Episode 4. Recent Research on Career Development with Dr. Steven Zhou

Episode Description

What is a calling – and are there any downsides to having one?

In this episode, Hannah sits down with Dr. Steven Zhou, Assistant Professor of Psychological Science at Claremont McKenna College, whose research sits at the intersection of leadership, personality, and career development, using methods ranging from traditional statistics to natural language processing (NLP) and AI. Steven brings a refreshing combination of academic rigor and real-world HR experience to a conversation that covers shared leadership, vocational calling (which has a dark side!), and the science (and skepticism) of leader development programs.

If you're a champion for evidence-backed practice, or the person who always seems to be asking "but what does the research say?" – this one's for you. Follow Steven’s work (or his newsletter) here: ⁠⁠https://www.statslabatcmc.com⁠⁠.

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References and Notes

• Holland's RIASEC Model – The foundational framework for understanding vocational interests, classifying people and work environments into six types: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. Holland, J. L. (1997). Making vocational choices: A theory of vocational personalities and work environments (3rd ed.). Psychological Assessment Resources. →⁠⁠ Wikipedia overview⁠⁠

• SETPOINT Model – A more recent 8-dimension model of vocational interests (Health Science, Creative Expression, Technology, People, Organization, Influence, Nature, and Things) that Steven referenced. Su, R., Rounds, J., & Armstrong, P. I. (2019). Toward a dimensional model of vocational interests. Journal of Applied Psychology. ⁠⁠ https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000400⁠⁠

• The dark side of vocational calling – The landmark study Steven cited as the paper that kicked off research into the downsides of calling, based on qualitative interviews with zookeepers across 157 U.S. and Canadian zoos. Bunderson, J. S., & Thompson, J. A. (2009). The call of the wild: Zookeepers, callings, and the double-edged sword of deeply meaningful work. Administrative Science Quarterly, 54(1), 32–57. ⁠⁠https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.2009.54.1.32⁠⁠

• Unanswered callings – The study Steven described showing that individuals who feel called but are not working in a matching role report worse outcomes than those with no sense of calling at all. Gazica, M. W., & Spector, P. E. (2015). A comparison of individuals with unanswered callings to those with no calling at all. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 91, 1–10.⁠⁠ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2015.08.008⁠⁠

• Stretch Assignments – A concept in both career development and leader development referring to tasks or roles that are more challenging than current competency but within reach. → A recent HBR article: Gilmartin, S. K., Brunhaver, S., Jordan-Bloch, S., Gall, G., Simard, C., & Sheppard, S. D. (2025, May 28). The right way to implement stretch assignments. Harvard Business Review.⁠⁠ https://hbr.org/2025/05/the-right-way-to-implement-stretch-assignments⁠⁠

• Developing leaders via experience – Research Hannah mentioned relevant to Steven's discussion of stretch assignments and the conditions needed for real development to occur. DeRue, D. S., & Wellman, N. (2009). Developing leaders via experience: The role of developmental challenge, learning orientation, and feedback availability. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(4), 859–875.⁠⁠ https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015317⁠⁠

• KSAOs – Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other Characteristics. The standard framework in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology for describing what an individual brings to a role.

• Kravis Leadership Institute (KLI), Claremont McKenna College – The leadership research and development institute where Steven works, led by some of the most prominent names in leadership research. Steven mentioned their applied student leader development work incorporating stretch assignments, reflection, and mentorship. →⁠⁠ KLI website⁠

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Music: "Feel Good (Instrumental Version)" by PØW⁠ via Epidemic Sound

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Episode Transcript

Hannah (00:08)

Hey, y'all. Welcome to Office Hours at the Alignment Lab, where we explore what it really takes to align values, strategy, and behavior at work. I'm Hannah Yung-Boxdell, an organizational psychology practitioner, strategist, and systems architect. In Office Hours, we take an honest look at the human side of work and offer practical takeaways for evaluating what matters, what doesn't, and how to focus our attentions accordingly. Whether you're mid-career or in the executive suite,

The things you'll hear about in Office Hours can build careers and organizations that are effective, resilient, and aligned with what matters most to you.

Hannah (00:47)

Hi, and welcome to Office Hours at the Alignment Lab. Today we're talking about career development and how our guest, Dr. Steven Zhou, approaches this topic as both a researcher and professor. So a little about our guest. Steven is an assistant professor of psychological science at Claremont McKenna College. His research and teaching focus on

Quantitative methods and data science apply to organizational phenomena such as leadership, personality, and career development. He uses methods ranging from traditional multivariate statistics to natural language processing, NLP, and AI with an eye toward producing research with real world impact for everyday leaders, managers, and employees. I love that. Welcome, Steven.

Steven Zhou (01:36)

Thanks so much for having me, Hannah.

Hannah (01:38)

Yeah,

glad to have you here. So we'll just jump right into it. Career development, which we're talking about today, is a pretty wide ranging subject. And today, we are breaking it down to talk about this subject from an academic perspective. So when it comes to career development, there's often a of debate around where the responsibility sits, with the employee, with the manager, the organization. So what's your opinion on this question?

Steven Zhou (02:06)

Where does the responsibility sit? That's interesting.

