Creative Leadership: Introspection
In the most recent edition of Inside Higher Education, Richard Greenwald wrote a great essay on the challenges of leadership in today’s higher-education climate. The system is under historic pressure (financial and other) to change in ways that have not been encountered for more than a century.In this column, we have recently been discussing leadership. Given that introspection is an important part of the Creative Leadership model we have been proposing, I thought it was high time to turn the microscope on myself, and Greenwald’s insightful essay seemed like a nice invitation to do so.
Greenwald suggests new models of leadership using colorful technology and gardening metaphors in his piece, “New Kinds of Leadership". As he eloquently puts it, “Gardeners must know when and what to plant, but they do not control growth. They need to guard against the wind, sun, and lack of water among other forces. They also must know what can grow in their soil and what is their growing cycle, as every plot of land is slightly different from another. Just like a college, no two are alike. College leaders must prune the dying parts to allow the young, growing buds to thrive.”
Over the last two years, I have learned that nothing quite prepares you for leading. I found that out the first weeks of my tenure as the dean of the School of Business at The George Washington University (GWSB). The responsibility and expectations I welcomed, and there was a wide group of university leaders, alumni, faculty, staff and students who seemed excited about my arrival at a time when the business school was in transition.
But I also was met with some skepticism and doubt. After all I had less direct managerial experience than most dean candidates. I had never been a department chair nor an associate dean, not that these jobs would actually prepare you for the dean’s position.
I quickly learned that being a dean is a lot more like being a chief executive officer or a division president than it is being an academic. You spend a lot of time thinking about market strategy, budgets, profits and losses, negotiating with the central administration and raising revenues while also maintaining quality and efficiency. And always, there is fundraising.
When I stepped into the job, I admit I had very little experience with any of these.
I did have a couple of things working in my favor. I was a longtime China scholar and China was hot. I had built a successful executive education program at my previous institution. I am an able speaker and enjoyed the prospect of jumping into the fundraising process. And I had taught leadership from a strategic perspective for a decade and knew much about how to integrate leadership with strategic positioning in the market and how to build an organization that was aligned with this strategy.
You might wonder how far my experience in teaching leadership at other institutions would take me. It’s a good question. For me I was confident that years of teaching leadership had prepared me to run a large-scale organization. Frankly, I was wrong.
In earlier columns about Creative Leadership, the theory I have put forward with scholars Sudhir Venkatesh and David Slocum, we have used outside examples of leadership to illustrate our key tenets -- complexity and alignment, and humility and being wrong. With this column, I offer myself as an example of the critical role of introspection in being a creative leader. Time and again, I have turned to self-analysis -- and a bit of 20-20 hindsight -- to evaluate my performance and redesign my strategy.
Creative Leadership is built on the idea that everyone at every level in the organization is a leader; that leaders must know themselves, alert to their failings and graces, to better serve the organization; and that only by mastering complexity – both human and organizational – will leaders be able to achieve alignment. I had much to master in becoming dean.
Becoming dean
When I arrived at GWSB, I found that the school was very different than the institution from which I came – much more decentralized, much more ground-up in terms of the evolution of programs. In some ways, it was underfunded if we were going to reach our aspirational goal of becoming an elite school. It was clear to me that we would need to grow and do a few things differently, and, as a newbie in organizational leadership, I have to admit I panicked a bit. I had seen complexity in organizations before, but to manage the complexity, shift directions and grow, I felt like I really needed a strong plan going forward. So, I rolled up my sleeves, dug into the research of the place, and began an organizational analysis that would lead to a business plan – one I hoped would help the school find a way to grow as I thought we needed to.The business plan was a frontal attack on the school’s decentralized structure (and the fact that it was underfunded). This is what I thought we needed strategically. It included an analysis of the market and the organization, along with a detailed plan for revenue growth. With new resources, we would be able to invest in key areas and thus grow without diluting quality. We hit all of our numbers, and even had a record-breaking year in fundraising in the second year. The financial problems were resolved.
All seemed grand, except it wasn’t. Somewhere along the way, I realized I was losing the faculty. Or perhaps I had already lost them. No matter how much I talked about the benefits of our business plan, or why we needed to move quickly on it, or how it was translating into resources for the faculty, it was still my plan, and many of the faculty viewed it that way. It was not our plan and nothing I said would change that. And this was a failure in my leadership.
A leadership prescription
One of the funny things about teaching leadership in a business school is that most of us have never run a large-scale organization, so we have never had to practice the theories we espouse. As a dean, I found myself at many junctures thinking about what I had taught in leadership class that might prove helpful in specific situations. Sometimes the answer was there, sometimes not. The one conclusion I am certain of is that when I teach leadership now to GWSB students I approach it with a far different attitude and emphasis than in the past.
