James Bailey

Kira:

Hello everyone. Thanks for attending the George Washington University’s Online Healthcare Engaged live lecture webinar, with Professor James R. Bailey. I’m Kira, your moderator for today.

Kira:

Before we begin, let’s go over some housekeeping items. Our event is currently in listen-only mode, so questions or comments, please be sure to send them my way via the Q and A window. It is the purple icon on your ribbon at the bottom of the screen, just click on it to activate. And other functions available to you are the technical FAQs icon, the slide media player, booking an appointment with the admissions coaches, and the super file if you’d like to read up on your presenter’s full bio for today.

Kira:

Now, I’d like to introduce you to our presenter, Dr. James R. Bailey, Professor and Hochberg Fellow of Leadership Development at the George Washington University School of Business, and fellow in the Center for Management Development, London Business School. He has also taught at the University of Michigan, New York University, IMD and [Hilton T. 00:01:14] School of Economics.

Kira:

Dr. Bailey is the recipient of many [inaudible 00:01:18] distinctions, including four GW School of Business Outstanding Faculty Awards. He has been named one of the world’s top 10 executive educators by the International Council for Executive Leadership Development. He has published over 50 academic papers and case studies and is the author of five books, including the award winning, bestselling Organizational and Managerial Wisdom, and the forthcoming, Lessons on Leadership.

Kira:

He has designed and delivered hundreds of executive programs for firms like Nestle, UBS and Goldman Sachs, and appeared on a broadcast program to major television networks, as well as cited in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes and Washington Post.

Kira:

Professor Bailey has served as a dean, department chair and program director during his 25 year academic career. Welcome Professor Bailey and your audience, and I hope you enjoy today’s lecture, mini-lecture.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Great. Thank you very much. Kira am I being heard all around?

Kira:

Yes. Loud and clear. Thank you.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Okay, good. Just wanted to make sure. Thanks everybody. I’m always a little bit intimidated by bios, introductions like that, because it sets the bar high. I would prefer somebody say, “Well, he’s okay.” And then maybe I can exceed expectations, which of course is a classic leadership lesson, is to under promise and over deliver. But let’s not focus on that, let’s move forward.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

I’m going to tell you a little bit about myself before we dig into our topic for today. Actually, my father was a high school principal, my mother was a teacher, and all five of my older sisters became teachers, so this is something that is very, very much in the family blood if you will. I wanted to be actually four things my entire life. One of them was a professional baseball player, and I was drafted by the Kansas City Royals out of high school, to be a standup comedian, and I paid my way through undergraduate being a standup comedian. The third thing which I was never able to achieve, which was a talk show host. I’m young enough maybe that’s going to happen. And third is being … Or the fourth, being a professor.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

This is not a job to me, this is a calling. This is something that I wake up every day and look forward to doing. It is in my fiber, and I think that you’re going to find that of a lot of the faculty here, is that they feel the same way. This isn’t just something they do, this is something they are.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

As we move forward here, we are going to have a time for questions and answers a little bit later, but feel free to ask them via the chat function as we’re going along. Kira will forward those to me. And I want to say one thing before we start, is that the interface that we’re currently using, this Presentation Manager XD, while it’s perfectly fine, what we actually use for the online classrooms here at the university is Blackboard Collaborate, and it adds enormously more functionality than does this particular platform. For example, I’d be able to pick up a … You could follow my cursor. I could draw things on a screen. I can create tables. I can create figures. Somebody can raise their hand and I can put them on screen so that everybody sees them through their video, assuming they are running video from their own computers so that everybody can see them while they ask questions. I can do polls as we’re going along, so it’s a much more interactive system. It’s much more purpose built for teaching. And so just letting you know that you’ll have a more sophisticated interface were you to enroll in the program, which of course we all hope that you do.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

I’m going to spend about 25 minutes or so talking about the new neurology of leadership, that in the last few decades that we’ve been able to discover a lot of things about the human brain and its functioning, mainly through PET scans, positron emission tomography. And I think when we look at this there’s a lot of parallels between it and leadership, and I want to try to work those through today.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

