Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen

Dr. Marianne Roux & Dr. Jonathan Reams - There's More to It

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 155

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Dr. Marianne Roux has 30 years of global experience as an HR Executive, Future of Work Strategist, and Professor of Leadership. She holds a Master's degree in HR and Organisational Psychology and is completing her Ph.D. in Leadership in the Future of Work context. She currently runs Roux Consulting, a global niche consulting firm based in Dublin, Ireland, and regularly teaches at Business Schools around the world.

She has worked for PWC, Accenture, Deloitte, and Mercer and has held two HR Director roles in two countries - Woolworths Food South Africa and Cricket Australia. Her experience spans several industries, and she focuses mainly on Future of Work Strategy, Leadership Development, Organisation Redesign, and HR transformation.

She has recently published a book on Adaptive HR and a Personal Agility reflection journal: Knowing Your Superpowers is the Key to Your Success in a Changing World, and she is featured in Maturing Leadership: How Adult Development Impacts Leadership.

She was chosen as one of 52 Inspirational women at work in South Africa in 2004, one of 20 Female Entrepreneurs by Management today in 2011 in Australia, and in 2015 she won the excellence in NFP consulting award from the Worldwide Who’s Who. 


A Quote From This Episode

  • "The biggest challenge, I can tell you for sure, is keeping the very senior leaders on board for that long journey of lifelong development."


Resources Mentioned in This Episode


More About Series Co-Host, Dr. Jonathan Reams


About  Scott J. Allen


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.


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. 

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, welcome to Phronesis - thank you for checking in wherever you are in the world. We just if you listened last week, we had a conversation with Jonathan Reams and he has published a book he edited a book I should say he didn't publish it. That would be too many hats, I think Jonathan, but he edited a book. And it's called Maturing Leadership. And it's really looking at the cross-section of adult development theory and leadership. And so if you listened last week, you would have heard us kind of discuss the project, but also give you a little bit of a primer when it comes to adult development theory. And today, we have our first guest in this series, Marianne Roux. She has 30 years of global experience as an HR executive, Future of Work strategist and she's a professor of leadership. She holds a master's degree in HR and organizational psychology, and Ph.D. and leadership in the future of work context. She currently runs Roux Consulting, a global niche consulting firm based in Dublin, Ireland, and regularly teaches at business schools around the world. She has worked for PwC, Accenture, Deloitte, and Mercer, and has held two HR director roles in two countries at Woolworths Foods South Africa, and Cricket Australia. Her experience spans several industries including retail FMCG, mining, oil and gas, public sector utilities, infrastructure, media, financial services, telecommunications, sports, NFP, health and pharmaceutical, and tech startups. Her work focuses mainly on future of work strategy, leadership development, organizational redesign, and HR transformation. She has recently published a book on adaptive HR, and a Personal Agility Reflection Journal: Knowing Your Superpowers is the Key to your Success In a Changing World. And as we mentioned, she's also featured in this edited book by Jonathan Maturing Leadership: How Adult Development Impacts Leadership. Marianne works pro bono and developing women and alleviating poverty and trauma; she has served on the boards of Hagar Australia, Hagar International YGAP, and the Edmund Rice Foundation. She was chosen as one of 52 Inspirational Women at Work in South Africa in 2000, for one of 20 female entrepreneurs by Management Today in 2011, in Australia, and in 2015, she won the Excellence and NFP Consulting Award for the Worldwide Who's Who. Marianne, what else do we need to know about you? That's just incredible. That's absolutely incredible. What else do you want listeners to know before we jump in?

Marianne Roux  2:51  
I don't think there's much else; I would just say it sounds that impressive. But I know lots of people like me in the country I grew up in, and I think so much of what I do was shaped by growing up in apartheid South Africa in a very complex transformation between governments and seeing the absolute best of leadership and the worst of leadership altogether. And I would just say the South African core is probably very, very strong. And the African mindset and not seeing everything just through a Western lens is probably a lot of what is informed and why I do what I do if that makes sense.

