Graduate Education: Outstanding Alumni Hall of Fame Series

Feature Interview

Leadership As Resilience & the Talent to Innovation Continuum

Dr. Anthony Boyce, Principal Research Scientist for Talent Assessment at Amazon
Interviewed by Meseret Negash, Director of Development at the Graduate School

The Boyce family.

Dr. Anthony Boyce and his family

I’m Meseret Negash, Director of Development at the Graduate School. Thank you for taking time to be interviewed for Illuminating the News, the second edition of our newsletter. You were identified to be part of our Graduate Education – Hall of Fame by your department, as someone really excelling in their field, and we’re excited to learn more about you. Could you start off by introducing yourself and telling us what you studied at MSU?

I’m Anthony Boyce – I go by Tony. I received my Bachelor of Science in Psychology, as well as my Masters in Industrial Organizational Psychology and my PhD in Industrial Organizational Psychology as well from MSU. So, I'm a super alumni!

Excellent. Tell us a bit about what you're doing now, and what your career path has been since you left MSU.

Currently I am a Principal Research Scientist for Talent Assessment with Amazon. I sit in recruiting within the organization, and specifically within a talent assessment group. Talent assessment is responsible for pre-hire assessment. So, our focus is really from when a candidate lands on our website or clicks on a position on a job board. That's when we start to come into the picture and where our research starts to help inform whether Amazon is a good match for the candidate, and whether the candidate is a good match for Amazon. We use a whole range of tests – of skills; work styles; performance in work simulations – to establish this. We also do a lot of research around interviewing and how to make sure that anyone that we hire is most likely to be successful and thrive and to be engaged at Amazon, in addition to being able to perform well.

As the principal on the team, my particular role is focused on vision, strategy, and innovation. I'm tasked with looking a few years out into the future and asking, where is the field of pre-hire assessment going; where do we want to go and how do we get there? I specifically focus on innovation and how to promote diversity as well as a great candidate experience. At a company like Amazon retail brands, regardless of whether somebody is a good match to be an employee, we want everyone to continue to consider Amazon as a customer. So, candidate experience is hugely important, along with likelihood of success.

The final thing that we look at is efficiency, for candidates as well as for hiring managers and recruiters. When you are hiring – I actually think it was 500,000 people last year – and you're getting tens of millions of applications, you have to find a way to be really efficient about process; be respectful of candidates time and conscious of the cost and effort it takes to review candidates and give each one a really fair evaluation.

Since we're in the graduate education space, I'm curious what tips you would give to graduate students as they're navigating the job market. What do you wish you knew you before you left MSU, understanding the inside of the hiring process now?

If we're talking graduate students, who are highly educated professionals, we're focusing on the interview. At that level of expertise, a lot of times you really need an interview to understand the functional skills a person brings to the table. Amazon, in particular, focuses on leadership principles. Every organization has their organization-wide competency model, which is the skills and behaviors that they expect that all employees have. Amazon is no different; we just happen to call them ‘leadership principles.’ My advice to grad students is, understand the organization you're applying to: What is their mission? What are their values? What are their leadership principles and core competencies? Understand what those are because most organizations, whether they're doing it explicitly or implicitly, are thinking about your qualifications from the lens of that competency model or those leadership principles that are part of their mission or value statement. Think about how your anecdotes, the stories that you're going to use, will illustrate your skills and abilities, and tie those back to the principles that the organization values.

“My advice to grad students is, understand the organization you're applying to: What is their mission? What are their values? What are their leadership principles and core competencies? Understand what those are because most organizations, whether they're doing it explicitly or implicitly, are thinking about your qualifications from the lens of that competency model or those leadership principles that are part of their mission or value statement.”

Building on this, what advice would you give graduate students specifically considering a career path outside the academy, similar to yourself after earning your doctorate?

Confidently know that the skills that you've built in your careers as a student and as a grad student are totally fungible and applicable everywhere. You've built skills around being able to learn and practice in a new domain, to learn a subject matter area, to focus on a particular problem or a particular piece of information. You've built the ability to critically evaluate your own ideas and arguments and those of others. Those are hugely valuable skills that are widely generalizable to pretty much every domain. So, find a business, mission, area, and role that matches your interests, and then just go after it. Your skills will allow you to be successful in a huge range of different roles.

