Host Annmarie Caño speaks with academic leaders at Wayne State University to learn how they have developed their careers while empowering themselves and others.

Subscribe

Stay up to date on future episodes by subscribing to EmpowerED to Lead.

Show notes

About Marcus Dickson

Marcus Dickson is a professor of psychology at Wayne State University. He is an organizational psychologist whose research focuses on leadership, with emphasis in leadership across cultures. An award-winning teacher and mentor, Dickson directs Wayne State's doctoral and master's programs in organizational psychology. He also consults organizations on research development, personnel selection and adverse impact reduction.

Conversation highlights

Host Annmarie Caño begins the discussion by asking Dickson what he loves about his job. For Dickson, it's twofold: He not only gets to think about things that matter to him, but he also gets to work with a rich mix of students.

Dickson shares that he became interested in researching leadership as the result of a happy accident. While completing his graduate studies at the University of Maryland, leadership scholar Robert J. House visited on a sabbatical. At the time, House was launching what evolved into the GLOBE Project, a massive study of leadership across cultures. "Bob needed somebody to set up his computer, and I was the only person way back then who knew how to set up a Macintosh," he says. Dickson got to know House, who ultimately invited him to contribute to the project, and the rest is history.

Dickson believes there are two essential elements of being a good leader. "They focus on the task that needs to be done, and they focus on the people that they work with." He notes that there are variations within those two breakdowns, not to mention different expectations. "If you believe that your leader needs to be helping you succeed and your leader takes a hands-off approach to let you learn, both of those are valid, but you are not getting what you expect a leader to provide, so that's going to be dissatisfying," he says. Dickson adds that he avoids stereotyping when dealing with leadership across cultures, but culture can be a potential explanation when the unexpected happens. He also mentions that a significant work that has emerged from the GLOBE Project is called "global mindset," or an awareness of and appreciation for interacting with different people.

Caño asks Dickson to share a challenging situation that he's faced as a leader, and Dickson reflects on his experience joining a national volunteer agency, where he was later elected into a leadership role. "I got to know the folks in a different way, and I realized that they were perhaps not perfect," he says, noting that he had idolized his peers. It took him some time to process the notion that leaders can have, as he puts it, "normal human emotions." He encourages everyone to be cognizant of the idea that leaders were once in followers' shoes (and for those checking, Dickson still admires his peers at the volunteer agency).

While thousands of books are being written on leadership, Dickson urges people to stay mindful of contextual issues (e.g., what works for a military leader might not be applicable to everyone). When it comes to teaching his students, he relies on Reframing Organizations, which centers on the notion that people view the world through various lenses (think symbolism or politics).

Caño concludes the discussion by asking what it means to empower someone to lead. "It's possible for people higher in the power structure to empower others by showing that you trust them to make wise decisions and you're not going to micromanage what they do," Dickson says. Still, he notes the importance of referent power, where we willingly follow the lead of those we respect and admire. "Empowerment to lead can come not just from above, but also below," Dickson says, "and I think it's helpful for us when we do empower others from below it's beneficial for us, and we can help people in the process."

Additional resources

GLOBE Project

Bolman, Lee G., and Deal, Terrence E. (2017). Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership (6^th ed.). San Francisco, CA. Jossey-Bass.

Follow EmpowerED to Lead on Twitter @WSUFacSuccess.

Transcript

Annmarie Cano:                  

Welcome to EmpowerED to Lead, a Wayne State University podcast for academic leaders who are committed to empowering their community to succeed. I'm your host, Annmarie Cano, associate provost for faculty development and faculty success at Wayne State.

Annmarie Cano:                  

In this podcast, we'll explore the personal journeys of academic leaders, both current and emerging, to learn more about how they've developed their careers. We'll speak with faculty and staff about their work and how they have empowered themselves and others along the way. By doing this, we hope to empower listeners like you as you continue on your leadership path.

Annmarie Cano:                  

Today we're speaking with Wayne State professor of psychology, Marcus Dickson. Marcus is an organizational psychologist whose research focuses on leadership, especially leadership across cultures. He directs Wayne State's doctoral and master's degree programs in organizational psychology and consults with organizations on leadership development, personnel selection, and adverse impact reduction. He's an award winning teacher and mentor and has held a variety of academic, professional, and nonprofit leadership roles.

Annmarie Cano:                  

Welcome to the podcast, Marcus.

Marcus Dickson:                 

Well, thank you. Good to be here.

Annmarie Cano:                  

Great. Let's start with what you love about your job.