Scott Allen  3:25  
Oh, that's wonderful. Well, so you had a front-row seat to a lot of that transformation, then. And that's really set the stage and informed how you view the world and how you think about work. That's incredible...

Marianne Roux  3:39  
And it's made me also love complexity, and really see people thrive in complexity and see that it doesn't have to overwhelm us if we are very adaptive and very resilient. And that's all of that sparked my interest in the work that I do.

Scott Allen  3:52  
Oh, wonderful. Well, Jonathan, I know you have some questions for Dr. Roux. 

Jonathan Reams  4:00  
So there's a lot that is going on here. So there's a chapter in your book, and we'll focus on that a bit. But it's that part of your Ph.D. It's also representative, I think of this broad scope of work you've been doing, and maybe a place to start is this context of the future of work or "work 4.0?" Could you say a little bit about what that looks like? Why is it 4.0 Compared to 2.0? Or whatever?

Marianne Roux  4:30  
And you know, that that's the thing, you know, you watch the world. I'm interested in complexity, right, Jonathan? So for me, it was if we had the 66 very confusing unintegrated leadership theories and practices out there and competencies and behaviors and neuro and all these things, and nobody can make sense of it and a million Google things and a million, you know, airport books on leadership. You know, how does one set leadership in its context, and at the moment meant the context is very much industry 4.0. And I'm going to caveat that and say it was before COVID industry 4.0. But we now have a convergence of three things. So I think the future of work now and it mustn't be hijacked by any of those three, by the way, I think of three things - The World Economic Forum had this quote that I use a lot in 2020. And it says at the start of the decade; you've seen this convergence of three trends. And for me, future of work is a convergence of three trends. One is the fourth industrial revolution, technology, and acceleration. So AI, automation robots, how that affects work, the more meaningful work the impact that has on jobs, the reskilling/upskilling, all of that the skills lead HR, all of that is industry 4.0, which was slightly slack before COVID, but now has gone into major acceleration mode. So that's heating up. At the same time, which I feel is a bit like the tail wagging the dog in my clients as well is hybrid is suddenly becoming future of work. So everybody's now forgetting about industry 4.0, which is alive and well. And now really, everything's about hybrid, but hybrid is a part of it because now what the work is has changed. But also our work has changed. Now we've got added complexity for leaders, not just how people work is changing. But now, the way they work is changing. And then the very how they feel about work. Number three is also changed. Now it has to be purposeful and meaningful for me to even want to come back to your office or want to engage and I've got a better choice of where I want to work and what you need to pay me and the flexibility you need to give me. And by the way, if you don't care about the environment, social and governance ESG issues, and you don't so know the third thing. So first is the industrial, and the fourth industrial revolution. The second is hybrid. Third is social justice. Everybody wants to know what I've never seen so many CEOs comment on social issues on LinkedIn as I have in the last two to three years. It was just never done. You know, I was even a communication for a year, and nobody ever…you just didn't say anything. Now it's like Black Lives Matter. Yes, we'll post about that. Yes, we'll take a stand on the environment. We'll take a stand on a war...publicly. So how do you navigate for me the complexity leaders lead in our in this future of work, which is the convergence of those three things? is exponential. Really, that's how I see it the convergence of those three things, Jonathan,

Jonathan Reams  7:39  
That's the context. And then your research questions were really around what does leadership look like In that context? Can you say a little bit about where you started that journey?

