Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen

Dr. Sean Hannah - Ethics is a Team Sport

August 19, 2021 Scott J. Allen Season 1 Episode 83
Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen
Dr. Sean Hannah - Ethics is a Team Sport
Show Notes Transcript

Professor Sean Hannah, Colonel US Army (Ret) is an experienced senior leader, scholar, and leader development expert. He studies, teaches, and consults on exemplary leadership, leader development, business ethics, strategy and strategic thinking, and the building of high-performing teams and organizations.

Prior to his appointment to the Wilson Chair at Wake Forest he served 25 years in the US Army, retiring as a Colonel. He served as the Director of the Center for the Army Profession and Ethic, and the Director of Leadership and Management Programs, both at West Point. He served in command and staff positions in Infantry units in Europe, Cuba, Panama, Southwest Asia, and the United States. In the Pentagon on 9/11, after the attack, he was reassigned to lead the reconstitution of the organization sustaining the highest casualty level, and its multibillion-dollar operation. 

Sean is a Fellow in both the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Association for Psychological Science. He is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, sits on the editorial boards of three major journals, and has published over 60 papers on leadership in top journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, & Journal of Applied Psychology.

He has conducted over 600 executive education and consulting engagements in the US, Europe, and Asia, with clients amongst the world's most successful firms such as Microsoft, Deloitte, DOW, GE, 7-11, IBM, UTC, P&G, Wells Fargo, & Morgan Stanley.

Selects Publication by Sean 

Quotes From This Episode

  • “Ethics should be a team sport in an organization. It shouldn’t just be some leaders sitting there...you know, the grand leader making the decision. Often these tough ones have so many pieces, and so many elements, and so much complexity that it’s good to get everybody’s perspective in the room.”
  • “Your team is always better than one, and leaders who think that they’re going to step up there and lead on their own are fools... you’re not maximizing the talents, skills, abilities, & knowledge of your team.”
  • “We found that ethical leadership and ethical culture, was a key predictor of moral efficacy and that soldiers had much more confidence to act morally when they had an ethical leader.”
  • “One of the toughest things in leadership research is doing leader development research. Because it’s hard work. It requires having a sample that you can track over an extended period of time; it requires having some sort of a control or comparison group so that you can show the treatment group really did change...and that’s tough work.”

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

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

Connect with Scott Allen

Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate. 

Scott Allen  0:03  
Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Phronesis podcast. This is Scott Allen. And today I have a very special guest, Dr. Sean Hannah, Colonel US Army retired. Now he is an experienced senior leader, scholar leader development experts. He studies teaches and consults on employee leadership, leader development, business ethics, strategy and strategic thinking and building of high performing teams and organizations. Prior to his appointment as the Wilson Chair at Wake Forest, he served 25 years in the US Army, retiring as a colonel. He served as the director of the Center for Army Profession and Ethic and the Director of Leadership and Management Programs both at West Point, he served in command and staff positions in infantry units in Europe, Cuba, Panama, Southwest Asia, and the United States. In the Pentagon on 911. After the attack, he was reassigned to lead the re-constitution of the organization sustaining the highest casualty level, and its multibillion dollar operation. Sean is a fellow in both the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Association for Psychological Science. He's the editor in chief of the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies and he sits on the boards of major journals in our field. He was recognized by the Academy of Management amongst its 19,000 members with the 2017 Practice Impact Award. And if this isn't tall enough, he has consulted with some of the biggest organizations in the world. Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, MetLife, P&G, IBM, just to name a few. Dr. Hannah, thank you for being with us today sir. What what gaps Do we need to fill in? What else do listeners need to know about you?

Sean Hannah  1:56  
Thanks, Scott, great to be on your program. And I appreciate the invitation. I think you you cover my bio pretty good. I've been retired now for close to a decade from the Army and at Wake Forest University. So I begin to transfer over and, and focus on business and business management and leadership over the last decade and kind of merging the two together best practices from the military leadership, best practices from business leadership, and finding the best connections between the two to help leaders get better.

