get a handle on that. But there are also some interesting political effects at play, right? You have more credibility, assumed credibility because you're a professor and you work in academic institutions, and you're supposed to know what you're doing. There's more assumed credibility there than actually going in collecting data and realizing, Oh, this doesn't work now. Oh, you know, glass half full. There's a benefit to actually doing that. Because you go in and you collect the data, you realize, I thought I was doing this, I guess I'm doing something else. Let me try again. Let me try again. And over time, you get better, and you serve, but we don't have that cyclical, you know, learning, which is a little absurd because we do hold evidence to the highest standards. That's why we became academics. We just don't apply it to our own teaching. That have a hypocrisy or, you know, that's gonna depend on multiple personality disorder. Like when it comes to our specialty of expertise. these, let's say, I don't know human resource management or whatever. We want the HR managers out there to use our evidence. But then, when it comes to our own teaching, and we know there are education signs, there are signs of development. And this is a big part of our lives as professors; if we're really serious that we want managers to adopt our signs, why are we not adopting the signs of the education people? Or of the development sides? Anyways, you get what? I'm getting at there's; there's room for improvement.

Scott Allen  10:34  
Exactly. Exactly. And I think you are we are singing from the same songbook. I think it's wonderful that you and your colleagues have put this out there because it is a very interesting topic. I mean, at points in the article in different phases. I mean, you could go to, if you ask academics, well, what are the results of using classroom-based discussion? 360s, or we could call them instructional strategies, active learning, we could say action learning, we could say any number of what do we know about cold and that learning cycle when you really start digging down, I mean, a lot of the times, it's a little bit mixed, a lot of the times we don't have a lot of concrete data or evidence to suggest that these different instructional strategies that they work, and that's really interesting. I mean, it's, to your point, if we were in the Yale School of Management, really was producing, quote, unquote, world-class leaders, and I'm just picking on Yale because it's the first school that came to mind. But in this list of 25 institutions that we explored, if they were developing leaders and actually moving the needle, they would be holding that data up and those research up from the top of the mountain, saying we've done it, we've figured it out. And I think another interesting thing here is that I wonder, at times, how people are constructing the definition of a leader is a leader. Because again, when you sit back and look at it, at least in my college of business, we have one graduate course on leadership, yet we develop leaders. So Does that just mean that a leader is a person with one course and then a bunch of courses on accounting and marketing and finance? Is that just the conglomerate of all of those other courses plus one class about leadership equal leadership? Is that how we're defining it? Because I think it is.

Hannes Leroy  12:36  
Well,  it's a good question. And this goes back to, you know, what I said before about the TED Talk and the need to certify the profession of leadership. Because if you do certify, then the question is, what basic competencies? Do those people need to be certified? And can you do, like, an assessment center, three posts to determine, like, this is the bar, this is the bar that everybody needs to jump? And it's so funny, I always have discussions with my colleagues, when they have no problem saying like, ya know, they need at least this amount of finance and that amount of marketing. Otherwise they get, but then when it comes to leadership, like, Yeah, but Hannah's leadership? That's soft stuff, right? Can we really ask people to have a certain amount of emotional intelligence? And can we really have them? You know, be sensitive to injustice and respond appropriately? And I'm like, Heck, yeah. You can, like, yeah, it's hard. But guess what, you know, some people come in, and they're already higher on the queue. And this is easier for them. But some people also come in with low marketing skills. And they also are low accounting skills. And they also have to work really hard to pass the bar and accounting, why would it be any different, but that's excess, something I think, now I'm off on a rant, but it says something about, I think how we organize these leadership development workshops, it's more so oftentimes more self-development, we throw in some things that often have a feel-good nature to it, but not necessarily to the point that we're willing to hold ourselves accountable of saying, like, No, we actually develop these skills. And my students will demonstrate those skills at the end of the term. But because that's a high bar,

