Tuesday, March 15, 2022
4:00-5:00 p.m. ET
Free and open to the public, registration required: https://positiveorgs.bus.umich.edu/events/the-power-of-flexing-growing-into-your-best-self/

Positive Links:

The Positive Links Speaker Series, presented by Michigan Ross’ Center for Positive Organizations, offers inspiring and practical science-based strategies to build and bolster thriving organizations. Attendees learn from leading positive organizational scholars and connect with our community of academics, students, staff, and leaders.

About the talk:

One of the best things you can say about someone is that they continued to grow, develop, change, improve, and evolve throughout their life. Indeed, personal growth is crucial if you want to become like that role model you most admire, have more influence as a leader, create better relationships with those joining you on a task, and ultimately, to bring positive change into our troubled world.

In September, I achieved a lifelong goal of publishing a book, The Power of Flexing, that summarizes decades of research and teaching on this very topic. This talk brings that book alive by sharing some of the stories of people who have put growth prominently on their agenda, suggesting key practices that facilitate growth for anyone anywhere, and highlighting what companies can do to enable the growth journeys of their employees.

About Ashford:

Susan (Sue) Ashford is the Michael and Susan Jandernoa Professor in the Management and Organizations group at Michigan Ross. She served previously on the faculty of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and received her MS and PhD degrees from Northwestern University.

Sue’s passion is using her teaching and research work to help people to be maximally effective in their work lives, with an emphasis on self-leadership, proactivity, change from below, and leadership and its development. She teaches across several programs at Ross, in the Leading Women Executives program of the Corporate Leadership Center, and for various companies. Sue recently published a book that lives out her passion entitled The Power of Flexing: How to Use Small Daily Experiments to Create Big Life-Changing Growth (Harper Collins Business, 2021).

Sue is an award-winning scholar, having published papers in the fields’ best journals in the areas of leadership development and leader effectiveness, middle management voice and issue selling, job insecurity, and individual proactivity (e.g., self-management and feedback seeking). Her research has been summarized as advice for managers in the Harvard Business Review, the Harvard Business Review blog, New York Magazine, and The Conversation. Sue is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and was awarded the prestigious Career Achievement Award for Distinguished Scholarly Contributions to Management by that Association in 2017.

Host:

Dave M. Mayer, Center for Positive Organizations Research Director; John H. Mitchell Professor of Business Ethics; Chair of Management and Organizations Area

Series Sponsors:

The Center for Positive Organizations thanks Sanger Leadership Center, Tauber Institute for Global Operations, Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, and Diane (BA ‘73) and Paul (MBA ‘75) Jones for their support of the 2021-22 Positive Links Speaker Series.

Series Promotional Partners:

Additionally, we thank Ann Arbor SPARK and the Managerial and Organizational Cognition (MOC) Division of the Academy of Management for their Positive Links Speaker Series promotional partnerships.