John Sumanth
Examining Leadership

Sometimes one moment can change the course of a person’s career and life in unexpected ways. Wake Forest School of Business James Farr Faculty Fellow in Leadership and Organizational Development John Sumanth certainly knows that truism well. 

After earning a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Miami (cum laude) and an MBA in marketing and management from the University of Florida, Sumanth took a job as a management trainee for Norwegian Cruise Line, spending nearly 18 months rotating throughout the company, working in all of its departments. That rotation complete, Sumanth earned a position in strategic planning, using his marketing and analytical skills to do everything from developing itineraries to negotiating deals with governments and port authorities around the world. The day he returned from vacation, Sumanth received some unexpected news.

“My boss, who was a vice president, told me the company fired him and the other senior manager in the department,” Sumanth says. “So effectively, I went from being fairly challengingly sheltered in the hierarchy to reporting one level away from the CEO.”

The cruise line’s restructuring came right around the same time as the September 11th terrorist attacks, which further impacted Sumanth’s job in ways he never could have anticipated. Suddenly, he found himself thrust into a critical leadership role at a major travel corporation during one of the most tumultuous eras of that industry’s history.

“I gained valuable insights into how leaders approach making strategically important decisions and how they lead effectively amid chaos,” Sumanth says. “I also observed fascinating dynamics around decision-making, particularly how leader behaviors influence people to speak up or remain silent in meetings. These experiences have greatly shaped my research, which focuses on how leaders cultivate environments where employees can speak up more freely and better engage.”

After leaving Norwegian, Sumanth worked for a time at Burger King Corporation, contributing to several product launches. By that time, his experience in the corporate world left him curious about organizational behavior—the difficulty of motivating and engaging employees, and the challenges of organizational change. So he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in organizational behavior at UNC-Chapel Hill. 

“Through my corporate experiences, I came to realize that managing people is both the most rewarding and the most challenging aspect of any organization,” he says. “Coming from an engineering background with no psychology training, I struggled to understand what drives people’s thoughts, behaviors, and feelings.”

Upon graduation, Sumanth knew he wanted to take the insight he’d gained to the classroom, rather than the corporate boardroom. Having grown up in a family of academics—his father and grandfather were both professors and his mom a teacher—academia felt like a natural fit for his work. In 2013, he came to Wake Forest to 

teach in the School of Business.

Sumanth’s research focuses on employee communication, specifically workers’ comfort in speaking up, offering feedback or even whistleblowing, and how leaders influence these critical outcomes.

“One of the things we’ve found pretty consistently is that leaders who model ethical behavior and talk about the importance of ethics and doing the right thing in decision-making have a powerful influence on creating environments where people feel free to speak up,” he says. “This type of leader behavior  creates courage, confidence, and a sense of ownership in people that fuels their willingness to speak up with ideas that can be helpful to the organization.”

Recently, Sumanth and several colleagues (including Wake Forest professors Sean Hannah and Sherry Moss) published a paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology on what they call “Jekyll and Hyde leadership”—the idea that some leaders think they can make up for Hyde-esque bad behavior by putting on their best Dr. Jekyll face the next day.

“We find that combination is actually worse and more taxing for employees emotionally,” he says. “Instead, leaders need to model ethical consistency if they want to get the best from their people.”

Sumanth strives to model that behavior in his classroom, taking care to create a learning environment where his students – undergraduates, MBAs, or executives – feel comfortable speaking up, contributing, and even challenging him.

“That’s how you’re going to learn this content best—breeding a safe space where learners can try, fail, and reflect on their experiences is what will help them become successful professionals who positively impact their organizations and beyond ,” he says.