That doesn’t mean I don’t value scholarship in the field of leadership. The structure of leadership teaching (and research) has broken down along four levels of traditional analysis: (1) vision and strategy—how well does an individual understand the competitive environment in which their organization is embedded, and how well can they create the competitive advantage the help this organization win in the market?; (2) alignment—given that strategy, how well is this organization going to be able to be aligned to meet these strategic ends?; (3) interpersonal motivation—how well is this leader and this organization going to be above to motivate people to work for these ends?; (4) and introspection—how well is this individual going to be able to think about him or herself in an honest way? This is often referred to as the V-A-M-I framework—Vision, Alignment, Motivation and Introspection.
The majority of leadership professors and scholars are “micro” in their orientation (so more on the M-I end of the spectrum). Most of them come out of the fields of psychology or Micro-Organizational Behavior, which focuses on the psychological aspects of interpersonal interaction in the workplace.
There is a second group or movement that has been central to the development of leadership education over the last 40 years. Let’s call it the Harvard School. In his 1977 essay, “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?”, Harvard Business School Professor Abraham Zaleznik dramatically changed the trajectory of leadership scholarship, and not for the better in my view. By turning leadership into a personality trait, Zaleznik laid the foundation for the cult-based view of leaders. Only visionary, charismatic and inspiring individuals need apply for the ranks of leadership. This view of leadership is wrong and depresses me.
In my leadership teaching, I took a different tack. I followed the thinking of Mike Tushman and David Nadler. Their Strategic Alignment Framework focuses on the “macro” and “messo” that integrate vision and strategic thinking with organizational alignment. Under this theory, the key question is: how do you create an effective organization culture that will serve the strategic imperatives of the organization?
I built my leadership teaching around this question. I actually used to joke, somewhat dismissively, that I was not a psychologist (as many micro-OB people are), so my students wouldn’t be getting any therapy sessions in my class. I told my students that it would all be about the tools of analysis and strategic alignment. They would learn to break down their organizations and rebuild them into a harmonious whole.
Going forward
Today, after two years of leading a large, complex organization, I think I might have been mistaken. Don't get me wrong, I still think that vision, strategy and alignment are important. Nevertheless, I think my psychologist and micro-OB colleagues might have understood something that I did not.
Human resources professionals often talk pay and incentives, but I think motivation relates directly to how much people perceive whether you are listening to them or not. Listening is much more crucial than I thought. In my leadership classes, I would spend less than 20 percent of the time on personalized motivation, but I realize now that this is probably more important than anything else in the leadership oeuvre.
In my first days as dean, I was so taken with strategic issues, the business plan and the prospects for the future that I had forgotten that the successful organization is built on the respect and commitment of faculty and staff, people who have a keen understanding of the organization and are just waiting to be asked to contribute. When I realized I had taken a wrong turn, I was flustered and chagrined. I was acting like economist Robert Taylor (of the failed movement, Taylorism), who viewed employees as cogs in the wheel, rather than Richard Thaler, the highly regarded University of Chicago behavioral economist who offers a more profound understanding of human behavior in the organization.
Leaders need to ask hard questions, but first and foremost, they must pose those questions to themselves. How much are you thinking about and analyzing yourself, your own motivations, you own anxieties and your own goals? To what extent are you being honest about all of these issues? I have always thought being honest and real is an important part of leadership, but it was always given short shrift in the classroom. I used to joke: “Of course these issues are important, but I am not a therapist; if you need a good therapist, I can give you the number for one…” This would always draw a few laughs. Today I feel chagrined that I made light of these issues in my years of teaching about leadership.
Taking a step back and assessing yourself honestly and critically, admitting where you have made mistakes and failed, and adjusting your course in response to those failures are truly the marks of creative leaders. Two years into the job of leading a fairly complex organization, I realized I had spent a lot of time thinking strategically and trying to convince people of the importance of this strategic vision and not nearly enough time listening and engaging. A rookie mistake from a leadership perspective and a hard lesson learned.
In the end, these two years have taught me that leadership is a difficult, double-edge sword. If you are a leader who thinks too much about consensus, being liked and walking softly, you will not get many things done. Organizations are institutionalized spaces that sometimes resist change, and the individuals who live and work within these spaces, when they become comfortable, resist change as well.
Moreover, if you have followed the leadership prescriptions I used to teach—strategic alignment, incentives, structure and design—you may very well lose the help of those you need most. I realize now that it takes more emotion and personal investment to be a leader than I thought. It takes patience, connecting with people, and personally convincing them that you care and that they can trust you. Leadership isn’t gained by browbeating colleagues with a good strategy and economic success. It can only be achieved when you believe in your people and respect their opinions and input.
This year, my goal is to try to do a lot of listening. And maybe a little gardening.