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Professor Kimberly Elsbach Named First Newberry Chair in Leadership World-Renowned Scholar Recognized for Research and Teaching
In today’s global economy, leaders are faced with challenges and opportunities that have never been more dynamic or complex. They must inspire others —often across continents —in times of great uncertainty and make timely and tough decisions on the fly. Helping executives excel as nimble, effective and responsible leaders— and preparing the next generation to develop these skills—is a top priority of the UC Davis Graduate School of Management. Professor Kimberly Elsbach is on the forefront with her cutting-edge research and MBA leadership development. In recognition of her internationally renowned scholarship and her initiatives to prepare UC Davis MBA students, Elsbach has been honored as the first recipient of the Stephen G. Newberry Endowed Chair in Leadership. Newberry, president and CEO of Fremont, Calif.-based Lam Research Corp., praised Elsbach’s appointment. He underscored the value of her insights into situational leadership styles and importance of emotional intelligence versus older models of leadership and influence through positional power. “I have built my career on situational leadership styles,” said Newberry. “Over time, as an organization develops and matures, leaders need to adapt to the needs of the people in the organization. The real burden is on the leader to be effective by allowing the people to be the most productive they can be.” Elsbach joined the School’s faculty in 1997 from Emory University, after earning her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1993. She is a globally visible expert in organizational behavior and 2 0 • spr i ng 2 0 1 0
organizational identities and reputations, especially images of legitimacy, trustworthiness and creativity. Elsbach this year was named an International Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Corporate Reputation. Her research is critically acclaimed, including two papers cited by the Academy of Management Journal’s Editorial Review Board among the 17 most influential in organization and management literature from the past century. “Kim is certainly a world-class scholar and focused on the complex aspects of what goes on in corporations and what corporations have to think about, including issues such as leadership, creativity, sales and social responsibility,” Newberry said. “It takes world-class research to bring forward a perspective to get people to think about these challenges in new and different ways.” Newberry said he looks forward to sharing with Elsbach the challenges and thoughts he has as CEO of a global, high-tech company.
Chameleon-like Leadership Over the past decade, Elsbach said, research on the styles and qualities that make a “good leader” have shifted dramatically. Today’s stand-out leaders are “flexible and more chameleon-like” and can adjust and adapt how they lead according to the situation, she said. “The best leader is not the charismatic leader who can never be anything else. And the best leader is also not the thoughtful, rational, soft-spoken leader who can only do that,” Elsbach explained. “The best leader is the one who can do both of those things in the appropriate circumstance. “That’s a big change in thinking about leadership,” she noted. “It’s
Stephen G. Newberry and Professor Kimberly Elsbach
more situational and it’s more conditional. There is not one right way to do it, but there are good strategies depending on circumstances.” Elsbach teaches these strategies in her core course in organizational behavior, requiring Daytime MBA students to take “The Leadership Challenge,” an online self-awareness leadership assessment tool developed by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner. Students’ peers, family and colleagues also offer feedback. The result: students learn their strengths and weaknesses, and receive personalized and practical tools to improve how they think and act in diverse situations. “It’s designed so tomorrow you can go out and change the way that you behave,” Elsbach said. The personalized leadership assessments are reinforced by a series of nine extracurricular leadership skills workshops, which are sponsored by Lam Research (see page 46). Elsbach said students who took a follow-up leadership appraisal and attended the most leadership workshops have shown the greatest improvement. “The workshops are making a difference,” she said, “and it proves what we are doing in the classroom dovetails very well with our skill development opportunities.”