CHAPTER 4

Challenge the Process

WHEN KIM LOEB BECAME EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of Professional, Applied and Continuing Education (PACE), the program was small and losing money. She immediately set about restructuring PACE by overhauling programs and courses that hadn’t been updated in decades, refocusing initiatives on student services and bringing in professional development resources to ensure that her team was working to full capacity. Within five years Kim’s program offered more than 600 full- and part-time programs, courses, and workshops. It recruited students from more than 30 different countries and generated over $1 million in revenue. “People say it’s so great your university sends you on international recruitment trips,” Kim told us. “But no; they don’t send me. We create these opportunities.”

Much of the credit for PACE’s new directions is due to Kim’s encouraging her team to consider innovative ideas and opportunities. She does not feel threatened by ideas or skill sets that differ from her own. Instead she sees each of her team members as having something unique to offer: “I always try to bring in people for our team who have different skills than me.” Her openness and vulnerability helped her expand PACE in directions that wouldn’t be possible if working on her own.

Of course the accomplishments at PACE don’t mean that every change has been a success. “We’ve definitely developed some programs that weren’t winners,” Kim told us. She knows that being successful means you have to be willing to fail, and she fosters that same understanding within her team. It’s okay to make mistakes, Kim said, so long as your team can learn from them. One way she shows her team and university that she’s open to feedback and growth is by attending lunch with class participants and writing up a report based on the improvements and constructive criticism she hears from them.

Getting people to venture beyond the limitations they usually set for themselves and experiencing victory over doubt are keys to their effectiveness. This triumph is significant because the challenges facing colleges and universities demand a willingness to take risks and experiment with innovation. Leaders foster risk-taking and encourage others to step into the unknown rather than play it safe. They set goals that are higher than current levels but not so steep that people feel only frustration. Leaders raise the bar gradually and offer coaching and training to build skills that help people get up and through each new level.

In our interviews and case studies, we asked people to tell us about their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences. Invariably, they talked about times of change, difficulty, and adversity. We didn’t ask them about times of change. We asked them about their personal bests, but they chose to write about times of change. This response underscores the fact that leadership is inherently associated with change and challenge. It involves doing things differently, experimenting, and taking risks. Leadership without change is entirely ceremonial. You can’t lead yourself, your department, or your institution to a better tomorrow without change. Doing your best as a leader means that you must Challenge the Process.

We asked direct reports how often their leaders engaged in the six behaviors associated with Challenge the Process on the Leadership Practices Inventory, with assessments ranging from 1 (Almost never) to 10 (Almost always). We also asked them a separate question about the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with the statement Overall, this person is an effective leader (1 = Strongly disagree and 5 = Strongly agree). How effective direct reports rate their leaders increases systematically (p < 0.001) as leaders are observed engaging more and more frequently in the behaviors associated with challenging the process. There was a huge 84 percent bump in effectiveness from the bottom to the top quartile.

SEIZE THE INITIATIVE TO IMPROVE

Colleges and universities are not typically bastions of change, often quite the contrary. Faculty often cling to what’s familiar, administrations can be slow to adopt new systems and processes, and alumni love the traditions. Still, within the hallowed halls change is central to every institution’s DNA. After all, students will be changed by the institutional experience. Otherwise, what’s the point? As Jeffrey Buller, author of numerous books on higher education, has acknowledged, “In an academic setting, we need to set ourselves a loftier goal than simply settling for the status quo.”¹

Challenge the Process is not about change just for the sake of change but, consistent with higher education’s purpose, change for the better. Leaders on college campuses are motivated by making the status quo not merely different but better. Improving the current situation demands change. It would be foolish to expect better results just by doing the same things over and over again.

Within and outside higher education, when people tell the stories of their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences they talk about the challenge of change. When we look at leaders, we see that their work is associated with adversity, uncertainty, hardship, disruption, transformation, transition, recovery, and new beginnings. Sometimes the changes are small and sometimes they are large, but they are all about awakening new possibilities. Leaders don’t always have to change history, but they do have to make a change in “business as usual.”

When asked about who initiated the projects that they selected as their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences, we assumed that most people would name themselves. Instead more than half the cases were initiated by someone other than the leader—usually the person’s immediate supervisor, manager, department chair, director, or dean. Yet if leadership is about seizing the initiative, how can people be called “leaders” when they are assigned the jobs and tasks they undertake?

