CHAPTER 1

Leadership Is a Relationship

TOGETHER WE HAVE MORE THAN 50 YEARS of experience in higher-education administration—and even more time than that researching and writing about how leaders make extraordinary things happen. The thousands of interviews and leadership cases we’ve collected, not to mention the millions of responses to our surveys, have been from people very similar to you. They’re the colleagues you run into daily around campus. We’ve chosen to tell the stories of these everyday leaders because we firmly believe that at its core leadership is not about position or title. It’s about caring, about relationships, and about what you do.

Leadership is an identifiable set of skills and practices that are available to everyone, not just a few charismatic men and women or individuals with lofty titles and positions. We challenge the myth that leadership is found only at the highest levels of an organization, whether in the halls of academe or in corporate executive suites. The theory that there are only a few great men and women who can lead is just plain wrong. We consider the women and men in our research to be exemplary, and so do those with whom they’ve worked.

We know from our experience, research, consulting, and seminars that everyone at your institution can learn to lead. This realization is inspiring. It gives us great hope for the future. Hope because it means that no individual, program, department, or function needs to wait around for someone to ride in on a white horse and save the day. Hope because the truth is that there is no shortage of willing people on campus searching for opportunities to make a difference.

There’s another fundamental truth about leadership, one that we’ve known for a long time and now prize even more. In talking to campus leaders and studying their cases, we hear this unambiguous message: leadership is a relationship. Leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow.

Understanding and interacting with others is critically important in higher-education settings. Institutions of higher education are generally organized and governed according to two seemingly contradictory sets of practices—one hierarchical and the other individualistic. The most effective academic leaders know that the only way to achieve any significant change is through developing and sustaining positive working relationships.¹ Knowing people, and having trusting relationships with them, is just as essential as knowing information. Even in this nanosecond world of e-everything, this conclusion is consistent with the facts. According to the World Economic Forum’s report The Future of Jobs, strong social and collaboration skills will be in higher demand than spectacular technical ones.² It’s not the web of technology that matters the most; it’s the web of people. Social capital, the network of relationships among people, joins intellectual and financial capital as a necessary pillar for greatness.

Success in leadership and success in life has been, is now, and will continue to be, a function of how well people work with one another. Success in leading will be wholly dependent on the capacity to build and sustain those human relationships that enable people to make extraordinary things happen on a regular basis.

THE FIVE PRACTICES OF EXEMPLARY LEADERSHIP

When we ask people to tell us about their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences—experiences that they believe are their individual standards of excellence—several significant patterns emerge. First, everyone has a story to tell. Leaders reside on every college campus, in every position and every setting. Leadership knows no racial or religious boundaries, no ethnic or cultural borders, and no age or gender constraints.

Second, when reflecting on their personal-best experiences and when listening to the leadership stories of their colleagues, people conclude that when they are at their best, the behaviors and actions of all leaders are quite similar. Regardless of the times or context, people who guide others along pioneering journeys follow surprisingly comparable paths. Though each experience is unique in its expression, there are clearly identifiable behaviors and actions that make a difference. Consequently, leadership is not about personality; it’s about what you do. It’s how you behave that matters—independent of the size, status, or nature of your institution; your place in the organizational hierarchy; or various demographic characteristics such as your age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, function, discipline, or length of service.

We’ve forged these common behaviors of what people do when they are at their personal best as leaders into a framework we call The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. You can think of it as a leadership operating system for how you can guide others toward peak achievements on your college or university campus. In making extraordinary things happen, leaders engage most frequently in the following five practices; they:

Model the Way

Inspire a Shared Vision

Challenge the Process

Enable Others to Act

Encourage the Heart

The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership—which we introduce and briefly illustrate in this chapter and will discuss extensively in later ones—aren’t the private property of the people we studied or of a few select shining stars or unique personalities. They’re available to anyone, in any collegiate organization or situation, who accepts the challenge of taking people and organizations to places they have never been before.