Scott Allen  2:29  
Well, I love the perspective that you bring to this work Sean because you are an individual who has done the work. And you are an individual who has studied the work, done the work at the highest levels and studied the work at the highest levels. And I think it's a incredibly unique and valuable perspective to have. Well, in your scholarship, a paper that you wrote, and Bruce Avolio, and Doug May, were on that article with you that really stood out for me, it's really one of the first papers of yours that I that I read. And I used it as a centerpiece in a course, on ethics that I taught four or five years ago. And it's it's your kind of thinking through moral thought and action. And this is a fascinating topic, right? moral thought and action because leaders are placed in so many different scenarios. At times, it can be incredibly gray at times having to make atrocious decisions. But how do you think about this topic? Help listeners kind of think through your process of thinking about moral thought and action? I know it's a big topic.

Sean Hannah  4:17  
No, it's a huge topic, Scott, I don't but it's one that I really felt and so that Bruce and Doug that we really needed to tackle. There had been a lot of research in moral psychology over the years to people like Kohlberg, and Rest and others that have looked a lot at how people make decisions. And most of the research have been focused on how do people make decisions, which would be focused on the stage I call moral judgment. But you know, James Rest summarize the literature in a famous book of his where he shows that only about 20% of moral judgments actually manifest into action. That there's all kinds of reasons why people will and won't act on the judgments that they make, I mean all the time and we walk down the street, we saw somebody shouldn't do this, or somebody should do that. And we make and pass, these judgments all the time, but us as an individual taking action on those judgments when it's tough when it needs moral courage, when we may have to confront appear, confront a leader, do something that makes us uncomfortable, or just that need to take ownership over the situation and, and not just say, you know, "somebody ought to do something about that. But I ought to do something about that." So we really got into trying to determine this issue that the scholars called the judgment-action gap between making that judgment and actually acting on it. So you know, in my career in the military, I've been faced with some pretty significant and severe moral ethical dilemmas. And I knew intuitively It was a lot more than just being able to have the capacity to make decisions, when it gets tough, and you need to act that that's really where the rubber meets the road. And so we designed a model that has two components, moral maturation on the one side, the maturity of the individual, the development of the individual, so that they can make those tough decisions. And then on the other side, moral conation. And the word conation isn't used very much in common parlance. But it simply means the impetus to act is an orientation, that impetus that readiness to act when when we do make a judgement, then you can apply it to many things, not just morality, but moral conation is the impetus to act when you're faced with a moral situation. So those those two major components, we spent a lot of time going into the literature and trying to tease out what helps people be more morally mature, able to make those right decisions. And then what also gives them the conation to act. And I can unpack that model for you. There's a lot of different sub components there. But that's where the motivation came from.

Scott Allen  6:56  
Well, you've got the the moral complexity, the metacognitive ability, and moral identity. We talked a little bit about that side of the house, the moral maturation, because a very simple way to say this is sometimes people don't even realize they're in a in a dilemma,  Sometimes people don't even know how to think about this space, correct?

Sean Hannah  7:16  
Yes. And that's something that's really interesting is you can take two people that can go through the same experience, and some will have the radar go off, you know, that, "hey, there's some moral issues here that we need to think about" somebody else might not even recognize and just think of it as a business decision that needs to be made. Not a business decision that's interlaced with ethical challenges or implications. So the moral maturation side of the house, the ability to be morally mature, we did first start with the the research from people like Kohlberg, and others, where they looked at how people develop complexity in their schemas, their mental models about ethics, which makes them more atuned to what's going on around them and able to process complex information, moral information that might come to them. So there's a developmental perspective here of developing that. Those rich schemas are what we call moral complexity. And there's been some other research on moral complexity. But you know, beyond the the moral complexity piece, you also have to have the ability to process at risk information, which is moral metacognition, for the listeners out there that might not have heard that term, there's cognition thinking. Then there's metacognition, which is the higher level which is thinking about your thinking - it's the ability to, to not just process what's happening in the moment, but even think about how am I processing this? Am I considering all the factors? Am I considering all the implications on all stakeholders in this particular issue? Have I looked at this through, numerous multiple ethical lenses, not just like the justice lens, but also thinking about duties and responsibilities and virtue and other potential ways of looking at the same issue and metacognition is that ability to kind of get off the dance floor or get up on the balcony and think about your own thinking, making sure that you're applying all your moral complexity to the situation at hand. And then lastly, the on the moral maturation side is his idea of moral identity. How do I see myself as a moral actor? And what's my personal identity that I bring to the table? How does that apply here? Because most of the work that had been done prior to us on on moral development, moral maturation is more about "what should somebody do" in a tough ethical situation. But it's also equally critical that people have to think about "who do I need to be" in this situation. And bringing that self to the table is a key factor I personally found it was you know, as a practice when I was faced with tough ethical issues, it's not just some abstract moral judgment, it's who do I need to be in this situation? And also, what kind of a role model do I want to be for - you know, in my case, for my soldiers in this situation. That's kind of the moral maturation side, how's that their maturity of the individual, as a developing moral being?