As we see it, the fact that more than half the cases were not self-initiated is quite positive. It liberates the people who thought they had to kickstart all the changes themselves, and it encourages the idea that responsibility for innovation and improvement is everyone’s business. If the only times people reported doing their best were when they got to be the supervisor, department chair, director, or some head honcho, the majority of leadership experiences would evaporate—as would the majority of change both on and off campus. The reality is that much of what people do at work is assigned; few of us get to start anything from scratch. Leaders who were seen as “taking the initiative in anticipating and responding to change” were concomitantly assessed by their direct reports as bringing out the best of people’s talents and abilities, as the analysis in figure 4.1 reveals.

Seizing the initiative has less to do with position than it does with attitude and action. Innovation and excellence are the results of people, at all levels, making things happen. It’s no surprise, then, that when it comes to change and continuous improvement, everyone needs to believe that they can take the initiative to do something different. It’s the responsibility of leaders to foster an environment in which that belief can become a reality.

Figure 4.1 The more often leaders are seen as taking initiative in anticipating and responding to change the more they are viewed as bringing out the best in people’s talents and abilities.

Encourage Initiative in Others

Innovative leaders seize the initiative, and they also encourage innovation and resourcefulness in others. You want people to speak up, to offer suggestions for improvement, and to be straightforward with their constructive criticism. Yet when it comes to situations that involve high uncertainty, high risk, and high challenge, many people feel reluctant to act, afraid they might make matters worse.

Because of its high visibility, the annual “You Can Make a Difference” conference had been heavily micromanaged by various staff members—that is, until Jackie Schmidt-Posner became the adviser to the students running the conference. As she said, “I challenged our staff to walk our talk and support student development by empowering our students to carry out the project. We had to step back and let the students learn from their experiences, even if they made some mistakes. This was risky because some of my colleagues felt the conference would not be of high quality if the students weren’t closely monitored—and there was a chance they could have been right.”

While Jackie admitted to being “a little nervous” at the start, she challenged the student leaders to excel by “constantly posing questions, asking them what their vision and goals were and how they could include and empower others to get there.” She also encouraged and supported the students when they stumbled “to always learn from their experience.” The conference turned out to be a huge success, engaging large numbers of students from very diverse backgrounds. A broader range of students assumed leadership roles in the conference than ever before. Not only did the program receive a university-based award but the two student coordinators also received individual service awards for their leadership.

Leaders like Jackie, who speak out and Challenge the Process, believe in their ability to do something about the situation they face. They also believe in their ability to help others.² People who are high in self-efficacy—the personal belief in how well one can handle prospective situations, capable of taking action to achieve a goal—are more likely to act than those who are not.

The most important way leaders instill this can-do attitude is by providing opportunities for people to gain mastery of a task, often one step at a time. Training is crucial to building self-efficacy and to encouraging initiative. Isn’t it interesting, perhaps ironic, that “training”—the sine qua non of higher education—is too infrequently applied to the development of faculty and staff capabilities? Exemplary college and university leaders design and build learning opportunities for more than just the students. They fully appreciate that knowledge, like any institutional asset, deteriorates over time. They realize that people can’t do what they don’t know how to do. Short of firing everyone who doesn’t come with all the skills intact—a virtual impossibility—capabilities need to be continuously upgraded. More and more higher-education institutions are recognizing the importance of lifelong learning by investing in administrative and management development programs (as opposed to content-based training) for faculty and staff alike.³

Leaders provide opportunities for people to exceed their previous levels of performance. They regularly set the bar higher. And the best leaders understand the importance of setting the bar at a level at which people feel they can succeed. Raise it too high, and people will fail; if they fail too often, they’ll quit trying. Raise the bar a bit at a time, and eventually more people master the situation. This awareness of the human need for challenge and a sensitivity to the need to succeed is among the critical balancing skills of any leader.

Make Challenge Meaningful

When we’ve asked people to think of historical leaders whom, if alive today, they would willingly follow, all of those nominated were people with strong beliefs about matters of principle: Susan B. Anthony, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Jesus Christ, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Ghandi, Maria Klawe, Martin Luther King Jr., Wendy Kopp, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Golda Meir, and Eleanor Roosevelt, to name a few. Another consistent thread that’s woven through the list of admired historical leaders is that they were all individuals who served during times of turbulence, conflict, innovation, and change. They’re people who triumphed against tremendous odds, who took initiative when there was inertia, who confronted tradition and the established order, and who mobilized people and institutions in the face of stiff resistance.