One of the greatest myths about leadership is that some people have “it” and some don’t. A corollary myth is that if you don’t have “it,” you can’t learn “it.” Neither could be further from the empirical truth.³ After reflecting on their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences, people typically come to the same conclusion as Tanvi Lotwala with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: “All of us are born leaders. We all have leadership qualities ingrained; all that we need is polishing them up and bringing them to the forefront. It is an ongoing process to develop ourselves as a leader, but unless we take on the leadership challenges presented to us on a daily basis, we cannot become better at it.”

Furthermore, this leadership operating system has been widely studied and tested. Hundreds of scholars have applied The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership framework to their investigation of leadership in higher education. From studies of college presidents,⁴ business and finance officers,⁵ deans and department chairs,⁶ student affairs and program administrators,⁷ athletic directors and coaches,⁸ librarians,⁹ and faculty,¹⁰ among others, numerous scholars have found these leadership practices closely correlated with organizational and professional effectiveness.

Empirical evidence conclusively shows that those leaders in higher education who use The Five Practices most frequently have the most highly engaged and productive people in their departments and functions. According to surveys of their direct reports, exemplary leaders are more than six times more likely to employ The Five Practices in comparison with the frequency observed in the leaders of the least engaged direct reports. More specifically, the extent to which direct reports feel, for example, valued by their organizations, that they are making a difference, and that they are personally effective—all are directly related to how frequently they observe their leaders engaging in The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership.¹¹

Model the Way

Titles are granted; it’s your behavior that wins you respect. This sentiment was shared across all the cases we collected. Leaders Model the Way. They know that if they want to gain commitment and achieve the highest standards, they must be models of the behaviors they expect of others. You must first be clear about your guiding principles before you can hold them up for others to emulate. Once you are clear about your core values, you can give them voice, share them with others, and act on them. “It’s as straightforward,” Andy Ceperley* told us, “as never asking anyone else to do something you’re not willing to do yourself.”

Andy has served in career services positions, both in the United States and abroad, experiencing a wide variety of academic institutions: public and private, secular and nonsecular, centralized and decentralized. In helping turn around one university’s career center, which had experienced substantial staff turnover and burned out several directors, he explained how it was necessary for him to personally get “very deep into conversations with people across the campus.” He interviewed more than 50 people and asked tons of questions, listening attentively to their perceptions of the career center. In building relationships, Andy typically began by sharing his values and beliefs about what it meant for the career center to be a service organization and his experiences about how such a center effectively engages with the campus community. He made sure to facilitate similar reflective thinking on the part of every staff member in the career center.

To effectively model the behavior they expect of others, as Andy noted, leaders must first be clear about their guiding principles. They must find their authentic voice, clearly and distinctively articulating their values. Because leaders are expected to stand up for their beliefs, they’d better have some beliefs to stand up for. By knowing what he valued most, Andy was better prepared to make decisions that were consistent with the principles he held dear. By itself, however, this isn’t enough. Leaders must also make sure that what they are doing is consistent with their values and standards.

Leaders’ deeds are far more important than their words when demonstrating how serious they are about what they say. Words and deeds must be consistent; if they are not, hypocrisy spreads and cynicism grows. Like Andy, leaders need to go first and set an example through daily actions that provide evidence that they are deeply committed to their beliefs. One of the best ways they prove that something is important is by demonstrating it themselves. The model that leaders set with their actions is far more powerful than anything they say. Exemplary leaders walk the talk.

Inspire a Shared Vision

People describe their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences as times when they imagined exciting and ennobling futures for their organizations. They not only envisioned what could be but also had an absolute belief in those dreams and aspirations. When they spoke about the future subsequently, their enthusiasm and energy for the vision was contagious.

Leaders have a desire to change the way things are, to create something that no one else has ever created before. In some ways leaders live their lives backward. They see pictures in their mind’s eye of what the results will look like even before they’ve started their projects, much as architects draw blueprints or engineers build models. Their clear image of the future pulls them forward. Yet visions seen only by leaders are insufficient to effect an organized movement or a significant change. People will not follow until they accept a vision as their own. To realize the vision, you must be clear about why it is important to you, and you must be equally clear about why it should matter to those who need to share it. Therefore, leaders must be able to Inspire a Shared Vision.