And so, we also when we think about leadership, we need to think about followership, and what it is, to means to be a follower. And when we do that we have to ask some pretty important questions. And I think the most fundamental question for a leader to ask him or herself is, “Why should anyone want to follow you?” Now, not why should anybody have to follow you, that doesn’t interest me. That’s answered by the organizational chart. We all have to follow someone, because they’re our boss. The more important question is want there. Why should anybody want to follow you? And that’s starting to introduce a theme that I want to run through this, which is the idea of want, which is an emotional reaction. I’m going to make the case here several times that leadership is an emotional relationship.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

This is a very important question to ask yourself, but you begin by asking this question. What do you want as a follower from a leader? What do you want? And when you have an opportunity, hopefully when this program is over and you’re taking a few minutes to reflect on it, is ask yourself that question. What do you want from a leader as a follower? And just start jotting them down, and I think you’ll find that it’s going to be things like transparency, developmental opportunities, meaningful feedback, constant but not overdrawn challenges and broad information about what the strategic vision and mission of the company is. What’s going on in cross-functional exposure? What’s going on in other departments, marketing, or project management, or assembly, or whatever it happens to be? You want to be acknowledged for your work. You want somebody to take time to talk to you.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

I think that you’re all going to write down pretty much the same thing. And then the question becomes, this is what you would want from your leader. When you’re in a position of leader, you are obligated to deliver the same thing to your followers, the people who choose you to be their leader. If what you want is this constant, and productive, and meaningful feedback, well you need to take time out of your day and do it. It’s something you want, why wouldn’t you give this to someone else? Why wouldn’t you offer this to someone else? You would want it, why wouldn’t you do it for them? It’s the Golden Rule of leadership.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

And so this becomes a really important question, and in my classes I push the students to address this question. We have exercises around that. And so this obviously is a bit of future looking, for those of you that are going to enroll, and again, I’m sure all of you will, into what actually happens in the classroom.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

And then this really is I think a followup of from that, is that we choose our leaders. Let’s just focus on that word choose for a moment. We choose our leaders. We are not appointed our leaders. We’re appointed a boss. We can do nothing about who our boss is, originally. Over a period of time of course, we might be able to move in the organization so that we get the boss that we want. But we don’t always choose our boss and we don’t choose our families. Right? We choose our friends. And just like we choose our friends, we choose our leaders.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

And how do we choose them? What’s the base of how we choose them? We choose our leaders based on how they make us feel. That’s where I’m going with this. That’s the theme that I’m building on.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

And here we have an interesting little slide. I hope you can all see this well. Yes, this is your brain. Yes, this is your brain on my PowerPoint. And let me kind of work through just a little bit of basic neurology here, is that the brain is oftentimes called the tripartite brain, because it has three central ares to it, all of course that interact, but they’re functionally different. If you look at the tan area in the middle, that is oftentimes called the reptilian brain and it’s called the reptilian brain because it is identical to the brain in a reptile. Now, what this does is oversee low-level functioning, critical functioning, low-level functioning. For example, breathing, eye blinks, galvanic skin response. All important … Temperature modulation. All important stuff. Okay? But for our purposes we’re not particularly interested.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Now, if you look at that purple area just outside of the tan area, that is oftentimes called the mammalian brain, and as you might guess, it is common, it is shared among all mammals. This is oftentimes called the limbic lobe, is its formal name, and so that’s how I will be referring to it as. And the limbic lobe is responsible for processing emotions, so it’s the area of the brain that determines which particular neurochemical to release depending on stimuli, external stimuli as well as internal stimuli. And so this is where emotion is recognized and then pushed through the rest of the brain, and of course, through the entire endocrine system all the way down to our toes.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Now, these colored areas at the top here, the blue one, the green one, the kind of orange-ish one, the yellow one down below, this is the neocortex, and this is what we normally think of when we think of the brain. This is the cognitive centers of the brain, the thinking brain if you will. This is higher-order functioning, problem solving and so forth. This has to do with basic cognitive activity. This has to do with the interpretation and the production of speech. This has to do with the integration of visual stimuli into the cognitive areas in order to identify what those stimuli are and so forth. This is the thinking brain, and this is what we normally think of. And of course, this is unique to primates and a few other creatures, particularly ocean-based creatures like dolphins.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Okay, so we’ve learned a few things about the brain over the last few decades that we didn’t know before, although perhaps we could’ve speculated on that. The first is emotional primacy. That is that we feel before we think. We feel before we think. The idea here is that every sensory receptor in your system, everything, whether it’s visual, whether it’s auditory, whatever it is, every stimuli that you receive runs up your central nervous system and first goes to the limbic lobe, the emotion centers, before being pushed off to the cognitive centers. It goes to the emotion centers before being pushed off to the cognitive centers. Meaning, that we feel before we think, that emotion is prime in our processing of information. All of the data, all of the stimuli that our body is being bombarded with at any given moment.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Now, this makes some sense from a design perspective, and from an evolutionary perspective and from a survival perspective here, is that we need to first react to something emotionally in case it’s dangerous. This is a survival activity. If you hear a loud noise, as opposed to scratching your head and think, “Hm, I wonder what that is. I think I shall investigate.” Well, the building might have fallen on you by then. We hear a loud noise, boom, there’s a huge emotional response to it, a ton of chemicals are dumped into the system and a fight or flight reaction ensues, so that makes sense. That’s the first element of emotion, emotional primacy.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

