Dr. Laura Empson - Leading Professional People

Dr. Laura Empson is Professor in the Management of Professional Service Firms at Bayes Business School, University of London, and holds Research Fellowships at both Harvard Law School and the University of Cambridge.

She has dedicated 30 years to researching professionals, professionals, and the professions, and is a globally recognised expert in their leadership and governance.  Her research also explores organisational and cultural change; growth and leadership transitions; mergers and acquisitions; professional careers; and the future of professional work.

In addition to dozens of publications in leading academic journals, she has published several books with Oxford University Press – her first was Managing the Modern Law Firm (2007), and her latest is Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas (reprinted in paperback, 2022). 

Laura serves on the editorial board of Organization Studies and the Journal of Management Studies. She is a founder member of the Strategic Advisory Board of the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies (SAMS) and a member of the Peer Review College of the ESRC.

She advises many of the world’s leading law, accounting, and consulting firms.  From 2013 to 2016, she served on the Board of KPMG LLP (becoming Chair of the Independent Non-Executives). 

Laura was previously an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford.  Before becoming an academic, Laura worked as an investment banker and strategy consultant.  She has a PhD and MBA from London Business School.


A Quote From This Episode

• "I use the phrase ‘intellectual junk food.’ I think that a lot of leaders are raised on a diet of intellectual junk food because that is what’s saleable...By contrast, some of our academic world is so mired in ambiguity and subtlety that it never even gets itself published...we need the balance. "

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Podcast: Leading Professional People
• Laura's Articles
  • HBR -  Ways to Prepare for the Future of Work
  • HBR - How Has the Past Year Changed You and Your Organization?
  • HBR - How to Lead Your Fellow Rainmakers

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

• The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for ILA's 26th Global Conference in Chicago, IL - November 7-10, 2024. 

About  Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: The Leader's Edge

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 views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, a

Chapters

• 0:00 Professional Organizations and Leadership Dynamics
• 10:25 Leading Professionals
• 17:24 The Dynamics of Successful Leadership
• 29:33 Leadership Insights and Podcast Experiences
• 38:59 Disrupting Academia and Leadership Industry

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, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today, I have Professor Laura Empson. And she is an academic speaker and advisor. She has dedicated 30 years to researching professionals and the professions. Funded through a series of prestigious government awards, her research encompasses themes as diverse as leadership and governance, organizational culture and identity change, mergers and acquisitions, professional careers in diversity, partner evaluation, and reward systems, and the future of professional work. Now, she has been conducting academic research into professional organizations for her entire career. She is a professor in the management of professional service firms at Bayes Business School, University of London. And holds research fellowships at Harvard Law School, and Judge Business School, the University of Cambridge. Alongside her academic work, she serves, as I said, as an advisor to many of the world's leading professional organizations. She is also a fellow podcaster, so she has a warm place in my heart. Her podcast, and all of this will be in the show notes for everyone: Leading Professional People. Now, Laura, something that is so interesting about you, and I'm going to let you speak in a moment here, but you, in a very, very beautiful way, kind of straddle these two worlds. You started your career in business, and then you went and got a Ph.D. And so, you bring this really beautiful perspective of kind of existing in both worlds. You are an academic, but you also are a business person and work with and speak with, and really, really work alongside professionals. So, before we jump into that conversation, maybe share with listeners a little bit more about you. What's something else that we should know about you before we jump into the dialogue?

Laura Empson  1:56  

Scott, it's great to see you again. And thank you for inviting me to be on the podcast. But I started my Ph.D. when I was 30 at London Business School. So, I had 10 years before that working in investment banking and strategy consulting. So, my identity, and I'm really interested in identity formation, was really shaped by my experiences of working in the City of London and working for a global strategy consulting firm. I never really wanted to be an academic. And, indeed, when someone told me that they were thinking of doing a Ph.D., I really leaned into them and told them they were ridiculous. And then, about a year later, I found myself applying for a Ph.D. at London Business School. And what prompted me to do that was that I was in the middle of experiencing the third extremely painful merger of my career. And I've seen the leaders of these firms making the same mistakes over and over again. And, to some extent, investment bankers, when they mess up with management, you can cut them a bit of slack. But when consultants, when strategy consultants are making the same kind of stupid mistakes, I thought there was something important I wanted to understand and try and make sense of my own pain and the pain of my colleagues. I asked the librarian in our consulting firm to do a literature review, a search for me, on the topic of research into mergers between professional service firms. And he came back the next day and said, “There isn't any.” And it was literally one of those light bulb moments. I remember sitting at my desk, and it just went ‘ping.’ I thought, “I have to do this.” And as much as anything, it was because I had to get out of my work situation, I was desperately miserable and very angry. And, I have thought about giving it all up and sitting on a beach in Bali for six months, but instead, I went and did a Ph.D. at London Business School for five years.