Marianne Roux  7:53  
Yeah. So I have been doing this for 30 years. And I've been doing leadership development for 30 years. And honestly, I remember the days when we had competency profiles that were designed down to level four what it looked like and what it didn't look like, and it was the standard set of things fly everybody in standardized approaches. But then also, then you start to look at there was this confusing use of theories. Some would say, "oh, it's definitely contingency theory,” and other would say, "No, it's emotional intelligence," and then suddenly "oh, no, it's all about the brain changing itself." In a way, it was really driven by vendors than anything else, rather than academic research, right? People selling magical solutions. And there was an even MBAs, I got teaching MBAs, and I would go ha, I just don't know if this is the stuff that really makes leadership work. So I was interested Jonathan, in first understanding the evolution of leadership, from you know, the start to where we are now, what are all the theories? They were anything between 66 and 75 theories? Wow, they were four eras of leadership. And then when you get right to the end of it, people start to talk about how we've got human leadership, you'll see that popping up everywhere. So what's the next fad? I wanted to get off fads and habits, with a scoping review, which is where we started off. Let me have a look at this. And there were four stages and the stage we seem to be in was the integrative era. Okay. And you started to see some researchers moving that way. Right. David Day's model was kind of one of the first ones that said, "Hang on, you know, we need an integrative view of this," but also the various thought of breaking down between the disciplines, HR and psychology and education and neuro work and sociology and anthropology and it was really important for me to look not just at what came out of leadership theory and applicate practice, but also what was happening in terms of the behavior of leaders in humans, and in the context of how organized are changing, and work is changing, so this scoping review was the starting point. And then I went on and thought, let me interview 22 thought leaders that are kind of on the edge of this. And they either CEOs or academics, it was a mix and understanding of what they are saying, what are they seeing. What did they see work or not work because we were spending this other 365 billion a year on MBAs and others, and still getting very poor leaders at the top of organizations, and some very ordinary behaviors? Looking at the scoping review, and taking those 22 interviews, I triangulated that and started to pull out and build out on David Day's model some additions that really just put, you know, that was a 2009 piece of work...so 2014 onwards 2014, Industry 4.0 started, we've now had hybrid we've now had, what does it look like in 2022? And beyond?

Scott Allen  10:56  
Hmm. So, Marianne, that's incredible. That sounds fascinating. What are a couple of things that you built upon?

Marianne Roux  11:03  
I started with David day, it was a model from 2009, which was before you really think industry 4.0 really took off in 2014. So you'd say that even be even though this is a great model to start with, what has happened from then till now in the market is really important. And what I loved about the model is it had a visible, less visible, and invisible component, I see an edge, a discomfort, from researchers and practitioners when we start to look at least visible and invisible. And I think that's really, really important. So visible is what we've always known, always done competencies. Less visible, yes, people have started to play in that leader identity, and self-regulation is a lot of behavioral work that gets done, they're probably not at the level, I think there's you know, that we've really needed to do it. So there's a lot more research coming through, I think, especially as we understand the brain and how the brain changes. And the invisible adult development processes are so critical. And it hasn't been taken up enough understanding to really pull it through the leadership development and spend the time that is needed for it because it takes time for adults to develop, right? Yes. And so, when you start to think about the work that's coming through there, it's so critical to have that as the foundation. And we've built upon that in the model.

Jonathan Reams  12:31  
Yeah, and this is where we have gone with this book, basically. And David Day actually wrote the foreword to the book, because he sees that this is an under-developed and under-researched area. And so, the more work we can pull together, the better, and at the same time, it's when I remember reading Robert Kegan's, In Over Our Heads for one of my doctoral classes back in the late 90s. We all said, "What is he talking about?" Because it was literally invisible to us because there were not socially normative ways of talking about it. So, you're having to kind of fumble your way into something that the air that we breathe, or the water that we swim in, but we don't know how to talk about it. And that's why I think David put that at the invisible level.

Scott Allen  13:29  
But it frames everything. I mean, it frames everything. It frames how you construct and make meaning of your educational experiences, and your work experiences. I mean, it frames everything. Right?

Jonathan Reams  13:42  
So then Marianne, the question becomes you were taking this model and some others that you found in your literature, but you were also you've alluded to now, what has Industry 4.0 and the future of work added that maybe wasn't in that model. Okay, what can you say about those things?

Marianne Roux  14:03  
I think for me, from the scoping review, and from the interviews, it was quite clear to me that, you know, I'm really, I was very interested in something else, which is slightly different, I think, in my view, again, open for interpretation to adult development and leader identity. And that is sensemaking, sensemaking, and contextual intelligence, I felt that there was something about making sense of the world that was required in an industry 4.0 very complex world, in a different way to kind of the cognitive process there. But it's kind of that much more strategic, systemic view of strategy, policy, my industry, making sense of that. And I felt that it would be more if I looked at why leadership development failed, even from practitioners whether it was consulting firms thought leadership, whether it was research, it was an underdeveloped area of understanding all of what we've spoken about in context. And in our current era, we are in industry 4.0. You know, the social as we spoke and the hybrid era. So what does leadership look like in this era?

Jonathan Reams  15:13  
And I just make a comment. As you spoke there, you said, you know, underrepresented or underdeveloped. I've started to see a few articles coming out that start talking about the importance of context, but they're kind of like, early weak signals of people really saying, "Hey, this is important." But also, I think, Scott in some of your other podcasts, like with Barbara Kellerman, the leadership system involves context. So there are people out on the forefront, starting to bring this in at least. So you've integrated that into your model Marianne...

Scott Allen  15:45  
for sure. And I think for me, at least, I was about to make a joke a little bit ago, and I didn't jump in. But I was gonna say, so "it wasn't just contingency theory?" because there were three meta-analyses proving that, you know. But, you know, Fiedler really was one of the first individuals who started bringing kind of context or the environment to the situation, into the dialogue and into the conversation. And I couldn't agree more. I mean, I have this idea of a paper called Into the Great Wide Open, because I think that's just it and Mary Uhl-Bien is doing some nice work on thinking about complexity theory and thinking about the context. But it's, it's big, it's really big. You're right, Jonathan, that Barbara will talk about the leadership system that is the leader, and the followers, in the context, is what she says, right? It's fascinating.

Marianne Roux  16:41  
And if you're not designing your leadership model, and your leadership development model, with that in mind, I really feel like it's not relevant enough for the learning and application to happen. Which then means we throw millions of dollars at generic concepts that don't land.

Jonathan Reams  16:57  
And to build on that and transition. And you mentioned learning because I know one of the things in your PhD is you found a lot of literature where Leadership and Learning were almost synonymous

Marianne Roux  17:09  
100%, we know that leadership is learning now. So the second piece I added, which is kind of something that came in from the side, I ran, you know, this personal agility book, I wrote the superpowers book, I've always been working with. And early in my life, I had the opportunity to work with Stephen Covey in the seven habits in South Africa and Margaret Wheatley. So you'll always see me coming from because they were involved in our transition, you'll only see him coming from the inside out and at the same time. And I think that's what made my vantage point probably a bit unique is that I was very, very interested in what would the conditions be that we needed to help people with so that they can actually engage in these invisible and less visible processes, Jonathan, and for me, it was, I looked at seven habits and emotional intelligence at positive psychology, and then growth mindset. And how Microsoft and everybody's using curiosity and a growth mindset. And I, for me, just having seen this for 30 years, if somebody doesn't, is not curious, and they don't have a growth mindset, no matter what I do, the learning is not going to occur. And they are not going to be adaptable; the leaders are not going to be adaptable. That's why leadership is learning. Because as you go up the layers and the complexity increases in this stakeholders multiplying it's more emergent. People are struggling to stay curious, they want to revert back that's that less invisible to being the expert, or they work harder and burn themselves out at that achiever level. And they simply can't hold the paradoxes they can't hold. But alongside that, if they don't have that curiosity of not being overwhelmed by it, but seeing it as interesting, I thought that was an addition we really had to bring in the context. And really, that curiosity, grit focus piece, less distracted to make this happen.

Scott Allen  19:06  
I think an interesting way of framing some of this is that I sometimes think as I'm working with leaders, they construct the role that they have to have the answers. And something I will, especially when navigating, we could call it wicked problems, VUCA context, adaptive challenges, we could go to a number of different, ill-structured problems, it's more about in some ways, are you bringing the right questions to the table and as you're working with a team to identify the right questions to work, so that we can co-create and identify a path forward. Because no one individual has THE answer. That's not a thing.