What kind of self-assessment tools would you recommend for young professionals to take inventory of their interests and skills?

That's a great question and there's a couple different ways to think about it. It depends a bit on where you are in terms of your overall career trajectory. If you're graduating and thinking, ‘what are the ways I can explore career possibilities?’ and trying to figure out what might be a really good fit with your interests and values, the O*NET Interest Profiler is something that is publicly available. It's built and maintained by the federal government and is based on a comprehensive database of every job in the entire US economy. This Interest Profiler basically asks you a bunch of different questions that are all mapped back to the different interests that people in different jobs espouse. So, its output will be something like, ‘based on what you've said says here are 50 jobs that are really closely aligned with your interests.’ A lot of these occupations might be things that you never would've considered because you didn't know they exist, or you didn't think they would align with your interests.

And whether you’re graduating or in your early career just starting out or you've been in your career for 20 odd years or more, I always recommend personality tests. There are a bunch of really high-quality ones out there. Hogan, OPQ-32, ADEPT-15, are some of the brand names, but there are tons of other good ones. The reason why I recommend these is because they are based on deep science, decades of research. They help you understand how your unique personality causes you to think the way that you do, perceive things the way that you do, and behave the way that you do. By building that self-awareness and an understanding of how your personality can influence all of those things, you can, for example, say ‘I know why such-and-such situation makes me anxious and so next time I'm in that situation, I just need to challenge myself to think about it differently.’ It gives you tools and language to understand how your internal processes influence your behavior and how you can develop. That's how you can grow.

From your perspective, how is talent defined and measured?

The way that I define talent is highly informed by my academic background. I think about it in terms of KSAOs – knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics; the sum total of things that you bring to a role. So, it's not just what you can do; what your education is and what functional skills you have. It's also, what will you do; how do you behave? How do you interact with others? Do you like people? Do you like working with customers? Are you adaptable? I’d say talent is kind of that sum total package that determines what you can do, what you will do, and what you like to do.

Would you agree that, as one matures, changes, and grows, one can continue to expand their ability in all of those areas?

Absolutely. I mean, I do think certain things are fundamental. For example, if you're not the most social person – that is, you're not a strong extrovert – it's going to be hard for you to go into a sales role where your whole purpose is to build relationships with people. If you're not highly extroverted, that's going to be a hard skill for you to develop. You can develop it, but you might not ever be as good at it as somebody that is kind of naturally wired that way. Most of us know what the equivalent is for us – what are the situations that cause you anxiety, that make you uncomfortable? You can work at developing talent in those areas, but do think about where you are comfortable and where you have skills and abilities. What kind of experiences get you jazzed and excited? Go into situations that are going to involve those skills; where you can shine and, for example, show how empathetic you can be with another person or show how critically you can think through a particular problem or situation. Certainly, we all can and need to continually learn and develop. However, it's really important for people as they're thinking about careers to think about what fits most naturally with their values and their interests and with how they're wired as well.

“What kind of experiences get you jazzed and excited? Go into situations that are going to involve those skills; where you can shine”

I'm curious how all this relates to the theme of leadership. What would you recommend for those individuals who aspire to C-Suite positions or an equivalent leadership role in a given profession?

I think my recommendation is: know yourself, your strengths, and your opportunities. Do what you can to build that self-awareness and then start to target those things that may be a misfit in your skillset. For example, and I keep harping on the extroversion example, but I think it's a good one. Regardless of whether you're an extrovert or an introvert, leaders have to be engaging. You have to establish a vision; you have to empower people. And that's often done in a way that requires a personal connection. For those of us that are introverted, you have to learn how to do that, regardless of the fact that it doesn't come naturally. This does go a bit against what I said earlier, in terms of finding what you're good at, etc. That's more natural, but leadership is a huge constellation of things. There are many different ways to be a successful leader but there are some minimum thresholds that are required. So, for example, there is the super charismatic kind of leader that walks into a room and they're best friends with everybody and know where they all went on vacation last year within half an hour. However, another way of being a leader is establishing a vision and connecting with people through empathy, and through talking and understanding what makes them tick. Maybe you're not going to become fast friends or be the life of the party, but you can connect with people on an individual level. Still, that requires you to engage with people. So, if you are shy, you have to overcome that.

