A Lesson in Effective Communication: An Interview With Dr. Gary Latham

This interview-based article addresses the question of how management educators can increase their effectiveness in communicating with their students. A challenge for management educators who are looking to bring their teaching and impact to the next level is that there is a voluminous literature regarding effective communication best practices. The current article focuses on what management educators should prioritize to better engage their students, communicate with their students, and disseminate their work beyond academia. To help management educators determine which of the many effective communication practices should be focused on, the current article presents an interview with someone who is among the most influential scientist–practitioners in the field of management, Gary Latham. We advocate for management educators to set a specific, challenging goal for improving their teaching performance, and to also implement one or more of the following recommendations to communicate memorably when teaching management education students: (1) using everyday, layperson rather than scientific language; (2) emphasizing the value of behavioral science theory for practice; (3) explaining the danger of ignoring conditional variables; and (4) capturing and keeping students’ attention by presenting surprising findings.