Scott Allen  10:22  
And then the conation side of, of acting of actually, you know, it's that gap that you said sometimes can exist, and the ownership, this is really, really interesting, the ownership, the efficacy, and then the moral courage that because I could have those first five, but do I actually have the courage to step into this, which is going to, you know, put forth any number of different scenarios that I will then have to confront? 

Sean Hannah  10:54  
And that really gets into this this thing I was talking about earlier, Scott, with the the judgment-action gap, you could do having right on the moral maturation side make a great decision, you know, and I might go home and say, "yeah, I'm going to go out and confront my boss tomorrow morning." And, you know, "I got this all wired in my head," and then you get a cup of coffee in the morning, and you walk in the office, and it's like, gosh, you know, is this really something I should be doing? Or should maybe their boss be the one calling them out on it is really my responsibility, I might be thinking, Oh, man fear, my going to get fired, or I might just simply be thinking, I don't have the confidence in myself that I can address this with, maybe I'm not confident that I've even made the right decision, you know, maybe he or she is right versus me, or maybe I don't feel confident have the social skills to to have this interaction, you know, with this individual. So the the moral conation piece has those three elements. Number one is, am I going to take ownership, instead of saying, well, somebody ought to do something, you know, that I ought to do something? Second, do I have the courage to overcome fear to overcome risk? And to step up and do what's right? And then third, do I have the confidence even if I could, if I feel hey, okay, I've got the courage to go ahead and do this. And my confident that I can follow through and be effective at it. And so we found that those three elements are key elements of this idea of moral conation that give people that impetus to act overcome that judgment actually get.

Scott Allen  12:27  
Sean, you had mentioned when we started these or even, that over the course of your military career, you had experienced some of those ethical dilemmas yourself as a leader. Are you able to share a couple examples of and I know, I'm going to edit this part out, Sean. So I'm just I know, I'm jumping this on you. So what are a couple examples from your career? Were upon reflection? You know, I thought to myself, I really did a great job with that. And what's an example? Maybe where, upon reflection, you could have done something a little differently?