The second is, now if you look at that purple area, the limbic lobe, the emotion center, there are more connections, and these connections take the form of dendrites, dendrites are literal physical structures in the brain, and dendrites are what neuro-electric chemical signals travel along to connect the different areas of the brain. This is just a communication channel if you will, these dendrites. There’s more dendrites going from the limbic lobe, the emotion centers, to the cognitive centers, the neocortex, that blue, green, orange and yellow areas of the brain, around on the outside, more connections going from

the emotion centers to the cognitive centers than there are going from the cognitive centers to the emotion centers. Let me say that again. More connections going from emotion to cognition than there are connections going from cognition to emotion.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

The effect of this is, is that we can be hijacked by our emotions. The brain is arranging its communication channels and it’s neuro flow from the emotion to the cognitive more than the cognitive to the emotion, and so we can be hijacked by our emotions. And I think all of you have been hijacked by your emotions. You could be especially worried about something, and all of a sudden you can’t think straight. That’s not an uncommon experience. You can be upset about something and it influences your cognitive functioning.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Here’s one example, have any of you ever been in love? Anybody? And specifically, have you ever had a crazy love? My experience is, everybody in their life at some point has had a crazy, the crazy love. And we have been overwhelmed, we’ve been hijacked by this emotion center of our brain and we’re not actually thinking about this in a rational way that, “Hey, this person is wrong for me. This is bad. This whole relationship is self-destructive.” Our friends see it. Our friends are telling us this, but we can’t see it because we’ve been hijacked. Pathos is more powerful than logos in the human brain.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

We go to the second one, emotional contagion. It turns out that emotions are contagious. I don’t mean just identifiable, I mean contagious. Certainly I can look at somebody and say, “You know what? They’re angry. That person is angry. They’re clearly angry.” However, I also, if that person is important to me, if they’re let’s say, a colleague that I work with, I actually start to feel the anger. I don’t just recognize it, I start feeling angry too. The limbic system is oftentimes called the interpersonal limbic system, because my emotions don’t exist in isolation. My emotions affect you. My emotions are having an impact on you, and vice-versa, to the extent that I start feeling your emotions or you start feeling mine.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

This is particularly important when we refer to the dominant person in the room. And by the dominant person in the room, I mean your boss. Your boss is the dominant person in the room, because he or she determines what it is that you’re going to do, what assignments you have, which clients you’re assigned to, and of course your performance appraisal, your pay and ultimately whether you have the job or not. This actually becomes a wonderful leadership instrument that I’m going to talk about here, right now, under positive emotions.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Very, very clear, people in good moods make better decision than people in bad moods. Big surprise right? There’s no real surprise here. We know that. You know that. You are not at your best when you are in a bad mood. You are at your best when you’re in a good mood. As a matter of fact, when we’re in good moods, we have better memory, we have better recall, we’re better able to detect patterns and co-variations in data plots, when presented with problems we come up with more solutions, more effective solutions and more creative solutions.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