You know we talk a lot about person organization fit, In organizational psychology. We talk about what do we know about the individual and to what degree do they fit the organization or the job or the environment or any of those questions that they are involved in and how does that lead to positive or negative outcomes, subjective or objective career related outcomes. I would have to say I think the reason why there is a distinction sometimes between

organizational psychology and organizational behavior management is that micro versus macro.

lens, right? As a psychologist, I am trained to look more from the micro lens. I'm trained to look more on who are you as an individual? What's your personality, interests, knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics, KSAOs, right? And how does that set you up well or not well to fit into different types of jobs, organizations, or environments? We are not as much trained, although occasionally, you know, there was like an organizational development class at the graduate level in my program in the IOPHD.

But we're not trained as much to focus on the macro level of how do we design an organizational context or design a job or an environment to accommodate a variety of different persons. Certainly from the HR perspective, that's where that gets really important, right? And so I guess I'm rambling a little bit, but I guess I'd like to say that I do hope that I'm looking at it from both lenses, especially given my own personal background as someone who started my career working in human resources.

and data analytics before shifting towards a PhD in IO psychology, where in the HR side, that was our question. That was our question on how do we develop jobs and career pathways and so forth for individuals from a more macro lens, from a business down lens as opposed to a individual up type of lens.

Hannah (04:02)

I love it. I love it because it's, I think it's like so many things, you know, it's kind of a both and. That's really interesting to hear about, where you're sitting, whether a practitioner in HR or, now as a researcher, approaching it from bottom up versus top down. Super interesting. Okay. So as mentioned in the intro, one of your areas of research focus is leadership.

⁓ dissertation explored negative effects of shared leadership, great read even for those unfamiliar with computational modeling. And it recently won a SIOP achievement and best paper award. Congratulations on that, by the way. So for listeners unfamiliar with the term, can you explain what is meant by shared leadership?

Steven Zhou (04:37)

Thank you.

Sure, this does pivot a little bit from the career development conversation, but I do like to think my various streams of research are connected in some way, right? But to directly answer your question from the beginning, shared leadership is a concept of having two or more individuals share in leadership influence. Now that can be any number of different structures and in some ways part of the reason shared leadership has been difficult to study is that the definition does vary quite bit.

and how it's operationalized varies. you could, for example, have co-CEOs. You could have two people who share in leadership. They're both the top title of an organization or subgroup of an organization, and so they have to share everything together. You could have a more rotational type environment where maybe you have a project lead who's leading a project, but it gets handed over to a different project lead at some point along the span, and then it gets handed back and things like that.

rotational style, can have more distributed style where you have, this is more common in nonprofits where you have a board of directors some board of directors have a clear precedent, they call the shots, but many are distributed. They have somebody focusing on the money, somebody focusing on the vision, somebody focusing on this, somebody focusing on that. So a little bit more distributed in that sense. So that's idea. So sharing of leadership influence and purposely keeping it broad and vague

because I acknowledge there's a lot of complexity in how it's operationalized in the real world. What does that actually look like? And then it blends quite a bit with just general teamwork theory. And actually I have a different project I'm working on with some colleagues that are actually trying to purposely blend the two and have come up with a better conceptualization of shared leadership as a process of teamwork. So it's integrating the teamwork processes, literatures that have been around for decades.

You know, the thing I'll say about my dissertation is

It was first inspired by a lot of my work with nonprofits that had a shared leadership structure where they didn't have a single person in charge. They actually had intentionally a set of three or even seven board of directors that all shared equally in leadership influence. And there wasn't one person that was like, they are in charge of the organization. I worked with a number of nonprofits that did that, had that style. And so it was inspired by that. It was also inspired by recent reviews of shared leadership research. It's been around for

few decades now and so there's been meta-analyses in the past five years or so but all of them have essentially focused on the positive effects of it and that's why you heard the title was negative effects it was looking at the flip side right. We know from decades and hundreds of years of leadership research that leadership that's right of teams research that teamwork doesn't always work right there's downsides when you get people together to work as a team in addition to upsides the idea of process loss if anyone knows

that from the teamwork literature. I basically took that and said in my dissertation we should be applying the same theories and the same logic to shared leadership teams because they are a team at the end of the day. And so what are some of the process losses that might occur in a shared leadership context when you're intentionally sharing leadership influence? And we use competition modeling or I use competition modeling to explore a relationship conflict, role conflict, transition,

and things like that.

Hannah (08:09)

Okay, so I feel like we could just spend the whole episode just on this. so thank you for that kind of very high level introduction. But given that, you know, we have been seeing a rise in shared leadership in both research and practice in recent years. What are the implications of this model on worker career development?

Steven Zhou (08:31)

So.

I don't actually know of a lot of research focusing on shared leadership and career development directly. I can think of a couple of examples, and I don't remember the exact citations off the top of my head, but I can think of a few examples So when we talk about career development, a lot of what we talk about is stretch assignments. So if you've heard of that term, this idea of how can you practice something that is harder than what you're used to doing, but is within the bounds of what you

possibly could do. So as developing a career means looking for stretch assignments that can help expand your KSAOs and allow you to build a career in some direction or whatnot. And so oftentimes in leadership we use actually use the same language and leader development we use the same language of what are some stretch assignments you can take to challenge yourself to practice some leadership skills or behaviors that you otherwise wouldn't have the chance to practice. And so what I'm getting at is again not remembering

this excitation, but there are some examples of thinking of shared leadership as an opportunity for stretch assignments for both leader development and concurrently career development. And it does make sense if you think about it because if you have a very hierarchical organizational structure where there's only one CEO at top, well, you're not going to have very many opportunities for many people to take stretch assignments to be in the CEO type role or to enact CEO type behaviors. But if you have a more shared leadership structure, then

It creates more room for people to enact leadership behaviors, to be able to practice taking stretch assignments in leadership type roles. So that's probably one connection point. that is really interesting, but I haven't seen direct longitudinal studies of. Maybe someone out there listening will actually design a study and start doing it, right? I can actually just off the top of my head envision a pretty cool project, assuming you can get access to employees and data, right? But some kind of project where you set up

tracking employees to take on shared leadership roles and to what degree does that then influence their development of KSAOs over time and of course their downstream development of their career.

