Professor Laura Morgan Roberts Focuses on the ‘Human Side’ of Business

As an elementary school student, Professor Laura Morgan Roberts envisioned two potential career paths. She might be a translator, she thought, listening to different global perspectives, and interpreting and sharing across cultures and languages. Alternately, maybe she would be a DJ, figuring out how to move a crowd, infuse energy and share messages that enliven the human experience.

Spoiler: Roberts did not become a professional translator or a DJ. Still, she likes to think she regularly flexes some of those early childhood interests in her role as a professor and organizational psychologist with a globally renowned body of work.

“When I think about what we do in the classroom, the DJ and the translator are still there,” Roberts said.

While the elementary school ambitions shifted, Roberts did settle on a future profession early. As a high school student interning in a program for young people interested in business, she resolved to one day work on what she calls “the human side of the enterprise.”

“I didn’t have that language at the time, of course,” Roberts said, “But I knew I was interested in people’s career motivations, in different kinds of workplace conflicts and social dynamics, and what brings people together around common purpose. Decades later, that’s still what I’m doing.”

Raised in Gary, Indiana, Roberts grew up in a family with a long history of academic excellence and achievement, and she and her two sisters continued the family tradition. Both of her sisters were valedictorians of their high school before attending Duke University and Brown University, and Roberts was in the inaugural class of the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and Humanities, a public residential magnet school based at Ball State University.

Roberts opted for the University of Virginia over Stanford for college, interested in a school with a strong business program and student governance, while also drawn to her family heritage on the East Coast. Later, Roberts learned her great grandmother was born in Charlottesville, and the family traced its lineage through generations of both free and enslaved laborers at the university. But at the time, UVA simply seemed like the most welcoming environment for an ambitious 18-year-old with an interest in business and psychology.

An Echols Scholar with the ability to chart her educational journey, Roberts took classes in the McIntire School of Commerce but also followed her interests across courses in sociology, African-American studies and psychology. She earned a degree with the highest distinction in the latter. Roberts went from UVA directly to graduate school at the University of Michigan, where she earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. in organizational psychology.

‘Nothing But a Piece of Chalk’

At 27, Roberts began her first full-time professor position, teaching the core leadership and organizational behavior course to Harvard Business School MBA students.

Imagine the moment, as the recently minted Ph.D., essentially the same age as her new students, steps into the pit of the 90-person classroom to lead the required leadership course at one of the world’s most prestigious graduate business programs, with, as Roberts recalled, “nothing but a piece of chalk.”

“Basically, it’s me and the chalk and 90 people, for whom 50 percent of their grade is class participation. And I’m the sole evaluator,” said Roberts. “The case method is a curious approach; it requires tremendous trust in a two-way dynamic. The students trust that the professor asks the right question at the right time to help them have the conversation they need to have. As a business school professor, you have to earn that trust, and that credibility, one conversation at a time — especially when you bring a unique background.”

It was a period of great challenge and personal and professional growth, as Roberts was learning how to teach in a high-pressure environment, ramping up research and publishing on a range of topics related to cultivating individual strengths and maximizing human potential in work organizations.

One enduring piece from this era, “The Reflected Best Self Exercise,” has been used by tens of thousands of individuals and many large organizations. The unique personal and professional assessment tool Roberts co-created aims to help leaders uncover their personal best and accentuate strengths. An article accompanying the exercise was included in Harvard Business Review’s “10 Must Reads For Business Students,” a volume published in 2023 — nearly two decades after the publication of the article.

The Best Self tool is one of many examples of Roberts’ works that have become touchstones in the field, leading to plaudits from organizations such as Thinkers50, which spotlights leading management and business thinkers.

“Creating fairer career opportunities is an urgent necessity,” the organization wrote in citing Roberts in 2021. “Laura Morgan Roberts is leading the way in making this reality.” “I’ve always just followed my gut,” Roberts said of her approach to research and publishing. “I’ve always pursued work that I’m interested in, that I believe in, and that I think can help make a positive difference and a better world.”

An Opportunity on the Potomac

After moving on from Harvard, Roberts spent time at Antioch University and was living in Washington, D.C., teaching at Georgetown McDonough and raising her two children. She received word that Darden was opening new Grounds in Arlington, Virginia. An upstart venture with her alma mater was appealing, and Roberts joined Darden in 2019 as a member of the Leadership & Organizational Behavior team, quickly becoming a key contributor in professional degree and Executive Education & Lifelong Learning programming.

Roberts earned tenure at Darden and was recently named a Frank M. Sands Sr. Associate Professor of Business Administration. Her recent courses include “Leading Organizations,” “Leading Change,” “Organizational and Individual Change” and “Servant Leadership,” among others.

In the classroom, the mutual trust-building is never finished in an ever-changing business leadership context, Roberts said, but the transformational learning moments make it worthwhile and gratifying.

“We are able to enter into spaces where people can process information out loud, can express divergent viewpoints informed by data and recommend various courses of action in a civil way,” Roberts said. “I work really hard to create an environment in my classrooms where people can have tough conversations and walk out of that space with their shared humanity and dignity intact.”

As someone who has been devoted to the education of self and others from a young age, and has now published dozens of journal articles and book chapters and edited three books, the ability to work in an environment of continuous education is an ongoing incentive. “I feel very fortunate that I am able learn something new every day,” said Roberts. “I’m always, always learning.”