Debate Training May Help Employees Rise as Leaders, New Research from Smith’s Hui Liao Shows

A recent study co-authored by Smith’s Hui Liao shows that a surprisingly accessible skill—debate training—can meaningfully shape who emerges as a leader in U.S. organizations.

Published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the findings demonstrate that individuals who receive structured debate training are more likely to advance into leadership roles, largely because the training strengthens a key leadership trait: assertiveness.

Liao, the Long Jiang Endowed Chair in Business at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, co-authored the work with Jackson Lu of the MIT Sloan School of Management, Michelle X. Zhao of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, and Lu Doris Zhang of the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The study won the 2025 Best Paper in Management Education and Development Award from the Academy of Management’s MED Division, was featured in Harvard Business Review, and stood out to renowned New York Times bestselling author Daniel Pink, who described the findings in a LinkedIn video blog.

In the first of two experiments, 471 employees at a Fortune 100 company were randomly assigned to receive nine weeks of debate training or no training. Eighteen months later, those who completed the training were significantly more likely to advance in leadership levels.

Increased assertiveness—defined by the American Psychological Association as expressing one’s needs and views clearly while respecting others—statistically explained the effect.

A second experiment with 975 university participants reinforced the results. Individuals who received debate training were more likely to emerge as leaders in group tasks than those who received alternative training or none at all.

Though leadership development is a multi-billion-dollar industry, much is unknown about what truly works, the authors say, but add that their findings show debate training can be an effective pathway.

They identify key supporting factors. Debate training, they write:

• Pushes individuals out of their psychological comfort zone to assert their views in front of large crowds and individuals holding opposing views
• Teaches individuals to achieve confident and persuasive communication
• Teaches individuals to stand their ground diplomatically in a disagreement, which is an important element of assertiveness
• Helps individuals focus on communicating only their most essential points because each debate speech period is short (e.g., 2 min) and strictly timed
• Improves verbal eloquence. For example, the ‘summary speech’ trains individuals to reduce fillers (e.g., “um,” “like”) so that they sound more confident.

Liao emphasizes that assertiveness is not the same as aggressiveness. “Assertiveness is often misunderstood as aggressiveness, but they’re fundamentally different,” she says.

“What we see in our research is that assertiveness is really about the ability to speak up, communicate with clarity, and contribute with confidence—skills that matter more than ever in today’s attention-driven workplace.”

She adds, “When people learn to express their ideas succinctly and respectfully, they don’t just participate more effectively; they come across as more leader-like.”

Importantly, the benefits of debate training were consistent across gender, ethnicity and birthplace, suggesting broad applicability, Liao and her coauthors say. But at the same time, they caution that organizations must not place the full burden of leadership advancement on individuals. Firms, they argue, should recognize and reward a wider range of communication and leadership styles.

Read “Breaking Ceilings: Debate Training Promotes Leadership Emergence” in the Journal of Applied Psychology.