The Coxswain as Leader

In my line of work I think a lot about leadership. What makes a good leader? What makes for effective leadership? How can I be a better leader, and a better follower, where I am right now?

On a seemingly separate note I have been participating in a virtual Lenten series this year that has drawn material from a book, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown. In the series we have read snippets of the book and have talked about rowing as a metaphor for life as a whole.

In the kind of eight-oar shell discussed in the book, there are nine people: eight rowers (each with a distinctive role to play) and a coxswain, or cox. The cox rides in the back of the boat, calls the pace for the rowers to follow, and steers the shell. In that sense, the cox looks very much like a leader.

But being a good cox is not about barking orders (though that's what it looks like on the surface). I think there are a number of lessons that leaders can learn by looking at what it takes to be a good cox:

• Coxes are always the smallest person in the boat. This is to reduce weight and drag, to make the boat lighter and therefore faster. Good leadership is often about not being a drag on your organization and not letting your weight get in the way.

• Coxes don't actually move the boat forward. A cox, sitting alone in a shell and calling time, accomplishes nothing. It is the oarswomen or oarsmen who actually make the boat move. Leaders must recognize that the success of their organizations relies on the efforts of others far more than on their own.

• The cox steers the boat with a small rudder mechanism. This mechanism can be easily overmatched by what the rowers are doing. If the rowers are pushing the boat one way and the cox trying to steer another, the rowers win (and sometimes the rudder breaks). A leader's ability to steer an organization is only as good as her or his ability to get the people doing things in the organization to agree on where things should go.

• The speed of a shell is ultimately a function of swing - a state in which each of the rowers is performing her task to the best of her ability and also in perfect synchrony with the others. Each is an individual and each has her own strengths and distinctive characteristics, yet all are harmonized together. It is the job of the cox to create and sustain this state. Leadership is not about being "in charge". It is about getting groups to work together with each other in ways that not only maximize their own individual potential and ability, but harmonize with each other.

It takes a long time, a lot of practice, and a lot of work for a crew to develop swing. Many never do. In the absence of this state, coxes can yell louder or faster, but the result is generally not a faster shell. Worse, faster and louder yelling by the cox can cause the entire boat to capsize and the rowers to get hurt.

In this time of crisis, our organizations are discovering the truth about ourselves. Our leaders are yelling louder and faster, and steering our boats in suddenly new directions. The organizations that have done the long, slow, laborious work of developing themselves, of tuning their capacity for swing, will do OK in a crisis. Those that have not will flounder still more.

There's one last observation about leadership-as-coxswain. It's not about the individual leader. The best cox in the world could step into a shell with eight rowers she doesn't know and produce terrible results. Coxes only succeed based on the relationships they have built with their rowers and the relationships they have fostered among the rowers themselves. Hiring a great cox won't make the boat faster. Hiring one with the right skills and mindset, and letting that leader do the work over the long haul, will.

Concluding the UVA Saga: Return of the Jedi (President)

As many who read this blog undoubtedly already know, Teresa Sullivan was reinstated as president of the University of Virginia yesterday by a unanimous vote of its governing board, including from the board chair who had engineered her ouster in the first place. As has been true over the past few weeks, there will be plenty of commentary on these latest events - mine is only one voice in a large chorus. Nevertheless, a couple of thoughts:

First, I would disagree with one phrase in the Chronicle's opening paragraph (linked above): that Sullivan's reinstatement is an "improbable comeback tale". I think that this outcome was not only probable but entirely predictable. The damage that was done by Sullivan's firing was vast. Prominent faculty were leaving, alumni were upset (and therefore less likely to give $$), students were protesting. Had the decision been upheld, recruiting students, faculty, and alumni dollars would have been much more difficult for the foreseeable future - and these things are the lifeblood of any university. Finally, the political ambitions of the board members themselves could not survive this debacle. If the board's Rector, Helen Dragas, wants to go on to bigger and better things, being known as the woman who trashed UVA was not going to get her there. In social science lingo, reinstatement was overdetermined - too many forces pushing for it, not enough pushing the other way.

The second and more important observation has to do with the argument that this case has rekindled about the nature of higher education. Even in retreat, Ms. Dragas has continued to insist that "the days of incremental decision-making in higher education are over, or should be." She insists that the only mistake here was process, not substance - that "we did the right thing, the wrong way."