Leadership and challenge are inextricably linked, just as leadership and principles are inextricably linked. The implication is crystal clear. The leaders people admire are ones who have the courage of their convictions. They expect their leaders to have values, but it’s even more essential that these leaders are willing to stand up for their beliefs during times of intense challenge and radical change.

What gets you going in the morning, eager to embrace whatever might be in store for the day? What motivates you to do your best, day in and day out? Why do people push their own limits to get extraordinary things done? And for that matter, why do people do many things for little or no tangible reward? Extrinsic rewards—the traditional cliché of “what gets rewarded gets done”—certainly can’t explain these actions in higher education. Institutions can’t pay people to care about students, alumni, or even their colleagues; they can’t pay people to care about their classes, programs, services, facilities, families, or even the college’s bottom line.

A sense of meaning and purpose is what gets people through the tough times, when they don’t think they can even get up in the morning or take another step, give another lecture, make comments on another blue book, write another article, generate another strategic report, refurbish another residence hall, attend another pep rally, organize another reception, or hold another orientation. The motivation to deal with the challenges and uncertainties of life and work comes from the inside and not from something that others hold out as some kind of carrot. One of the primary motivating factors for Kim and her PACE team was to keep a focus on what any changes would mean to the students she worked with every day: “We do what we do to change the lives of our students,” she told us. Keeping that noble transformational possibility in the forefront was central to their sustained efforts to overhaul their programs.

It’s evident from our research, and from studies by many others, that if people are going to do their best, they must be internally motivated.⁴ This is nowhere truer than in the higher-education arena. The task or project in which they’re engaged must be intrinsically rewarding. When it comes to excellence, it’s definitely not “what gets rewarded gets done”; it’s “what is rewarding gets done.” Leaders tap in to people’s hearts and minds. They get faculty and staff to understand, appreciate, and believe in the noble purposes of their specific organizational unit or department within the context of the overall college’s mission.

Look Outward for Fresh Ideas

When faced with new challenges, people live with a high degree of ambiguity. Change and the accompanying uncertainty throw off customary equilibrium. Yet it’s these fluctuations, disturbances, and imbalances that are the primary sources of creativity.⁵ Leaders must embrace innovation as they navigate their departments, programs, and institutions through what is becoming the permanent white water surrounding higher education.

Leaders appreciate that improvements and innovations can come from anywhere. For example, some of the best new ideas for classes and program changes come from alumni. Technology applications often find their way onto college campuses after first being introduced in corporations. Changes in service-learning experiences at the secondary-school level have accelerated the scale and scope of university-based initiatives. Consequently, you must be actively looking and listening to what’s going on around you for even the fuzziest sign or weakest signal that there’s something new on the horizon.

Being innovative requires more listening and communication than does repetitive, predictable work. Guiding a change demands that leaders establish more interpersonal relationships, connect with more sources of information, and get out of their offices—even off their own campuses—more frequently than taking care of routine responsibilities. This means you must stay in touch with trends in the academic and professional marketplaces, with the ideas and advice of people from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, and with ongoing social, political, technological, economic, and artistic changes.

Godfrey Mungal, when he became dean, inherited a school of engineering that was in financial turmoil, with enrollments failing to meet budget targets and donor contributions declining. To move the school forward, one of the first orders of business was achieving financial stability. Godfrey realized that to raise revenue, he had to look outside the existing portfolio of degree programs. He and his colleagues saw the possibility of offering a series of nondegree courses and certificate programs for graduates and area professionals. For example, they developed a series of short courses on such hot topics as photovoltaics and renewable energy that could be taken for credit or self-enrichment.

If leaders are going to detect opportunities for change—before those opportunities wither, become demands, or cause huge problems—they must use their outsight. Outsight is the sibling of insight, and it means being able to perceive external realities. Without outsight, innovation cannot happen. And insight without outsight is like seeing clearly with blinders on—you just don’t get the complete picture. It can also be useful to get outside your usual discipline or functional field. Attend a conference in an entirely different area from your own; take a class in a different field; tour facilities in industries with which you are unfamiliar. See the world through a different lens.

To get a good sense of the external realities, you must get up from your desk, get out of your office, and talk with your constituents—local citizens, staff, employers, trustees, alumni, faculty, students, suppliers, vendors, managers, or just interested parties. You have to listen—in person, on the phone, via email, via websites, through social media— and stay in touch with what is going on around you. You also need to put yourself into new situations, which forces you to examine and confront your existing paradigms; this is akin to gathering data and analyzing it. Be willing to hear, consider, and accept ideas from sources outside higher education.