Sean Hannah  13:06  
That's a tough question. Like I mentioned, I faced some pretty, pretty tough situations that require a lot of moral maturation and a lot of moral conation. But you know, one of the things do, I want to really put out there to the listeners, that ethics should be a team sport in an organization, it shouldn't just be some leaders sitting there, you know, the grand leader making the decision. Often these tough ones have so many pieces, and so many elements and so much complexity, that it's good to get everybody's perspective in the room, you know, and I, it was rare that I made decisions on my own when it was the tough ones. But I'll give you an example of one that I share some times after Operation Desert Storm back in the 1990, early 90s. When the main battle was over, I was part of the seventh core, which was the the main attack element during during Operation Desert Storm. We had 150,000 soldiers just in our core. And when we had attacked into deep into Iraq, we had established what's called a military demarcation line. So anytime the Army is at war, eventually we got to draw a line in the sand and call it a military demarcation line. And it's it's essentially a temporary international border so that we could go into treaty negotiations with the other side. So once we had defeated the Iraqi army, we pulled up onto this line this military demarcation line into a defensive position. Well, General Schwarzkopf, the Central Command commander could go into treaty negotiations with the Iraqis. Well, my unit was upright on that line in a defensive posture. And we were under strict orders that we were not allowed to use any hostile force across the MDL that we were to treat that as An international boundary international border that now is again, Iraqi sovereign territory until told otherwise. And we could only use force and self defense. Well, the Iraqis were bringing women and children out in front of our lines and executing them, even young children and women just to taunt us right in front of our lines, like half a football field away. And here we are with these strict orders that we're not allowed to do anything in this situation. So if you think about that, from a simple standpoint, we might say, "Okay, I'm under orders, I have a duty, I should follow the rules" right? Well, you know, with moral maturation, we've got to look at all the aspects of this. So duty is certainly one element, you know, we're under the duty to, to follow orders, and we obviously can't have chaos on the battlefield, and soldiers run around doing whatever they want to do. But we think about duties, we also have to think about, well, you know, these other people have rights too, that are being executed. They have human rights, and we have a duty to protect them. If we're able to move might might we do you know, but we also have to look at what they call a utility type of ethics. You know, utilitarianism, okay, what if we act or don't act? In this case? Might we restart the war? Might we get some of our soldiers killed? Might, some of our soldiers be court martialed for disobeying a lawful order, we got to look at all the tentacles of the possible outcomes, if we act or if we don't act and you know, continues to fuel this situation with these women and children being killed? Or look at it through a virtue based lens, you know, what would a good right person do in this situation? And I'd say you start thinking about like, I mentioned earlier, different lenses of looking at initially, like through a rights and duties lens, a virtue base lands, utilitarian/outcome type of base lens, and there's others. And you start seeing that, wow, this is not a simple, simple issue, you know, how do we deal with this? How do we make the decision and then and then the conation to act on that decision, you know, and, you know, we, we really were pretty torn about this. And again, team team sport, right lot of leaders in the room talking about what we should do. And so we started to kind of go in some gray areas, we rushed the line with some meal tanks, and Bradley fighting vehicles to try to scare him off the next time that happened, which didn't work. And then we eventually fired some artillery across the line over their heads in illumination flares instead of high explosives, just kind of give them a warning, you know, that we got you in range, if we want to do we could use AGI explosive. And then they stopped doing it. And we're very thankful that they did, because the next level of escalation would certainly potentially broke our, our duties to, you know, law and order the the orders of the leaders on top of us, and we got in trouble for even firing the artillery across the line, I was not within the rules of engagement we were given. But, you know, again, it's it's having that, you know, that ownership and courage and say, "we're not just going to let this happen," you know, we're gonna do something, we're gonna push the envelope, maybe take on some personal risk ourselves, because, again, some of our leaders weren't too happy that we, we fired the artillery, but you know, I'll take that. And, you know, and live with it. So, you can see that I think, you know, that's a complex situation is a lot of moral maturation of processes. But then you also have to have that, that conation and say, I'm going to do something about this and work within the bounds of the best you can to make it happen. And I mentioned earlier moral identity, we also had to think about who do we want to be? And how do I want my soldiers to feel when they redeployed back home after this? You know, I did not want them to redeploy back home, without on their minds. And, you know, we watched that and did absolutely nothing. That's not how I want it to be. It's not who I wanted them to see themselves as.

Scott Allen  19:14  
It's such a wonderful way to think about this topic. And even your phrasing of ethics is a team sport. Talk a little bit more about that. I love that phrasing. I'd never heard it before, Sean.

Sean Hannah  19:26  
Well, I use it. I say a lot of things are a team sport, you know. And that's what I learned. That's what I learned in the military. You know, your team is always better than one and leaders who think that they're going to step up there and lead on their own are fools. Because, again, you're not maximizing the talents, skills, abilities, knowledge of your team. And so you bring your your team of leaders together, you know, if, if I'm a captain, I'm gonna bring my lieutenants together and as much as possible share leadership to try to make decisions together. I mean, sure, at the end of the day, I'm Make the final call. But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to it anytime possible, we'll pull in their ideas and pick from the best and then sanction those ideas. It's the same with ethics. If we think about moral maturation, a key component of that being moral complexity, well, the more minds you have in the room, the more complex the team will be to think through creative options. It was others that brought up these ideas about rushing the lines, firing the artillery, elimination rounds and things like that, you know, and it's like, "Great idea. Let's do that," you know. And so there's a, there's a big value in bringing teams when it comes to this stuff.