“there's certainly other giant societal level challenges, but this is something that has hit us all at once. We all are living our own pandemic.”

Pivoting now to what's happening around us – In your role at Amazon, what elements of individual or organizational resilience have you seen play out during the pandemic?

That's a big one for all of us, right? We've all been faced with one of the biggest collective challenges of our lives. I mean, there's certainly other giant societal level challenges, but this is something that has hit us all at once. We all are living our own pandemic. When you think about resilience, it's about adapting and overcoming obstacles; about not giving up. For some of us, that means overcoming social isolation. Others of us have children and they're home from school and now we've got to figure out how to keep our four-year-olds focused on e-learning while we're also trying to work our 40 hours-a-week job. It's hard for everyone uniquely, and even harder for the people that have lost loved ones or don't have the luxury of staying home. So, on the individual level, I think it's played out in a million different ways. Look around, every single one of us has been resilient. Everyone that is still showing up for work, trying to be productive, trying to live through this, is exhibiting resilient behaviors. So, we all have them and resilience takes different forms in the face of this pandemic.

Organizationally, the question is almost easier to answer. For Amazon, it's been interesting. (I should probably say, I'm speaking purely for myself, not for Amazon and nothing I'm saying reflects any corporate views.) From where I've been sitting within the organization, the company has had to allow for and support all of their employees through the unique hardships and individual resilience paths that they've had to take, while also being in a position where the services that the company provides are relied upon by millions of consumers that are also in that same position of trying to cope with the pandemic and trying to avoid going to the store and so they're buying more online. They're also lacking in the entertainment alternatives so are watching more Prime Video, and so on. And the other part of our business, the Amazon Web Services, is basically the backbone and infrastructure of the Internet. All of a sudden, the internet is the predominant way that we are all meeting our entertainment, our retail, and our social needs. All three of those businesses for Amazon are growing at unprecedented rates and are facing unprecedented demand, while our employees are also facing unprecedented demands on them as individuals, from the perspective of personal, social, and family obligations. So the organizational resilience that had to come into play is about how one manages delivering on the services that are the sum total of all of these individuals’ efforts, that the rest of us are reliant upon on a daily basis to help get through the pandemic. It's kind of a meta situation where the individuals that are trying to produce these services are in the same boat as individuals demanding those services and one has to provide support for each person to help them survive and thrive. The scope of it is pretty mind-boggling. That's why Amazon added almost half a million people to its workforce last year.

“It's kind of a meta situation where the individuals that are trying to produce these services are in the same boat as individuals demanding those services and one has to provide support for each person to help them survive and thrive. The scope of it is pretty mind-boggling.”

Returning to the theme of nature versus nurture, is resilience an innate trait or is it something that we can develop over time through training and experience?

I think it's like a muscle like anything else. The more that you practice it, the stronger it gets. And I think there’s good versus better resilience. There's the resilience where you do what you need to do but really high resilience is being able to take things as they are, feel the whole range of emotions that come with it, but bounce back from it and retain optimism for the future.

Why is resilience important as it relates to leadership?

Leadership is a series of frustrations. You've established this vision or this objective and you want to get there. But to get there, you need the help of a lot of people and you need them to do the things that support that vision or help you get there. And they all have different opinions and motivations and different levels of ability and skills. So, yes, leadership is a series of frustrations and obstacles that you have to overcome. Without resilience, you can't really be a leader because you're going to be frustrated and facing obstacles on a daily basis.

“leadership is a series of frustrations and obstacles that you have to overcome. Without resilience, you can't really be a leader because you're going to be frustrated and facing obstacles on a daily basis.”

Does your past research in ‘learning agility’ relate to the discussions we're having around leadership and resilience?

If resilience is adapting to the environment and overcoming obstacles, learning agility is, on some level, how you do that. It’s about learning from your experiences and from others and applying those learnings to new situations to overcome new challenges. And there’s also self-awareness, which I've talked about several times; learning about how different things make you feel and think and using that as a source of strength or of evidence to help you figure out how to adapt to different situations. It's almost like resilience is the ‘what’ in learning agility is the ‘how’.