Scott Allen  14:21  
and when you think about it, how when, when it comes to just even skill development, which I think can very much be somewhat of an Achilles heel. Let's just go back to a surgeon or a pilot for a moment; you have an individual who has spent hours in the simulator, or hours being coached by someone in the other seat, or another surgeon who's observing the work that you're engaged in. And there's true skill development. I mean, we could go to K. Anders Ericsson, where there's deliberate practice happening, time, repetition, real-time coaching/feedback, and working on skills outside of your credibility level. Sometimes if you want to be a heart surgeon for a decade or more 15 years to really get to the level of working on hearts. Or, if you want to fly the 737, you are starting with a Cessna and working your way up. You don't start there. And so to your point, I mean, I think it's, it's really interesting because it's a fun, it's a fun conversation. It's a really, I think, to your point to glass half full. I agree, there's an opportunity here; there's a really cool puzzle in front of us; how do we prepare individuals to better serve in these very complex roles?

Hannes Leroy  15:34  
So can I tell you a little bit about this glass half full and some of the initiatives that this league of leadership has taken because one of the critiques that we ourselves kind of voice is like we talk about the importance of this stuff, but do we actually do it? And so, as a spin-off of this article, there are a few initiatives that came out. So one of the things is the Academy of management is hosting an award now, an evidence-based leadership development award, or schools worldwide; your school may be Scott; if you guys want to apply, you can put forward programs, and it doesn't have to be ideal, right? Some of this will be aspirational like we think we develop this, we hope the look we're going to, we intend to do this. And that's perfectly fine. But showing that willingness to engage in this evidence-based management cycle of getting better and better over time. So every year we're gonna have a few finalists have an award winner, they get their own symposium at Academy, they can present, they will also be assigned a marketing firm, who will summarize and integrate and communicate about their excellent programs to the world, such that there is an alternative for students, companies, whoever out there who's like, oh, I need a leadership development program, or I'm an MBA, yeah, sure. I want to make money. But I also want to develop as a person. Hmm, where do I go? Well, right now there's, there's little information out there. And so what we're working towards is this website that will highlight all these evidence-based programs with keywords with, you know, relevant, and then people can search which program really fits with my preferences. We even wrote a book now related to that, a book that's called strategic swiping. And it's a nod and a wink to tender because we've done research on how companies and students make leadership development selections. And it's often who what, what looks nice, what is like an O swipe? Oh, like this? Oh, let me try that. So we take strategic swiping, and it says like, hey, there's still going to be swiping going on, we're still going to think like, Ooh, this is horse coaching. This sounds interesting; I want to try something like that or Oh, and expedition, in the end, so that that's still going to happen. But let's make it a little bit more strategic. And so, with this website, we've developed a book to highlight more. I think the title is The Forgotten questions on leadership development, like how to ask better questions and how to get better at leadership development. So there's a host of things that we do, don't just talk about it in the article, but we're, we're doing stuff. And I think that's important that we get off our, you know, our out of our ivory towers and there to interact with the real world.

Scott Allen  18:26  
Exactly, exactly. I mean, when you again, when you go back to some of these other domains, like medicine, for instance, I mean, the research is close to the work, it's close to the work. And I think at times as management educators, or leadership educators, we aren't necessarily close to the work some of the time in the organization's really, truly engaging. And I just have great respect because I think not only have you sounded the alarm, but now you're also trying to elevate and highlight organizations that really are engaged in the work that is trying to learn from what they're learning, actually conducting the research. And it's that continuous improvement cycle that I think is most important, where we truly are going to work, where we truly are going to learn. I had a great conversation with George banks, the incoming editor of leadership quarterly. And he suggested, you know, hey, we're going to start accepting proposals ahead of the actual research being conducted. We are going to give someone a conditional acceptance if we have approved the research that they're going to embark on, and then it doesn't matter what their results are. We're going to publish it because that's just as important as that bias towards only positive results. I mean, it's limiting us, right?

Hannes Leroy  19:49  
Yeah, we cherry-pick the things that then only...Yeah, I agree.

Scott Allen  19:55  
And even then, there isn't a lot there when you really start looking under the hood?