Kelly McInnes started her higher-education career in admissions and worked her way up to the position of registrar, before getting hired as the director of human resources and the university’s chief leadership development officer. She saw an opportunity to develop a leadership program that was specific to a Canadian public university, and she was convinced that doing so would rally people at all levels on campus. Kelly interviewed many faculty and staff administrators about their experiences and listened carefully to what they told her they were looking for, where support was available or lacking, what was working or needed fixing, and so on. She shared this feedback widely and used it to entice and recruit many academic leaders on her campus to collaborate on developing the program. Working together they co-created a program that spoke to their shared interests and aspirations.

To enlist people in a vision, leaders must know their constituents and speak their language. Similar to others we interviewed, Kelly knew that people must believe that leaders understand their needs and have their interests at heart before they will come on board. Leaders breathe life into the hopes and dreams of others and enable them to see exciting possibilities. Leaders forge a unity of purpose by showing constituents how the dream is for the common good. Leaders ignite passion in others by expressing enthusiasm for the compelling vision of their group, communicating their zeal through vivid language and an expressive style.

Challenge the Process

Leaders are pioneers—people who are willing to step out into the unknown. They search for opportunities to innovate, grow, and improve. Every single personal-best leadership case we collected involved some change from the status quo. Not one person claimed to have achieved a personal best by keeping things the same—by doing what had always or had already been done. All leaders Challenge the Process.

But leaders aren’t the only creators or originators of new curricula, programs, services, or processes. In fact, it’s more likely that they’re not: innovation comes more from listening than from telling, from asking questions and hearing what others are thinking and have to say. When challenging the process, the leader’s primary contributions are the recognition of good ideas, the support of those ideas, and the willingness to challenge the system to get new products, processes, services, and systems adopted. It might be more accurate, then, to say that leaders are early adopters of innovation.

J. Patrick Murphy, CM, didn’t dream up the idea for a public services graduate program out of his imagination alone. He listened to the aspirations espoused by the university’s president and the yearnings of many students about wanting to apply the lessons being learned in the classroom more directly in their communities. Pat also heard several of his colleagues express an interest in being involved with a program that intersected the private and public sectors and how there seemed to be opportunities to apply best practices from the for-profit sector to community-based organizations.

Pat’s own dean was not initially supportive, citing financial and strategic limitations. Not easily discouraged, Pat shopped around the proposal to other parts of the campus (which at his relatively conservative university was considered a governance taboo), gaining interest and support for an interdisciplinary approach (not just in the curriculum but in staffing and funding as well). He even approached several members of the board of trustees, circled back with the president, and found sufficient support for what has now turned out to be the largest graduate program at the college.

Funding for the program was tight at the onset, as it generally is at colleges and universities, so Pat raised monies through several novel initiatives. For example, Pat and his colleagues founded a small consulting and executive training business and launched several fundraising programs, including a “pub night” to raise scholarship money for students studying in Ireland. Many of these efforts Pat had to initially bring in under the radar to keep from attracting too much attention; sometimes, he would say, “asking for forgiveness rather than permission” was necessary to learn what ideas were or were not feasible.

Leaders know well that innovation and change involve experimentation and risk. One way you can deal with these potential risks and failures is to approach change through incremental steps and small wins. Learning also unlocks the door to progress, and exemplary leaders make a point to ask, “What can we learn?” when things don’t go as expected. Learning leads to little victories, which when piled on top of one another build confidence that people can meet even the most significant challenges. In so doing, leaders strengthen commitment to the long-term future.

Enable Others to Act

Grand dreams don’t become significant realities through the actions of a single person. Leadership is a team effort, and to make extraordinary things happen in organizations exemplary leaders Enable Others to Act. They foster collaboration, developing relationships and building trust. Leaders engage all those who must make the project work—which was precisely the conclusion Charlie Slater reached when recounting his Personal-Best Leadership Experience of launching a new doctoral program. When asked who the leader was in developing this program, he quickly replied, “There was not a single leader but rather many leaders. At different times in the process, each one of them was critical. The program would not have come about without the leadership of all these people.”

