Sean Hannah
Evaluating Ethos

After serving for nearly three decades in the United States Army, Sean Hannah knows exactly what makes an effective leader. During his years of active duty as an Army infantry officer, Colonel (Retired) Hannah served in four different combat and contingency deployments, as well as in strategic positions in the Pentagon, received 44 military decorations and was inducted into the Officer Candidate School Hall of Fame. 

During his tenure with the Army, Hannah was selected to be a professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point upon completion of his Ph.D. in business management at the University of Nebraska.

At West Point, Hannah served as director of the school’s leadership and management programs before being chosen by General George Casey—Chief of Staff of the Army at the time—to create and lead the Center for the Army Profession and Ethic as its founding director.

“It was an army-wide center responsible for studying character-based leadership across the entire army and providing doctrine, training programs, and research on the Army Ethic and the Army Profession,” Hannah says. 

Hannah retired from the Army and came to Wake Forest in 2012 as the J. Tylee Wilson Chair in Business Ethics, leading research teams, teaching in the MBA program and serving as senior scholar in Wake Forest’s Allegacy Center for Leadership and Character. Hannah says his experience in the military prepared him well for the role at Wake.

“In the Army, leadership is the most important thing we do,” he says. “The Army recognizes leadership as the core element of ‘combat power’—you can have the greatest equipment and weaponry and best fighting force in the world, but if you don’t have leaders who can orchestrate that on the battlefield and align everyone around a shared purpose and vision, the best equipment doesn’t matter.”

And in the Army, those leaders are bred, not born. Hannah says the military’s structure instilled a perspective on leadership that levels the playing field—no one starts at the top, and respect and credibility are earned through exemplary leadership. 

“You can’t come in as a major—every general was once a lieutenant, every sergeant major was a private,” he says. 

That ethos translates from the battlefield to the boardroom. Hannah teaches his students that the military’s bottom-up approach to leadership holds true in the business world, as well.

“Leadership is a process, not a position, and you can be a great leader and not be in a formal managerial position, just as you could be in a managerial position and not be a true effective leader,” he says. “Leadership is something you have to earn. You have to earn that trust and credibility as a leader, and your formal position does not matter in that equation.”

Hannah credits his military service for making him a better teacher and researcher. “When I started studying leadership academically, I was able to take the theoretical and apply it to my practical experience and share those lessons-learned with others.”

Sean also regularly shares his expertise with business audiences through training and consulting engagements across the US, Europe and Asia and is a sought after keynote speaker. 

Research plays a big role in Hannah’s work outside the classroom, with a recent Stanford University study ranking him among the top 1 percent of cited researchers in the world across all sciences and all 8 million global researchers in each of the last three years. As the senior researcher for the Allegacy Center for Leadership and Character, Hannah’s work often examines the intersection between science, exemplary leadership, and leader character. He is also conducting some cutting-edge leadership research.

“Some of our research is on neuroscience and applying that to leadership,” he says. “We’re brain mapping leaders and studying how brain activity relates to their psychological activity and how that relates to their behavior and leader effectiveness.”

Hannah’s military experience also figures prominently in his research pursuits. While leadership plays an important role in business, it’s even more critical in situations where lives and the fate of nations could be on the line.

“I’m doing a lot of work on leadership in extreme contexts, which fits into my background of understanding how leadership and the demands on leaders can be a bit different when things get extreme,” he says. “I’ve been studying what makes exemplary leadership when leadership matters most, such as in combat, fire departments and situations like that, and also crisis situations in business.”

And whether they lead a company into battle or toward greater profitability, Hannah says great leaders all share one important trait that he ensures his students take from his classroom.

“Every great leader knows their number one job is to develop followers into leaders,” he says. “It’s the only way to sustain a business or a military force over time.”