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Leadership Think Tank

Some Recent Research Highlights:

BOLDS (Baseline Officer Leadership Development Study): We have recently completed a 20-year longitudinal study of the 1998 Cadet Class of the UW West Point Military Academy. One of the key findings is that how these cadets viewed their leader identity and self-concept when 18 years old, predicted their leader self-awareness 20 years later! Early indicators of leadership potential predicted midcareer perceptions of leadership.

Sustainability: In a recently completed study with over 200 manufacturing units around the globe, we found that the manufacturing facilities led by more authentic leaders, had employees who were more willing to voice their ideas to their supervisors, and in turn each of those factors, predicted key sustainable metrics for these facilities including energy usage and waste.

Employee Approval: Employees are oftentimes one of the key stakeholders in firms that have received the least attention from Boards of Directors and their CEOs. Employees are important stakeholders of firms because they are directly engaged in strategy implementation, and thus, are critical to firm success. In a longitudinal research project including 338 publicly traded firms and over 1,000 firm-year observations with data collected between 2010 and 2018, we found that employee approvals ratings of their CEO on Glassdoor.com, predicted the involuntary dismissals of CEOs of those firms.

Wanna Play?

Gamification is the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts (business processes, behavioral changes, etc.) in order to solve real world problems. Examples of gamification run the gamut – from the simple, such as LinkedIn using a progress bar to show users how complete their profile is, to the more advanced, such as Nike+ using an accelerometer and GPS to track a person’s workout in real-time and awarding them points and badges for different achievements. CLST is researching gamification to improve leadership and strategic thinking by creating Wheels Up.

Wheels Up (featured in the video above) is an educational, cooper-tition board game for 2-5 players. The purpose of the game is to educate players about two key things:

1) How strategic transformational change unfolds over time within an organization
2) Leadership decision making within customer relations, operational efficiencies, finance, and labor relations.

It was developed using real data collected from a major U.S. airline that had successfully implemented a critical strategic organizational change over a 10 year period. The game involves a hybrid between cooperation and competition strategies (hence the term cooper-tition) because players need to cooperate with each other to address turmoil as it emerges in the game and are also competing with each other to be crowned the MVP.–>