Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D.

Send us a textTodd Deal, Ph.D., serves as Senior Faculty and Director of the Higher Education practice in the Societal Advancement group at the Center for Creative Leadership. In this role, his focus is on partnering with institutions across the broad landscape of higher education to provide leadership education and leader development. Todd and his team work across the higher education spectrum. They co-design leadership programs for college students to facilitate leadership development initiatives for faculty, staff, and executives at the college, university, and system levels. Todd served as Associate Dean, earned tenure, and was promoted to full professor. He also authored a chemistry textbook - now in its 4th edition. Todd was the founding director of the leadership, community engagement, and service-learning program at Georgia Southern University where he taught leadership courses for 10+ years. He earned a graduate certificate in leadership from Northeastern University, completed the Art & Practice of Leadership Development with Ron Heifetz & Marty Linsky at Harvard University, and twice served as faculty for ILA's Leadership Education Academy (LEA). Todd is the founder of TDLearning, Inc. He is a sought-after speaker and leadership development professional, having partnered with various corporate, non-profit, and higher education institutions to provide innovative, strengths-based development experiences for professionals and students. His professional affiliations include the American Chemical Society, the International Leadership Association, the Association of Leadership Educators, and the National Clearinghouse for Leadership Programs. Todd and his wife (of 27 yrs) Karen live in Hilton Head Island, SC (NOT retired, far from it!) and are the parents of two brilliant, beautiful, talented young adult daughters.  Quotes From This Episode"Activation energy - the minimum amount of energy that is required to activate atoms or molecules to a condition in which they can undergo chemical transformation or physical transport." - BritannicaOn moving from chemistry to leadership - "The molecules behave so much better than the people. They're regular and you can predict what's going to happen. The people you never know!"On resilience - "It's less about grit and getting through it - that's a component. But it's taking that recharge time, what is it that you're doing to fill your bucket back up? So that you show up at your very, very best."Connecting With ToddLinkedIn Resources Mentioned In This EpisodeThe Screwtape Letters by C.S. LewisMoonwalking with Einstein by FoerSomething Deeply Hidden by Sean C ♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a textDr. Barbara Kellerman is a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. She was the Founding Executive Director of the Center, and a member of the Kennedy School faculty for over twenty years. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, Uppsala, Dartmouth, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.  During spring 2022, she's a Visiting Professor of Leadership at Christopher Newport University. Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A. M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books including The Political Presidency; Bad Leadership; Followership ; Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (2010); The End of Leadership (2012); Hard Times: Leadership in America (2014), Professionalizing Leadership  (2018); and (with Todd Pittinsky) Leaders Who Lust: Power Money Sex Success Legitimacy Legacy. Kellerman has appeared on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Reuters, and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.Barbara Kellerman has spoken to audiences all over the world including in Berlin, Moscow, Sao Paolo, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Toronto, Kyoto, Beijing, Sydney, and Seoul. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association. In 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 she was listed by Global Gurus as among the “World’s Top 30 Management Professionals.” Her most recent book – The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America – was published in August 2021 by Cambridge University Press. A Quote From This Episode(On Russia's invasion of Ukraine) - "It's enormously gripping, fascinating, depressing, instructive, and surreal. At moments deeply sad, but it is nevertheless instructive. I really urge any students of leadership, and experts on leadership to pay close attention."Resou ♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a textCynthia McCauley is an honorary senior fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership. With more than 35 years of experience, Cindy has been involved in many aspects of CCL’s work: research, publications, program and product development, evaluation, coaching, and management. Capitalizing on this broad experience, she has developed expertise in leader development methods, including developmental assignments and relationships, 360-degree feedback, and action learning. She has also played a central role in CCL’s efforts to understand leadership as a collective phenomenon shared among people and to expand its leadership development practice to include the development of teams and leadership cultures. Cindy has published numerous articles and book chapters for scholars, HR professionals, and practicing managers. She is the co-editor of three editions of The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development (1998, 2004, 2010), as well as two books on experience-based development (Using Experience to Develop Leadership Talent, Experience-Based Leader Development: Models, Tools, Best Practices, and Advice). Cindy has a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Georgia and is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the American Educational Research Association.A Few Quotes From This Episode"What we say is leadership is an 'achievement of the collective,' which might be the most concise way to express a relational view of leadership."