Empson & Morley - Leading Professional People: Recent Episodes
Laura Empson & David Morley
Professor Laura Empson and David Morley uncover the complicated, messy and surprisingly emotional challenges of leading professionals – people like top lawyers, consultants, accountants, doctors, architects, academics, bankers, investment managers, and many more.
The series draws on Empson’s decades of academic research into leading professionals and Morley’s many years of leading one of the world’s largest law firms, together with interviews with leaders of the most successful global professional organisations, such as McKinsey, KPMG, Allen & Overy, and London Business School.
It reveals the realities that lie beneath the ‘professional’ veneer that these highly successful individuals and their organisations present to the outside world and brings together for the first-time cutting-edge theory and first-hand experience to explore crucial leadership questions.
This podcast is for anyone who has – or aspires to have – a leadership role in a law firm, consultancy, partnership, hospital, university, investment bank, media company, investment management, or other professional organisation, who wants to challenge assumptions, develop explanations and explore new solutions.
Laura has been conducting academic research into professional organisations for over 25 years. She is the Professor in the Management of Professional Service Firms at Cass Business School, University of London; Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Law School; and acts as an advisor to many of the world’s leading professional organisations.
https://www.lauraempson.com/
David led global law firm Allen & Overy 2003-2016. Under his leadership, the firm expanded internationally, and revenues doubled from £652 million in 2004 to £1.31 billion in 2016. Profits increased by 175% in the same period. David left Allen & Overy in 2016 after 36 years and now consults on strategy and leadership of professional service firms.
https://www.dhmorley.com/
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What are the parallels between the worlds of espionage and professional services? Laura and Tony talk to David Bickford, previously General Counsel to MI5 and MI6, about his role as the agencies’ Legal Director and Under Secretary of State. They explore how to build trust when professionals are working remotely, how to collaborate when knowledge is shared on a need-to-know basis, and how to stop powerful professionals from going rogue.
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Laura and Tony speak to Katherine White, the first Chief Talent Officer of global executive search firm, Spencer Stuart. They explore the challenges of being a senior leader when you are not a fee-earner, and of leading the so-called talent when the fee-earners themselves do not see you as the talent. Katherine explains how she built trust and influence, and how she learnt to add value quickly while working slowly and discretely to bring about change.
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Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor at INSEAD, is ranked as one of the top 50 management thinkers in the world. Laura and Tony talk to him about the difficult emotions that often stay hidden and suppressed in organisations and individuals, and how leaders of professional organisations can become more effective when they engage more directly with these emotions.
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Laura and Tony are joined by June Sarpong OBE, the BBC’s first Global Director of Creative Diversity. They explore how to bring about disruptive change in a large, complex and high-profile professional organisation, and how to get things done quickly in an environment when decisions are taken slowly. June explains how she managed to do all this as an outsider with no previous leadership experience, but a great deal of broadcast experience.
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Chris Saul is the former Senior Partner of the UK’s most prestigious law firm, Slaughter and May. Laura and Tony explore how leaders use subtle power to build consensus among partners in a professional organisation. They discover some of the secrets of how Slaughter and May has evolved successfully over more than a century, and managed to retain its powerful position at the heart of the UK’s economy.
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Laura and Tony speak to Steve Varley, EY’s first Global Vice Chair for Sustainability. They find out how he was inspired by Greta Thunberg to try to build a bridge between environmentalism and capitalism, and the skills he used to make this happen. He explains how he created this role in EY to place sustainability at the heart of the firm’s business, and how he mobilised both colleagues and clients to build a significant sustainability practice.
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Welcome back to Leading Professional People, the podcast that explores the most crucial leadership questions currently facing professional organisations.
For this third series, Professor Laura Empson, who has dedicated almost 30 years to researching professionals and professional service firms, will be joined by a new co-host, Tony Hall, Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the former Director General of the BBC.
Laura and Tony’s guests include a fascinating selection of senior leaders from professional organisations, including EY, Slaughter & May, Spencer Stuart, INSEAD, the BBC, and MI6.
Join them to explore the challenges, confusions, frustrations, and elations that make professional organisations so difficult to lead and so fascinating to understand.
Follow this podcast so you never miss an episode.
Find out more at lauraempson.com
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Empson & Morley speak to Tony Hall, Lord Hall, about his time as Director General of theBBC, and his many other high-profile roles. They examine what it is like to lead complex organizations with multiple groups of stakeholders under intense public scrutiny.
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How do you build better leaders in a professional service firm? Empson & Morley speak to Russ Hagey, Worldwide Chief Talent Officer of Bain. They explore Bain’s self-reinforcing leadership development system, and the way “insurgency” is both encouraged and controlled to strengthen the system.
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Why do professionals do bad things? Empson & Morley speak to Professor Brooke Harrington of Dartmouth College, in the USA. They explore the factors which drive some professionals to behave unethically, and the organizational and societal factors which encourage it.
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What is collegiality and how does it work in practice? Empson & Morley speak to Jill Ader, Chair of executive search and leadership advisory firm Egon Zehnder. They examine how to create an environment of mutual support, cultural consistency, and equality among peers.
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Can dual leadership be effective and how does it work in practice? Empson & Morley analyse these questions with the help of Barry Devereaux and Catherine Deane, Managing Partnerand Chairof leading Irish law firm, McCann Fitzgerald, who have recently introduced a dual leadership structure.
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How can leaders help their professionals prepare for the challenges and opportunities of post-pandemic professional work? Empson & Morley explore this theme with Nick Owen, Chair of Deloitte UK. They consider how hybrid working is calling into question some well-established “truths” about the nature of professionalism.
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How do you create and sustain collaboration when you no longer meet each other face to face? Empson & Morley discuss this with Kirsten Edwards-Warren, Executive Vice President EMEA for Compass Lexecon. They examine the distinctive culture, systems, and structures the firm has developed to encourage collaboration and how it continued to thrive during the pandemic.
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In a global professional organisation, how do you achieve alignment across national offices? Empson outlines one powerful method – social control – and Morley explores his experience of leading partners through the process of global integration. They talk to Philip Davidson, currently Global COO of KPMG about exercising power while walking the global/local tightrope.
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Empson explains how the culture of partnership is created and sustained while Morley highlights the challenges of growth and scale in this context. To examine the differences and similarities between leadership in partnerships and corporations, they talk to Sir Ian Davis, former Global Managing Partner of McKinsey and now Chairman of Rolls-Royce plc.
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Professional people can be notoriously reluctant to see themselves as leaders. Empson & Morley explore what can be done to support professionals making the transition from full-time fee earner to leader. They examine the myth of “authenticity” with Professor Herminia Ibarra, of London Business School, globally renowned expert in leadership identity and career transitions.
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Empson outlines how a crisis changes the balance of power in professional organisations, but only temporarily. Morley explains the importance of adapting your leadership style as a crisis ebbs and flows. They interview Wim Dejonghe, Global Senior Partner of global law firm Allen and Overy, to find out how he has dealt with the Covid crisis.
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Empson gets a call at midnight from a client asking for advice as a potential leadership coup gathers momentum. Morley & Empson discuss the paradoxes of leading professional people, including the paradox of autonomy and control. When your “followers” don’t like being told what to do, how do you get them to do anything?
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Professor Laura Empson and David Morley introduce their new podcast series ‘Leading Professional People’.
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