It turns out that a good mood is an intellectual salve. It helps the brain function. It releases chemicals. Good moods release chemicals like dopamine, and dopamine is the crack of the brain, and it feels good, and it actually helps those dendrites pass along the electrochemical signals to different areas of the brain, meaning that our brain is operating more wholistically and more ranging, more complete, in a wider fashion if you will. And so I’m going to lead here to some conclusions on those in a few moments.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

The third is neurogenesis. Now, this is a really, really big one, because we now know that you and I, even as adults, and some of us older than others, even in adults can develop brand new neural tissue, brand new neural tissue. That’s amazing. Nobody ever expected that this was possible. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been told my whole life that I’m just killing brain cells.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

There’s a great episode of The Simpsons where Homer actually has to problem solve to save Marge. And what he does is that balloon forms about his head and his brain’s in there, and he looks up and says, “Look brain, you don’t like me and I don’t like you, but let’s just save Marge and I’ll go back to killing you slowly with beer.” That’s what we’ve been told. It turns out that’s not true. It turns out that we can develop new neural tissue, brand new neural tissue, real actual substrate structures of the brain, even as adults.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

However, this is inhibited to the extent that a chemical called cortisol is in our system, has been released in our system. And cortisol is what the brain releases, what the limbic lobe releases when we’re under stress. It’s sort of the stress chemical. You know exactly what this feels like, you know how it makes you feel a little bit jumpy, pit in your stomach, all the rest of it. That’s cortisol that’s been released in your system. Now, if cortisol is present, we can’t develop new neural tissue. Now, that’s big, right?

Dr. James R. Bailey:

And this has a lot of implications for leadership in terms of how you lead and how you manage. Oh, and by the way, it takes as long as five hours for cortisol to be flushed from your system. This stuff is toxi and it doesn’t go away quickly.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Let’s move on to a few other things. And you’re going to see, I’ve got a bunch of slides here, but I’m not going to go to all of them, because that would take too much time. I always throw a bunch of slides up just in case something dawns on me and I want to go somewhere else, and so, but we’re not going to do that.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

To me, what this leads to is what leadership is, or a way that we can capture what the central elements of leadership are. And the first is that leaders, and notice the formula, this is something us academics have to do. We have to break … It’s actually in your contract when you get a PhD, is you have to break things down into formulas at every possible opportunity. And so even whether it’s love, whatever it happens to be, we got to come up with a formula for it. So anyway, leadership is a function of resonance. Resonance, think of the idea of sound, and when two different sounds are in harmony, when they’re composed, that is a perfect resonance, those two sound waves are combining to create

something unique, and something beautiful, and something that could not have been created unless there were more than one sine wave, so that’s resonance. Leadership is a function of becoming in resonance with the people around you. Now, how does that happen?

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Resonance is a function of two things. First off, overall positive emotional tone and synchrony. Let’s walk this through. Overall positive emotional tone. This, and this is a piece of gold folks, this is at the very, very basic level, this is Leadership 101, your job as a leader is to provide, is to create, an overall positive emotional tone. That’s your job as a leader. This now, you’re creating a place where people are in a good mood, and as we’ve already established, people in a good mood function better cognitively. This isn’t just about creating a humane workplace, although that’s true, this is actually improving performance. This is actually making people better at their jobs.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

And one of the ways that you do that is make your emotion contagious. By you setting that positive overall emotional tone every day, and I don’t care how you feel, I don’t care whether you’re nervous, I don’t care whether you feel crappy, you’ve got to get over it because you’re having this contagious infection on everybody else in the room. You really need to know where this comes from and that’s at the root of what you do. And it’s hard work. This is the hard work of leadership.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

I oftentimes say, and I meant to put this down below, that this is a … By the way, a slide deck I put together for a presentation I did for a board of governors not very long ago, and I meant to, and I just wanted to throw it back up and work it through again, but I’d rather put my other definition of leadership down below here, which is, leaders are energy givers and stress absorbers. That’s what leaders do, is they give positive energy to the people around them and they absorb people’s stress. They say, “No, let me carry that for you.” And by taking that stress away, you’re helping to flush that cortisol through the system more quickly, and therefor to help the person get back to optimum functioning sooner.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

