Leadership at Wharton and Beyond, an interview with Professor Stew Friedman

 

by Leeor Plotkin (WG’04)

Professor Friedman, can you start by telling me a little bit about your background and your work here at Wharton

I’ve been at Wharton since 1984. I came from the University of Michigan where I earned my PHD. I began as an assistant professor and evolved in terms of my professional identity by focusing on teaching and consulting practical work. In 1991, I was asked to head the new leadership course initiative when Wharton was redesigning the MBA program. I was responsible for putting together all the different pieces of what eventually became the leadership program. This job ultimately led me to adopt a different kind of faculty role, that of a practice professor, which means that I focus on the bridge between theory and practice.

I do applied research and practical application of ideas from the world of organizational theory and organizational psychology to help create a change in the world of business. I created the Wharton work-life integration project to develop practical knowledge that is used to help educate business leaders on how to fuse the worlds of work and personal life. The project received wide coverage throughout the business and popular media, and I’ve been recognized for my research and served on a task force with Vice President Gore. We have incorporated some of the material into the Wharton curriculum in order to present the notion of the leader as a whole person into the work of leadership development.

During the ‘90s I worked with several companies to help initiate their leadership development activities, and from 1999 to 2001 I took a leave of absence from Wharton to work at the Ford Motor Company, where I developed an internal business school called the “leadership development center.”

What are the major changes that occurred at Wharton during the time you spent at Ford? The leadership course that I’m currently teaching became more focused on executive leadership and on learning by studying others, and less on the model that we had developed during the ‘90s which was more of an experience or action-based learning model.  In that model the learning team was absolutely central to the whole process, and served as a vehicle through which students could learn leadership in a team environment.

Prof. Friedman

I’m very excited about the recent evolution towards more of learning from guest executives,case histories, and conceptual material. We are inventing a new model that captures the best of both worlds and I’m optimistic and hopeful about it.  

We are also looking to make the leadership learning experience a full year process. In fact, this past year we had a small pilot program of 33 students called WILL (Wharton Initiative for Leadership Learning), and we hope to incorporate lessons from this year’s pilot into future models of the core leadership program experience.

Can you talk more about WILL?

Students initiate a lot of the innovation here at Wharton- it’s one of the fun things about this institution. A couple of years ago, the DGSAC (Dean Graduate Student Advisory Council) mapped out all of the ways of learning leadership at Wharton in a framework called CEO (Class, Experiential learning, Opportunities for action). A number of us recognized the fact that there are many ways to develop leadership capacity here, and wanted to create a structure through which everyone would be encouraged to do that in a systematic yet highly individualized way. The general idea is for everybody to establish his own leadership learning agenda and then map out a plan, revisable over time, which takes full advantage of all the available resources and opportunities at Wharton. This is a two years process that starts at pre-term, with a number of checkpoints for reflection and for taking feedback from numerous sources. The basic elements are drafting an initial vision of the kind of leader someone wants to become, setting up near term leadership development goals, creating an action plan with some built-in feedback mechanisms, and forming small coaching units that are dedicated to the development of each member’s capacity as a leader. 

How is Wharton different from other top MBA programs in the way it approaches leadership?

When we first started the new curriculum we created the learning teams as a vehicle for learning about leadership in a team environment. This notion of the live case was something that we actually borrowed from Yale where they had a smaller, more contained version of this concept. We really took it to a different level by building these teams into the whole curriculum over the entire year, and extracting all the lessons that were available to our students by ensuring that students were reflecting on their experiences and helping each other to develop. Furthermore, we built accountability and a reward system within the teams. Students received a passing grade only if their teammates concurred that they demonstrated basic teamwork proficiency. None of our peers uses learning teams as serious vehicles for learning. Indeed, when I spoke to folks at HBS a while back, the chairman of the management department asked: “how did you do that?” He was very curious about how we developed our system. I think that this is a very good example demonstrating how our commitment to action-based learning makes our approach different.

Stepping out of Wharton, what are in your opinion the most important characteristics of business leaders today?

I think the big one is the skill of being able to learn fast, which in a more stable environment – technologically, politically, and economically - was less important since there were other ways of competing.  The capacity to adapt quickly by having an open mind and the willingness to listen to complex stakeholder interests is extremely important. Because of the kind of interdependencies that now exist and the availability of information in the digital age, hierarchy is far less important. The courage that is required to change rapidly and continually distinguishes today’s leaders from yesterday’s leaders. 

We witness today a higher proportion of women in positions of authority in the business world – does it matter?

Certainly the infusion of women into positions of authority has made a difference, and I think a positive one.  However, it’s too early to tell how it will ultimately affect the evolution of our corporate norms and values. Because women still retain primary responsibility for child bearing in our society, although that too is slowly changing, there has been a greater awareness of the need to redesign the structure of work. That’s the heart of what my real passion is all about in thinking about leadership and what I call “total leadership” - the integration of work, home, community and self to both increase business results and enrich lives. The standard model of the single earner dad with the mom at home is quickly disappearing, and there is a growing need for flexibility in the time and place of work, and for emphasizing performance and results rather than “face time”. The good news is that the convergence of the technological revolution with the cultural changes has produced a new set of opportunities.  These opportunities can change the way we live our lives and the ways in which we contribute to the economy. Unless we figure out how to really leverage technology and not let it strangle us we are going to miss a huge opportunity to liberate our time and our energy towards the kinds of productive outcomes that most people want, which is not only to work for work sake or for economic reasons, but to contribute to improving the quality of life.

Any final words before we finish?