Scott Allen  3:43  

Bali or a Ph.D., I don't know. (Laughs)

Laura Empson  3:47  

I would not have been happy in Bali, I know myself well enough to know that. And I was very happy doing my master's degree at London Business School. And I went back to LBS to think about it, and I walked into their library, and I smelt books, and I felt an overwhelming sense of peace. I realized that I was drawn to scholarship, and I always have been. But still, at that stage, I wasn't intending to become an academic, but things just developed, and I ended up taking a position at Oxford at Saïd Business School. I wouldn't say the rest is history, that sounds really pretentious, but the rest is my history, at least.

Scott Allen  4:25  

(Laughs) I love that phrasing, “The rest is my history.” Well, I'm so excited. You just mentioned Oxford. We have a trip this summer. So, our goal was to get our kids to all 50 states. And then, we accomplished that here in the United States, and then my daughter came down one day and said, “So what's our next goal?” And I said, “I don't know.” And she said, “Well, what about every continent?” And so, we kind of got really kind of excited about this notion. So, last time we were in Greece, but this summer of the trip, we have some friends outside of London, and so we're going to be in England for 10 days. And so, we actually have a couple of nights in Oxford booked. And, of course, some time in London. And so, I'm just so excited to get to your, quote-unquote, “neck of the woods.”

Laura Empson  5:09  

Well, literally, I do live surrounded by forests in Oxfordshire, actually. So, yes, it's some wonderful woods.

Scott Allen  5:16  

We'll have coffee this summer. 

Laura Empson  5:18

That would be good.

Scott Allen  5:19

Well. Okay. So, obviously, you've published in some of the world's greatest journals at Harvard Business Review. Again, you are interacting with these individuals leading global organizations, talking with these individuals on the podcast. What are some observations that you've had in recent times? You're steeped in the literature, what keeps coming up for you that you're seeing that's intriguing you right now?

Laura Empson  5:45  

Well, I think one interesting question is why I continue to study professionals for 30 years. The answer is they continue to intrigue me and fascinate me. The phenomenon they're dealing with may encompass all of the most complex management and leadership problems you will find in any organization. They’re a microcosm of all those issues because they are the ultimate people businesses. So, from the perspective of scholars of organizational behavior, if you want to study people, professional service firms have gone through an organization - a lot of them. And there are some very, very, very powerful and very, very successful organizations that are not necessarily run at all the way that our textbooks would suggest they should be run, and that always also intrigued me. I think one of the reasons is because of the peculiar nature of their power dynamics. The people who often own these organizations are sometimes owned by hundreds of people who work internally within the firm and see each other very much as peers. Right at the age of 35, once you make it into this inner cohort of people who have a stake in the organization, that means that leaders can't rely upon the conventional levers of power; hierarchy is extremely contested and very ambiguous. At the same time, the professionals are highly autonomous, so they have their own book of business, they often have their own team, they have their own profit centers, and they have their own very strong opinions. And they don't submit very well to being told what to do. So, a simple way of thinking about it is to imagine an academic department or a group of faculty; why should the professors agree to do what the head of the department or the dean says they should do? The answer is, most of the time, they actually read that, and some of them are polite about it, and others are rude about it. But that conventional idea that you want to rise to the top, you want to become head of department, you want to become Dean doesn't really apply in academia. And it doesn't apply in professional organizations because what they really get a kick out of, like you and I get a kick out of, is our research. What they get a kick out of is working with their clients. And all the leadership stuff, the management stuff that feels to them like bureaucracy and administration. And someone else can do that as long as they're doing the right things, but they reserve the right to criticize, complain, or ignore, and ultimately to depose because a lot of the leaders in these firms are elected, though certainly, at the most senior level. Surprisingly, they are often brought down or not reelected for a second term. So, all of that creates these weird power dynamics, which I find endlessly fascinating. 