A question was asked here, where does the Resonant Leadership Model come from? This comes from a book written by two close colleagues of mine called Primal Leadership, and that’s by Dan Goleman of Emotional Intelligence fame, and Richard Boyatzis. And so I worked with both of those guys on several different projects. This is where they worked through the formula itself. And obviously they’ve got chapters and chapters devoted to this and I’m not going to that.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Resonance is a function of overall positive overall tone. That’s job one as a leader. If you start to do that tomorrow, you will see an impact in the performance of your people. And second is synchrony, and I’m not really going to go too deep into synchrony. Here’s what it means, is you get it, you get these people. You understand what’s important to them, and you help them achieve those goals. And here’s the simple part, if you don’t get me, if you don’t know what’s important to me, I will not choose to follow you. Period. Full stop. This is not some social science mumbo jumbo I’m talking about. If you do not get what’s important to me and where I’m trying to go, that means you’re either daft, that is you don’t see

what is going on around you, or you don’t care. And if those two are the case, then I’m not going to follow you. The second thing that leaders really need to do is to understand their people.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

An example of synchrony would be, for example, as I’ve gotten older in my career, older, as my career has advanced, as I’ve aged like a fine wine, my priorities have changed. I don’t want to do the standard journal articles and books anymore. As a matter of fact, as you’re going to see in a moment, I’m going to report some of my research which is now appearing in places like Harvard Business Review, California Management Review. I write a lot for Forbes, for Fortune, for other kinds of places, so I want to change my focus of who I am and where I’m going, my identity, I want it to evolve from what it was in terms of more or less your traditional professor publishing academic journal articles and books and the like. If my department chair and my dean don’t see that, or when told about it don’t respond to it, they aren’t in sync with me.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

If they kind of look at that and say, “Well, wait a minute, why don’t you just go publish more journal articles?” Well, that’s silly because there’s different kinds of contributions to a university. I want to be a practitioner-facing professor, not an academic-facing professor. And if they don’t get where I’m wanting to go with my career, which is very valuable, and very valuable to the school, if they don’t get that, then I’m not necessarily going to follow them.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

When the dean says, “Okay people, here’s an initiative. We need to put ourselves behind this.” I might not do that, because he doesn’t get where I’m trying to go and is not providing any opportunity for me to try to get there, so that’s perhaps an example of this.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Okay so, as I said, I wanted to discuss a little bit of some of my own research and then we’ll wrap this up. In a recent paper, not so recent now, I guess five years ago, in Harvard Business Review, I used the term renewal. And the idea here was sources of renewal. What do leaders need to do to renew themself? It’s a hard job. Being a CEO is a lot of work. Being an energy giver and a stress absorber is a lot of work. It’s exhausting. Leaders need to renew themselves. They need to find ways to help flush that toxic cortisol from their system. So what do they do?

Dr. James R. Bailey:

And so I interviewed a group of executives, 217 in this particular study, and I asked them some simple questions. I described what renewal and renewal activities were. 79% of them … Program mentor. Okay. All right yeah, give me … I’ll get to that in just a couple of minutes here. Sorry, Kira’s communicating with me via a different chat modality. 79% of these executives report engaging in renewal activity themself. I’m going to give you examples of some of that renewal activity in a moment. They said, “Yes I do this sort of stuff.”

