Building Better Leaders

Caroline Vial brings nearly a decade of industry experience plus executive coaching into the classroom to teach mpd2 students how to organize teams and create cultures where employees can thrive.

Employees who report a toxic workplace are more than twice as likely to say their mental health is poor or fair, according to the American Psychological Association. Data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration states that workplace stress causes 120,000 deaths in the United States each year and that as many as 80 percent of workplace accidents can be attributed to on-the-job angst.

Caroline Vial is looking to offset that angst — and teach students about happy, highly functional workplaces in the process.

Vial is in her first year as an adjunct lecturer in Northwestern Engineering's Master of Product Design and Development Management (mpd2) program. Her course focuses on teaching mpd2 students about team building and organizational behavior.

The goal, Vial said, is for students to go on and create workplaces where professionals thrive and are happy to do their jobs.

“What I would love for students to come away with is a really clear vision of what a healthy team culture looks like,” said Vial, who started coaching leaders eight years ago and last year launched her own company, Upward Bound Executive Coaching. “The goal is for them to be able to not just understand it rationally, but to have actionable strategies and steps that they can take to implement their vision.”

Vial’s own experiences as a business development officer in the tech world play a role in her teaching. More importantly are her students’ own experiences, she said.

“It's always fun when people bring up things that have happened to them in the workplace that they would like to see done differently,” she said “The classroom becomes a laboratory focused on how to create a healthier work environment.”

Vial arrived in the mpd2 classroom having deep familiarity with Northwestern. She earned her PhD in comparative literary studies from the University, where she studied phenomenology of perception and leadership development, and later completed its executive development program through the Kellogg School of Management.

Her career grew increasingly focused on inspiring others to be the business leaders who foster a culture of innovation, which can only exist if people feel a sense of psychological safety, she said.

“There must be room for making mistakes and navigating difficult conversations with vulnerability,” she said. “To build resilience in teams, you need to be able to have an understanding that making mistakes is OK.”

Psychologically safe teams also must be made up of diverse members in a broad sense, she said. Part of Vial’s coaching business centers on helping women and underrepresented leaders overcome obstacles to reach their full potential. She focuses on identifying and creating teams that support and include folks with a variety of strengths, lived experiences, and neurodiverse traits.

Diverse teams foster that psychological safety when varying viewpoints based on different lived experiences can be brought to the table, she said.

“Once you have all of those ingredients put together, you start to see strong, innovative outcomes within organizations,” she said. “Innovation is the core of how organizations can be most successful.”

Vial is focused on instilling these lessons in her first group of mpd2 students. Her main message is for students to grow their own self-awareness so they can build off their leadership strengths and develop areas in need of improvement.

“The fact that people call it a soft skill is already indicative of how undervalued leadership development can be,” she said. “There is so much work to be done for people to start to embody the leadership they want to see that aligns with who they are.”