Scott Allen  8:40  

Well, you're in the realm, whether it's the dean or the lead partner in the law firm, you're in the realm of influence. And how educated are they on even simple topics like influence tactics? Like, how are we going to influence others and build a coalition? Because you're right, you're in that realm of that space versus using power or authority to get work done.

Laura Empson  9:05  

One of the odd things, and this is, I guess, where I've been able to carve out a contribution and a space for me in terms of my engagement with practitioners, is they're not very educated on this at all. So, they might have done some kind of courses. The consultants will often have done MBAs, but the rest of them won’t have. And what they know is what they're hearing in the classroom isn't relevant to them. So, when they pick up a management book at the airport, it doesn't resonate with them because it just doesn't fit. They're not trying to lead Walmart or be a commercial bank or something; they’re trying to lead these very awkward, spiky individuals.

Scott Allen  9:46  

(Laughs) Maybe we'll call the episode - Awkward Spiky Individual.

Laura Empson  9:52  

(Laughs) Well, so then the challenge is, well, what did they read? And I'm pleased to say quite a lot of them read my books, or my HBR articles, or, increasingly, they're more likely to be listening to the podcast. And, as you know, there are thousands of podcasts out there with the word ‘leadership’ in it. But what they consistently say is that there is something very special about the particular dynamics of leading accounts, leading consultants, leading bankers, investment bankers, leading lawyers, and any kind of professional, and we can broaden that. We can look at people in academics, for example. I've also heard this, apparently, in my research, but the podcast, in particular, is big with oncologists in the US. They love it. 

Scott Allen  10:36  

Yeah. Healthcare is a very similar dynamic. Depending on the organization, but yes, a lot of that work is influencing these highly specialized individuals who may even have their own businesses. Places like the Cleveland Clinic, or the Mayo Clinic, their employees. But yes, that's another definite context. 

Laura Empson  10:58  

My favorite context is, apparently, the bishops of the Anglican Church, which see significant relevance to my work. The most recent episode of the podcast I did was with the General Counsel, the chief lawyer of MI5, and MI6. And they're really clear parallels there. So, on the one hand, what you'll find is that lawyers, in particular, think they're unique. And unless you're very specifically talking about lawyers to lawyers, they're not really that interested in hearing. So, they don’t think they have much to learn from other sectors. So, on the one hand, this is where you really narrow focus. On the other hand, these groups that I never intended to speak to are finding the podcast, finding my books, finding my articles, and saying, “Oh, that's us. She gets us.” So, that's this weird combination of generalizability and specificity. You asked me sort of what really intrigues me, it's the weird complexity of trying to bring together a group of individualistic, opinionated individuals into some kind of collective whole to work towards some kind of common endeavor. And that is at the heart of it. That is the essence of the fundamental organizational challenge that all organizational behavior goes back to that root. But you see it in its purest sense in professionals. 

Scott Allen  12:27  

Okay. So, what's interesting is, for the individuals you've come across who do that work well, what are some of the themes that stand out for you? I have to imagine, and maybe I'm stealing your thunder here, but something like someone who's adept at building relationships and truly spending some time building relationships with those people that they're going to need to influence would be high on my priority list, at least.

Laura Empson  12:56  

That's important. It starts, first of all, with being outstandingly successful as a professional.

Scott Allen  13:04  

Okay. So, you have that street cred so to speak of, “I've built the book of business, I model that.” You're in the door. 

Laura Empson  13:12  

That is essential. So, you have to role-model the thing that they most aspire to being, which is a phenomenally successful client-relationship manager and high-quality technician in terms of the work that you do. You've got to be an outstanding professional. And then, that's the kind of qualifier. Then you need the other stuff. So, relationship skills are absolutely important. Political skills: Really important. The ability to network internally as well as externally. So, to understand just how much time it takes to get anything done, spend as much time on developing your relationships with your peers as you would in your previous work developing with your clients. Apparent sincerity is also pretty important as well if we go back to some of the core political skills. And people always laugh when I talk about apparent sincerity as an important leadership quality in these organizations. And the point is it doesn't actually matter whether you're being sincere, truly, I don't know what's going on in the heart of the people that I'm studying or interviewing, but that you can convey that image to the people you're dealing with so that they feel you. They feel that you're hearing them. They feel that you respect them. They feel that you care about them. And if you've got these underpinnings of having also done their job astonishingly well, first of all, they will cut you some slack. You will be able to influence them more effectively.