Hannes Leroy  20:03  
And it's I find, you know, I find that so intriguing. I'll give you a simple example. Because people are often like, oh, Hans, are you asking me to now set up research on my own? That sounds...you know, that sounds very heavy. Like, I don't have time, I can't even get my papers published, and I don't have tenure. And what are you asking me to do? I said, like, look; it doesn't have to be so tough. I'll give you a simple example. Mostly. In schools, universities, and classes are still evaluated on satisfaction scores. Yes. How happy are you with the course? And in most schools? How happy are you with the teacher, which could almost be a direct measurement of how charismatic is the teacher? And you know, without wanting to boast, I can do infotainment. I think any of us can do infotainment, right? We watch enough TV and movies to know a little bit about what keeps people interested, right? To make sure that they don't lose attention, does that actually develop them as better leaders? There's a meta-analysis on Kirkpatrick model of learning outcomes that suggests that satisfaction scores are no correlated with actual behavioral change and sometimes even negatively correlated with behavioral change. So if are all aiming for that 4.7 out of five, satisfaction score? Well, great. But does that mean we're developing leaders? But those satisfaction scores will, of course, not change immediately. Because, you know, we are a client-driven like, did you know it matters in our system, but there are simple tweaks you can do? So here's an example. I heard from one school, rather than just asking, were you happy with the teacher? What are the learning objectives? What do you expect these people to do? Like? Well, I expect them to be better at emotional tells I expect them to be better at having courageous Congress. I expected. Okay, great. Those are your eight learning objectives. Now slide that into that satisfaction survey at the end, where it's just about how happy were you? But on these eight very concrete things? Do you feel like you actually now improved? They're better than before? Well, now it's gonna get interesting. And you're gonna see, as a professional, may still meet the infotainment satisfaction score, but you're gonna see like, Hmm, out of the eight, only three, I hit the mark. Well, that's weird because I spent four classes on this, and they're not paying; I'm going to need to go back; I'm gonna need to see what week I can do. And sometimes, that's the thing, right? Sometimes it's just a little tweak; it doesn't have to be a lot, right? It's like, oh, but I should change my assignment. Or they should translate this better or more transparent, whatever it is. And there's, then you start, a cycle. So I say this to all the program directors who are in charge of evaluating for the love of God, let them set learning objectives and then measure those. And now, you can have a meaningful conversation with your professor. Yes, what is happening is what you know, and it doesn't have to be hard to use that system that is already in place. 

Scott Allen  23:12  
Okay, so you're making me think now, too; I mean, I'm so excited for, let's say, I teach a course on technologies, enabling disruption. So every week in this course, we're discussing machine learning, we're discussing blockchain, sensor, technology, AR VR, we're talking, we're touching on all of these different, not all of them, but a number of different technologies, enabling disruption. And we're gonna get to a point, I think, where we're gonna be able to start more readily employing learning opportunities that are a simulator, How did someone behave? We got into that simulator, the mission to Mars simulation; I'm going to be learning about that tomorrow; some folks at INSEAD have this mission to Mars VR experience. Well, now we have actual concrete data as to what people said, how they responded, what they were paying attention to, what was in the background, and what was in the foreground. And I think we can, we can leverage some of these technologies to do some pretty interesting things. So that it gets to more of a simulator, it gets to not that that will, by any means, replicate the real world. But from a behavioral standpoint, are we moving the needle as well and getting some concrete data? I mean, I think there are just a lot of cool opportunities in the future. 

Hannes Leroy  24:30  
Yeah, exactly. These things like simulations and, you know, if you get like coaches or shadow coaches observing people, there's so much more that we can do to the point that your assessment of whether or not the training works become part of the development. This is they invented the word for it's called the Development Center. It integrates the assessment with development. And this is what we're good at. We're academics. We're good at assessing, and measuring is pretty much what we do. So why not integrate that into your coursework and show that you're actually moving the needle and moving the ascent? Yeah, I like that idea. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Scott Allen  25:13  
Hannah's before we wind down. What else is kind on your radar recently? What have you excited and intrigued, and curious? Anything? It could be something else along these lines, or it could be something 10 Gentle that has you cooking right now.