Marianne Roux  19:44  
And in fact, the levels of collaboration required now and co-creation required now, to lean into this really complex challenges is exponential compared to what it was before. It's almost as if you know, silos just don't even exist anymore. We're an organization. So when I do the organization design piece, it's as if, you know, the walls have collapsed. And we run a complex we're doing my clients are running on fake bits that have cross functional, evolving, you know, kind of using design thinking and testing things, and they're evolving. And this is so different from the one-year strategic plan that rolled down into everybody's goals. Very, very complex.

Jonathan Reams  20:28  
Now, there was a third piece that you added in this model at the base of it, that maybe has been talked about lots, but wasn't necessarily integrated yet. So can you speak a bit about that,

Marianne Roux  20:44  
as I was doing the scoping review, but even more so, the actual interviews with the practitioners really highlight this issue of we aren't just still struggling so much with moral and ethical foundations of leadership. And it says, if there's this special three-day program, somebody would go on to go off and learn ethical reasoning. But if we don't, it feels like with the complex problems we have, and the ethical dilemmas replacing, let's just take AI for a moment the ethics of artificial intelligence, right? It is an issue that leaders have to deal with board chairs have to deal with; I feel we have to call out that at the core, even underneath adult development processes. There's got to be a level of moral maturity, the ability to hold real ethical dilemmas and moral dilemmas that have no clear answers that we have not seen before. And so much of what we see as the failure of leadership, which, if you listen to Jeffrey Pfeffer, and these people, we have to look at what goes wrong in leadership in our leadership models. And I think this is where leadership does go wrong. I think you can probably say, "oh, tick tick, great contextual intelligence, yes, very curious," all those things - very competent. Ethically, you know, morally, not there, for me, was a real challenge. We had to call them out in a more integrated way.

Scott Allen  22:09  
I have a question for the two of you. Because I think, I don't know. I mean, if we go to let's just take Kegan's model, we could go to Tobert’s model as well. But if we went to Kegan's model for just the sake of this conversation, it all for me comes back to that adult development conversation. Because it would seem to me how someone makes meaning of the conversation around ethics, you know, at stage two, how I'm going to construct ethical behavior may be different than how I construct ethical behavior at stage three. I've been engaged in some conversations in recent times about how someone constructs conversations around JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion). And at different levels, someone might make meaning of that conversation or that topic in very, very different ways. So, for me, it just kind of all comes back to this adult development conversation. That's so critical, and are we helping people...are we creating environments that help aid in the development and growth of individuals through the stages so that they have the complexity of mind to make meaning of these situations in different ways. Does that make sense? Do you all agree? I mean, challenge that, please.

Marianne Roux  23:23  
It does make sense. For me. For me Jonathan might have a different view. And that's good. I say yes, it is part of adult development, but I think there's actually more to it as well. Because I feel like if you look at it's Kohlberg had a great model. Fabulous. We can work with Kohlberg's model. I mean, I actually use Kohlberg’s model when I teach ethical reasoning and moral maturity. Yeah, I actually think we need to immerse leaders much more in moral dilemmas and ethical reasoning challenges along the journey. I don't think we do that. Well, you know, I think we need to test it out a lot more. You know, they do so well. In this kind of slippery slope. I've seen organizations where somebody does something small wrong, and they kind of get away with it, and so it's not a very big deal, so you kind of get this moral slippery slope. My worry is I have seen people who measure out really high on adult development, okay, when you meet with them, I tell you what, for me, their purpose and value set is almost becoming it's almost like, I don't know Richard Barrett talks about it's almost like they "fall through their own greatness." And it's almost...I'm going to use Mandela because he's, of course, in this maturity, but there's a sense of humility required to really sit in that level of moral maturity that you'd see in a Mandela, for example, where they hold the greatness and insight and sense-making at that level, but they also hold it at such a likely, and the thing that Mandela did that I think is so different is he really knew how to love his enemies and bring that together? And how would you develop that? It's so tricky. And often people would say, Well, you know, and I kind of asked this question of him, you know, if you were not in prison for so long, how much did that shape that experience shaping? How do we do that with an average leader we want to develop? We can't really imprison them for 27 years? Because he said to me, I wasn't that man when I walked into prison, right? So, I think it's a tricky one. But we have to keep thinking about it. Because I can tell you, I've got friends who are doing master's degrees in AI ethics and technology ethics, we have got a tsunami coming at leaders that we're going to and board directors on cybersecurity, all these things that no one has ever seen before. It's tricky.

