CLF Virtual Leadeship

The future of work involves a virtual context for many occupations. Hence, a new challenge for leadership coaches is to train leaders to perform effectively in a virtual context. Another challenge for coaches is that there is a need for them to leverage future technology in their training of leaders. The current talk will discuss the fundamental approach of identifying leader behavior (i.e., signals) and establishing causal connections via preregistered experiments. Such behaviors can then be incorporated into a platform that leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to provide real-time feedback to leaders. An interactive dashboard including visualization and storytelling can then provide information on leaders’ performance to improve their leadership signals. This work has practical implications for a broad reach of stakeholders. First, coaches will be able to effectively train current and emerging leaders to work in the virtual setting. Second, future leaders and their followers will benefit from the improved training. Third, the approach aims to substantially reduce discrimination in leader evaluations by creating objective and diverse training data. The current talk will conclude with a set of opportunities for future inquiry for theory and evidence-based practice.  

Dr. George Banks is Chair of the Department of Management at UNC Charlotte. He is also an affiliate faculty member of the School of Data Science and is the Deputy Title IX coordinator for Academic Affairs. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Leadership Quarterly, Chair of the Board of Directors at The Center for Open Science, and co-director of The Center for Leadership Science.