Hannah (10:42)

Yeah,

I would love if that was an outcome of this episode. We'll have to see, but I've kind of thrown you into it bringing these two things together. You recently shared on LinkedIn, I believe that's where I saw it, your review on the topic of vocational calling and its implications for careers. So again.

first off, what is vocational calling? And then what are some of the implications of the current research?

Steven Zhou (11:07)

Yeah, thanks for asking. Now that's one of the areas I'm most passionate about within career development research. You know, there's a lot of things you can do in career development research. I've done some stuff on the personality side, so vocational interests. If anyone's familiar with Holland's RIASEC model or more recent advancements like the SETPOINT model, basically different ways you can think about what are the specific stable vocational interests I have and how does that then help me understand what kind of jobs I should pursue. So I'm very interested in that space.

And

there's lots of other spaces, you people have done a lot of great work in career transitions. I think there's been a lot of recent work on the transition to retirement. I'm fascinated by that topic. I am unfortunately nowhere near retirement, but it is a really interesting topic and I love this catchphrase that I hear people using of, it's not that you retire out of your career, it's that you retire into something. So there's been some really cool stuff on, what does it mean to retire?

Is it really a loss of identity? We hope not. It's actually a discovery of a new identity in some ways. networks, social networks, all of this stuff. then here's the part where I have been most active is this idea of vocational calling. Now I'll give you a broad definition to start and I'll preface by saying this is highly debated, So the broad definition is a steep sense of meaning and purpose in your work motivates

to support some greater good and derive from an internal and external summons. I'm butchering the exact words just a little bit, but that's probably one of the long-standing definitions. Let me break that down into some components. So first, deep sense of meaning and purpose in your work. So there's something more to your work than just making a paycheck meet. And so I think there's something there that anyone listening would probably agree, okay, yeah, there is something that happens where you have a deeper sense of meaning and

purpose to work. Now where it gets tricky is that that gets conflated easily with some other definitions and constructs in career literature, for example, meaningful work. So there's some conflation of definitions there and so there's been some good words trying to separate and disaggregate the two. The second thing about towards some greater sense of good, that there is something greater than yourself, beyond yourself that you're doing this for. You could say that it's for my family, it's for my community, or even just broadly it's for the world and society.

as a whole. That's another core component of a definition of calling. The tricky thing there is how do you actually define that and how do you measure that? You know, we're used to measuring psychological constructs like sense of purpose and sense of meaning. We're used to that even though of course you can debate all you want on how accurate are surveys. That's a whole other topic. But we're just not as used to measuring these concepts like do I think I'm doing this for a greater good?

Right? Almost like beliefs rather than psychological feelings. So that's another area. And then the third component of that definition that's been fascinating, it can be traced back through a little bit of the history of how this construct came about. And that's this idea of internal versus external summons. There was a really cool review paper a few years ago that really contrasted the two and talked about how maybe they're two separate constructs entirely. But basically this idea of

More historically, I think the earlier definition was more external focus. That something outside of you has called you to this work. Hence the actual word calling in the actual construct. You can say that that's something spiritual, that's something like my family's called me to it, my culture has called me to it. Those are different ways to think about external summons. But then probably, maybe it's, I want to say the past 15 years or so, I don't know exact dates of course, but then there came this other conceptualized

that you can also be internally summoned, that it could be who you are, like my skill set is calling me to this work. So it's similar but it's different, right? And so there's been a lot of cool stuff on are these two, you know, two sides of the same coin or are they completely separate constructs? So that's my rambling on the definition of calling. It is messy and it's one of those things that I love studying because it's really good to talk about because

Hannah (15:05)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Zhou (15:22)

we can all sit down and agree, okay, there is something to be said about when you feel like there's something deeper to your work. But when you then try to take the next step to approach it scientifically and to take it empirically, it just kind of breaks down. I love that, actually, because it's so messy and it's so difficult to wrap your head around, but it forces you to think, is my opinion. So that's where the definition of the construct is. And I'll end with this and happy to elaborate, this is kind of, actually kind of like shared leadership

Hannah (15:38)

[laugh]

Steven Zhou (15:51)

Probably for a long time the focus is on the positive effects. Find a calling, pursue it, and leads to positive outcomes. And obviously I'm oversimplifying. The point is it wasn't until more recently that scholars are starting to say, wait a second, it's not always a good thing to focus on your calling. And perhaps that can lead to burnout if you get over-focused on it.

lead to being taken advantage of. There's some cool papers on how people who tend to feel called to an industry tend to be in the same industries that experience a lot of burnout and a lot of people being taken advantage of. for example, nursing and healthcare and social services, amazing important work, but employees tend to overwork in those industries. And then just even the disappointment that can come if you identify a calling but feel like you can't find it

or can't find a job that meets the calling. Once again, kind of an interesting phenomenon where the same industries where people tend to feel called to also tend to be the more competitive industries, like entertainment or something like that, where it's very hard to find to get a stable job that can just meet basic human needs. So that's kind of where the research on calling is and the areas that I'm really interested in.