Jonathan Reams  24:58  
And so I'll add a little bit to that and some references that we can put in the show notes, Scott. So, there's an article that we published an integral review recently about JEDI and developmental thinking and a response to that. Yes, there is also and this is why I think it was important Marianne that you called out the moral and ethical element independent of adult development, because it can be seen as a line of development, it can be seen as related to how complex were you think about it? But what I also see is it matters what you think about, okay, one of the things that I have in a model that I built in, in talk about in my chapter, is that prior to the complexity of thinking, we have this kind of moral element of is our heart in the right place, so to speak, okay, do we have a "heart at peace" or "heart at war" in terms of Arbinger Institute terms, or an "inward or outward mindset," an "I-Thou or I-It relationship," because that will set the course. And what happens is, if you have an objectification of otherness, then what tends to happen is more complex reasoning serves to justify the otherness and not seeing the other as a person. And so, as an example of that, there's another link we can put in here. In Norway, we had this mass murderer, about 10 years ago, Anders Behring Brevik, who, it turns out, had fairly complex reasoning, yet at the same time, you know, the most horrible atrocities in modern Norwegian history. So, there is no guarantee that complexity of thinking or just ego development is development in service of what?

Scott Allen
I appreciate that you are; I really do. That's very helpful.

Jonathan Reams
Marianne, now I know that the chapter in the book was the first part of your research. And maybe you could say a little bit more about the second part around developing a leadership development model or leader development model. And the third part is about an actual case study, and tell us a little bit about what happened when you tried to apply for this work in an organizational context.

Marianne Roux  28:23  
Sure, I think one of the first things that was really interesting when I was doing the definitions a little bit is that I found a lot that talked about leadership and leader. So that was the first thing we had to resolve, not the individual leader; we're talking about its leadership, it shared collective leadership in the industry, 4.0 context. The second thing was leader development and leadership development, leader development being that very competency-based individual leader, leadership development being a much more complex, integrated, longer-term journey. So that was the first thing, but also a lot of people. I find people don't think carefully about what we are developing, which is our leadership framework and how we are developing it, our leadership development framework. And so, if we do have an integrated future-fit leadership model, what does an integrated future-fit leadership development model look like? So, again, we did another scoping review. We also, in the previous interviews, asked questions not just about how they saw leadership and leadership challenges but also about how they were developing their leadership. So, I had that, and we did another scoping review against it. How has leadership development evolved from very functionalist to much more complex and transformative.

Jonathan Reams  29:45  
I want to clarify for the listener, Marianne, I know from editing her writing is very good at using the word "we," but I want to acknowledge that she was the one that did the scope.

Scott Allen  29:59  
There was no "we" involved here!