This suggests that Ms. Dragas continues to cling to a delusional fantasy about higher education: that if you are bold and "radical" enough, you can remake universities like Jack Welch remade corporations, changing their fundamental direction and strategy in a short period of time. (Of course, one of the things Welch did to GE was get it involved deeply in financial services....) There continue to be those who think that universities really should be "run like corporations", that they should be agile and nimble and strategically dynamic and all those other great buzzwords that people in the business world love to sling around.

This fantasy rests on two errors. The first is that radical transformation of a business's direction is a good way of doing business. The history of successful business suggests otherwise. Ford has been around for nearly 100 years doing the same thing today that they did at their founding: making cars. Apple computer, the world's most valuable brand, makes innovative technology products with the same focus today as they did in the early 1980s.

Yes, some companies do remake themselves in fundamental ways - usually quite rarely, and often to uncertain effect. In the last decade a number of airlines went from running planes and flying people around to being commodity speculators - because they thought that the "new strategic environment" demanded it. That hasn't worked out very well for many of them.

The second mistake is in believing that rapid transformation of a large university is possible, and that the lever to do so is replacing the president. As my friend Steve Saideman pointed out, universities are a lot more like aircraft carriers than sailboats - turning quickly isn't a function of motivation but of physics. Anyone who understands how a university works - how education is "produced" - will understand this intuitively.

The primary "producers" of education are faculty - people who have taken the time and the trouble to become experts in their fields. Unless you can come up with a way to educate students that doesn't involve expertise - and nobody yet has - you have to run an organization that can recruit these experts and keep them happy. You can appoint anybody you like as president of a university, but if that president tries to lead where the faculty don't want to go the result will be a parade of one. Presidents can do a lot of damage to a university in the process of trying to drag an unwilling faculty over a cliff (or to a different pasture), and they may whine and complain a lot about how "stubborn" and "unreasonable" the faculty are. But in the end, the faculty win, because administrations don't educate students - faculty do.

This, by the way, has been an argument that faux-business types have used against tenure for years. But tenure isn't really the issue here. Yes, faculty without tenure can be fired if they don't cooperate with some new "strategic direction", whereas tenured faculty have more immediate security. But as the UVA debacle shows, if you tick the faculty off the ones you lose first are the tenured faculty with stellar records - your superstars. And everyone, tenured and untenured alike, can and will vote with their feet. If the faculty perceive an institution as being badly-run, many of them will find a way to go elsewhere - and in any competitive labor market, it's always the best and the brightest who are most likely to leave, because they have the most opportunities.

So describing the UVA mess as another instance of a "debate" between two somehow equal and opposite sides is simply misleading. What Sullivan's rapid firing and reinstatement demonstrate instead is what happens when delusional ideas run into reality. Smart university leaders and boards of trustees would do well to learn this lesson.

A Small Voice in the Chorus on UVA

I'm late getting on this bandwagon - I blame the fact that most of what I own is in boxes, and has only recently been delivered to my new home in Ohio. That's knocked a lot of my schedule off kilter. Figures that while I'm moving, the most public higher education governance scandal in years comes along. Given my proclivity for talking about academic governance, I feel the need to say something.

For those not familiar with this mess, the short form is that a very popular and apparently quite effective president at the University of Virginia was fired overnight and without warning by the governing board of the institution. When asked for a reason the Board largely failed to provide one that makes any sense, which has led to both speculation and a great deal of journalistic digging. The latest narrative in the Chronicle is chasing the possibility that this involved a small group of Board members who wanted to drive UVA towards online education. I've no doubt that more details will emerge in the coming days and weeks.

Unfortunately, much of what I want to say has already been said. My friend Steve Saideman has an excellent piece on his blog, which makes points I wish I had made before he did. He is right in pointing out that universities are much more like aircraft carriers than sailboats - anybody who thinks that you can change course quickly simply doesn't know what they're talking about.

To these and other excellent pieces out there (check out here and here), I would add only two other observations:

1) Among the many sins committed by the Board of Visitors in this case, communications is one of the most important. Yes, it appears that the substance of what was done - firing a good president on a whim - was sheer stupidity. But the failure to apparently anticipate the need to explain that decision in public, and the failure to plan a communications strategy ahead of time, raise this from the level of mere mundane stupidity to idiocy of the highest order. If you can't think at least one step ahead to your crisis communications plan, you have no business holding a leadership position of any kind. To my mind, the bumbling, stumbling incoherence which has been the Board's public response disqualifies the lot of them from running anything more complex than a bake sale.