Scott Allen  20:44  
The first side of the house, is really, in some ways, at least how I'm reflecting on it right now is some of the pre work that an individual is going to do some of the work that occurs ahead of time, I think this is probably why only going through case studies and reflecting on what potentially Enron should have done probably is only a piece of the puzzle, a relatively small piece of the puzzle, because then as you said, there's that inner work within myself. And so as you think about training individuals, how do you think about that? How do you think about educating individuals, so they are better prepared with both sides of the house in consideration of that curriculum?

Sean Hannah  21:34  
Again, I take a lot of my experience from from the military, where we have a saying, "We train like we fight." And we train in realistic situations as much as possible. So when we're training, we're introducing moral ethical challenges all the time. We purposely planned them into the training. And even even during operations, we make sure that we pre think through those dilemmas that we might face. Good leaders pull their team together and say, All right, we're about ready to go in this village military and take down a potential terrorist cell. We're going to think through what are those not just the operational challenges we're going to have, but also what are the moral ethical challenges. In the military, we are planning, we have a phase called Red Teaming, where we take any one of our plans and we wargame it and we look at all the possible decision points we might hit in the contingency plans we need to have in place and pre think through all of those possible challenges we're gonna face. Some of those are operational. You know, what if we start getting low on ammunition? What if the enemy tries to flank us, whatever? Some of those are also moral, ethical? What if the terrorists use women and children is human shields? What are we going to do? I don't want to 1819 year old kid sitting behind the sides of an M 16. Trying to make that decision and no point eight seconds. I want the team to think about that ahead of time. And pre planning what we might do work through that scenario planning and, and become much more adept at it and be able to evoke the thoughtful process that we had ahead of time versus an emotionally laden process in the moment.

Scott Allen  23:19  
Sean, I know you all continued this work, would you talk a little bit about that, because the and I'm going to put the paper in the show notes so that people have access to that. But talk a little bit about how this work then proceeded from this original paper.

Sean Hannah  23:34  
Sure. So the Academy Management Review paper was a conceptual papers, a theory paper to create the basis of the the knowledge and the theory underneath the framework, then we focused in predominantly on the Moral Potency piece, because there's already certain measures and assessments and research done on the moral maturation piece, not not integrated, like we show it where you have, you know, maturation and you know, the complexity, the identity, and the moral metacognition all integrated into a whole model. But there there had been individual research on each of those, those streams, just kind of yet to be integrated. So we thought the biggest bang for the buck was trying to address His judgment-action gap, that 80% loss that I talked about, between, you know, hey, I made a judgment and then actually acting on it. So we developed a measure that's called Moral Potency. You know, to be honest with you, we like the word word, Moral "Conation," but, you know, in science, you got to get stuff to reviewers and we had a reviewer that didn't like the word moral "conation" and so we went back on him about three times and they wouldn't budge even though it they wouldn't tell us what scientifically, they had an issue with that term. So we will call mortal potency. Sean...

Scott Allen  24:51  
Sean was this reviewer number two?

Sean Hannah  24:56  
I don't remember I probably had a different name for him than "reviewer number two." But you know, I have no product, the review process is great, but a reviewer owes scientific logic back to the you know, which was not provided this time. But anyways, I don't want to digress. So, you know, we want to call it moral potency, but it's the same thing. So for the reviewers out there, I mean, for the listeners out there, you have your moral conation and moral potency, they're kind of one in the same, although they're more conation, again, is an idea, this impetus to act moral code, a moral potency is those three constructs as one way to measure moral conation. So it depends whether or not to upset about it, because it does leave room for others to think about different ways of operationalizing and testing, moral conation, you know, besides those three constructs, but so we went forward, and we created a measure of moral potency that has moral ownership, moral courage, and moral efficacy or confidence in it. That was published in the Consulting Psychology Journal. And then we went forward and started doing some research using those different scales in different papers. And so we've got some papers that are published in Academy Management Journal and other top journals, Journal of Applied Psychology and some others where we use these scales to integrate into models of moral ethical decision making an action in teams.