“Assessment, challenge, and support…are the elements that combine to make developmental experiences more powerful. That is, whatever the experience, it has more impact if it contains these three elements.” “Individuals broaden and deepen their leadership capabilities as they do leadership work. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that learning from experience is the number one way that leader development happens…. How can organizations better harness the power of experiences for leadership development?”  “A leadership development strategy is a plan for the thoughtful, intentional deployment of organizational resources to ensure the ongoing availability of leadership for achieving the organization’s strategic agenda…." (with Karen Grabow)“Relational views of leadership may be the disruptive idea that helps reconstruct leadership development in ways that meets these concerns” (with Chuck Palus )Resources Mentioned In This EpisodeBook: Trust in a Complex World: Enriching Community by Charles HeckscherBook: The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson Book: Mou ♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a textIra Chaleff is an author, speaker, workshop presenter, and innovative thinker on the beneficial use of power between those who are leading and those who are following in any given situation. His groundbreaking book, The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders, is in its third edition, has been published in multiple languages, and is in use in institutions around the globe including educational, corporate, government, and military organizations. He has recently completed two terms of service as a member of the Board of Directors of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is the founder of its Followership Member Community. He is currently mentoring a community of academics and professionals in the field of courageous followers gathered around the Teaching Followers Courage project. Ira is also the founder and president of Executive Coaching & Consulting Associates, which provides coaching, consulting, and facilitation to companies, associations, and agencies throughout the Washington, DC, area. He is chairman emeritus of the nonpartisan Congressional Management Foundation and has provided facilitation to nearly one hundred congressional offices to improve their service to constituents. Ira is Adjunct Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute where he teaches a weeklong elective workshop on Courageous Followers, Courageous Leaders in the Leadership in a Democratic Society program, and is a Visiting Leadership Scholar at the University of Cambridge, England.Ira has been named one of the “100 best minds on leadership” by Leadership Excellence magazine. He was cited in the Harvard Business Review as one of the three pioneers in the growing field of followership studies. Ira Chaleff lives in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Washington, DC, where bears frequently disobey the No Trespassing signs on the road and help keep his connection strong with the wonders of nature.A Quote From This Episode"I had to ask myself the question, 'if evolution sorts out the behaviors that don't contribute to a species' survival, why is this strong-man-autocrat, proto-tyrant, still so prevalent? They must be serving some purpose.' That's a very problematic statement."Resources Mentioned In This EpisodeBook - People of the Lie by M. Scott PeckBook - Intelligent Disobedience by ChaleffBook - ♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a textDr. Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries is the Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organisational Change and the Raoul de Vitry d’Avaucourt Chaired Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus, at INSEAD. He brings a different view to the much-studied subjects of leadership and individual and organizational change. Bringing to bear his knowledge and experience of economics (EconDrs, University of Amsterdam), management (ITP, MBA, and DBA, Harvard Business School), and psychoanalysis (Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association), he scrutinizes the interface between international management, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and dynamic psychiatry. His specific areas of interest are leadership, career dynamics, executive stress, entrepreneurship, family business, succession planning, cross-cultural management, team building, coaching, and corporate transformation and change. Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries directs The Challenge of Leadership Executive Education program.He has received the INSEAD Distinguished Teacher Award five times. He has held professorships at McGill University, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, Montreal, and the Harvard Business School and has lectured at management institutions worldwide. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than 50 books and has published over 400 papers as articles or chapters in books. His books and articles are translated into thirty-one languages. He is a member of seventeen editorial boards, and he’s a Fellow of the Academy of Management. Financial Times, Le Capital, Wirtschaftswoche, and The Economist rated Manfred Kets de Vries as one of the world’s top fifty leading management thinkers and one of the most influential contributors to human resource management. In 2008, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association (the Leadership Legacy Project), being viewed as one of the world’s six founding professionals in developing leadership as a field and discipline.A Few Quotes From This Episode“I try to train reflective leaders. People who have some self-knowledge, some self-awareness...have some ability to deal with the complexity of what’s going on.”