Humanities education builds formula for better leaders

People are more than their resumes. Leaders are more than the so-called hard skills that they may have picked up in business school or in software development programs.

Marisa Ronan saw that firsthand. She left a career in academia for the corporate world, and now she is working for Microsoft in Dublin, Ireland. At the multinational technology company, she leads global leadership development for cloud business operations.

Ronan is far from a techie but that’s OK. She develops programs at Microsoft to help people become effective leaders. It’s based on a deep understanding of human behavior, motivation, and culture. Humanities are at the heart of her work. 

Ronan is one of 11 professionals, some from mega technology companies, who spent the past nine months with the Virginia Tech Institute for Leadership in Technology, studying history, religion, philosophy, creative writing and more - all with the goal of growing their leadership potential and purpose. The program offers liberal arts classes, taught by Virginia Tech faculty and other humanities experts, entrepreneurs, and evangelists.

Graduating fellows earn an executive leadership certificate from Virginia Tech. The program, held both in person and virtually, is believed to be one of the first executive leadership credentials in the nation that is grounded in the liberal arts and humanities.

This spring, the professionals, including executives from Boeing, Amazon, and many other companies, graduated as members of the institute's inaugural class. Three members of the cohort, all Boeing employees, are Hokie alumni.

Since the institute’s start in September, Rishi Jaitly, its founder and professor of practice at Virginia Tech, said he has had inquiries from people around the world, asking about the concept and themes of the venture.  

“The humanities are worth the hype,” said Jaitly, an entrepreneur who has in the past held executive roles at Google and Twitter and presently is a senior advisor to OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization. “There’s a huge appetite for this mission we’ve embarked on. To me, it indicates that we’re not the only ones who believe that in this AI-ascendant era, the skills and sensibilities that emanate from the humanities will be a superpower.”

Jaitly himself studied history at Princeton University, where he served as a trustee. Currently, he is vice chairman of the National Humanities Center and board director of Virginia Humanities. 

Now through July, the institute is accepting applicants for the 2024-25 class. The new year of courses will resemble the same format.

For the class of 2025, Jaitly expects to expand the curriculum to include faculty from other subject areas at Virginia Tech, and he’s exploring ways to offer some aspects of the institute curriculum to niche audiences of all ages.  

“This new year, I’m excited to keep sharing more publicly and with more rigor all we are learning in real time about the role the humanities play in shaping a higher form of leadership,” he said.

Several institute participants spoke about how the experience has changed their focus or reinforced their ideas about the connections with the humanities and their own success as leaders in technology and beyond.

Empathy at center of success

One of the institute’s graduates, Amrita Tripathi, an entrepreneur and author, has taken empathy and advocacy in her career to new levels. Previously, Tripathi was a journalist and head of content partnerships for Twitter in India.

In the past several years, Tripathi, who lives in New Delhi, India, started two companies centered on human emotions and experiences. One is the Health Collective, which showcases stories of mental health, grief, and anxiety, and tackles the idea that these topics are taboo in many cultures. She also runs a membership network for women called Tap In Tribe, which offers mentorship and professional training.

Through her work, she said she has noticed that the “cult of the alpha leader” is shifting.  

“There’s definitely an understanding that in the leadership world, you need to have more of a focus on human-centric skills,” said Tripathi. “You need to be better at empathy. You need to be better at empathizing with your team, with multiple stakeholders. You need to be curious, and I think that intellectual curiosity is really at the heart of what the humanities teaches.”

For Tripathi, the past year of courses in religion, culture, history, and more have opened her eyes to how she could become a better leader of people and inspire their success.

“There are interesting studies that show that the best way to increase empathy is to read fiction and to read stories from other cultures,” said Tripathi, whose work as an author is so well known in India that she was invited to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival in February. 

“The fact that someone is thinking about the importance of ethics and humanities, and making sure that tech leaders of today and of tomorrow are grounded in this is just mind blowing,” she said. “It’s a delight to be a part of it.”  

It’s about the story

Ronan works for a technology giant. But the heart of her job is storytelling.

When she became a manager at Microsoft, she said she couldn’t help but feel that she had imposter syndrome. Ronan had worked as a humanities scholar and researcher previously at Trinity College in Ireland. What was she doing in a tech job?

But as she embraced her role of helping people discover careers path in data centers, she realized that her background was essential to her success.

She worked with schools in Ireland and the United States, talking with female students about the skills that they needed to be successful and that could lead them in a journey through various Microsoft roles.

At least nine of the world’s top software companies are based in Ireland, and Dublin is a hub.

“As a culture, we are very invested in education and that has been a boom for tech companies who want to base here and have that talent, but that’s not just across the STEM areas,” Ronan said. “Increasingly, there is that idea that human-centered skills are of great value.”

Already, Ronan said she is drawing on what she learned through the institute as she works to embed those human-centered skills into the new fiscal year’s leadership programming. In March, she spoke during an event at Trinity College that included researchers discussing how the humanities skills fuel their work.

“So much of great leadership is reliant on that capacity to get people’s trust and their buy-in. We’re really moving, if we look at a global level, to an increased valuing of those skills,” she said. “They have a great impact on organizational excellence when you have that capacity to think in a considered way.”

Hidden skills

For years, Bryan Garey never spoke about his side gig as an actor. As he was building his career in human resources, he was afraid that people would be confused if he told them that he was headed to an audition after work.

But as his career evolved, he stopped seeing his passion for theatre as a stumbling block. Instead, he believes that it has fueled his success as a human resources professional, in particular, in his current role as vice president for human resources at Virginia Tech. 

“Whatever the background is for your life, it actually informs and is part of who you are,” said Garey. “It actually makes you better. It’s a strength. It’s not a sidebar.”

His participation and graduation from the institute affirmed this mantra.

Of the institute courses, Garey said he found it most useful to study the ways that leaders in history, from as far back as ancient China and before Christ, led people. Garey said he could connect the same issues and values with those of leaders today.

“It was pretty remarkable the through line,” he said. “They were talking about all of these aspects of leadership, authenticity, vision, fairness, communication - all of these things that we still teach and learn today.”

Looking broadly, he hopes that his work in human resources supports the ways that all people experience work life, health, and wellness. The institute helped him draw those parallels and gave him ideas for the future.

Garey also said he would rather think of soft skills as professional skills. The terminology - soft skills - implies that they are not as important. 

“It’s this idea of better listening skills, better writing skills—it just helps you think differently, it helps you connect better,” he said. “My work in the theatre has helped me to be better with conflict resolution, reading an audience, building teams, and articulating common goals.”

“There are these important skills that the humanities cultivate,” he said.