UIC Professor Talks Leadership on Up Close Podcast

Robert Liden, a professor at UIC’s Liautaud Graduate School of Business, recently appeared as a guest on Up Close, an online, audio talk show of research, opinion and analysis from the University of Melbourne, Australia. The podcast has an audience in 170 countries and is downloaded about 40,000 times each month, according to the program’s website.

Each episode of Up Close covers a different topic in business and invites guest experts to lend their two cents to the discussion. Liden was invited onto the show to discuss how the leadership style at the top of an organization can determine whether staff have a deep personal investment in their work, as in whether they take initiative, exercise critical judgment and try to push a firm forward or merely feel like cogs in a machine.

Liden is more than qualified to discuss business leadership. His research on management and prosocial motivation helped develop the dialogue on which management styles work best at innovation hubs like Google.

In the podcast, Linden was asked questions like what sort of leadership is necessary to foster an innovative workforce and how does management make work more meaningful for employees. He explains that the benefits of having servant leaders—namely, leaders who share power, put the needs of others first and help people develop and perform as highly as possible—aren’t enjoyed by innovation-driven firms alone. Any organization grounded in strong customer relations stands to benefit from the ripple effects of servant leadership.

Listen to the entire podcast by visiting the Up Close podcast page. Every episode of Up Close is available as a podcast, an mp3 download or as on-demand streaming audio. Episodes are also transcribed to text and offered in both PDF and HTML formats.

regions: Chicago

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