For example, consider “associating,” the discovery skill linked with innovators, which involves making connections across “seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas.”⁶ Consider how you might stir the imagination by starting a discussion with your colleagues about such questions as: How would Disney engage with our admissions process? How would Southwest Airlines cut our costs? How would Starbucks design our alumni relations program? How would Amazon register our students?

EXPERIMENT AND TAKE RISKS

If we’re talking about challenging the status quo, you might ask, Why not start BIG? Unfortunately, problems conceived of too broadly can be overwhelming. Just thinking about big problems can defeat our capacity even to imagine what might be done, let alone strengthen our desire to solve them.

Leaders face a similar challenge: that mountain (a curriculum change, or shift in parking policy, or integration of marketing practices) looks much too high and difficult to climb; even taking the first few steps can’t be contemplated. Getting yourself and others to exchange old mind-sets and habits for new ways of thinking and acting is daunting. Even with the best intentions, people tend to revert to old and familiar patterns, especially in times of stress. Therefore leaders must get people to want to change the direction in which they’re currently headed on a one-step-at-a-time basis.⁷

The most effective change processes are incremental; leaders break down big problems into small, doable steps and get the people around them to say yes numerous times, not just once. Successful leaders help others see how progress can be made by breaking down the journey into measurable goals and milestones. This was precisely the process Richard Hall, associate dean, employed when developing and launching a new executive MBA program, an education space the university had never entered.

One of the most radical things they did, which had never been done before, was to integrate faculty from a variety of fields seemingly unrelated to a business education, such as philosophy, art, and music. The faculty stumbled a lot at the beginning of the program, as did the students, in sorting out what was happening and how they were to take responsibility for integrating the lessons and learnings across the various disciplines. Richard and his team referred to the multiple iterations of faculty and student efforts as “trials” and viewed each as a learning opportunity. The program’s eventual success was due to their ability to build on these trial experiences as a series of small wins. The methodology, Richard explained, was “trialing things wherever possible in bite-size chunks, on a small scale. Failing often, and failing fast, and being prepared to be as agile as we could and changing things as needed.”⁸

Richard’s experience illustrates that change, or learning, doesn’t typically happen overnight: it’s a step-by-step process. Leaders break projects, dreams, and aspirations into smaller pieces so that their constituents can make progress. An essential building block in achieving these small wins is soliciting feedback. When students volunteered to participate in trials, Richard’s team would make sure everyone understood that it was an experiment and that students and faculty were required to give feedback about their experiences. That information would be forwarded to the various academic committees, and they would make any necessary adjustments.

Reflecting on the experience, Richard said, “So you do it small scale, you make sure it’s a trial, you take the feedback very seriously, and you spend a lot of time deliberating about what worked and what didn’t. And then you try it again and again.”

Whether it was a success or a failure, Richard’s team constantly monitored what they were doing while they were doing it and after they had done it. He went on to explain: “We have an informal debrief, a more formal debrief, a formal debrief that involves the full evaluation, the final evaluation, and then the preliminary for the next delivery. We revisit that again, looking at the changes that are being made and planned as we go to the next time we deliver it. That is time-consuming, but that’s part and parcel of a constantly evolving program.”

The academic community has always understood that major breakthroughs are likely the result of the work of scores of researchers, as countless contributions finally add up to a solution. Advances in medicine or biophysics, for example, often involve many experiments focused on various pieces of the problem. Likewise, taking the sum total—all the “little” improvements in technology regardless of the industry—has contributed to a more substantial increase in organizational productivity than all the great inventors and their inventions.⁹ Progress is more likely the result of a focus on incremental improvements in tools and processes than of tectonic shifts of minds. Leaders keep the dream in mind, then they act and adapt on the move.

Make Small Wins Work

This incremental change process that leaders like Richard use has been called “small wins,” as each success enables leaders to build people’s commitment to a course of action.¹⁰ The alumni or development office does much the same thing when they ask graduating students and recent alumni for a small contribution. They know that it’s easier to go back and request more in the future from those who’ve made an initial pledge than to return to someone who’s never made a contribution. Leaders start with actions that are within their control, that are tangible, that are doable, and that can get the ball rolling.