Hannah (17:10)

I love it. And I also just one of the things that this subject brings up for me is that, saying or kind of adage, right? Like "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life," which I really dislike. because, I don't think it's quite realistic or really true maybe. But then also I think there's a lot of times,

this whole conversation can really create pressure to have a calling, right? but not everybody necessarily feels like they have one or even maybe wants one. so I think there's a lot, there's just so much to unpack.

What are some of when it comes potentially the dark side of calling. Can you say anything more about where that research

Steven Zhou (18:01)

Yeah, so, you know, it's been probably the paper that really kicked it off was actually about 15 years ago. I think it was in 09 and Bunderson and Thompson. And it was a fascinating study on zookeepers specifically. So they interviewed a bunch of zookeepers and they highlighted through these qualitative interviews that exact phenomenon that I cited of people who feel deeply called to a particular work and as a result feeling like they have that responsibility to do everything

to do whatever it takes and to really overwork and burn out as a result. And so that's really what kicked it off. It probably didn't really take hold until then, maybe five or six years later. So personally, I started seeing like the boom in this area in the late 2010s. So the papers that I cite when I do research in this area really started in 2015 and now to present. So the past 10 years or so. And really there are multiple

streams here. So there's been more more research on that burnout side and the overworking side. And then there's been more and more research on the meeting a calling side. So probably one of the papers that I often cite and the one that I wrote about on LinkedIn was a study that looked at individuals who feel a sense of calling and found that those who felt a sense of calling but did not feel like they were in a job that matched their sense of calling reported worse outcomes

overall, like subjective life satisfaction, blah, blah, outcomes, than those who felt like they had no calling whatsoever.

So it was worse to say I'm called to something but I'm not working in it than it is to say I have no purpose in my work Which is that was really shocking and that was about eight or nine years ago. And I think that was a big component of it as well They also did they did report though that those who found a calling who? Felt like they had a calling and found a job that met it reported the highest out of highest outcomes overall now of course. That's just one single study and there's been some debate over the over the sample size and other small metrics within this

study of course. But it does I think help with this takeaway that it's not that calling itself is a bad thing like you should avoid you know asking questions about calling. I would encourage it. Not saying everyone has to have one of course but it's good to ask questions on.

you know, is purpose, like you're spending, what's the metric, you spend a third of your life in work, right, like 90,000 hours or something like that. So if that's the case, then yeah, I hope you're asking questions on you're doing something that's meaningful. So it's not bad to ask those questions, but.

it can go down some bad paths, I guess is really the takeaway there. And so I guess when I started doing this research maybe three or four years ago when I started diving into it as a grad student, the angle that I took and am taking is the side of let's kind of go back and say what is calling in the first place? And the paper that I published a couple years ago that really, at least for me, is kind of where I'm building a lot of my research stream on is this idea that we need to complex

if you will, our understanding of calling itself. To move away from a, we'll call it a more singular approach that you focus on, here's one job I'm called to, that's what I'm gonna pursue and I need to go for it right away and that's my job for my life. Again, exaggerating just a little bit, but I would say implicitly sometimes we assume that. If we ask questions about calling, we kind of assume, yeah, find the job, pursue it, and that's your calling.

And so we challenge that.

in this paper by saying, maybe not, it's not just a single job, it's a broad calling. It's quite possible that people might just say, oh, I'm called to help others. That's about the broadest calling you can possibly have. But I guess the point is to contrast that from saying, I'm called to be a ER room nurse in this specific area. Again, not saying it's bad to do that, but you can see how having a broader calling just opens your options more. You have potential different paths you can go down to meet your calling, right?

We also included time as a component. We argued that just because you identify a calling doesn't mean you're meant to pursue it right away. That maybe it's something that you actually have to wait a year, two years, five years, 10 years. We use an example of, hey, I'm called to be a teacher, but I'm going to go do this first to build experience or even just to literally save up money so I can go back into an industry that tends not to pay as well. And that's a perfectly acceptable and perhaps even encouraged way of identifying a

and the last thing we suggested is that your calling doesn't have to last a super long time. That it could just be for the next year that's what you're called to, the next two years, five years, ten years, and so forth. But there's a potential end point to it. And so just helping people try to think about, okay, I'm called to this, and not saying you have to say, okay, I'm called to this for exactly the next ten months or something, but just acknowledging that there may be an end point and that your calling might change and redevelop and might be completely

different one after a year.

Hannah (23:10)

I love the just kind of bringing in so much more nuance into this And thank you for highlighting some of those really practical takeaways It's it reminds me what you're saying is like this, casting a little bit of a wider net in the approach, trying to be a little bit more adaptable in.

in this kind of discovery process reminds me a little bit of how strategic workforce planning is done, you know, in HR and organizations where, a lot of times traditionally it was like, okay, we're doing succession planning for like a specific, role right. Whereas, there's also another approach you can take when you actually try to develop skills for an entire,

role family that's of strategic importance right and so I'm seeing a connection in terms of where the conversations are on that topic

Okay so again kind small pivot but one of ⁓ the mantles you've taken on is kind of like a science communicator or ambassador right

So as a science communicator, in addition to being a researcher, what's a concept or a facet of development that you wish was more widely understood?