2) There has been, and will continue to be, a lot of conversation about how this is a prime example of the dangers of applying "business models" to higher education. Slate had a good piece that touched on this, but there has been a lot within the higher ed world on this question. This is predictable, because the "business vs. higher education" meme has been around for decades - it's a well-worn path with well-worn arguments on all sides. Personally, I think it's time to move beyond the combative debate to a more constructive conversation, but that's a topic for another day.

The more important point here is that this case is not really about business vs. higher education. That's because while the Board of Visitors people who threw this grenade may have thought they were motivated by "good business practice", what they have done would be bad in ANY industry. Solid businesses that are well-run for the long term don't read a couple of articles in the press (articles they don't really understand) and suddenly fire their CEOs. This isn't how good corporations behave, it's how the Pointy-Haired Boss in Dilbert behaves (and Scott Adams has made this exact joke numerous times).

So what we're seeing here isn't really a case study for why ideas from the corporate sector have no place in higher education. It's an illustration of how bad corporate ideas should't be applied to universities. The lesson is, "don't do stupid things." But that, one would hope, is a sufficiently obvious point for most folks. Although perhaps not to the "leadership" of the Virginia Board of Visitors.

Two-Level Games in Real Life

Our students sometimes complain that the stuff we teach them about is too theoretical, too abstract, or too esoteric to be useful in "real life". We face a constant challenge in getting them to see the connection between the "airy-fairy theoretical stuff" and the headlines in the newspapers and on TV.

Every once in a while, however, a really great case comes along that almost perfectly illustrates the theory we're trying to get across. For those of us who have tried to get across the somewhat abstract notion of the "two-level game", Greece is right now providing that perfect example. If I had a European politics class (which I don't - I'm not nearly enough of a European expert to pull that off), I would love to game this out.

Greece, of course, just went through an election to try to fix the last election that failed to produce a viable government. This latest round seems to have solved that problem, only to have handed the likely new government a potentially insoluble problem: how to strike a bargain with its own population such that Greeks don't shut down the country with protests, fail to pay their taxes, or any number of other things they could do, while simultaneously reaching a deal with the rest of Europe (primarily, Germany and the EU central bureaucracy) on some kind of budget-saving austerity program.

As I've pointed out before, there may not be a solution to this problem. Germany and the international bankers may demand more pain than the Greek population (or a sufficient minority of it) is willing to bear. I heard one analysis this afternoon suggest that Greece's exit from the Euro is all but assured, simply because the chances of Greece voting (at the ballot box or in their daily behavior) over and over again to support austerity is extremely unlikely.

The new Greek government will find out soon enough how very real this "theory" is. These next few months should prove an excellent case study - although I doubt that the Greeks, or many Europeans for that matter, will appreciate the lesson.

Higher Ed Search Firms & the Legislative Process: An Update

A few weeks back I wrote about a story involving proposed legislation in Illinois that would ban the use of search firms in public universities. At the time I argued that this was a bad idea, and a good example of legislators trying to legislate something they don't understand. (I should have pointed out that these were the same Illinois legislators who may have been handing out university scholarships as political favors for years, but that's a different story).

Today we have an update on the search firm story from the Chronicle. Apparently, cooler heads have prevailed, and a total ban has been softened to a need to justify the use of a particular search firm at levels below president. In itself, this seems like a reasonable compromise, one that I would guess will find support in the Illinois legislature while the universities breathe a sigh of relief.

However, the resulting legislation may not change current behavior much - if at all. The devil, they say, is always in the details. In this case, the key paragraph from the Chronicle story is here (emphasis added):

The amended bill, which passed the Illinois House of Representatives and the State Senate this week, would allow universities to contract with search firms to help fill presidential vacancies, but it would limit their use in other cases. Before employing outside consultants to aid in nonpresidential searches, a university and its board of trustees would have to "demonstrate a justifiable need for guidance from an individual or firm with specific expertise in the field of the hiring." The bill would require the state's public institutions to enact policies that define the criteria for when hiring a search firm is necessary.

The first piece seems reasonable - universities will have to demonstrate the need for a particular search firm in a given instance. But the key questions are: to whom do they need to make that argument, and on what basis? The second question is answered in the last sentence - the universities themselves get to "enact policies" (read: write the rules) that determine when a search firm is "necessary".