The small-wins process may not have initially been on Jeanne Rosenberger’s mind as the dean of student life at a small private non-secular university, but she put it to good use when she found herself as the link between the administration and a student group protesting the university’s acceptance of a major donation from a government defense contractor. Jeanne needed to find a way to keep the protest from escalating, to ensure everyone’s safety, to safeguard the health of the students who decided to fast as part of their protest, and to formulate a win-win outcome.

Jeanne aimed to cultivate a calm, collaborative setting rather than a confrontational one. This she managed step by step, gaining agreements and trust from multiple parties along the way. She made sure that a neutral location was used for meetings, emphasizing the importance of face-to-face communication and careful listening. She began each conversation with the students by asking about their health and well-being—not with any ultimatums. She gained their trust by promising that the university would call the police or campus safety department only if needed, rather than having a constant police presence.

As a result, the protest remained peaceful, the students fasted for four days—with no health problems—and a dialogue about the development of a corporate gift policy for the institution began. If Jeanne had not taken the small-wins approach and had instead seen the situation as an enormous problem, the protest could have escalated and resulted in a disaster. But it didn’t. Jeanne realized that incremental steps were the most promising path to a successful resolution. Afterward she made use of this experience to involve students in reflecting on what they had learned—about the demonstration, about the university, about corporations, and about themselves. Turning a protest into a learning opportunity—a teachable moment—required being open about the process and made it a win for everyone.

Small wins form the basis for a consistent pattern of accomplishment that attracts people who want to be allied with a successful venture. Small wins build people’s confidence and reinforce their natural desire to feel successful. Because additional resources tend to flow to winners, slightly larger steps or wins can be attempted next. A series of small wins therefore provides a foundation of stable building blocks. Each win preserves gains and makes it harder to return to preexisting conditions; each win also offers information that facilitates learning and adaptation.

Small wins also deter opposition for a simple reason: it’s hard to argue against success. Thus small wins decrease resistance to subsequent proposals. In achieving a small win, you identify the place to get started. You make the project seem doable and within existing skill and resource levels. This approach minimizes the cost of trying and reduces the risk of failing. With the achievement of a small win, natural forces are set in motion, propelling actions toward another small win. This simple strategy of winning step-by-step succeeds more often than massive overhauls and gigantic projects. It’s not just that it’s easier; it’s also because personal and group commitment is built in to the process.

Learn from Mistakes

There’s no denying that change and leadership involve taking risks, and with any uncertain action there are always, at a minimum, mistakes and, worse yet, failures. To be sure, failure can be costly. For the individual who leads a failed project, it can mean a stalled career or even a lost job. For the scholar, pursuing a new avenue of research may result in failure to receive tenure or a promotion. For the institute or center, it can lead to a loss of contracts and funding. For a dean or college president, it can mean a vote of no confidence.

It is, however, absolutely essential to take risks. On the academic side, all scholarship, with its scientific method of hypothesis testing, is an experiment in risk-taking (with the goal of explaining variance or the unknown). On the staff side, few programs have ever become better by not doing anything different. Over and over again, people in our studies tell us how mistakes, setbacks, and even failures have played a role in their successes. Without those experiences, there would have been little to no learning, and they would have been unable to achieve their aspirations or discover breakthrough achievements.

For instance, Lillas Marie Hatala, as a program director for her university’s continuing education division, told us about her first encounters with the dean of the business school and how they had clashed over which of their organizational units should be offering business and leadership programs. Their discussions and negotiations often seemed to proceed, Lillas said, “one step forward and two steps back,” but eventually they succeeded in working through their differences. Lillas realized that successful collaboration requires a bit of back-and-forth to formulate a shared vision, find common values, and put together a solid practical operational plan.

It may seem ironic, but many echo the thought that the overall quality of work improves when people have a chance to be tested—and possibly even fail. Whatever the endeavor, a learning curve has never been a straight line. In fact, most innovations could be called “failures in the middle.” In any new endeavor, you seldom learn without making mistakes. Consider the times when you tried to learn a new sport or game. Maybe it was skiing, snowboarding, surfing, skateboarding, tennis, golf, hockey, bridge, or the latest video game. It’s highly unlikely that you got it perfect on the very first try.

Nothing is ever done perfectly the first time—not in sports, not in games, and most certainly not in higher education. The point isn’t to promote failure for failure’s sake, of course. We don’t advocate for a moment that failure ought to be the objective of an endeavor. Instead we advocate learning. Resilience is built through the process of learning from mistakes and setbacks. Leaders don’t give up easily on themselves or others, and when things don’t work out as expected they view the outcome as temporary, local, and changeable.