Steven Zhou (24:22)

Thanks for calling me that. I don't know if I can really take on that mantle, but I certainly try to. I do believe that we are discovering really helpful concepts within organizational psychology, but we're doing honestly a pretty poor job of communicating it to everyday managers and practitioners. And I just want to acknowledge it's hard, right? And I don't pretend to do it perfectly, and I'm sure there are listeners out there who actually disagree, who say, yeah, you're oversimplifying it.

you forgot this nuance or you're recommending something that's not going to work for everyone. And the thing is, well it's not. Our favorite phrase in IO psychology is the phrase "it depends." So of course it's not going to work for everyone and of course I don't have space in an 800 word blog post or in a quick podcast to explain all the nuances or caveats. I have to give the one sentence takeaway that's going to be wrong for a lot of people.

but hopefully right for a few. So I just want to acknowledge how difficult that is and I am fully aware of the challenges of doing so and aware of the mistakes that I can make in doing so that I will look back and say, now that I know this, I wouldn't have said it that way. But that's the reality of communication. We should be doing what we can. At least that's my position on it.

To directly answer your question on what's a specific aspect of development,

would say that there are scientific approaches and a lot of what people think is scientific is masked by entertainment. Now, I am not trying to say that there's a formula for development. there's no formula. There's not like, this is exactly the way to develop. At the same time,

Hannah (26:07)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Zhou (26:09)

There are so many programs out there, I'm not going to name any because then I'll get in trouble, there are so many programs out there that sell themselves on leader development and career development and so forth that we use the catchphrase sometimes, they're nothing more than leader-tainment, that they try to show you're developing as a leader, but really they're just making you have a good experience and right afterwards you say, yeah, that made me feel like I'm a better leader, but there's no downstream impact on

Hannah (26:14)

mm-hmm

Steven Zhou (26:39)

like a year out, are you actually changing your behavior as result? Do you actually have a noticeable growth in your KSAOs as reported by others? Not just my own self-reported KSAOs, but others can affirm that you have gotten better at this area or you've changed in this area. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'll say this, but listen to this out there, if you are being sold a development program, ask for

evidence. There should be evidence. There should be ways to show empirically that there is growth, long-term downstream growth in an individual using both self and other supported data on an individual based on what they experienced. Now the place where I then say there is no solution or formula to this is that it's actually really hard to do this. It is really hard to tie an experience in a workshop to downstream behavior

Hannah (27:32)

[laugh]

Steven Zhou (27:39)

impact and change across time. Hard in the sense of just from a research design perspective, like think about trying to find a group of individuals and then following them over the course of a year or longer, getting them to supply both self-report and others report data, disaggregating the effects from your workshop from other effects that maybe, you know, maybe they were already self-motivated to develop. So of course they're going to develop as opposed to if you force someone to take a workshop, are they going to develop or not?

Or they happen to go to another workshop as a result and that you had no idea about and that's confounding the results of your study, of your analyses. So, I'm not trying to oversimplify to say that the study is really simple, like everyone should be doing it, but I am trying to say that you should be like that there should be some attempt to provide this type of scientific evidence to support some sort of development exercise. So, I guess, yeah, I would say I wish people knew that

we do want to see the gold standard even though we recognize the gold standard of research is very hard to achieve but we should see some attempt to achieving it to support any sort of platform being sold for development purposes.

Hannah (28:48)

Have mean, I feel free to say no to this question. So have you seen organization, anyone doing this who does this pretty well or say like someone wanted to be able to on their own kind of capture this. Do you have any suggestions for how they might approach that?

Steven Zhou (29:07)

Yeah, I don't know too much about on your own because one of the other fundamental aspects of development is feedback. It's having a feedback loop so that you're not only self-reporting and self-assessing, but you're getting other support and you're discussing, you're getting advice. It's a process and it's an intensive process. So the idea of one's self-developing, there's research on it to be clear, but I would not go there as my go-to direction on

individual development or career development I wouldn't go to the self piece as a starting point. So then yeah, so what are the different programs you can get involved in that provide that sort of mentorship and guidance and so forth? I don't...

I am not as familiar right now honestly with the current workforce world and employee development and what the suppliers are. I am a little more familiar on the AI side, that's because I'm interested in that area. there's, know of groups that are trying to develop these AI chatbots for career development and leader development. So I'm aware of a lot of these platforms. It's still very early, so I can't speak to what the evidence is suggesting. But you know, these are good people, good scientists doing really interesting work.

everyone knows AI is changing by the day at this point. So we'll see where that goes. So I'm a little more familiar with that side. I am also a little more familiar with the student leadership side, you know, being a college professor and being deeply invested in higher education. There's a lot of work on college student leadership development. In fact, one of the reasons I chose to be here at CMC, Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, in addition to a great school, balanced environment, love teaching, love research, all of these other pros to it, but we have what we call the Kravis leadership.

Institute here. And for those who aren't familiar, ⁓ it's run by Professor David Day, Ron Rigial, Jay Conger. Anyone in IOS psych research will probably recognize these names as probably the foundational names behind leadership research. Rigial was on the Bass and Rigial Transformation of Leadership, right? David Day is probably one of the world's best known leader development experts out there. And so Kravis Leadership Institute here really invests in student leadership development. You know, I'm not directly involved

them all that much. I am running the more quantitative lab here, but I just sit in on some of their meetings of course because of my experience with leadership, primarily with leadership measurement.