Scott Allen  14:43  

Okay. So, there are a couple of things in there that I really find fascinating. Yes, you're totally right. We don't know what is in the person's heart. I imagine, if it's truly there, that's going to be helpful, that's more sustainable because we're gonna find out if it's not at some point. But totally understand the spirit of what you're saying there. And then, we, on this podcast at least, have not spent really any time talking about kind of that political skill. What are a couple of things that you think about…? Because I think you're exactly right. And I think, at times, political skill can feel like the word ‘power’ for some people. That it's kind of a bad thing, or that influence is a bad thing. Well, it just is. I think humans make it so whether it's good or bad or used for good or ill. But when you think about political skill, can you unpack that a little bit? Because I think that's a really interesting… What are some of the real dynamics and the real skills they have to have in this space to be successful? 

Laura Empson  15:46  

Well, the most important one is that other people don't think that you're politically skilled. 

Scott Allen  15:53

Intersting.

Laura Empson  15:54

If people are going around saying, “Oh, he's really politically skilled,” they don't necessarily mean that in a good way. So, if we go back a bit, when I talk to professionals, they are often quite uncomfortable with this idea of discussing politics, because they'll confuse that with Machiavellianism or they'll confuse that with national politics and see that as dirty, and self-seeking, andinappropriate. But the reality is for them to be effective with their clients, they likely will have quite sophisticated political skills because they do need to manage to charm to effectively manipulate the client over a sustained basis. What I think distinguishes the really effective leaders from the less effective ones is they don't realize that they also need to be doing that when they get home, or rather, when they get back to the office. And I see two different kinds of ways of being political in these firms amongst the leaders of these firms. Two good ways, I should say. There are a whole bunch of bad ways, and that's one of the things I am going to be writing about or publishing about next. The two good ways are quite different, and they tend to be performed by different kinds of people. So, one is always thinking several steps ahead. Having a long-term plan for the organization, maybe five years out, and thinking, not just strategically, but, “Who do I need to get to do what by when in order for this to work?” So, one leader of a global accounting firm I spoke to said they see themselves as playing chess, and they always need to think several moves ahead. And when they say something in a board meeting in March to some particular person, that's because they're already planning, at the April board meeting, to ask them something else. And they know that by having interacted appropriately with them in March, by having raised them up, lifted them up amongst their peers, that when the big ask comes in April, they'll have a natural ally, for example. So. it's putting as much effort into developing the internal relationships as you would if you were trying to win a multimillion-pound piece of work. That's one version. Another kind of political skill, which I think is just as important, and this is going to run really contrary to current rhetoric around authenticity, is the ability to be the person you need to be in that moment in order to achieve the outcome you want with that particular person. So, I find it intriguing with senior leaders I know really well is how they are with me, and then I watched them go into a situation with clients, or with junior staff, or with their peers, and they shift. It’s like shapeshifters, they become the person that they need to be in that moment, which is the outcome they need to achieve. It doesn't mean that there isn’t a sort of card core of authenticity that runs through them, but they've got the social skills in order to read the room, to read the situation, and continuously adapt. So, the person who is very good at the latter may not necessarily have the same kind of… That's a much more kind of intuitive, instinctive response. The first person is, yeah, plans it like a military campaign. The best outcome is when you have dual leaders, and a lot of these firms have leadership dias at the top where people bring together both sets of qualities. So, there'll be the chess person and the shapeshifter person, and together, they keep each other honest and can say, “You know what? This is not the right time for you; Ithat situation,” or need to handle  “You know what? You completely messed up on that; I'm gonna go back and talk to this person again and try and calm them down about the proposal that you made.”

Scott Allen  19:49  

Well, it's so interesting because I think, again, at times, we might label the shapeshifter as, to your previous point, inauthentic or manipulative, etc., etc. And I think what's interesting about this conversation, and what's fun about this conversation, is that I think for each one of us, we are shape-shifting. How I'm speaking with you right now is not how I spoke with my son this morning or my wife on our walk at 5:30 A.M. that I was texting you about. And I also am a little bit of a different version when I'm in front of 100 people who are executives in an organization. And there's a core of who I am, but for the different contexts, I’m probably going to have to show up in a little bit of a different way and employ what's appropriate for that situation, right? 