Hannes Leroy  25:30  
I just came back from the NCLR conferences, new directions, and Leadership Research. It's a collaboration between RSM, INSEAD, Darden, and Duke, Michigan many, many interesting conversations and doers. I had a conversation with Nathan Hiller of Florida International University also runs a leadership center there. And they're very well known for leadership development. So I would say there's some value in capitalism in the sense that people keep coming back again, and again, this seems to be something that they're doing right. So I was asking Nathan about that. And what he mentioned, I've been, I've been stuck with that in mind, he caught he described the concept of tweaking. Look, when when you develop leaders, sometimes you're like, you need to learn a new habit, you need to learn a new skill, or you need new mindsets like we like to think big and leadership development. But he said like, I think one of the reasons why people come back to our programs is we tweak, we say like, no, no, no, no, don't change who you are. Don't try to add on things that you know will take you months to retrain; look at your situation and just apply smart little tweaks. Yeah. So I'll give you an example. Right, and the viewers won't see this unless they Google me. But I'm a bald guy. And we know there's some research out there that bald guys tend to be seen as more aggressive, as having something to do with the stock. There's an FAQ article; it's always a joke that I go back to. But it is true. Like in my communication, I'm very passionate, bald, intense guy. And so I realized I come across as sometimes as aggressive or assertive. But the people who have worked long with me know I'm really just a loyal puppy. But people will know that. So what is my tweak? Am I suddenly going to be the most compassionate for, like, No, I have a very simple tweak, which is, when I meet new people, like I'm meeting you today, Scott, I tell them like, don't let my passion and enthusiasm and bald heads fool you, I may come off strong? But make no mistake, I really do care about people. And if you see that, like it's, it's a simple tweak. And this may be the catalyst of, for example, me becoming more emphatic. Because the more that I say it, the more I realize what I come up with. But it's simple tweaks like that that can have an immediate effect for leaders out there, that then over time. And so I've been have been super intrigued about this concept. So I want to explore it more to see what those tweaks are and how we how that could really accelerate leadership developments.

Scott Allen  28:21  
Well, it makes me think a little bit of BJ Fogg or James clear some of the atomic habits or little baby tiny habits. There are a lot of different names for, you know, this little micro, and I just had a conversation with a guest a few weeks back; his expertise is the transfer of training. And he's been studying it for 30 years at Indiana University. And that aligns very closely with what you just said in his thoughts. His takeaway was to look small, small tweaks, small adjustments that people can build upon. Versus to your point, these grandiose, you know, authentic leader, servant leader. I mean, it sounds big. It's huge.

Hannes Leroy  29:10  
But there's, there's, I remember this case study by Dan Silver congressional candidate, they had this person who was incredibly competent to be a senator but wasn't really warm, and you need warmth, you need empathy, right? They could change this person, they could have them take acting classes and tear up and then, but there's just a little thing that they did, they watched videos of this guy, and they saw that every time that the guy brought up his kids, his full whole face lit up, he showed more empathy and so forth. So what did they tell him? Every time you do a speech with your son into there, right, talk a little bit about your son, and then we're clear, right? Don't change, don't

Scott Allen  29:54  
already there, but we're exactly tapping into it. And all of a sudden, there's a shift, right? Yeah. Yeah, just like your example, you are a loyal puppy. It's there. But people might not see that. So you tap into it, and all of a sudden, it totally reframes people's experience with you. Right? Yeah.

Hannes Leroy  30:12  
Let's talk again in a few years; maybe then I'll have more data and more thinking around it. But this, you're asked for the most recent thing. And I got really intrigued by what Nathan told me, and I'm going to pursue it further.

Scott Allen  30:24  
I love it. Well, sir, thank you for the good work that you're doing. It's it's valuable. It's important. And it's moving us forward. And again, I'm going to put a link to your information. I'm going to put a link to that article in the show notes. And thank you so much for challenging us to think differently, to do better, and to go to new places. I think it's incredibly valuable. And I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. And I would love to have you back so that we can continue this conversation. Maybe we can get the whole league here. We'll get just all 30 of them.

Hannes Leroy  31:00  
I'm happy to make I'm happy to make introductions. That would serve you for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, pretty well. All right. Bye, Scott.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai