New Faculty Director for Sanger Leadership Center Shares Her Goals, Priorities, and Favorite Fantasy Book Series Just after being named a “rockstar prof” in Poets & Quants list of the “Top 40 Under 40 Business School Professors,” Lindred (Lindy) Greer joined the Michigan Ross community this summer as an associate professor of management and organizations and the faculty director of the Sanger Leadership Center. In her first few months at Ross, she’s already made an impact: Greer has been busy prepping course content for the first cohort of Online MBA students as well as an elective course for the Full-Time MBA program on the psychology of start-up teams. She’s also been getting up and running with the Sanger team by contributing to Business + Impact Challenge during MBA orientation in early August. We interviewed her over the summer to learn more about her goals and priorities, her research, along with a few fun facts.
What drew you to the Sanger faculty director role? Sanger has the unique ability to bridge research and teaching, science and practice, and different university stakeholders, including companies, students, alumni, staff, and faculty. The opportunity to help Sanger continue to build and expand these bridges in our community is incredibly interesting to me, as well as the chance to think strategically about how we can develop the best data-driven leadership development program in the world.
What are some future possibilities you’d like to explore with the Sanger Leadership Center? Michigan Ross is ‘the’ historical home for leadership research; I would like Ross and Sanger Leadership Center to continue to innovate and lead in this area. We will leverage the center as a platform to spread relevant research from Ross faculty out into the world to create more effective leaders. This will involve building faculty relationships, creating a
research lab, supporting emerging researchers, and perhaps involving external stakeholders to gain funding. Additionally, I’m thinking about how we can loop in more research and teaching around diversity and inclusion.
Let’s talk about your research. What does your research focus on? Broadly, my research looks at how leaders can design and lead effective teams. Key leadership skills I have looked at include how to design and structure teams, manage conflicts, regulate emotions, and develop inclusive cultures for diverse teams.
Can you share one research tidbit that really surprised you? While I was working on my dissertation, I conducted a training session on diversity and inclusion for employees across all levels of a bank in the Netherlands. My session for their management team was the only one that completely bombed: not because of its content,