Laura Empson  20:44  

And the better you are that, that is going to be bound up with how secure you are in yourself. And people who want these roles and put themselves up for election in order to satisfy some kind of insecure, ego need, who crave power and control to help them deal with some deep-rooted fear, and who want to be the big ‘I am’ in order to make themselves feel special, often don't get elected because their peers can see through that. And some of them have worked together for 20 years or so, and they will think, “The guy was a pain his first year out of graduate school, 20 years on he's still a pain, I am not going to let him run my firm.” 

Scott Allen  21:22  

Yes. So, that's interesting. So we have the individual who is the shapeshifter, the individual who can show up in these different contexts and have that social and emotional intelligence to adjust depending on the situation, while still, because I imagine, again, to your point of those people who do this badly, I imagine that person who isn't anchored, there isn't a center of gravity in who they are what they stand for, that self-awareness, that integrity. Again, it can happen, and it does happen. But it's probably not sustainable internally and externally if, to your point, they're just meeting some deep-rooted need to have power. Well?

Laura Empson  22:02  

Absolutely. And I think the two elements that, well, one is, like I said, they often get deposed. So, they may step forward in a time of crisis and say, “Yes, our profits are tanking because the previous leader was a complete idiot, but trust me, pin all your hopes on me.” And they can give a good speech on the hustings. And this is where it does get a lot like national politics, you do get populist leaders coming forward in times of crisis. And they sometimes do get elected, but they don't necessarily last that long. 

Scott Allen  22:33  

Wow, that is such an interesting connection, that kind of the populist playbook working internally in some of these firms. I've always associated it with government or politics externally to countries, but that's so interesting.

Laura Empson  22:51  

There was one firm I studied where they often talk about becoming corporate, and what they mean is the professional organizations I hope, “We used to be good, but now we become corporate.” And by that, they mean, “We've become bureaucratic; we've loosened our autonomy. And the chief executive is, well, he stopped calling himself the managing partner; he's now called the chief executive. And he's got a chauffeur and there's the C-suite, and we don't do that here because we're all peers.” So, in one of the firms I studied, the existing leadership had gone too far down that route. And they had anointed their successors for the next election, and the partnership would absolutely not going to do it. They would not elect the anointed successor of these people. Instead, they elected someone who was on his platform statement, and his big tagline was not, “Make America great again,” or whatever, or “Take back control.” It was “Give the partnership back to the partners.” And all the partners, not surprisingly, said, “Yaay.” And they all elected this guy. And then they said, “So, what are you going to do?” Because there were some performance problems. But, unfortunately, this particular person didn't have a plan or any particular aptitude for turning around a difficult situation. He was saying, “Well, I've given it back to you, you fix it.” They said, “We're too busy. We're too busy trying to make money. Your job is to get us to work together effectively,” so that's an example. And this is a bit of a clunky transition, Scott, but we haven't actually talked about collective leadership; we haven't used that phrase yet. And I realized, of course, that most of what I'm talking about has collective leadership behind it, so maybe we should spend a couple of minutes…

Scott Allen  24:35  

Yeah. Real quick. Yeah, please. 

Laura Empson  24:39  

Okay. So, when I started thinking about leadership, it was over the course of probably the first ten years of my research, looking at organizational change, looking at organizational governance, a whole bunch of things like that. I kept seeing weird leadership things happening, and people kept telling me, “Stay away from leadership. You're not a micro-person, you're not a psych-person, you're not a positivist, you're not a quantitative person. Leadership belongs to those people.” 

Scott Allen  25:08  

Which you saw a gap at that point.

(Laughter)

Laura Empson  25:11  

No, I was just scared because I'm sort of averse to jumping in the deep end like that. But, in the end, I just thought, “Look, this is here. Leadership is everywhere. And it's weird in these organizations, and I don't understand it. And I can't find anything in the books which help me understand it.” But I'd come across a few articles, including a very influential one by Ann Langley on Collective Leadership in Medical Organizations. Gradually, more and more scholars started using the word collective leadership. It was still a small group, but there were also concepts like Mary Uhl-Bien’s work on relational leadership and distributed leadership, which was relevant as well, although distributed leadership is a bit different because it implies there is some of the power to distribute. The collective leadership was much more amorphous and peer-based. So, I started my research. At that stage, I'm not even sure I was… No, I wasn't using the word ‘collective leadership’; I was just talking about leadership dynamics. Over the course of my research and study, more stuff was being published on collective leadership, and more literature reviews were coming out, and it started to become a thing. So, now, I would bring together everything I've been talking about so far under the category of collective leadership. So, how is it that you work together with colleagues in very ambiguous peer-based environments to influence and bring about some kind of outcome that broadly fits within the collective understanding of what needs to be done? However, within that, there are continuous micro-negotiations amongst these peers in order to make anything happen.