Dr. James R. Bailey:

50%, only 50% report encouraging their reports to engage in renewal activity. Only half of these executives tell the people around them, “You guys should do some of this stuff well.” And only 35% of

them have championed or advanced meaningful company programs around renewal, stress reduction and the like.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

I found this kind of fascinating. These executives basically were saying, 80% of them were saying, “This is important for me to do as a leader.” And only 35% of them said, “I’m going to do something to help the other people in the organization engage in these kind of activities.” I thought that was a little hypocritical to be honest.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Now, what kind of renewal sources are we talking about. Using the same data and in a separate piece, basically I broke them out into four different categories. I’m not going to go too deeply into these, but the first is health. They’re engaging in exercise, they’re eating right, they’re drinking lots of water. By the way, water is really important and you should all drink 36 ounces of it a day.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Sleep, and goodness gracious people, sleep is critical here. As a matter of fact, sleep deprivation is worse for your health than is obesity. That is clear at this point. Most people are running on too little sleep. The average person needs eight to nine hours a night. If you’re only getting six and seven, and I realize there’s some variation here, don’t mistake me, I realize there’s some variation, but the vast majority of us are getting too little sleep, and it is having effect and you are taking years off your life, just as if you were obese. Take sleep seriously.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Removal activities. And my favorite example of a removal activity is like hobbies. If you have a hobby, for example, my hobby is cooking. And so I put some music on and I start cooking. I don’t use recipes, I just start going, and I will look at the clock and it’s an hour later and it feels like it’s been five minutes to me, because I am totally immersed in this activity, which actually removed me from the sources of stress in my life and was very, very renewing. Another removal activity would simply be putting on your Beats and getting into some deep house and some EDM, just letting it carry you away.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Third being intellective. These are things like puzzle solving, whether there’s crossword puzzles, whether it’s Wordscapes or Word Stacks, any of these kinds of activity, that again, the intellectual engagement there completely sets aside the struggles and the stresses at work.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

And then third is sort of … Or fourth rather, fourth is introspective activity. And this is things like meditation, prayer, mindfulness. And so these are important kinds of activities that we engage in and that are known to contribute to the renewal activity.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Okay, this one, I really loved this study. It’s coming up in California Management Review, is we just simply went to executives, this is a different group of executives. 27 different countries represented in it. And we ask them this question. We said there’s three kinds of labor. There’s intellectual labor,

thinking about something, and that’s hard work. There’s physical labor, and that doesn’t mean necessarily lifting and carrying things, but we’re talking about energy during the course of the day, getting up, walking around. There’s a lot of physical to even an office job, even a corporate job. And then there are, there’s emotional labor. And that’s managing your own emotions and managing the emotions of others.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

The executives in this study reported that 59%, of 100% of their day, 59% of it were spent in emotional labor, that’s what they did more than half of their day. Only 31% of it in intellectual activity, and 20% of it in physical activity.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Now, when we looked at middle managers and asked them the same questions, only 22% of their day do they say they spent in emotional labor, 60% is intellectual and 18% is physical.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

In other words, executives are spending a lot time in emotional labor than are middle managers. And I would put something to you right now, that’s why they’re middle managers, is that the allocation of labor, emotional labor, during the course of their days is not compatible with rising to the level of leadership. And when asked to look at leaders in the organization, they actually also reported that they believed that the executives, the leaders in the organization spent more time in emotional labor than the others.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

And then one that I just finished and is under review, is I gave people just a simple question. Think back over your life and career to who has played a profound role in shaping who you are, and helping you develop into the person you wanted to be. Think of a specific story that encapsulates his or her impact.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Now, I’ve had people write this up, and then we’ve coded them, and we’re looking for thematics. We’ve used a software program. I can’t remember what it’s called. [Ready 00:37:06] or something, which is a sentiment analysis program that’s gone over all these to identify the themes, the words and the clustering of the words around those particular stories. And what we’re finding is that these coding programs, as well as the individuals, we have people coding these as well, identify more emotional content in these stories than they do intellectual or physical.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

When you and think about who’s most important in our life, we are not thinking about how they helped us think about something, how they helped us advance intellectually or physically. What we think about is how they made us feel, which comes back to my central premise here, which is that leadership is an emotional relationship.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

When I teach one of the things that I try to do is to make it as real as possible, in as much as taking things like the studies I’ve just re

and then going to the data that was covered, and trying to make an important point about who they are and what they need to have the impact that they want to have in the world, that would they need to do, very practically and simply, is to create a positive emotional tone every day. And to be in sync with and to understand the people around them, that’s it. That’s the primary work. And that day-in and day-out you are providing that positive emotional tone and you are absorbing the stress of the people around you. And if you want to be a leader someday, if that is your desire, then that’s how you have to allocate your time and think about who you are.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

That’s what I’ve got for you guys. I hope that you found this at least somewhat interesting. And so right now I’m going to turn this over to my colleague Debra Saxe who is going to give you a little bit more program information. Thanks for your time everybody. I’m going to sign off here in just a moment.