And so, you know, we actually just recently got out of a meeting with some students doing some research on leader development and they do some really cool work here on developing stretch assignments, on assigning self-reflection prompts for people to think about what are the specific behaviors I have done or can do to develop as a leader, getting

mentorship and feedback in response to their written responses, all of these best practices that we've heard of in leader development and you know there's a room of 30 students here at CMC who get to go through that for two, three, four years of their college career. It really is a huge benefit to them. They're getting the best of the best leader development work.

and I'm aware that KLI, Kravis Leadership Institute, is connected with a number of other college leadership development, leader development programs across, I think one of our close partners is the one over at Rice University and there's many others that have different frameworks but are also trying to do that same thing, apply the best practices to student leader development.

Hannah (32:28)

Love that. as someone who does work with students, some of them may be seeking to enter the workforce for the first time. Some of them may be seeking to do maybe a career transition. Where, if there's any commonality, where do you see most of your students having the most questions when it comes to their career development?

Steven Zhou (32:52)

So my students here primarily at Claremont are undergraduate students. I teach in the undergraduate school. And so we tend to have, I guess, unquote, traditional foreign college students. And so the questions here are primarily, all right, I'm majoring in this. How do I get a job? How do I start a career in this field? Our students here tend to be very motivated and very focused. And so they tend to come in and say, I want to pursue this career. I want to pursue this job. And how do I get there?

It actually baffled me our Career Center did like a resume development workshop, know, pretty classic thing, and opened it to our first year students. This was like third day of class, fall semester, and 90 % of first year students showed up and developed like and wrote a strong resume. This is first year freshmen, was like straight in college, day three, and they have polished resumes already. And they already kind of, many of them already know like this

what the internship I'm applying for this summer and so forth. You could actually raise an eyebrow and like, ⁓ that isn't always healthy, right? It kind of goes down to our earlier conversation, right? Maybe it's an over obsession on career path that that narrow focus that doesn't lend itself to flexibility. So I kind of feel that a little bit at times, but I guess point being most of the students here, yeah, they have a strong sense of I want to do this or at least I want to do one of these.

things, how do I get there, what do I need to do, who do I need to network with, what kind of internship do I need to pursue. So very practical in that sense. And what's really interesting is that you have that environment in the context of a liberal arts school. Claremont is unabashedly a liberal arts school. Students have to take first-year writing seminars, first-day humanities seminars, we have a fair number of general education requirements, and so we're not, our curriculum is not pre-professional, but our culture is pre-professional.

Hannah (34:44)

interesting.

Steven Zhou (34:44)

My colleagues

and I here actually have an interesting debate over that and there's an interesting tension, right? Because the liberal arts environment is ask hard questions, read, think, discuss.

and philosophize in ways that may not be directly like this is what I'm supposed to do behavior-wise, right? But then the pre-professional culture is write this resume, get this internship, apply for this job. And so these two tend to be at odds with each other sometimes. And I personally really like that. And I'm probably the oddball here where I don't take one side or the other. So a lot of my colleagues, without naming names, of course, take one side or the other.

No, we need to be liberal arts focused like it's not our job to get students jobs like we focus on helping them think critically and the others like look I don't know they didn't get any job So we're gonna get them all the networks they want like we're get them the internship and so forth and I'm right in between like I went to an undergraduate liberal arts school I know how valuable and liberal arts education was half of my College career was taking classes like sit and talk about Dante's Inferno for two hours like that was the entire class

So I did that and I found that it really helped me professionally. You wouldn't think so, but in ways like how do I think about this data analysis? How do I think about writing this policy and human resources? So I really stand for the in-between. Yes, we are liberal arts. We need to focus on critical thinking and our reasoning and logic and so forth, but not lose sight of the purpose of that is to help them learn how to apply that in their day-to-day lives when they actually are working a career.

my position on this.

⁓ Why did we get here? I'm sorry, this feels a little off topic, but...

Hannah (36:24)

I did,

Maybe, I did ask about where your students were coming from when it came to this topic. And the thing is, I love the both and I think I probably would be there with you. And also just because I'm just completely unsubstantiated take here, right? But

Steven Zhou (36:30)

Okay, there we go. A little bit.

Hannah (36:45)

as someone who's been in the workforce and just the need for, ⁓ you need to understand at the end of the day, how to get a job, you know, some resilience, some of the rules unspoken or otherwise, but then also the critical thinking, the adaptability, you know, like in how you solve problems and how do you develop ⁓ in, a learning environment.

There's a few more questions. I always like to get at the end, but one If you were to make, one or two suggestions for either team or organizational leaders who want to develop their people more intentionally, what would they be?

Steven Zhou (37:25)

would say...

do what we call gap assessment, gap analysis, or needs assessment. There's lots of different names for it. It's very common, I see, and maybe some people will listen to this and be like, no, no, no, we already know to do that. But I do see it's very common for people who work in leader development to think, I'm going to go ahead and say, this is what we need to see. This is what everyone should do. This is what I'm going to teach. But what you're missing when you do that is asking, well, where are people at in the first place? Where are they at? What are their current cases?

KSAOs knowledge skills abilities and where do they need to be and that "need to be" questions should be contextualized right in this particular company industry organization what not where do we want people to be and where are at right now that's what I mean by gap what's the gap what's the need and how are they gonna fill it and so that would be my

first recommendation that don't just jump straight ahead to, hey, I read this amazing book by this amazing leader saying this is the five principles of how you are a good leader. That might be true for that leader in that context for that person with that background. That doesn't mean it's true for your people with their context and their background in your situation. Right. And so you can certainly learn from it. That's where that's where I'm willing to say except like all these pop psychology books out there.