Exemplary leaders do not look for someone to blame when mistakes are made in the name of innovation. Instead they ask, What can be learned from the experience? That was certainly the approach Lillas took in her negotiations with the dean, and the data supports this perspective. The extent to which leaders were reported “Asking ‘What can we learn?’ when things don’t go as expected” was significantly (p < 0.001) related to the level of commitment to the organization expressed by their direct reports.

There is no simple test for determining the best tactic for learning. But it is clear that leaders approach each new and unfamiliar experience with a willingness to learn, an appreciation for the importance of learning, and a recognition that learning, inescapably, involves making some mistakes.

There is likewise no simple test for ascertaining the appropriate level of risk in a new venture. Costs, benefits, potential losses and gains—all must be weighed. Knowing that one person’s risk is another’s routine activity, you must factor in the present skills of your team members and the demands of the task. But even if you could compute risk to the fifth decimal place, every innovation would still expose you to some peril. Perhaps the healthiest thing anyone can do is complete a risk assessment and determine whether what can be learned is worth the cost.

Promote Psychological Hardiness

Uncertainty and risk come along with any effort to make matters better and improve on the status quo. But how are leaders able to accept the inevitable mistakes, setbacks, and even failures—and the accompanying stress—associated with leadership? How do you help others handle the stress of change? It turns out that it isn’t the stress that makes people ill; it’s how they view and respond to stressful events.

The Personal-Best Leadership Experiences shared with us—like the campus protest Jeanne faced or handing over the conference reins to the students as Jackie did—are clear examples of difficult, stressful projects that generated enthusiasm and enjoyment. Instead of being debilitated by the stress of a challenging experience, in relating their personal bests people generally said they were energized by them. That was certainly the case with Karen Slakey Hull when she assumed responsibility for the university’s reproduction and graphics services department. There were large operating deficits, and reserves had been depleted. The equipment was obsolete, production volumes were low, spoilage was excessive, print quality was not up to modern standards, and customer satisfaction was suffering. Employees worked hard but feared for their jobs and were skeptical of leadership’s ability to make the required changes.

None of this deterred Karen. “I was an experienced business-woman and not an expert in the print, copy, or graphic design business,” she told us. “But I was confident that together with the employees the situation could be turned around.” Karen and the management staff evaluated each product and service. They looked at revenue/ expense relationships, customer demand, product quality, and the type and quantity of work that was being outsourced. They conducted a customer satisfaction survey and learned what was really important to consumers.

Upgraded equipment required new, higher-level skills. To ease the transition, production staff attended conferences on state-of-theart production equipment and processes and also received extensive training specific to the new machines. Karen and her managers coached staff in their new roles while also recognizing employees who continued to work on traditional printing presses. Throughout this time Karen held monthly all-staff meetings so that teams could present their unit updates, including major achievements and near-term goals.

Karen, her managers, and the staff could have given up in the difficult situation they faced. But they didn’t. They stepped up to the challenge and overcame it. This is precisely what researchers refer to as “grit.”¹¹ Grit is an individual’s ability to maintain passion and persevere despite a lack of positive feedback. The characteristic forward-looking, which we identified earlier as an important quality for leaders, provides leaders with an enduring focus on long-term outcomes. Research shows that grittiness is associated with those individuals who most often Challenge the Process.¹²

Moreover, the ability to grow and thrive in stressful, risk-abundant situations, such as the one that Karen and her colleagues faced, is highly dependent on how you view change. Psychologists, intrigued by people who experience a high degree of stress and yet are able to cope with it positively, have discovered that these individuals have a distinctive attitude toward stress, which they call “psychological hardiness.”¹³ Researchers over the past 40 years have found that in groups as diverse as corporate managers, entrepreneurs, students, nurses, lawyers, and combat soldiers, those high in psychological hardiness are much more likely to withstand serious challenges and bounce back from failure than those low in hardiness.¹⁴ And the good news is that hardiness is an attitude that people can learn and that leaders can support.