Debra Saxe:

… Thank you very much Dr. Bailey. That was fascinating.

Dr. James R. Bailey:

Great.

Debra Saxe:

And one of the people you mentioned actually, I had a class with, one of my courses-

Dr. James R. Bailey:

[crosstalk 00:39:39]

Debra Saxe:

… For my MBA. I wanted to talk about the application requirements. We do talk about this on the phone in more depth individually, so I invite anyone to contact one of us, one of the admissions advisors and talk to us individually, because we will tell you exactly what you need.

Debra Saxe:

But overall, we should be a couple slides over. We have an application. We send you the link. It is online. There is a non-refundable application fee of $80, but for having attended today, you can have that waived, you just have to, we’ll have you on our list, but just let us know as well and we’ll give you a code to use. The application is pretty straightforward. There are a couple of parts where we can help you if you have a computer glitch, which sometimes happens.

Debra Saxe:

The requirements that we really have, are that you have at least a bachelor’s degree. Many of our students, if not most, and it could easily be most, have several degrees actually. And we look for transcripts from all of those, at the time that you apply they don’t need to be official. Just going down the list, the GMAT or GRE, we need where applicable. There are conditions under which people can have that waived and there are a couple of ways to do that, and that’s an individual discussion.

Debra Saxe:

We need your resume or CV. Also, we need one letter of recommendation that comes from a professional source. You place someone’s name and contact info into the application and the request goes out immediately, so I strongly recommend you talk with someone very early in the process. That could slow down your application considerably.

Debra Saxe:

And we need a professional statement of purpose. This is not a personal essay. And we send out exact instructions, but it is short, about 500 words. There are a couple of other optional essays if you have any specific circumstances you can use that.

Debra Saxe:

And I have here a line, in the case of board certified doctors, we need board certification, which actually helps you to have the GMAT waived.

Debra Saxe:

The TOEFL or IELTS is a test of English as a foreign language for those who are international. If you were educated overseas and you are already a permanent resident or citizen of the US, we don’t need that. And there are some other circumstances. So again, that’s worth an individual conversation.

Debra Saxe:

And someone had asked how long it generally takes to hear back from an admissions advisor. We’ll give you email addresses, it usually is within a day or so. Sometimes within a few hours. And I … The application fee at this point is usually non-refundable. I’ve told several people to wait on that until seeing this. That’s something though we can at least look into.

Debra Saxe:

The other thing that we wanted to discuss today very briefly, is that GW, the George Washington University is very much a military-friendly school. It is part of the core culture of the university. And if any of you are in the military or are veterans, we actually have a terrific webinar that we did in 2019 that explains how close that relationship is and how it can benefit you particularly. We’ve always had a lot of members of the seven branches of the service actually. And we are consistently ranked as a top military-friendly school by G.I. Jobs Magazine.

Debra Saxe:

And in fact, we’re one of the few schools that has unlimited Yellow Ribbon funding. And if you know what that is, great. The Yellow Ribbon funding, that goes along with the GI Bill, and it does mean that you don’t have to wait for someone else to graduate for a slot to open up. We have a lot to offer, for military and non-military members of our student body, and our alumni. They actually have an office on campus.

Debra Saxe:

The next slide has our names, and I will read them out, and it has our email addresses. They are [Rajiv Sharma 00:44:52], [Sahar Sharazi 00:44:53], Shernaz Kennedy and me, Debra Saxe. And you’ll see that what we have in common is that our email addresses are first initial, last name @programs.gwu.edu.

Our phone number, for most people toll free is fine, (888) 989-7066. And if you are local or if you’re calling from overseas it’s 1 (202) 572-9386, and we can answer a wide variety of questions.

Kira:

Wonderful. Thank you so much Debra.