They may be helpful, but a good scientific leader, coach, whatever you want to call it, should first ask, where are my people at? Where's my group, my team? Where are we at? And what situation are we in? What's the need? And then how does that map onto maybe these pop psychology books, maybe these theories, and maybe these pieces of scholarly evidence, but first identify where is that need, where is that gap?

Hannah (39:14)

Yes, yes, take stock of where you are, otherwise how do know where you're supposed to go? How to get where you're supposed to go, you know? 100%.

Okay, so before we wrap up, I'd love to switch gears for a moment. I have three questions I like to ask every guest about their values. Ready?

Okay, so what's one value of yours that shapes how you make decisions?

Steven Zhou (39:41)

I do hope that a lot of what I do and what I decide so-called around that idea of purpose that ⁓ there is a reason that I'm trying to do things and I always try to keep that broader reason in mind and when I say broader, like it could be fairly downstream but not like too far downstream I guess so you know I'm not trying to over

overhype everything until I want to change the world. I don't want to put it that way. I think that's too broad and not feasible for most people, right? Like the vast majority of us are not going to change the world. But I do want to say, look, if I'm teaching this class, right, I just want to look beyond a little bit. I don't want to just say like, hey, I need to get this curriculum in their heads and I want to, I need to assess whether not they learned this curriculum. I do want them to be able to say no.

this class instilled in me a sense of learning or desire to learn or, you know, okay, I'll use this example. I'm teaching an advanced stats class right now, right? it's really fun. Like I'm teaching graduate level statistics to undergrads. Like they're learning path analysis, structural equation modeling, factor analysis, multi-level modeling at an undergraduate level. And so I want to ask myself, what's the purpose here? And most of them are not, many of them aren't going to grad school, although a vast majority are because of the nature of the

Hannah (40:50)

amazing.

Steven Zhou (41:00)

elective like no one's gonna sign up for a advanced stats elective unless they are kind of thinking of grad school. So there's that but but even then you know not everyone's gonna go off to grad school and even if they go off to grad school they're gonna learn this material in much greater depth like I'm giving a broad brush overview of some of these methods that's all I can really do. So I guess what I'm saying my takeaway my purpose there is to get them to ask questions on what does it mean?

to empirically support something. And I try to instill that throughout. When we talk about a factor analysis, I want them to know it's not just you follow the point and click and you type this line of code and that's what you get. I want them to be able to think critically about what is a factor in the first place? We actually had a discussion debate over do latent factors exist? And if you think about it, there's nothing more than a blob of shared variance. That's it.

We try to name the blobs and we try to say that there's some meaning to them that supports some grand theory that we have on how humans behave But they're just blobs of shared variance at the end of the day now on the flip side Okay, so now you're saying that like because we have nothing more We don't have a measure of personality that personality doesn't exist. No, of course. We know that personality exists We just can't really measure it. So all that to be said I want them to ask

the hard questions so that whether they go to grad school or not, the next person who tells them, hey, I found the study that proves that the good leaders are the ones that are extroverted, they can ask the hard questions of what do mean by extroverted? What do you mean by proves? What do you mean by leadership? Where's the sample from? What kind of analysis did you do? Why did you choose that analysis? How did you get your data? How did you clean your data? How did you screen your data? So that's my long-winded answer of purpose and why.

I think that's important anything that we do so that we go beyond just the simple this is the task and we ask like what's the long-term impact of this task?

Hannah (43:04)

Right, connecting things back I do think that's so important and I'm really happy to hear you talk about that.

Okay second question can you share something in your life or career that changed once you aligned it more closely with your values?

Steven Zhou (43:24)

That one's harder for me.

I tend to make micro decisions. kind of go with the flow a little bit and try to say, okay, what are the different open doors in front of me? And kind of tiptoe through each door to see where they lead. That tends to be the case. And then the biggest decision I've made so far, honestly, at this point in time when you're asking me this question, was the decision to uproot our family from Virginia, Northern Virginia near DC where we were.

the time to take this job in Southern California. That was a massive decision. Even then there were a lot of tiptoe steps to get there and unfortunately I can't give you an answer on right now because I'm actually in the throes of like navigating yeah that's a big transition for us and what does that mean professionally and personally and the navigating the challenges of that. So I actually don't have a good answer for you on like how am I looking back and saying that aligned with purpose and that aligned with

sense. you know I can think of, obviously I have made big decisions you know in the past but I think a lot of them were, well they were come from an overflow of a series of smaller decisions down the

Like, decision to go to grad school came from an overflow of, I'm working in HR, I really love doing research, start doing some research on the side, really miss the teaching. Well, where does that lead me? That leads me to looking at graduate school options. And...

Okay, I guess I'll say this I think that the alignment there really does help because I look back now and I say I'm glad I did that I went down a traditional human resources job first before pursuing my PhD Because it just gave me so much context and insight into this is what the working world is like And if I'm prepare to study the working world, I should know what it's like And so that to me was a big moment of alignment where I could have gone straight to the PhD program, but I'm

really glad that I didn't.

Hannah (45:30)

Wonderful, We'll have to bring you back in the future and you can see how this transition's going. ⁓ So, okay, last question. What's one thing that you are currently experimenting with or maybe reconsidering in your own life or work?

Steven Zhou (45:38)

Yeah.

