The Michigan Model of Leadership was launched more than a decade ago when University of Michigan business experts saw important elements missing from traditional management theories.

Built on a model the Financial Times called one of the most important in history, the theory about organizational culture is now being put into practice in classrooms and boardrooms across the world.

On the latest episode of Business & Society, professors from U-M’s Ross School of Business discuss the model’s relevance and importance, particularly in times of great change and volatility. The guests are Gretchen Spreitzer, Monica Worline and Mike Barger.

“We have it embedded in many of our executive education courses. The executives who are in the courses really resonate with it,” Spreitzer said. “I was in India last month working with a company and they got so excited about the Michigan Model of Leadership. This is their high potential program, but they want to cascade it throughout the other levels of their organization in terms of using the model to help create the right kind of culture that they want for their organization.”

“When leaders find the space in the model where they’re most comfortable and they most feel strength, they’re also quite often seeing their blind spot because it will be the pulling or competing tension on the opposite quadrant of the model that they will most often overlook,” Worline said.

“I think AI will do a great job of helping us kind of aggregate and collect the hard data, but I think we all subscribe to this notion of business being ultimately a liberal art,” Barger said. “It’s about people. It’s about, you know, engaging them and helping them kind of feel like it’s all of our responsibility to get on board with this thing and move the organization forward.”

Business & Society is co-produced by Judi Melena Smelser of the Ross School of Business and Jeff Karoub of the Michigan News office. The audio engineer is Jonah Brockman. Listen to all episodes of the podcast.