Marianne Roux  30:02  
Jonathan worked very hard alongside even if it was just propping me up from time to time. And so, it was really interesting. Again, we triangulate the themes that were coming out, right? And the first theme, lo and behold, was contextual factors. And we wanted to make it nuanced. We did find some people using contexts when they did leadership remote; what is it that you actually have to look at? And they were really two models we saw that had a much more future-oriented, integrated contextual flow to it in terms of leadership development; one was the Veldsman model (Veldsman, T. (2017). Re-inventing Leadership Development for a different, future world. STOP-OVER 27. Accessed at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leadership-universe-27-re-inventing-development-theo-veldsman/)and the other was DeRue & Myers (DeRue, D.S. & Myers, C.G. (2014). Leadership development: A review and agenda for future research. In: Oxford Handbook of Leadership and Organizations. Chapter 37. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 832-855). And so, again, we built on that. And we said, what is it that we could work on now? What we found when we looked at leadership development in a very much more process-based view, and much more contextual view is that there are six things we need to look at when we design our leadership development journey. The first one is the context, the environmental context within which this will develop. So lots of things, and I'll talk about the case study in a moment. But lots of things that we use, for example, of course, you look at the strategy of the organization, of course, you look at the internal challenges that the leaders have, the real talent challenges, or the operational challenges, you really want to make sure it's embedded in their language, their industry. But you also what we do, which is very, very different, we co-create with the participants, we actually do discovery surveys with the participants about how they like to learn what they want to do, what worked, what didn't work so that environmental piece is a real deep dive into internal and external context, so that and we take time - usually, it's so short if people even bother doing it. So the environmental context the second one is the developmental context. It's so important that we spoke about the model. Is it developmental in nature? Or is it just a set of competencies thrown at people, right? It really has to be deeply developmental. It has to be relational. And this is really important. The balance of this one is tricky because you want to do a collective leadership development, where they learn together, and they share leadership in their learning. But you also want to make sure, because David Day also says everybody has an individual trajectory, that you also personalize it to some extent to meet people where they're at. Otherwise, the development doesn't occur. So environmental development, relational, and then pedagogical are really tricky. Social constructivist, not functionalist in nature, really important that we get into action learning, reflection, and real-life application; I will never use a case study that's generic. I use, and this is where my consulting background is useful. I use real challenges and real problems. We'll talk about the case study in the moment we use real clients; that's real outcomes. So really, that temporal. So one of the challenges we have is leadership development is lifelong. So what do you do? Everybody wants a six-month program, a 12-month program, or an 18 month program. What do you do? Do you do micro-learning and ongoing nudges? Do you? How do you create a lifelong leadership development journey? Adults develop lifelong context change. So that's temporal and technological. And this is where COVID has boosted us into a new era, virtual, blended, using augmented reality, virtual reality learning experience platform, micro-learning platforms, if we do not leverage a different level of learning where we can scale, you know, personalized, social, all those elements. So for me, those six contextual factors have to be built into a modern future for the leadership development process. So that was the second part of the Ph.D. But that was the second part. I then had the opportunity, quite fabulously, to develop 150 global senior leaders in a professional services firm; I was given over 24 months it was going to be blended. And then suddenly, it had to be thrown virtually. We had to do all that complex development. And we literally took the leadership model. And we applied it to their context. We did a 180-degree review with them and their managers. We did a discovery survey with all the participants. We did a desktop review of their industry. And then, we designed a learning journey for them over 24 months, and they now going into an alumni group. I'm just doing that work right now to make that micro ongoing learning journey. And we literally blended it using different technologies. So it was a set of webinars, podcasts, and real complex problem-solving on real clients. And we actually measure because we want to have impactful development, real sales pipelines, and real revenue, and we hold ourselves accountable to that, and we took them through this 24 months journey. And we then assisted using interviews with the stakeholders that sponsored it upfront. We used a survey at level three, two, and three of Kirkpatrick to test the assessment, and we looked at sales and pipeline results. And we again triangulated, that great results, the biggest challenge, I can tell you for sure, is keeping the very senior leaders on board for that long journey of lifelong development when the operational pressures come back in, and they want to get the short-term results back and they want to spend less and less time on it. But we are actually winning; I'm still in that client. And we're now taking the next 400 through, right? And looking at how we scale. So I think it worked really, really well. What would I do next environment keeps changing. How does ESG impact all of this? We haven't even dealt with that yet? Where is ESG? Taking us? You know, there are a lot of hybrid wasn't so in full flight yet that will change again; more things will happen. How do you keep evolving these models? I think is absolutely critical.

Scott Allen  36:38  
Well, I just even as we begin to kind of wind down the conversation, Marianne, I just have so much respect because having an individual who has been in the field and done the work for 30 years, and combining that with the research that you've done, how you're thinking about this work, I think it's so cool, that practitioner/scholar, those two dimensions to this work, it's just front and center for me, and I just love it. Because I think...at least how I see it, that's really what we need is we need individuals with that really beautiful blend of both that are helping to make sense and new ways of what we're seeing out there. Because oftentimes, at least in my opinion, in my experience, a lot of academics are not in organizational life every day. They are not close to the work. And I think you as an individual who's close to the work and who's actually working to operationalize your model. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, like,

Marianne Roux  37:44  
Absolutely, I need the crazy clients that are willing to trust me enough. And I luckily have this one, I have a few that are willing to just sit you know, we'll just be your test labs go for it!