(Speaking in Russia on 2.28.22). I made three comments when I ended my class because people were becoming panicky.Ideology overrules rationality.Paranoia is the disease of kings.He who rides a tiger cannot dismount.Resources Mentioned In This EpisodeThe Kets de Vries InstituteThe Starfish StoryAbout The International Leadership Association (ILA) ♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a textDr. Henry Mintzberg is a name known to many. He’s a writer and educator - most of his work focuses on managing originations, developing managers, and rebalancing societies (which is where his attention is currently focused). After receiving his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal (1961), working in Operational Research for the Canadian National Railways (1961-1963), and doing his masters and Ph.D. at the MIT Sloan School of Management (1965 and 1968), He made his professional home at McGill. He’s had extensive visiting professorships at INSEAD in France and the London Business School in England.He's authored 20 books, including Managers not MBAs, Simply Managing, Rebalancing Society, and Managing the Myths of Health Care. He also authored 180 articles plus numerous commentaries and videos. He publishes a regular TWOG (TWeet 2 blOG), as “provocative fun in a page or 2 beyond pithy pronouncements in a line or 2” (@mintzberg141 to mintzberg.org/blog).A collection has recently been published under the title Bedtime Stories for Managers, and following that will be Understanding Organizations...Finally (a revision of his book Structure in Fives).He’s also an outdoorsman and collector of beaver sculptures.A Few Quotes From This Episode"There are 23 countries that are now full democracies. With a couple of exceptions, I think most of those are models of balance, particularly the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Sweden), New Zealand...Canada's number five, which is the first middle-sized country...most of them are tiny...you could say that The Economist is claiming that about 175 countries in the world are not balanced in all kinds of ways.""The question I keep asking myself is 'what's dumbing us down?'"Resources Mentioned In This EpisodeWebsite: Rebalancing SocietySeven Basic PointsThe Declaration of our Interdependence Donald Trump is not the problem - five-part essay on the roots of the imbalanceArticle: The Economist - Global Democracy Has a Very Bad YearBook: Sapiens by Harari Book: ♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a textJonathan W. White is a professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University.  He is the author or editor of 13 books, including Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (2014), which was a finalist for both the Lincoln Prize and Jefferson Davis Prize, a “best book” in Civil War Monitor, and the winner of the Abraham Lincoln Institute’s 2015 book prize. He serves as vice-chair of The Lincoln Forum, and on the boards of the Abraham Lincoln Association, the Abraham Lincoln Institute, and the Ford’s Theatre Advisory Council.  His most recent books include Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War (2017), which was selected as a “best book” by Civil War Monitor; and “Our Little Monitor”: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War (2018), which he co-authored with Anna Gibson Holloway.  In October 2021 he published To Address You As My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln with UNC Press and My Work Among the Freedmen: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of Harriet M. Buss with UVA Press. His most recent book is A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House.About The Title Of This Episode“I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn...” - First Lady, Michelle Obama at the DNCResources Mentioned In This EpisodeBook: A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House by Jon WhiteArticle: Meet the Black Men Who Changed Lincoln’s Mind About Equal Rights by Jon WhiteWebsite: http://www.jonathanwhite.org/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. Plan now for ILA's 24th Global Conference Online October 6 & 7, 2022, and/or Onsite in Washington, D.C., October 13-16, 2022.Connect with Your Host, Scott AllenLinkedInWebsite ♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a textDr. Donna Ladkin is a professor of leadership and ethics at Antioch University. She is an internationally recognized leadership and ethics scholar whose philosophically-informed publications explore aesthetic, ethical, and embodied aspects of organizing and leading.  Her theoretical work is underpinned by a strong commitment to the realm of practice and is informed by extensive consulting experience in both public and private organizations. Her current research focuses on exploring the structural and organizational dynamics which limit follower and leader agency within organizations, particularly in relation to their desire to act ethically.  