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I'm particularly fascinated by this notion of the difference between successors and incumbents.
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That like, once you're established as an incumbent and you're in a good groove, you're probably
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going to stay in a good groove. That's a good notion. If you're established and you're in a bad groove, you're probably going to stay in a
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bad groove. You know, this notion that when a successor comes in, their actions land differently.
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You know, you could be a successor, I'm an incumbent. You come in, people are paying more attention to you than they pay attention to me.
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So I'm really interested. That's a new thing in leadership research. They're like, huh.
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Welcome to the Ripple Effect, the podcast that takes you on a journey through the minds
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of Wharton faculty. I'm your host, Dan Loney, and in each episode, we'll be diving deep into the inspiration
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behind the groundbreaking research that Wharton professors have conducted and exploring how
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their findings resonate with the world today. In the corporate world, it's always an interesting period when you're talking about the transition
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of when one leader decides to step aside and another one decides to take over. Most recently, we heard the announcement that legendary Apple CEO Tim Cook was leaving that
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role. And then John Ternus, who is the company's senior vice president for hardware engineering,
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was going to take over that role. But what are the challenges for Ternus and maybe more so other leaders as they take over
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a new role in leading a company? A new paper looks at those elements specifically.
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Katherine Klein is a professor of management here at the Wharton School, and she is lead
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on this new research, which is published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Katherine, great to talk to you again.
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How are you? I'm good. Great to talk with you. Thank you. So take us, I guess, first behind the scenes in why this topic of looking at how these
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two leaders kind of compare and contrast was so important. Great. So I'm an organizational psychologist, and as an organizational psychologist, I'm really
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interested in how leaders change organizations, how they motivate people. We believe that better leaders make their organizations better through their leadership,
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through their leadership style. But it turns out that we have very little research in my field looking at what happens
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when there's a change at the top, when a new leader takes over, and how employees respond
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collectively. And that's a topic I've been long interested in, how organizational leaders change, how
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motivated employees are, and how well the company or organization performs. So I specifically wanted to look at this in the context of succession.
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And so for this research, you used public schools as kind of the vehicle to look at
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that topic. Yeah. So it turns out that, you know, I think one of the reasons we have so little research
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on how employees respond to a change at the top, to a successor coming in, is it's really
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hard to get into a lot of organizations before there's a CEO change and say, what's the
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culture here? What's the climate? And then track it over time following that change.
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And you know, in a rigorous study, you want to study this in a large number of organizations,
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and you'd actually like to compare organizations that don't have a succession event.
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And so it's like, oh my God, how can we do this? I like to do large scale research, but like, where on earth can we do this?
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And at some point the light bulb went off and I was like, we can do this in public schools.
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Because public schools get new principals in the summer, and school districts know ahead
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of time when a new leader is coming in. So we can look at schools and survey teachers before and after a principal change, and we
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can compare them to schools after a principal change. I'm also fascinated by public schools.
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I believe they're super important in this country. Ninety percent of school children go to public schools.
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And you know, the vast majority of employers are actually the size of a public school.
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How frequently then does the vision of the person coming into the role, is it similar
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to the person who is leaving the role or is there a bit of consciousness that they wanted
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to be different than what it was before? I think a lot of new leaders come in thinking, I've got to change this organization.
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I've got to raise performance. I really need to make sure employees are highly motivated.
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I've got to make my mark. And so a lot of them come in with that sense of, I want to make things different.
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Though, interestingly, we'll get into this in my research, not all of them do.
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And sometimes they mismatch with where employees are. And that turns out to be really important.
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Well, right. And that was one of the things I wanted to talk about is the fact that the
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employee, and I guess in this case with your research, they're talking about the
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teachers, of what their expectation is and what their vision is of what they want to
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see come in with the new leader. Absolutely. And I'm so glad we, I'm glad you're honing in on this.
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I'm really glad we studied this because it turned out to be absolutely key. So we asked teachers before the new leaders were coming in, before succession, how much
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does this school need to change? Is this school performing well or do we really need changes around here?
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And it turns out that that's really important. And we have leaders coming in who, when the leaders don't align their leadership with
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employees' sense of the need for change, you run into problems. When successors come in pushing change and employees collectively are saying, you know,
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we're good here. We actually don't need a lot of change. Then that backfires.
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It also backfires when employees are feeling like, man, we really need help performing
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better. And this school needs to change. And the leader's not helping us. So what we find is that successors really need to read the room.
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They really need to understand where employees are coming from. And so then that puts even more focus on the behaviors and the tactics that a successor
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kind of brings to the table when they're taking over. Yeah, absolutely. And what's interesting is we find, we measure visionary leadership.
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Are you inspired by the leader's vision? That has no impact. Like none. Doesn't make it doesn't change anything for anybody.
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What matters is this, what we study is leader coaching and leaders who are high in
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coaching are really focused on improving employee performance. They're giving feedback.
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They're giving suggestions of how to perform better. They're monitoring and supporting employees like an athletic coach in a lot of ways.
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And that coaching has ripple effects throughout the organization. Teachers notice what the principal is doing with other teachers.
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They see what the leader's doing. Coaching is great when employees feel like we need to improve our performance.
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We need to change. Coaching backfires and hurts motivation, hurts performance. When teachers are saying like, again, we're good here.
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We don't need this. So then what did you see in the research about how these schools changed, changed,
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adapted when there was a shift of leadership and whether or not there was that component of working closely with the new leader or not?
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Yeah, it's really striking. So, you know, when we study public schools, people care a whole lot about test scores.
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Like are kids reading? Are kids up and, you know, are they reading at math level?
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All parents want it as a society. We want schools to perform well. And so what we see is what we measure is collective engagement, how focused teachers
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are on doing their work, how energized they are. And that engagement drives performance change.