Scott Allen  37:55  
Well, I think you said, I forget the phrasing, I'd have to go back and listen, but I think you said something to the effect of “we're still in the game, or we're still in it,” after 24 months, you're still there. And they've invested in it. Because I couldn't agree with you more, the long-term lens is a critical element of this whole conversation as well. Jonathan, do you have any concluding thoughts?

Jonathan Reams  38:18  
Yeah, I just in a similar way, having known Marianne for a number of years now and invited her to contribute to this and being involved with supporting her doctoral research. It's just been an incredible journey. Because of the breadth and scope and depth of pulling all these things together, and how it's been a moving target and the ground under you shifted and all these kinds of things, it's really been a pleasure to be on that journey, even though it's had its ups and downs and challenges, as you know, as all Doctor good doctoral research will have so but what's exciting about it to me is the need to continue to kind of push the edge of what do we need to consider? And how do we gather that in a way that is at least digestible? You can look and see a model, and it gives you elements, or you can have, here are the six things in doing leader development that you could think of in this, having those kind of comprehensive models and processes that integrate things is becoming more and more relevant.

Scott Allen  39:30  
Yep. Well, Marianne, as we wind down our time, we always ask guests what maybe has caught your attention recently, what you've been streaming, listening to what you've been reading; it may have something to do with what we've just discussed, it may have nothing to do.

Marianne Roux  39:47  
Well, actually there is one business thing and one personal thing, the business one is the McKinsey research on what makes a good CEO and if you've read that have knows pretty incredible the latest book On research has really looked at the practice of what makes a good SEO, I think it's so relevant. And even though it doesn't use any of these concepts, you can literally see it coming through in these CEOs, right? So I think if anybody's listening, I think that's a really good place. And by the way, I don't get paid by McKinsey to say; you know, the other than on a personal level moving to Ireland, the last seven months, Ireland is a very lyrical, poetic place. And the real reading of people like John O'Donohue, and the real spiritual lens that they bring two things and the wisdom is pretty incredible. And one of the things about the people here that I think is so good for leaders to know is that I've never been listened to or empathized with at the level that people do here, and genuine curiosity, interest in the care and human connection that I've almost never experienced.  And for me, I'm really trying to get in underneath that...Why is it so easy for people to do that here? You know, I have an executive assistant that, you know, it's not well, at the moment, and I have people in other countries people go, “oh, okay, well, sorry to hear that.” Here, it's like, you know, we're going to pray for this person and light seven candles? And are you okay? And I'm really interested in this level of really caring and really listening and the power that has in human connection and how people don't really want to do something. I'm studying Irish culture.

Scott Allen  41:33  
Jonathan, anything you want to add to conclude our session today?

Jonathan Reams  41:39  
No, I'm just, I'm thrilled to be able to, you know, have this opportunity with you, Scott. And to have you, Marianne, and all the other authors that we're bringing in, it's great fun for me to have been on the journey of pulling together the book and doing all the editorial work. And now, to get to promote it on this kind of platform and share it with a broader audience who may not have wanted to buy the academically-priced book. But now, as it's out in paperback, we can actually try to make use of this and have this kind of easy-to-digest intro to these things. I'm really excited about that. 

Scott Allen  42:19  
Jonathan, thank you for the work that you do. Dr. Marianne, thank you for the work that you do. And I heard you say something like, "in my conversations with Mandela," maybe we'll have you back. And we can talk about those experiences if I am hearing correctly.

Marianne Roux  42:35  
And I say there are actually others that made that happen. And that worked with him full-time. And so, we can, we might have a slightly broader chat with a few other people. That would be really interesting.

Scott Allen  42:45  
Oh, that would be a lot of fun. That would be a lot of fun. Well, have a wonderful day. Thank you so much for being with us. And for listeners. Thanks for checking in. 


Transcribed by https://otter.ai