Dr. Cherie Bridges Patrick is a leadership coach and educator, consultant, clinical social worker, and founder of Paradox Cross-Cultural Consulting, Training & Empowerment LLC. Cherie combines nearly 12 years of trauma experience with relational neuroscience to heal racial and social trauma, repair and build relationships with the goal of normalizing, generative justice-centered dialogue. Dr. Patrick has extensive experience in community mental health and engaging with immigrant families around the complexities and trauma of global displacement and resettlement. Her research examined how subtle and nuanced racial dominance was reproduced by justice-seeking professionals in day-to-day workplace discourses. She has also co-authored publications around racial dominance and racial justice in leadership. Dr. Marion Missy McGee is a research practitioner who specializes in expanding and reframing conventional narratives to create more equitable leadership ecosystems. As an organizational strategist, she administers the design, implementation, and evaluation of domestic and international programmatic initiatives for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, located in Washington, D.C. Marion’s scholarly research contributes to closing the gap between race and leadership through a multidimensional lens while amplifying lesser-known histories, increasing unexplored narrative exemplars, and providing greater empirical evidence from the vantage point of African American leaders.A Few Quotes From This Episode"The way in which we use language, any language, is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the many assumptions, power dynamics, and other relationships that underpin it.""There's a way that language and discourses foreground things and make things very obvious, and a way that it backgrounds things."(regarding leadership theory) - "First, we have to understand what purpose is being served? And then we can think about, do we want to align ourselves with that? Is there another purpose we want to be serving? And maybe we should look to those kinds of theories instead.""More recently, my critical eye has turned to the way in which race is very rarely actually spoken about within leadership theorizing. But at the same time, it's very mu ♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a textDeborah Helsing, Ed.D., is a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). She teaches courses in adult development, Immunity to Change, and she co-teaches a course titled, Practicing Leadership Inside and Out. She also provides individualized executive coaching to high potential educational leaders as part of the Doctor of Educational Leadership (Ed.L.D.) program. In addition to her faculty appointment, Helsing is a co-director at Minds at Work, an organization assisting individuals, teams, and organizations in making personal and collective change. Helsing is published in leading academic journals and is a co-author of the following books: An Everyone Culture (2016), Right Weight/Right Mind (2016), and Change Leadership (2006). Helsing holds a B.A. in English from Grinnell College, a master's degree from the University of Michigan, and a doctorate from HGSE.A Few Quotes From This Episode"I've been lucky enough to follow my own questions...I never had a map of what I wanted my career to look like. I felt like I could follow my interests and I've been lucky enough to connect with people I could learn from, grow with, and continue on.""(The Immunity to Change Exercise) is a little bit like a Trojan horse...maybe your improvement goal was very focused on one thing, but if you get to something powerful…it does start to impact other areas of your life."“Development is one important factor in someone's effectiveness as a leader."Resources Mentioned In This EpisodeJournal Article - Understanding leadership from the inside out: Assessing leadership potential using constructive-developmental theoryBook - Immunity to ChangeBook - In Over Our Heads Learning Opportunity - Immunity to Change - Facilitator TrainingLearning Opportunity - Programs at a GlanceFollow Minds at Work on LinkedInOrganization - Positive IntelligenceAbout The Inter ♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.

Send us a textMatt Dearmon is the Director of Leadership and Professional Development at Informatica, an organization that empowers next-generation cloud data innovation. Matt has a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Texas at Austin and began his career as an educator before moving to coaching and e-learning. Eventually, he moved from leading small, learning-focused companies, including his own, to guiding leadership and professional development at the global enterprise level. Matt is a dedicated leader focusing on innovative excellence, an expert curriculum developer, and an experienced facilitator with a passion for applied learning.A Few Quotes From This Episode“I’ve always kind of understood theory and practice as two records on a turntable. How do you blend those? How do you sync the tempo? How do you get the tonality to match?  How do you get the right key?”“One of the things I love about leadership is that I like to think of it as an asymptotal craft. An asymptote is a geometric figure where a line is infinitely close to both the x and the y axis, but it never quite touches - for infinity, it’s always closer and closer to the X-axis on this side and closer and closer to the Y-axis on this side. But it never quite touches its asymptotal - you’re never going to get there.”"My secret weapon is that research capability that I draw directly from my experience in academia."“Like a lot of practitioners, I rely a little bit on some of your aggregators of research - MIT Sloan or HBR. I think that’s a good place to start, especially for a practitioner in the field to understand having a framework or an approach or a school of thought that might go a little bit deeper. Then I’ll find some strains that I can dig into, and I’ll start going back to the research and dig a little bit deeper on it.”Resources Mentioned In This EpisodeBook - Assemblage Theory (Speculative Realism) by Manuel DeLanda Album - Dawn Richard - Second LineAlbum - John Batist - We AreDocumentary - Beatles - Get BackAbout 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. Plan now for ILA's 24th Global Conference Online October 6 & 7, 2022, and/or Onsite in Washington, D.C., October 13-16, 2022. ♻️ Please share with others and follow/subscribe to the podcast!⭐️ Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or your platform of choice.➡️ Follow me on LinkedIn for more on leadership, communication, and tech.📜 Subscribe to my weekly newsletter featuring four hand-picked articles.🌎 You can learn more about my work on my Website.