Scott Allen  26:50  

Yes. And in a context where, again, to your point, these contexts are pretty fascinating with highly individualistic individuals who are experts in their craft with strong opinions about that expertise. The population you're trying to influence is an interesting set of characters as well. 

Laura Empson  27:11  

Yeah. And I often ask why. Because when I see people stepping up for these roles, they are giving up so much. They're giving up the thing that's kept them motivated to work phenomenally long hours, maybe for 15, 20 years, which is client work. And there are lots of different reasons why they do it. Sometimes, it's because they're bored. They're really intellectually curious people. They are already the leading person in a particular field, and they're very driven, so they need to find another mountain to climb. That's one reason. Sometimes they are incredibly ambitious for the organization. I have to speak to leaders who have a sense that maybe their firm is languishing at about… Falls in their global rankings, or something. “I know, collectively, we can do so much more. And if only we could make it happen.” And then, some of them, it's just because they're angry. And I always remember the guy who I asked, “Why did you put yourself forward to run this firm?” He said, “Because I realized I was fed up with lying awake at night feeling angry with our leader, and I just thought, ‘To hell with it, I've just got to get rid of him.’ And there's no one else stepping forward. so it's gonna have to be me.” They get pressured to take on the role of their peers. So, people say, “Please, please put your name forward.”

Scott Allen  28:27  

You're reminding me of ‘The Motivation to Lead Scale.’ I don't know if you've explored that literature. But yeah, that whole kind of ‘why do people step up?’ And, of course, to go back to maybe some of the negative reasons, I think there is a faction of people who are meeting some deep inner need, some insecurity. Something that they haven't worked out, and it's gonna give them the power and authority to wield. And you see that at times in law enforcement, or you see that at times in going back to the clergy. It's at times, people move into these roles because it's going to meet some need for them, not necessarily more of an altruistic reason. And so, fascinating. Well, as we begin to wind down our time, let's talk a little bit about the podcasts because I want listeners to understand and know of your work. And are there a few recent conversations you've had that have caught your attention and might be of interest? I can put these in the show notes so that people can access that work. As you know, this is so much fun. It's such an interesting kind of existence to get into these conversations and kind of look under the hood a little bit at some of these folks' lives. I've had a blast. I have just absolutely really really enjoyed this process. And so, how about it for you? What are a couple of conversations that stand out and that have excited you?

Laura Empson  29:50  

Well, I was very careful about this because I'm conscious I need to maintain relationships with all kinds of people that I've done podcasts with, and each one of them, in their own way, is precious special and fascinates me, highly respected by me. Of course, that goes without saying. So…

Scott Allen  30:06  

Look at those political skills right there, Laura. That was so awesome. 

Laura Empson  30:10  

(Laughs) I follow everyone who gives up their time to do this, and these are sometimes people leading global firms. Why the hell should they speak to me? 

Scott Allen  30:16

Exactly. No, I get it. 

Laura Empson  30:18

I have to make it a positive experience for them. I think there are two that really, well, three actually that really stick in my mind at the most recent series. The first one I want to mention is my interview with the ex-global senior partner of one of the world's leading law firms called Slaughter and May, and the theme of that was Subtle Power. And what was fascinating was listening back to our interview on multiple levels, really deconstructing the language that he'd used the whole way through. And I didn't say to him, “I'm going to interview you about subtle power.” The word ‘subtle’ got added on afterward as a title. Even in simple ways, such as the self-deprecating way way he implied that he wasn't really a leader. And it was almost the way he negated himself constantly and modestly, whilst, at the same time, if you know the guy and you know the reality of the situation, you realize that he was immensely effective at playing us as interviewees. It's like he was exercising his political skills over us as we interviewed him about his political skills. That was amazing.

Scott Allen  31:38  

That’s a puzzle. That’s three-dimensional chess. 

