As NYU Stern’s Leadership Accelerator marks its fifth year anniversary, Management Professor Dolly Chugh has been tapped to take over as its new faculty director. She builds on a legacy that Vice Dean for MBA and Graduate Programs Nate Pettit and Director Hannah Levinson helped establish. Professor Chugh, a well-known social psychologist and popular TED Talk speaker, is the author of The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias and A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change, as well as numerous articles and papers. She also publishes a popular monthly newsletter called “Dear Good People,” with more than 10,000 subscribers, which she describes as “evidence-based, action-oriented, and zeitgeisty.” Professor Chugh’s academic research explores the gap between how we view our own ethicality and how ethically we actually behave, which has earned her a place on the 2025 Thinkers50 Radar list.

Approaches to leadership are always evolving, so we sat down with Professor Chugh to get her perspective on being what she calls a “good-ish leader.”

Q&A with Professor Dolly Chugh

How would you define leadership?

It’s been said that leaders manage change and managers manage complexity. We're living in a time of uncertainty, and with that comes a thirst for leadership. On a more practical level, we recognize that leadership is literally a laundry list of skills: everything from visioning to giving and receiving feedback, to communicating clearly, to having empathy and being able to motivate others. No leader has all the skills, but each has some subset of that list.

What constitutes being what you call a “good-ish” leader?

Today we face numerous challenges—global, multigenerational, and localized. We are in a moment of polarization and mistrust in our institutions. The future of work seems uncertain—will it be virtual, hybrid, or in person? Individuals are looking for guidance. The key to being a good-ish leader, especially at this time, is to lean into your humanity and demonstrate empathy and connection. Good-ish leaders see themselves as a work in progress while still providing direction to others. That requires vulnerability, owning mistakes or shortcomings, and claiming strengths. 

What’s your thinking on how to teach leadership?

Leadership can be taught if we view it as a bundle of skills. For example, somebody may be a terrific communicator, but that doesn't mean that they're good at resolving conflict. Research shows that these skills can be taught and learned. Stern’s Leadership Accelerator enables students to acquire the interpersonal skills that leadership requires by creating scenarios that put them in the “hot seat.” Part of the approach is to have students interact with a professional actor in a difficult workplace situation. The students get the opportunity to try something that feels uncomfortable, get feedback from their peers, and then try it again. That is gold, and it’s an approach that I have not seen elsewhere. They get a do-over, with the coaching of their classmates, who—through very intentional trust and relationship building—are invested in helping them succeed. That's just one example that happens in the Leadership Accelerator, and I’m excited to continue finding ways to incorporate immersive leadership development experiences at Stern.