Drawing again on your past research, when it comes to recruiting and cultivating talent, how important is the organizational culture?

This is a core question. My dissertation research, many moons ago, was around what comes first, organizational success or a positive organizational culture? The idea in some circles is that companies that are successful and are growing and making money have the luxury of investing in the creation of a positive organizational culture. And so financial success comes before a positive organizational culture. The alternative view is that if you foster a positive organizational culture; one that promotes respect for individuals, risk-taking, tolerance for failure, and innovation, then that is then going to lead to financial success for a firm, and that it becomes a virtuous cycle. I’m a very strong believer that organizational culture is at the root of firm success and it's also the route of attraction and retention. People come to an organization because the culture has things that they value; it does things that they value.

For example, you might be attracted to a company like Amazon because you value innovation and scientific, deep quantitative thought. Culture is hugely important to attracting the right people that are going to fit in and survive and thrive at a particular organization.

So how is culture created in your view? Is it leader-driven, organically developed, etc.?

I think it's both a top-down and bottom-up type of process because leaders of an organization can establish processes, mechanisms, and artifacts of a culture that try to reinforce a particular ideal, but if the individuals in the organization don't buy into it and don't behave in accordance with it, then it's not really a culture. Then, it's just some leader’s opinion. It's really a complex, dynamic situation but if people aren't buying into the vision and culture on a day-to-day basis and reinforcing it, then it's not a strong culture.

How does innovation play into all that we’ve discussed?

Great question. All these concepts are interrelated. Leadership is about establishing a vision and an objective. Resilience is about continuing to go after that objective, persisting in pursuit of that vision, despite the obstacles and frustrations that you encounter. Learning agility allows you to learn from your experiences and learn from the frustrations and the obstacles to ensure that you're not repeating past mistakes, but also enables you to build up your ability to overcome obstacles more quickly and effectively. Innovation comes into play here. It's about coming up with new ways to enact your vision, taking what you've learned but thinking about things in a different way, trying things out and pivoting quickly. Innovation is about recognizing that just because you have a ‘crazy idea’ doesn't mean it's a bad idea. It’s just one of those things that’s hard to precisely define because it's that thing that no one thought of. But once you see it, it seems obvious in retrospect.

“Innovation is about recognizing that just because you have a ‘crazy idea’ doesn't mean it's a bad idea. It’s just one of those things that’s hard to precisely define because it's that thing that no one thought of.”

What would you say was distinctive about your MSU experience?

I don't think there's many places where you can go in as an undergrad and say, I have no idea what I want to do with my life and sample a bunch of different domains the way I did. I started volunteering in the Industrial Organizational Psychology graduate program as an undergrad because I happened to get interested in it. I was able to start to learn about it and thought, wow, this is super cool. I wonder if they’ll let me stay here for grad school. And then I had the privilege to stay and continue my advanced studies at Michigan State. If I had gone elsewhere it’s unlikely that I would’ve had the experience and exposure to world-class graduate programs so early on.

Would you like to share any anecdotes or memories from your time at MSU?

Well, I love campus in the spring. Around this time a year, that first day that's 70 degrees – oh my gosh! Just walking around campus, along the river, seeing and smelling the flowers was wonderful. And, of course, sitting outside on the patio of Peanut Barrel – that was just awesome.

Tony, thank you so much for sharing your professional wisdom and Spartan story with us!

Dr. Anthony S. Boyce is a principal research scientist at Amazon where he helps drive global pre-hire talent assessment strategy and innovation to support the continued growth of Amazon’s 1 million+ employee workforce. Previously, Tony was a partner at Aon where he directed a team of PhD's, data scientists, and engineers to develop assessment and leadership strategies, tools, and points-of-view to help organizations identify, develop, and retain top talent. He has been the recipient of several industry awards for his collaborative research in the assessment space including The Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology’s M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research and the Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award. He regularly publishes book chapters and journal articles and presents his perspectives at national conferences. Tony received his Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Michigan State University.

Originally published May 4, 2021