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So the leadership makes a real difference in making strong changes in long term performance. We see test scores shift and sometimes they rise and sometimes they
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fall. And what's key is how successors are coming in and leading is making these
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changes. I should say also that this is really the first research we have of this
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kind that shows how successors' leadership behavior really changes how motivated
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employees are collectively and how organizational performance then changes. Can you correlate then what you found in this research with what you expect happens
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in the corporate landscape when you have a switch like this? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what the key message, a key message, we have a lot of them in this
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study, but a key message is successors really need to read the room. So we sort of assume that, you know, there's a lot of rhetoric in the leadership
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literature that leaders need to convince employees of the need for change. That's not what we're seeing.
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In the companies, in the schools we're seeing, a lot of times the teachers really
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believe there's a need for change before the successor comes in and the successors
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get it wrong. They don't coach, they don't help. And that's a problem.
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Successors can also get it wrong when they don't coach and don't support.
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So I think the same message applies for corporations and businesses of all types.
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You've got to read the room. You've got to know, you know, you've got to know what employees' appetite for
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change is before you enter because they're thinking about this. They're thinking, I'm getting a new leader.
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How's this going to change? So, and you mentioned about how important schools were to you.
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I was just thinking as you were saying that, not only does this most likely have
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an impact on the relationship between the teachers and the leader at the school,
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but does this have an impact on how a school district thinks about leadership and who they want to have in and how they want to run their operations from school
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to school on a daily basis? Absolutely. So the, you know, coaching and the style of leadership,
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sometimes in the leadership literature it's referred to as, in the school literature, it's referred to as instructional leadership.
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And it's, you know, it's instructional leadership, this kind of hands-on coaching is not a universal good thing.
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Like it can really backfire. The other thing that's really striking about our results is that successors'
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leadership behavior, successors' coaching really matters and changes things.
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When we compare that to incumbents, people, leaders who haven't changed who've been there all along,
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their coaching doesn't have much impact. And so what it's saying to us is when you enter an organization as a leader,
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when you start as a successor, your actions have a whole lot of impact. People are really paying attention to how you lead and you can make things,
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you have a window of opportunity. You can make things better. You can make things worse. When you're established as an ongoing leader,
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it's hard to move the needle with your, with your coaching, with how you interact with employees.
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So bringing it back to your question of how should school districts be thinking about it? You know, when a school district,
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when a school is really stagnant and you're having a hard time, the existing leader is having a hard time motivating people,
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getting improvements in test scores and performance. It's time to think maybe we really need a successor to do this.
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Maybe an incumbent just can't move the needle. So I mentioned the change at the top coming later this year with Apple,
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just, you know, this, this is such a brand new element to the story and ironic that we're talking about
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this as your research is coming out. What do you think are some of the things that you would be looking at as this
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change takes place at one of the most well-known companies in the world? Right. Well, I, it is interesting that it's, it's happening, right?
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As this research is coming out, you know, I think that, um, John Ternus is, he's an insider, right? He's been there for a long time.
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He knows this organization. My guess is he doesn't need a lot of help reading the room.
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He understands what the organization's challenges are, what Apple's challenges are,
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and he understands Apple's employees' appetite for change. So I think he's likely to do quite well along the vector, um,
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and the dynamics I've been describing. Um, you know, when we talk about reading the room and the importance of understanding
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employees' appetite for change, uh, it's also striking that Tim Cook is staying on as executive chair.
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It's sort of, it's a signal that like, things are not going to change, probably not going to change radically around here. Uh, and you know,
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my intuition is that's probably where employees are. It'll probably be slow and steady change. Uh,
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and that's probably appropriate for the culture and the performance of Apple.
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So, you know, I think this is a good call. And in general we know insiders do better.
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I think one of the reasons insiders do better is they do understand the organization. Is there off of this research,
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is there a follow-up that you want to look at next off of this? Oh, we would love to, we would love to,
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I would tell you this was a monumental effort to study this many schools over a hundred, you know, more than a hundred schools over time,
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seven of the largest school districts in the country, but there's a lot we'd like to know.
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I'm particularly fascinated by this notion of the difference between successors and incumbents that like once you're established as an
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incumbent and you're in a good groove, like you're probably going to stay in a good groove. Right.
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That's a good nose. If you're established as you're in a bad groove,
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you're probably going to stay in a bad groove. And you know, that this notion that when a successor comes in,
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their actions land differently, you know, you could be a successor. I'm an incumbent. You come in,
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people are paying more attention to you than they pay attention to me. So I'm really interested. That's a new thing in leadership research.
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They're like, huh, this may land differently if you're, if you're a successor.
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So as you're saying this, and this will be my last question, I promise. But it was an interesting element that you bring up because when you're talking
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about the framework of a school district, I would think in many cases, the incumbent could be somebody who was in another school as the
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leader and is making that shift and probably already has set a framework of how they run.
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And teachers obviously in other schools would know, you know, what to expect or,
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what the next step would be for their school with this person coming on board. Yes. I think you meant the successors. So successors will often transfer.
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Yeah. I think they know that, you know, they know something, right. They know something,
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but they haven't experienced the successor and they're still all eyes are,
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you know, are looking like, well, what is this new leader going to meet for us? Succession creates a lot of uncertainty. You know,
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we're getting a new boss, how are things going to change? So even if we know something, they're paying attention,
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people are going to be paying attention to John Turner. So they're going to be like, okay, he's probably not too radical. Okay.
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Know the guy. We like the guy. He has a very positive reputation. They're still going to be paying a lot of attention to what he does.
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Katherine, always great to talk. Thanks very much for your time today. Great to talk with you. Thank you so much. Take care.
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Thank you. Katherine Klein, who is a professor of management here at the Wharton School.
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