If I have to justify that something is necessary, but I get to define what "necessary" means, I am very likely to draw my definition to closely match what I already want to do (it all depends on what the definition of "is" is...). And this is exactly what Illinois universities are likely to do. Universities in general are very change-resistant, and have become masters of writing policies and procedures and white papers and such that essentially justify what they are already doing, put into whatever language has political favor at the moment.

My guess is that the answer to the "to whom" question will be some Illinois education bureaucracy, where people with better things to do with their time will be sent long, complex documents explaining why a given search must have a search firm and how the envisioned search carefully adheres to that university's policy on such searches. And since bureaucrats generally have neither the authority nor the inclination to pick a fight with universities by overruling their decisions, these documents are likely to get a cursory look, a quick stamp of approval, and be filed in a filing cabinet somewhere, never again to be looked at - except perhaps by an auditor 15 years from now.

Do I know for certain that this will be the outcome of this particular law? Of course not - there's always the outside chance of real and lasting change. But in this case Illinois legislators are up against the combined weight of resistance of all of the state's public universities, from which most of said legislators got their degrees in the first place. Odds are that this bill will move behavior only at the margin - if at all.

Whether that's a good or a bad thing I'll leave to others to debate. But if there's one lesson here, it's that legislatures need to understand the very real limits of their power to effect change from outside the academy. In the end, this may end up being a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Leaders Should Be More Ears and Less Mouth

This is a set of thoughts that's been coming together in my head for a week or so, in response to a bunch of disparate things I've both read and written. It started consciously with my post on Obama's "gay marriage" interview, but draws on things rattling in the back of my mind for some time.

Being an administrator in higher education, I get a lot of variations on the faculty question: what the heck are administrators good for, anyway? There's a lot of talk about "leadership", but the fear among many faculty (and I still think of myself as part of the faculty tribe, even if I draw my paycheck from elsewhere) is that universities spend a lot of money on administrators in exchange for - nothing, or sometimes worse than nothing.

So I think it's reasonable to ask administrators about what this "leadership" thing is that they (we?) like to talk so much about. What's the value proposition here? What are we getting for our money?

For some administrators (including some I have worked for in the past), "leadership" means "I'm in charge, do what I say." That this is a vapidly stupid sentiment does not keep some of these folks from thinking it, and even on occasion expressing it. Obviously, that's the wrong path.

We have done a good job of teaching our students that "leadership" isn't about holding a position (another myth sometimes held by bad administrators - think Cartman's "Respect my authoritah!"). We've taught them that leadership is about getting things done. I went to an awards ceremony for students last night, packed with energetic undergrads who have perfected the art of "leading" clubs and organizations by actually getting them to do things - no mean feat.

But in administrative positions, there's only so much we can actually do ourselves. In the mid-levels of administration (the place where I spend my days), my ability to actually do things is limited both by the scope conditions around my authority (which are considerable) and the time I have at my disposal (which is no more than anyone else has). Getting things done is indeed part of leadership - but if we're just doing things that faculty could (and should) do themselves, we're not leading, we're usurping.

In the political context, I suggested in my blog on Obama's interview that one of the most important things a leader can do is lead conversations, so that we (the group, the nation) can understand what it is that we want/need/desire.

This is particularly true, I think, in universities. It is true that, in many ways, the faculty is the university. And it's certainly true that the university can't offer programs, or market itself, in ways that aren't tied to the real and authentic strengths, abilities, and passions of its faculty. But what exactly is that "authentic self"? That's a conversation that individual faculty have views, opinions, and thoughts on - but who collects those views and knits them together into a coherent whole? Faculty don't usually have the time (or, often, the inclination) to do so.

That, I think, is one of the keys to real academic leadership: listening to the faculty (and the students and staff - because they, too, are important parts of the university community) and reflecting back what is heard. I tell faculty in meetings all the time: what I think is irrelevant. I'm not The Decider. I'm the one who has to put into action what the university decides. So I first have to listen to the university in all its cacophony - an act which is sometimes maddening, but never boring.

To me, the best leaders are those who listen (and the worst ones are those who never listen - I've seen my share of those). If you want to be a leader in this business, I think adopting the motto "More Ears, Less Mouth" is a good way to start.