Laura Empson  31:40  

And then, I sent him an email afterward, which I reflected this back to him. And I hesitated because I thought I didn't want to insult him, and he just very sweetly sort of just replied and said, “Absolutely, Laura.” And he had no problem with that at all. But it was an act of seduction. He was seducing us as we interviewed him, myself and my co-host, Tony Hall. The second one that had a really powerful impact was the interview we did with Professor Gianpiero Petriglieri at INSEAD, where we talked about the emotional dimensions of leadership and the psychodynamics of leadership. And we went pretty deep for an interview about emotional issues. But for me and my co-host, Gianpiero Petriglieri, who is a psychoanalyst by training, I think we all three went to places we we hadn't set out to go on at the start. But I think the interview was really, really powerful for that reason. The third one that really sticks in my mind is my interview with this MI6 guy, which I have to say I was probably more scared about than any other interview that I did on the podcast. And he was great, but I was just so conscious that he'd been sent away. These guys are trained and know how to resist torture, even the lawyers. So there was nothing very much that I was going to do, which was [Inaudible 33:04] to say anything off the cuff or spontaneous or even slightly controversial. So, again, this process of how did they get him to talk? And one of the things I remember was I was interviewing him from his home, and it happens to be I didn't realize he was right by the helicopter port for central London. So, every five minutes or so, a helicopter would go overhead, and we'd have to stop. And I became convinced I was waiting for the Special Air Service people to come through the skylight and drop down from the helicopter. And I can see these little feet dangling just in the background with the podcast, because every time I felt he might be about to say something controversial, particularly off the cuff, I was just waiting to see the subtle dangling feet as the Special Forces took control of the interview. So, in different ways, that was all really fun. 

Scott Allen  33:52  

Oh, that's great. And what have you liked about the process? We talked a little bit about this in Copenhagen last fall, December, but I think it's such an interesting, and not necessarily valued by our institutions from an academic standpoint, but just as really fun in just exploratory project that you never know what you're going to uncover. I didn't know that this conversation was gonna go the way it has, and I've been fascinated by it. But what have you found in that realm? 

Laura Empson  34:21  

Well, Scott, my approach is very different from yours. So, I am very directive in how I do it and how tightly I edit it, so I don't have the same kind of opportunities for surprise that you do.

Scott Allen  34:34  

You are a little more locked down and straight and narrow, right? On the pathway. Yes.

Laura Empson  34:38  

Yeah. And, in a sense, I think it needs to be for the audience that I've got. They won't listen for more than 30 minutes. Apparently, you know the stats are not very reliable, but we have an exceptionally high listen-through rate, which means that almost everyone who starts listening gets to the end and keeps listening. And I think that one of the reasons is because it's bom, bom, bom, delivering the whole way through. But that's just what my audience needs. What have I got out of it? Well, we started this in lockdown. I was lonely, and I was depressed. It was a great excuse just to have really interesting conversations with really interesting people.

Scott Allen  35:14  

We are together on that one. Yes. (Laughs)

Laura Empson  35:17  

It started that way. I've really, really loved learning a new skill. And I suppose a bit like those successful professionals who then put themselves up, it's great sometimes to go right back to the beginning and think about how you put these things together. I've also had, in my most recent series, the great opportunity of working with Tony Hall, who was head of the BBC and was previously head of news at the BBC. So, working with someone with that kind of journalistic training, and just hearing how we get to the end of the interview, and he just said, “Laura, where's the story? There's no story.” And I kind of sit down and think, “Okay, we've got to construct a story.” So, learning to be back sort of focused-driven to get the content out in the first three minutes has been a real learning for me. I think the final thing, the biggest kicker, got out of it, and the biggest surprise, actually, the biggest surprise is, nowadays, whenever a professional reaches out to me, it's because they know me by the podcast. So I'll get these messages from people saying, “We love your work.” And I'll say, “Oh, what have you been reading? Which of my books, which of the HBR articles?” And it's like, “What? Oh, but we love that episode where you interviewed the [Inaudible 36:30].” And I realized that, increasingly, professionals have not got time to read. But they work out in the gym, they walk their dog, they travel to work, they just stick the podcast in and listen to that. So, by 30 minutes, it's about the length of a dog walk, or it's a session on a treadmill; that' how they're getting their content. And I think that quite a lot of them do listen to it when they're on holiday because I've got listeners in 130 countries, which is weird. But if you actually look at the countries with the smallest number of listeners, they tend to be places like the Seychelles, or Barbados, or they tend to be really high-end holiday destinations. So, I think quite a few of them listen while they're on the beach as well. So, I think, for me, the biggest surprise has been the reach, the impact. And, yeah, the fact that I've kind of stumbled upon a gap in the market which needed to be filled, which is great. But it was just started because I was lonely and depressed. And I reached out to a friend of mine, and he said, “Obviously, you can do a podcast.” I said, “Can I do it with you?”

