Baking a Cake: Redefining Leadership for Performance Excellence

Organizations invest heavily in leadership development, yet workforce engagement scores remain stubbornly low. Why? Dr. Daryl Watkins argues that the missing piece is not better leadership training. It is a richer understanding of the relationship between leaders & followers and what both parties bring to co-producing organizational culture, engagement, and results. Using a simple but powerful analogy, Dr. Watkins reframes leadership as something neither the leader nor the follower produces alone. Drawing on followership theory and the Baldrige framework, he introduces a practical model that connects Category 1 leadership behaviors directly to Category 5 workforce outcomes, maps the full relationship to measurable results across all the Baldrige criteria areas, and gives practitioners three questions they can act on immediately.

Speaker: Dr. Daryl V. Watkins, Professor of Organizational Leadership at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University