Scott Allen  26:33  
What are a couple insights from some of that research that you would want listeners to know about?

Sean Hannah  26:39  
Well, I mean, we found we did a big study actually in in Iraq, not during Desert Storm. But in the, you know, the more current wars that we've been in for the last two decades, we did what is the largest study ever done in combat, in actual combat, so we had chaplains, because the religious chaplains, they have to circulate the battlefield anyways, to go around and give religious services and support to the soldier. So we leverage them as they're driving around the battlefield and visiting these small outposts all over, that they would also deliver surveys to the, to the soldiers that are out there, to get their true insights on on what's going on. So we, we found that ethical leadership and ethical culture, for example, was a key predictor of moral efficacy and the soldiers, that soldiers had much more confidence to act morally when they were in at the culture and had an ethical leader that instilled in them that, you know, that that confidence to step up and act when when they felt they need to, I think some of that, again, is those types of leaders, they they are active in introducing these conversations and the team, they talk about this stuff, we train about it, we Red Team and rehearse these things. And we, we gained the skills that we needed to training and through these conversations to act as as need be. We published another paper that was an Academy of Management Journal, we published another paper in Journal of Applied Psychology where we use the moral courage measure, as a mediator, and I found that abusive supervision was reducing soldiers. moral courage, which then resulted in more moral infractions. And the earlier paper I mentioned, Academy Management Journal is also tied to moral infractions in units. When you had a less ethical leader or less ethical culture and climate. Lower the efficacy also lowered the the moral ethical actions of soldiers on the battlefield. But leadership matters. You know, that's the one thing that we're finding. There's other people that have used our measure, moral potency measure that Bruce Avolio and I published, and it's showing, you know, across the board, that leadership in the team, those external factors are critical in driving moral potency in team members.

Scott Allen  29:15  
Well, Sean, you have such an interesting purview as editor, editor in chief, I would love to switch gears a little bit into what you see as opportunities for leadership studies. I think I'm really interested in knowing what are three or four potential streams that you think as an editor in chief, wow, this is just a gap. This is a ripe area for people to really dig into or build upon. Because obviously, in this work we've just been discussing you built and like you said, You integrated some things that hadn't been framed the way you all did, and you're moving that forward. What do you see?

Sean Hannah  30:00  
Well, I desk review close to 900 papers a year that come in to the Journal Leadership and Organizational Studies. And it's interesting we're getting we're getting a lot of high quality papers now. You know, we the current editorial board we took over the journal about two years ago and we created you know, a rock star editorial board. We've got people like Bruce Avolio, Tim, Judge, David Waldman, Joyce Bono, Dann van Knippenberg, we've got JJohn Schaubroeck, all his senior editors on this journals, we have like some of the top leadership researchers in the world and we are really trying to push push the envelope. We brought on a bunch of top sociated editors, Ron Riggio, Ron Piccolo, Daan Stam, Lisa Dragoni, Barbara Wisse and paying hottest Leroy Hannes, Stephanie Johnson, Yair Berson, you know, just just great people that are really trying to push the field forward. And so we, you know, we, we created a new mission statement, a new vision statement for the journal, to try to really expand out what what's been happening in the leadership field is a lot of just, you know, let me add one more box or one more arrow to a existing academic model, you know, theoretical model. And if you've got, you know, whiz bang, new methods, those papers are getting published, even in the top journals in the field. And we really want to try to push the field to try some different new things. Now, some of that is new methodologies. I mean, you got machine learning coming up, neuroscience, like, you know, I've been publishing some research using neurosciences as a technique, which not only brings new measurement techniques into the field, but also brings in new science into the field, and totally a way of looking at leadership instead of personalities, or states or traits. Looking at it from the actual neurological functioning of the individual. You know, there's, there's a lot of ways to look at leadership, some sets of new methods and having a little bit more openness to that also, I would say, qualitative research, qualitative research, if done, right, and it's hard to do qualitative research, right, and really kind of get at the phenomenon, you know, that what's really happening in the situation that people are dealing with not just what, you know, construct a investigator decide to put into a survey, but really going in and saying, "What is going on here in this leadership situation?" So we're trying to promote more of that. As far as what to study? You know, the biggest thing that needs to be studied is what are the antecedents to leadership, There is a dearth of research on what drives leaders to think and act in different ways. And that's a huge area that if we're going to get into leader development, which is the secondary, I was gonna say, that needs a lot of research, we first have to understand what are the antecedents that are driving leaders decisions and behaviors, then we have to think about how do we develop those things. And so one of the toughest things, and leadership research is doing leader development research. Because it's hard work, it requires having a sample that you can track over an extended period of time, it requires having some sort of a controller comparison group so that you can show, you know, the treatment group really did change. A lot of leadership interventions for development all have to be packaged together. And that's tough work. It takes a lot of time effort, it takes organizations that are willing to support that allow you to come in and do that over time. And you know, quite frankly, I think, because of those barriers, and you know, some of those are the scholars themselves, just not wanting to invest that much time and effort and energy into it. We just we have very minimal studies that are true experimental studies that are tracking leader development. And we, Bruce Avolio. And I had a bunch of colleagues published a meta analysis back 15 years ago or something where we looked at every leadership intervention study done over the last 100 years.

