Making her way: An interview with Marion Debruyne, Dean of Vlerick Business School
From first-generation student to first female Dean, Marion Debruyne talks to QS Insights Magazine about leadership, re-framing imposter syndrome and the power of education to opening doors.
By Nicole Chang
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When Marion Debruyne first joined Vlerick Business School as a faculty member, she expressly told the Dean at the time not to bother her with any admin or managerial duties – her focus would be on teaching and research.
“Obviously, that plan completely derailed,” she laughs now. Fast forward eight years, and the Belgian native is entering her third term as Dean herself at Vlerick. It’s a detail she says taught her an important lesson about career planning: be open to opportunities, follow interesting work where you can have an impact and doors will open.
Becoming Dean of one of Europe’s leading business schools wasn’t exactly an obvious career goal for Debruyne, at least not when she was growing up. She studied engineering as an undergraduate, and was the first in her family to go to university.
“Nobody in my family went to college, I hardly knew anybody who had gone to college. This idea that I was going to have an academic career seemed really, really far-fetched,” she tells QS Insights Magazine. “Getting higher education and getting an academic career was really not something that I thought was in the stars for me. As a first-generation student, you don't get that as being normal, or just the norm in your family.
“Not that this held me back. But it does help me not to take any of this for granted, and also to see the impact that education can have on individuals — because I've lived it.”
"Reading was a way to open up my world. I grew up in a small town, so that definitely characterised me."
As a child, Debruyne would go to the library every week, come back with a stack of books, read them all and then go back the week after for more. Eventually, she finished reading all the books in the small town and had to go to the bigger town further out. “Reading was a way to open up my world. I grew up in a small town, so that definitely characterised me,” she says. “I had big dreams, you know — having an exciting life and travelling the world and really to open up my world.”
This impetus eventually saw her studying engineering at university, before going on to business school at Vlerick itself and then eventually to the US, where she taught at a string of top-tier business schools including Kellog, Wharton, and Emory. She eventually returned to Belgium and re-joined Vlerick, this time on staff.
Pivoting from engineering to business school might not seem like an obvious choice, but Debruyne remembers working on her engineering graduation thesis, which was on removing nitrogen oxides out of exhaust gases, and just catching herself thinking more and more about the business implications of her research: “I still kept on wondering doing that work, if we get 99 or 98 percent purity, how important is that for clients and are they willing to pay for that?
“I was so inherently interested in the business side of the technology, and that really prompted me to go to business school, to understand that business side better.”
The only woman in the room
Now entering her third term as Dean, Debruyne is often lauded for being the first female Dean in Vlerick’s history, as well as its youngest when she joined at the age of 42. In an industry which is still heavily dominated by men, it’s easy to see why these attributes are often a focal point in profiles about Debruyne. But it’s not something she herself particularly chose to think about when she first started, until that is, she began getting asked about it in interviews.
“You don't really get up in the morning and think: ‘What will I do as a female young Dean?’. You just think about what needs to be done as Dean,” she says. Then, in one of her first interviews, a journalist asked her whether she was young to be a Dean.
“I said: ‘Well maybe, but that's a problem that gets smaller every day’.”
This line of questioning prompted a deeper reflection on issues of representation. “I had been gender-blind throughout my career, frankly, and so I was confronted with the need to educate myself,” she says. “As a typical academic, my instinct was to dive into the research, and to really understand diversity issues, gender issues, which I hadn't really spent time thinking about or really acknowledging in some way.”
“I grew up with one brother, no sister, I studied engineering,” she adds. “That's also a [male-dominated] environment, and you go into a business school – you just become so accustomed to being very often the only woman in the room that that did not register to me anymore.”
“You don't need to pretend you're anybody else than you are.”
Re-framing imposter syndrome
A few years after attending Vlerick and picking up a PhD in Applied Economics at Ghent University along the way, Debruyne eventually moved to the US to teach - an exciting but also intimidating experience. “When I was still teaching in the US at Emory, I very much felt: I'm pretending I'm this professor,” she says. “You get thrown in front of this MBA class, I was not even 30 when I joined the faculty at Emory. My students were on average older than I was. I felt very much ill-equipped.”
One day, she stumbled upon an academic paper on imposter syndrome and things clicked into place. “For me, this was a discovery. This was like an ‘aha’ moment,” she says. “Recognising, oh, I'm not the only one, I'm not the only one who feels like any day now, I will be discovered as just faking it – because my motto at the time also was like, ‘fake it until you make it’!”
Safe to say, that’s no longer her motto. “I've really come to understand that you don't need to fake it,” says Debruyne. “You don't need to pretend you're anybody else than you are.” This doesn’t mean you should ignore that inner voice in your head, she adds, but perhaps a better way to re-frame imposter syndrome is to think about what giving in to that little voice in your head actually implies.
“If somebody gives you an opportunity, if you get a seat at a table, if you are being put on a stage somewhere… it also means that somebody has opened the door for you, has put you on that stage, has asked you to be around this table,” she says. “Believing that imposter syndrome means that you feel those people have no judgement.”
In 2020, Debruyne published a book along with co-author and colleague Katleen De Stobbeleir. Titled Making your way, the (wobbly) road to success and happiness in life and work, the book seeks to address common misconceptions about success and happiness in life and work – an important topic for Debruyne, who sees sharing one’s “wobbles” as a way to remind people that nobody is picture perfect.
In one example, she talks about how in the same week of getting a faculty promotion at Vlerick, she also unfortunately had a miscarriage. “That week will always be in my mind, the combination of the joy and the pride of the promotion, and the sadness at the same time,” she tells QS Insights Magazine. “It's a long time ago, but it's just for me an illustration of how the sometimes picture-perfect image that you may see of people who are professionally successful – they also will have their struggles there.
“Everybody has their wobbles. And if you have your wobbles as well, [it] doesn't mean that you're not on the right path, or not on a good path.”
As Vlerick celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, Debruyne is reflective about the school’s future, and that of the sector as a whole. With Millennial and Gen-Z students and workers increasingly prioritising a career with meaning and many even questioning the benefits of capitalism itself, how business schools evolve to accommodate these shifts in attitude is a key question for the sector.
“I've really seen that evolve during my tenure as a Dean, how we as business schools have become much more conscious of the role that we have to play in society,” says Debruyne. “The message I give – and that I actually gave at the opening of the academic year to our students was: it's not enough to secure a better place for yourself in the world. You also need to make sure to make the world a better place while doing so.”
Looking back to when she first started as Dean, Debruyne says she remembers someone telling her there would eventually come a moment when she’d get bored. So, two terms down (and all the admin and management duties that must entail), has she?
“I cannot imagine that,” she laughs. “I still have not reached that moment.”
This article was published originally in QS Insights Magazine 9.