Scott Allen  37:42  

(Laughs) Well, I started an editor's introduction of a special issue for a journal that I'm working on. And I kind of went on a little bit of a rant, so to speak. And it's been taken out since, but it’s so interesting about your space and the work that you're doing is that I think, in a lot of ways, pushback if you disagree with me, but I think, in a lot of ways, academia has been disrupted. And it's been disrupted and decentered by a number of these firms. Business leaders are not going to academics; they're going to McKinsey, they're going to Bain, they're going to Deloitte, they're going to PwC for some of this thought leadership now, and overlooking the local university as the center of gravity for knowledge. I think we've been disrupted in some ways. I think we used to be that center of gravity of knowledge and expertise, but I don't know that we are any longer. And what I love about your space is that you're looking at this through both of those lenses and creating this really, really nice spot for a rigorous intellectual conversation. Because, as you know, some of the limitations of some of those organizations' research is that it can be fairly simplistic, and it can be something that is just a tagline to get people's… It's clickbait as well, at times. But you're bringing a more nuanced and important conversation to the table with that breadth of knowledge and the language and the world that they're living in. So, I think your comments about the podcast are brilliant. Every university should have a podcast and be talking with alumni and talking with people out in the industry because I think it's a beautiful combination. All of our work is behind a paywall. It's behind a paywall, and it's lost. All of this work may be behind a paywall eventually, but it's more of a loss leader for them than it is the bread and butter, so to speak. So I just very much respect your space because I think it's doing a great service to the industry and those professionals because it's complex, it's difficult. And we have to look a little bit deeper than maybe some of what we're being click-baited into, but we can't be so deep; it’s not translatable, which some of our colleagues can get into that space.

Laura Empson  40:06  

I'm absolutely with you, Scott. And I use the phrase ‘intellectual junk food.’ I think that a lot of leaders are raised on a diet of intellectual junk food because that is what’s saleable. And it might be through the books that they read or the more, shall we say, practitioner-oriented management journals, or even a lot of what's happening on LinkedIn. So, every time someone says to me, “Laura, what do you think are the five messages for senior leaders in this kind of situation or something?” And I think, “Oh, no, they can literally only think in bullet points.” And so, to talk to them about how those five bullet points might be densely interconnected, by how pressing too hard on one of these bullet points might have unintended consequences for another of these bullet points, how, in fact, there's a whole extra page on the PowerPoint slide with ten more bullet points that they really do need to bear in mind. These are complex and subtle, and uncomfortable realities. We've also talked about the leadership industry in Copenhagen. And, previously, there was this massive sort of industrial complex of the leadership industry trying to simplify, package, and monetize really trivializing recommendations. And my concern is that if that's the only diet you've been raised on throughout your professional career, you lack the ability to see behind that and you're uncomfortable with anything that is more ambiguous or subtle. By contrast, some of our academic world is so mired in ambiguity and subtlety that it never even gets itself published. We all know scholars whose thinking is so densely intertwined and subtle they can't actually put it down on a page and get anyone to read it. So, we need the balance. But I like always the question, that's a challenge, but to gently probe and try to do that in a way so that at the end of the call, the end of my interview, people really enjoyed it and want to talk to me again, but I also want to leave them slightly discomforted and thinking perhaps a little more critically about some of the sound bites that they've been trained by their PR people to regurgitate.

Scott Allen  42:28  

Mmm. Yeah. The intellectual junk food. I really like that phrasing. And we'll wind down here, but the populist playbook is to say, “I have a slogan; I'm going to take all this complexity and make it super simple for you. I alone can fix this.”

Laura Empson  42:45  

“Give the partnership back to the partners.” 

Scott Allen  42:49  

Yes, exactly. And, no, that's probably a little too… That's not probably gonna get us where we want to be. Well, I really, really appreciate your time today. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for your good work out there in the world. And, for listeners, there's going to be a whole bunch of links in the show notes so that you can access Laura's work. And you know what? We'll do it again. We'll do it again. I very, very much appreciate your time.

Laura Empson  43:11  

Looking forward to seeing you again, Scott. 

Scott Allen  43:13

Okay. Be well.

[End Of Recording]