Yeah, don't know, and it's not so much reconsidering, but definitely experimenting is running the research lab. That's probably the hardest thing about my job here, and also most rewarding to be clear. know, with an undergraduate research lab it's just different. I'm used to working with graduate students where, you as a PhD student you're required to do research 20, 30 hours a week. Like that's your job to do research. And even if you're not intending to go down a faculty career, there are plenty of careers you can go down that are

research-focused applied research careers and so forth. Especially in I.O. Psych, we have lots of those amazing job paths and career paths that many friends went down. point being, like, research, research, research, that's what you do as a graduate student. That's not what you do as an undergraduate student. And as an undergraduate student, to be clear, these are very talented undergrads, so there's that. But, you know, first of all, there's just, learning, they're still learning so much stuff, even though a lot of them are better program, like,

I have computer science majors in my lab who are much better programmers than I am. So it's not so much they lack the skills, but they just need training and they need experience, right? And then the other thing is like research is one component of what they're supposed to do as an undergraduate student, right? They also have, of course, all their classes, but then other extracurriculars they're involved in. so it's, so.

even a really good undergraduate researcher is spending what, maybe 10 hours a week of their work time in research at most. And so it's just very different as a result. So not saying they're worse, it's just that it's very different. And it's very rewarding because I get to work with more students, which is that's the cool thing. know, PhD students, like, you're around for a while and so you only end up two or three with them and you're kind of with them for a long time. ⁓ With these undergraduate students, you know, I've got 10 different students.

Hannah (47:31)

You

Steven Zhou (47:36)

I'm working with at different stages in their undergraduate careers. So that's really rewarding to get to meet a bunch of different students, get to invest in them.

But admittedly, it's quite tiring. Yeah, it's managing 10 different people and assigning them tasks and helping walk through issues and all this stuff. Again, I'm grateful to have really talented students so I can tell them, hey, go run this analysis for me. But then the follow up on like, here's how you interpret it, here's how you best position it in a paper, that's a lot of work and guidance that comes from me. And that's what I'm learning. It's hard, it's rewarding work, but I haven't figured it out yet. ⁓ I am running my lab.

in a way that's probably going to be different than if you talked to me even six months from now. Like I'm probably running it differently. I've learned, I've definitely made mistakes on how I run the lab and I'm definitely thinking, okay next semester I'll do this piece differently or that piece differently. And that's the place I'm experimenting the most in terms of how do I structure a research lab and how do I get it going.

Hannah (48:35)

So exciting

and different to hear about for me, you know, not running a lab. Amazing.

So again, Steven, thank you so much. I really appreciate you joining, sharing your insights, dropping all this knowledge today. I'm already plotting, you know, how I can bring you back on here so we can have a deeper discussion of maybe shared leadership. But in the meantime.

For listeners who would want to connect or follow your work, where should they find you?

Steven Zhou (49:04)

Yeah, my lab website is probably best, www.statslab.cmc.com.

Hannah (49:09)

Okay, okay,

Steven Zhou (49:11)

Thank you so much, Hannah for having me. It was pleasure.

Hannah (49:11)

Okay. Yeah, yeah, thanks

again for joining. It's been fantastic talking to you.

Hannah (49:19)

That was Dr. Steven Zhou giving us a peek into some recent research on career development, as well as some insight into working with students. I appreciated the point that Steven made about how development is tricky for individuals to accomplish on their own. It reminded me of a 2009 paper, I to look it up, by Scott DeRue and Ned Wellman that examined the development of leaders through

experiences, right? So experiential development. And one of the findings of that paper was that feedback is a key part, a moderator of developmental challenges, i.e. stretch assignments, and specifically that access to feedback offsets the diminishing returns of development that individuals trying to do development on their own may appear to face. So it's not to say that we can't do any self-development, but if you are

feeling unsupported, it's worth maybe investing some effort in finding or developing ways that you can get feedback. feedback doesn't only have to be from your manager. Obviously, that's a great place to get some. you can also get feedback from peers, mentors, other informal leaders. There's multiple ways to be able to get feedback on the development that you're doing.

Another highlight.

It wasn't the point of the episode, but I really, I loved seeing philosophy, maybe human authenticity, meet advanced statistics. I think philosophical discourse belongs everywhere, including in our everyday learning and work, right? so the part where Steven contextualized,

factor analysis and specifically called latent factors blobs of shared variance, it's the kind of thing that makes science or any specialized knowledge, right, feel somewhat more real, less serious, maybe a little more relatable or accessible. Maybe not super accessible to someone who doesn't know anything about variance and what we're talking about in that point, but

When you're learning about something that has a lot of rules, like statistics, this type of perspective, this type of allowance can be such a breath of fresh air. I loved it. That and the part about liberal arts versus pre-professional culture, that one I feel like is a little bit more universally understood. And...

Basically just the need that Steven was talking about in the need to balance both to bridge the gap so that we have workers who can both think critically and get stuff done.

I'm curious anyone out there listening, what resonated in this episode? Did it feel interesting, accessible, practical to you, or am I just a huge nerd? No, wait, I am a huge nerd.

Am I a lonely nerd? I don't think so. Please let me know if you can drop a comment or send me a message at officehours at alignmentlab dot online. And if you appreciated this conversation or it reminded you of someone who might, please share it with them. And please subscribe and rate the podcast on Spotify. I would really appreciate that. We're still very new here and I think you will too.

Until next time, stay curious.