As an academic, I’ve never had much interest in becoming a leader — not in the sense of climbing the ladder from department chair to campus committee chair to dean, anyway.
A main reason for my discomfort with leadership is that I tend to conceptualize leadership as leading groups of people toward decisions that they can all agree upon or at least accept. I think of such decisions as involving persuasion, and I think of persuasion as very difficult.
I must be only half-right about all this.
The part I’m probably right about is that, most of the time, direct non-coercive persuasion is indeed quite difficult. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens explained it well in an interview about his weekly “The Conversation” column with fellow columnist Gail Collins:
I think it’s very important that you not go into a conversation with the idea that you’re going to win. It’s not a competition. It’s an effort to learn how the other side thinks.
People have asked me, is persuasion possible? I have a hard time thinking it is. I think what you can do is make a person — a reasonable person — on the other side of an argument, say: “Hmm, I can see it. I can see what you’re saying.”
That doesn’t mean I need you to agree with me or that I need to kind of assert my intellectual dominance. It just means like, all right, I get it. That doesn’t sound completely stupid. And I’m going to go back and think a little bit about why that’s not entirely right or totally wrong. But the moment it becomes a competition, the moment pride gets involved, you’re doomed to bitterness.
Note that this is coming from a professional opinion columnist, whose entire job is the art of persuasion!
Nevertheless, despite the near-impossibility of persuasion, SOME leaders are effective somehow. And while they may tend to be better-than-average persuaders, I don’t think persuasiveness is their primary superpower. So how do they get things done? I don’t really know. (Alert readers might have noticed me grappling with this issue in part 27 of my absurd unfinished novella, but all I came up with there was a small grab-bag of context-dependent strategies.) I should probably read one of those airport books on leadership and/or talk to my cousin Paul, who is something of a natural leader and has an MBA.
For now, as I stumble along, trying to understand leadership without doing any actual research, I believe that two key pieces of the leadership puzzle must be the following: a curiosity about others, and a grasp of one’s own and others’ values.
In the quote above, Stephens is advocating for curiosity by thinking of a conversation as “an effort to learn how the other side thinks.” I am relatively comfortable with this kind of thinking (and have previously written about it in a different context). However, I’ve been slow to link this curiosity to issues of personal values. In fact, the connection was only solidified for me very recently, at the very end of a five-year leadership program in which I was (sporadically, peripherally) involved.
The program focused on leadership skills for mid-career women in STEM. I was slow to absorb its lessons in part because I’m not a woman and don’t have many leadership-related aspirations. Last fall, though, I finally got around to unpacking its title: “Values-based Leadership Training for Women in STEM” (VAuLTS for short). At a workshop hosted by Montana State University in Bozeman, I finally realized that centering values could make potentially challenging discussions go better. And a couple of weeks later, I saw an opportunity to articulate this to colleagues amidst an acrimonious all-campus email chain:
From: Greg Crowther
Date: Sat, Nov 16, 2024 at 9:18 AM
To: All Faculty
Oh, goody — this discussion is continuing on into the weekend. In that case I’m going to take my turn.
Aside from the question of whether these kinds of discussions should be conducted via email — a very valid question! — I have a general suggestion as to how to make such discussions more productive or at least less distressing. My suggestion stems from a professional development workshop I attended two weekends ago on values-based leadership. As you might guess, the main premise of that workshop is that, in leading discussions and making decisions, good leaders consistently center values — both their own and those of their constituents and other stakeholders.
When we are trying to make a potentially contentious point — whether in an email or on zoom or in person — it may be clearer and less inflammatory to lead by (briefly!) referencing the relevant core values, and then to try to relate the specific circumstances to those core values.
To take a couple of examples from this thread:
* To make the point that prof/tech is its own professional identity encompassing specific valuable real-world skills, consider starting by noting the great value in these domain-specific skills, then go from there to something like “to me, the ideal candidate would have extensive experience with the skills specific to this prof-tech community.”
* To make the point that spelling someone’s name right is important, consider starting by noting that we strive to respect all colleagues and applicants and that correct use of name/pronouns/etc. is an important way of conveying respect, then note that a specific name has been misspelled multiple times, which could be interpreted as showing a lack of respect.
In these examples, what could potentially come across as savage accusations can be greatly softened by reframing the ideas as, “Value X is important to me/us, and I worry that statement/action Y is in conflict with that value.”
In some ways my versions may not seem that different from what was actually written, but the sequencing of the points matters, and the specific choices of words matter. I claim that slowing down to think about how the controversies of the moment relate back to our core values leads to better communication with less misunderstanding and less pain.
The versions I’m advocating may sound a bit stiff and formal, but I’ll choose stiff and formal over angry and divisive any day of the week. Including weekends.
I don’t regard this email as brilliant, visionary, or strikingly effective — it did not immediately spawn a new era of unprecedented campus collegiality — but, at the least, it represented another step forward in my ongoing stumbling toward understanding leadership.
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