Marcus Dickson:                 

Oh, we could spend a long time on that. The job is one where I get to think about things that matter to me, that matter to the organizations that I work with, think about how to make leadership better, how to bring better people into the organization and those are things I think really matter and that I find interesting and challenging to work on. And then I get to work with students and we have a master's program and a doctoral program and though they're on the same topic, they're really a little bit different in the students who come in to them. We have such a rich mix of people who are very focused on research and other folks who are very focused on getting into the workplace to do stuff with this leadership and other kinds of organizational psychology. It's a great opportunity.

Marcus Dickson:                 

And then to get to teach introductory psychology to freshmen and bring them into the field of psychology, that's a lot of fun. The consulting work, the work that we do, is always high impact, dealing especially with situations that there's likely to be litigation around selection or adverse impact. The things we do have a big effect on the organizations we work with. That's just good stuff to work on.

Annmarie Cano:                  

How did you become interested in researching leadership and doing this work?

Marcus Dickson:                 

It was purely by accident. It was absolutely by accident. My students have heard me tell this story before. We had a very, very well known leadership scholar, a man named Bob House, who came to my graduate university, Maryland, on a sabbatical and he was working on this big cross cultural project. He was just in the beginning of starting what turned into Project Globe, which is the largest study of leadership across cultures that had been done to date. And Bob had bad vision and needed somebody to set up his computer and I was the only person way back then who knew how to set up a Macintosh. I got to spend a lot of time talking with this really, really well known and smart leadership scholar and just because we got to spend time together for nothing that had to do with academics, he invited me to get involved in the project because I'd had a chance to talk to him and learn about what they were doing. And I didn't know I was interested in cross cultural leadership until I got to work with some really good folks and began to see the challenging and important topics that were being dealt with. But it wasn't that I grew up thinking, oh, this is what I want to study. It was purely an accident, but a very happy one.

Annmarie Cano:                  

Great. When you're talking to students, teaching them or consulting, working with leaders at Wayne State and thinking about cross cultural leadership, what do you see as the essential elements of a good leader in that domain?

Marcus Dickson:                 

We can break that out into a few different things. At the simplest level, and I'm not going to try to talk a whole lot of theory, but at the simplest level, leaders do two things. They focus on the task that needs to be done and they focus on the people that they work with. And different leaders do that to different degrees, right? Some are very task focused and some are very people focused. And that breakdown of those two things has been well established for decades. But thinking about the variations in that and how we go about doing that, there are a lot of ways to get things done that destroy your people. There are a lot of ways to treat your people well that don't really get things done. And then when you start to think about cultural differences in the things that we expect of our leaders, one of the biggest predictors of leadership effectiveness, especially when we go across cultures, is whether the leaders are providing, at a minimum, what their followers expect them to provide in terms of support, in terms of guidance.

Marcus Dickson:                 

If you believe that your leader needs to be helping you succeed and your leader takes a hands off approach to let you learn. Both of those are valid, but you're not getting what you are hoping for and what you expect a leader to provide and so that's going to be dissatisfying. When we start to deal with going across cultures and we have people from a cultural expectation as to how to do leadership and be a leader versus people from a different culture who've grown up under a different set of assumptions about how leadership works. That can be a very challenging divide to work your way across. Understanding the typical ways or the common ways that leaders might interact in a different cultural situation is pretty important.

Marcus Dickson:                 

We never would want to use culture as a predictor. In other words, we wouldn't want to say, oh, I'm about to work with a German person in Germans are like this and so I need to be this type of leader. That's not a good way to go. But what we can do is say I'm a leader and I'm working with somebody and it's not going the way I thought it would. What I'm trying to do that usually works is not succeeding. Is it possible that cultural differences would be one explanation for that and that might be a way to look into it. We want to avoid stereotyping when we're dealing with leadership across cultures, but we can use culture as a potential explanation when unexpected things happen.

Annmarie Cano:                  

Okay. Very interesting to think about leadership in our current cultural context and the diversity that we have even at Wayne State to be thinking about these kinds of things when our projects or undertakings are not fulfilling the goals that we thought that they would.

Marcus Dickson:                 

Yeah. A lot of times people think that if we're talking about cultural issues in leadership that we're talking about ex-patriots, people who are from one country who are assigned to work in another country and really we don't think of it quite that way. There's some great work that emerged from that Project Globe I talked about earlier about what's called global mindset. And that idea is having an openness and an appreciation for and a willingness to interact with and a knowledge of how to interact with people who are different from you period. That may be with developmental differences, age differences, people working with older or younger people or people just from different regional backgrounds or just people who are different from you. Understanding that people often have different assumptions about how things should work, that my assumption and my experience in life is not inherently the norm and that other people might have different views and when we assume that the people are not doing what we expect them to do because they are lazy because they are ill informed, as opposed to they have a different expectation, then we're likely to run into problems and not be very successful.