Scott Allen  34:23  
Yes, that was 100 years was that 100 years paper?

Sean Hannah  34:27  
It was 100. Yeah, I can't remember the title of it. It was that we didn't. There's a couple of papers one actually had, like, 100 year in the title, and there was one that we published in Leadership Quarterly that I think didn't have that in the title, but, you know, readers can look it up. But we're in the middle of doing a new one now updating it with newer studies. But one of the things that shocked us was the dearth of studies that are even available to put into the meta analysis that met our criteria of truly being leader development intervention studies that showed growth You know, there they had a causal causally interpreted model.

Scott Allen  35:07  
Any others come to mind as we kind of wind down our time to get today any other areas, antecedents, leader development...

Sean Hannah  35:14  
antecedents, leader development, I think are things that need the most work. And then third would be just other contextual factors. I think in leadership research, we tend to focus too much on the leaders impact on individuals, versus looking at the fact that usually have multiple levels of leadership that those same followers are exposed to, you know, two levels up three levels up leaders, understanding that that bigger system, also understanding how they interact with their team members and the context in the team. But even with other teams, a lot of the consulting work that I do are with organizations that have a lot of cross functional teams, and, you know, that the lead each other, and what in the decisions and actions that followers make in their team are influenced by their membership on these other teams, and the actions the constraints they have, because they also have to serve on these other task forces in cross functional teams. And so I just think, you know, generally broader understanding of the multitude of factors that are influencing followers in the leadership situation, you know, is critical to good peer leadership, shared leadership, multiple sources of leadership all impacting the individual.

Scott Allen  36:36  
Well Sean, as we close down our conversation, what have you been reading or streaming or listening to that's caught your eye in the last few months other than those 900 desk reviews?

Sean Hannah  36:50  
That pretty much consumes the most of most of my time to be honest with you I don't do much like popular reading and I just simply don't have the bandwidth you know for I do sometimes like to get into thinking through historical figures and learning from from some of them so like I just read  I published not too long ago a a paper it's available for anybody out there want to pull it down off either apple or, or was the Amazon one for free about George Washington and character that was commissioned by the Mount Vernon society. They're a bit numbered and George Washington tome, but we'll take a look at George Washington and we apply his character and especially to the Newberg address the possible conspiracy there nuber that George Washington had overturned, and just how his character came to light to change the fate history. And the Newburgh conspiracy. So I think sometimes if we think about historical figures like that, and the actions and decisions they made, and how positively affected groups it's, it's pretty enlightening for for current leaders. So I'm doing a consulting event here next week, where we're going to use that reading about George Washington character to have a CEO and their top management team reflect on their character, and out of effects their leadership at the strategic level, so we can find a lot of those kinds of parallels.

Scott Allen  38:25  
Awesome. Awesome. Well, Sean, thank you so much for your time today. We really, really appreciate it. You've given us a lot of great, great wisdom in the last Oh, I don't know...39 minutes. So thank you for the good work that you do, sir. We appreciate it. Have a great rest of your summer. 

Sean Hannah  38:44  
All right thanks. Good to be with you Scott.

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