There are three key beliefs to being psychologically hardy: commitment, control, and challenge. All were evident in Karen’s personal-best leadership case study. To turn adversity into advantage, first you need to commit yourself to what’s happening. You have to get involved, engaged, and curious. You can’t sit back and wait for something to happen. When you commit, you find in whatever you are doing something that seems interesting, meaningful, or worthwhile. You also have to take control of your own life. You need to attempt to influence what is going on. While all of your attempts may not be successful, you can’t sink into powerlessness or passivity or victim-hood. You can’t engage in denial or feel disengaged, bored, and empty. Finally, if you are going to be psychologically hardy, you need to view challenge as an opportunity to learn from both negative and positive experiences. You can’t play it safe. Personal improvement and fulfillment come through the continual process of being engaged in the uncertainties of life. Easy comfort and security are not only unrealistic but also potentially stultifying.

Your view of events contributes to your ability to cope with change and stress. To take that first step, to start that new project, and to initiate improvement, you have to believe, like Karen, that you can influence the outcome of the situation. You have to be curious about whatever is going on. You have to look for learning every step of the way. With a hardy attitude, you can transform stressful events into positive opportunities for growth and renewal.

What’s more, you can help your team feel the same way. For example, when Karen asked the production manager for a proposal to modernize the equipment, he came back with a five-year plan. Karen asked, “What would happen if we made this investment in one year?” His eyes opened wide in an expression that said, Wow, we really could change this place! He returned with a one-year plan that made strategic and financial sense.

People with a hardy attitude take change, risk, turmoil, and the strains of life in stride. Whether the stressful event they encounter is positive or negative, they react similarly. They consider the incident engaging, believe they have the capacity and capability to influence the outcome, and see it as an opportunity for learning and development.

You can’t enlist and retain people if you don’t cultivate an atmosphere that promotes psychological hardiness. Given alternatives, people won’t remain long with a cause that distresses them. To accept the challenge of change, they need to believe that they can overcome adversity. You can help the people you work with cope more effectively by promoting conditions in which people experience commitment rather than alienation, control rather than powerlessness, and challenge rather than threat. For example, provide and assign tasks that are challenging but within the person’s skill set and that help build their sense of control. Offering rewards and recognition rather than punishment fosters commitment. Encouraging people to see how change can generate a range of possibilities promotes an attitude of adaptability.

It’s instructive to know that people associate doing their best with feelings of meaningfulness, mastery, and stimulation, and people are biased in the direction of hardiness when thinking about their best. It’s equally helpful to know that people don’t produce excellence when feeling uninvolved, insignificant, and threatened. Furthermore, feelings of commitment, control, and challenge provide internal cues for recognizing when you are excelling as opposed to only making it through the day.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION: CHALLENGE THE PROCESS

The quest for change is an adventure. It tests your skills and abilities and awakens talents that have been dormant. It’s the training ground for leadership. Exemplary leaders search for opportunities to make a difference—even when those opportunities are sometimes thrust upon them rather than chosen. You need to remain diligent for anything that lulls your department or program into a false sense of security; constantly invite and launch new initiatives. You need to be out in front of change, not behind it trying to catch up. The focus of your attention should be less on the routine operations and much more on the untried and untested. Ask, “What’s new? What’s next? What’s better?” That’s where the future is.

Leaders experiment and learn from their mistakes. One of your major leadership tasks involves identifying and removing self-imposed constraints and organizational conventions that block innovation and creativity. Yet innovation is always risky, and you must recognize failure as a fact of experimental life. Instead of punishing it, encourage it; instead of fixing blame for mistakes, learn from them; instead of adding rules, promote flexibility. Embrace continuous improvement and lifelong learning.

Leaders have a hardy attitude about change. Venture outside the constraints of your normal routine and experiment with creative possibilities. Foster climates in which faculty and staff alike can accept the challenge of becoming better. By having and fostering an attitude of psychological hardiness, you can turn the potential turmoil and stress of innovation and evolution into an adventure. Set the stage by getting started, taking the first step, and achieving small wins.

In developing your competence in the leadership practice of Challenge the Process, spend some time reflecting on the following questions. After you’ve given them sufficient consideration, let others know what you are thinking and willing to do.

What are the experiments or pilot projects you are engaged in or sponsoring in your department or unit? Are these sufficient? How are you going to evaluate not just the outcomes but the learning?

What can you do to ensure that people in your group feel that you have their backs and are supporting them as they exercise outsight and take initiative to be innovative and try new ideas? What more could you be doing?

What will it take for you to say yes more often than you are now?

What can you do to make it easy for others to say yes and undertake something they have never done before?

When things don’t go as expected, what can you do to adopt a learning perspective on the outcome or process? How can you demonstrate your willingness to take ownership of your foibles and missteps?