Marcus Dickson:                 

When we can approach our leadership roles and say, I need to clarify my expectations and I need to understand what would be needed to help these people get their needs fulfilled, then we can be more successful as leaders across all domains when we're working with people who differ from us.

Annmarie Cano:                  

Great. Great insights into leadership for people who are listening as well.

Annmarie Cano:                  

You mentioned sometimes leaders have goals that don't always turn out the way they want them to and I was wondering if you could share any challenges or disruptions that you've had and perhaps describe a challenging situation that taught you something important about yourself and your work as a leader.

Marcus Dickson:                 

I thought about this a little bit and one of the things that came to my mind was when I was a good bit younger, I was elected to this national volunteer agency and it was an honor and it was work I believed in. And when I got to this organization I was all in. I mean I was amazed by the people who were there and I was really impressed by everything about them and began to idolize some of the leaders in those roles. And then the next term for that organization, I got elected again to the organization and then I was elected into a leadership role and I got to know the folks in a different way. And I realized that they were perhaps not perfect. And for me at that time, that was almost depressing that these people that I had really idolized in some ways, when I began to realize that they could get angry and they could be contradictory and they could be hypocritical and they could have normal human emotions, I guess.

Marcus Dickson:                 

And so that was a difficult thing for me at first. And over time as I really began to process that, it helped me understand that leaders are people. And even though we often elevate them, and in the United States, we do have a tendency to elevate our leaders before we tear them down, but we have a process of elevating our leaders, but we need to remember that they are in fact people who were previously maybe at roles we were in and understand that there are a lot of human issues that go on because we're often disappointed in our leaders when they are not perfect and they're not going to be perfect. And that actually took some adjustment for me to realize with these people that I admired so much.

Marcus Dickson:                 

And I was able to get to the point of admiring them again but it was because I had to get to the point of recognizing that they weren't supposed to be perfect, they were supposed to be talented, effective human beings. And I tried to take that into other things that I do and recognize and I don't always do it well, but I try to recognize that folks in leadership roles have their own challenges and their own goals and they have multiple goals. They have organizational goals and personal goals and career goals and trying to recognize some of those things has been an important task for me, working with students, working with organizations. But that experience was a big one in recognizing just how do we think about our leaders and do we sometimes elevate them in ways we shouldn't?

Annmarie Cano:                  

Which on the flip side too, when you become a leader or you exert more of your leadership, it allows you to be a bit more gentle with yourself and not having to be perfect if you also see yourself as a human leader.

Marcus Dickson:                 

Absolutely. If you can recognize that in yourself. And it's a balance because we want our leaders to be role models. Part of what the leaders can do is be very conscious in what they choose to role model. And some leaders fear that they need to be role modeling perfection. And I think there's a tremendous amount of evidence that suggests that a more effective role modeling is how do we handle errors? How do we handle missteps? Do we acknowledge them? Do we ask for forgiveness? Do we recognize that we may have caused a slowdown in progress and acknowledge that and how are we all gonna work together to move forward? And do we acknowledge that we have needs? Do we need time off? Do we need time away? And when the leader does that, when the leader role models those aspects of being human, it sends a very powerful signal to followers, provided that the organization allows the followers to do those things. Sometimes leaders can get away with things that other people in the organization can't. But when the leader role models it and makes sure that the situation is that other people can follow that lead, that can have a tremendous effect for the health of the leader and for the health of the organization and the followers.

Annmarie Cano:                  

Great.

Annmarie Cano:                  

Are there any books or resources that have been helpful in your leadership development that you might want to recommend to listeners?

Marcus Dickson:                 

Yeah. One of the challenges here is just that there are tens of thousands of leadership books that are written every year. One of the things that we joke about when we do consulting work is it's really common that when you go to meet with a client and they'll ask, oh, have you read this book? Well, no I haven't. I haven't read that. But I'll read it by next week when we meet again. But there's so much stuff out there about leadership.

Marcus Dickson:                 

I will mention a couple of things, but let me first mention something that I wouldn't advocate among the leadership books. There are a lot of leadership books where somebody who was successful in their leadership domain will then write a book about it. And the implication of that is, here's what I did. It worked. If you do this, you will succeed. And what that does is it leaves out all of the context. A military leader writes a book and says, here's what I did and it worked. The military leader has the ability to order people to do things in a way that others might not. Sometimes those books, not just military leaders, lots of others have similar kinds of contextual issues. I'd always have a caution for people to think about taking that context into account and thinking about that.

Marcus Dickson:                 

There are a bunch of books that I would rely on when I'm teaching and one of the ones that I've found most helpful is a little bit older now. It's by Bolman and Deal. It's called Reframing Organizations. Frame is how we look at the world. And part of what this book talks about, just to simplify a lot, is that there are multiple frames. I think one of them would be the symbolic frame that we look at events and we say what does this mean? And another would be the political frame. We see the exact same event and we say what are the effects of this on the power structure or on people's ability to influence others? And another is the human resources frame. Part of it is to recognize that there are these different frames and then the other really key piece is that different people tend to rely most readily on a single frame. And you can probably think of people you know who view the world through great big symbols and who symbolism is really, really important to them and other people who that's totally irrelevant and it's all about the power and how we think about power. And they only did that to accumulate power. To recognize that different people fundamentally view leadership and leadership behaviors from different frames.

Marcus Dickson:                 

But there's been a lot more stuff that's more recent than that, that puts nuance on that idea. But I've always found that really helpful to think about the idea that maybe that the person I'm working with and I just view the world from different frames, but also that it's possible to help people see the world from a different frame than they normally do. People who look at the world purely politically, you can help them overcome their cynicism and think about the symbolism of things and the reverse as well.

Annmarie Cano:                  

It ties in a bit with the thinking about the cultural context that there's many different perspectives of the same event and the same can be applied to leadership.

Marcus Dickson:                 

Absolutely. There's assumptions that people bring in with them and a lot of those assumptions are so deep we don't even know we hold them.

Marcus Dickson:                 

Edgar Schein talks about organizational culture and he says there's three levels. The top level's essentially stuff we can see like behavior and building layout and who has a corner office and then the middle level is our cognitive understandings of why things work. If you asked me why did that happen, I can tell you something because I'm aware of it. And then the third one are things that are so deep that we don't even know we hold them. They're assumptions that are so deep that we're not even aware of them until we run into somebody who doesn't hold them. And that often happens when we go across cultures. Things like, to what extent do we owe elder people deference? Should we always defer to people who are older than us, out of courtesy or should we purely focus on the merit of the idea? Those kind of assumptions. And when people are coming at the world from a lifetime that led them to different assumptions that they don't even know they hold, they just know that you don't have something, there's something about interacting with you that's uncomfortable, right? Because you have a different assumption than they have. And then it can take some time to dig into that and understand where that conflict is coming from.

Annmarie Cano:                  

We end each one of our podcasts with this question and so we'd like to ask you, what does it mean to empower somebody to lead?

Marcus Dickson:                 

That's a great question. I think you can answer that from a number of perspectives. You can empower people hierarchically as a superior, where you are giving people the leeway to make decisions and giving people the support and the resources to have an impact on others. It's possible for people higher in the power structure to empower others by showing that you trust them to make wise decisions and that you're not going to micromanage what they do. But at the same time, it's possible for empowerment to come from hierarchically below where people identify someone who they are, again, willing to trust and willing to put their support behind. That doesn't mean that they're going to turn them into their boss, but they're willing to buy into that person as a leader.

Marcus Dickson:                 

70 years ago, French and Raven identified different, they call them bases of power, but they're really about how do we influence people. And some of those are like you can reward them and you can punish them but one of those is what's called referent power. And referent power is when we want to do what people encourage us to do or to follow their lead because we admire them, because we think well of them. One way that we can empower people to lead is to identify those people who we do respect and think well of and let them know that we're willing to be behind them.

Marcus Dickson:                 

Now that doesn't mean that we're going to follow them on every particular topic. I might choose to follow one person around how we're going to move forward in budgetary issues and another person on how we're going to move forward in educational issues. But to simply be willing to let people know, hey, I really respect what you're doing and I'd appreciate your guidance on something. That empowerment to lead can come not just from above, but also below. And I think it's helpful for us when we do empower others from below. It's beneficial for us and we can help other people grow in the process. And it's especially helpful when people who are maybe a little more senior in tenure empower younger folks and say, you've got something that I really want to follow. That's a huge impact.

Annmarie Cano:                  

Thanks so much for sharing your leadership insights. Where can our listeners find you online?

Marcus Dickson:                 

Well, Twitter, I'm at Marcus, that's with a C. M-A-R-C-U-S-Wdickson, D-I-C-K-S-O-N. That'd probably be the best way to go if they wanted to to track me down.

Annmarie Cano:                  Okay, great. Thank you.

Marcus Dickson:                 All right. Thank you.

Annmarie Cano:                  We're glad to have you listening to EmpowerED to Lead. To learn more about our podcast, follow us on Twitter @WSUFacSuccess.