Leaders make it possible for the people around them to accomplish great things. They appreciate that those expected to produce at their most inspired levels must feel a sense of personal power and ownership. Charlie talked about how the university president, while favoring the idea, clearly understood that such an initiative couldn’t successfully be launched by executive fiat, so he passed along his blessings to the dean, who in turn asked Charlie, because of his background and positive working relationships with the faculty, to accept this leadership challenge. Charlie knew that such a program could not be developed and sustained through the efforts of a single champion, and he worked with myriad faculty colleagues within the school to bring this new program to life.

This underscored for Charlie, as it did for others reflecting on their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences, the importance of commitment-and-support leadership versus the command-and-control techniques of previous generations. The work of leaders is making people feel strong, capable, and committed. Leaders enable others not by hoarding the power they have but by giving it away. The university president could not have made the program a reality by himself, and, in fact, no single person or group could have advocated successfully for the program without the cooperation of others. Working together, exemplary leaders strengthen everyone’s capacity to deliver on the possibilities they imagine and the promises they make.

In the cases we analyzed, leaders like Charlie proudly discussed teamwork, collaboration, trust, and empowerment as essential elements of their efforts. People don’t stick around for very long or perform at their best if their leader makes them feel weak, dependent, or alienated. But when a leader makes people feel strong and capable, raising their belief that they can do more than they ever thought possible, people will give their all. In our research it was not unusual for people to indicate that when working with their best leaders they gave to the endeavor more than 100 percent of themselves because that leader was able to elicit from them more than what they themselves had thought possible. When leadership is a relationship founded on trust and confidence, people take risks, make changes, and keep organizations and movements alive.

Encourage the Heart

The climb to the top of any endeavor is arduous and steep, and it is altogether easy for people to become exhausted, frustrated, and disen-chanted. Leaders Encourage the Heart of their constituents to carry on, to continue even when they might be tempted to give up. Genuine acts of caring, whether exhibited in dramatic gestures or simple actions— for example, bringing food to a sick colleague, visiting people in the hospital, or sending a handwritten note of appreciation—uplift the spirits and draw people forward. Jennifer Dirking, associate director for her community college’s foundation, says that she is always on the lookout for ways to foster a climate in which “people feel cared about and genuinely appreciated.”

An award for the “most outstanding faculty member” used to be given each year at Barry Posner’s school. In those days he was a faculty member and said that he “could never understand how there could be one award, with so many disciplines, and, given each discipline’s different standards, how the faculty and dean’s office could decide on what ‘most outstanding’ meant.” So, when he became dean, Barry says,

I was determined we’d change the system and do more to recognize the excellence among our many faculty colleagues. Working with our Council of Department Chairs, we established a specific set of accomplishments, from unsatisfactory to exemplary, which were appropriate to all disciplines and all ranks. Any faculty member who could be exemplary in teaching and scholarship and service would certainly be, in any of our minds, “extraordinary”—and that’s what we called the award. We could all be proud when anyone in the school was extraordinary.

In the first year, six Extraordinary Faculty Awards were given. Five years later 13 were awarded. As Barry recalls, “I thought it was great that the standards hadn’t changed, but the behavior—and hence the performance—of our faculty had risen to the ideal we set. With this change in criteria for the award, we took a giant step in eliminating competition among ourselves for ‘who’s the best’ and rather collectively focused on what everyone needed to do to be at their best.”

It is part of the leader’s job to show appreciation for people’s contributions and to create a culture of celebration. Over the years we’ve seen thousands of examples of individual recognition and group celebration, from handwritten thank-you notes to marching bands and “This Is Your Life” ceremonies. Yet recognition and celebration aren’t merely about fun and games, though both abound when leaders Encourage the Hearts of their constituents. Neither are they about pretentious ceremonies designed to present some artificial sense of camaraderie. Encouragement is curiously serious business. It’s how leaders visibly and behaviorally link rewards with performance.

When striving to raise quality standards, recover from a disaster, or make a dramatic change of any kind, leaders make sure that people see the benefits of aligning behavior with cherished values. And leaders also know that celebrations and rituals, when done with authenticity and from the heart, build a strong sense of collective identity and community spirit that can carry a group through tough times.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LEADERSHIP STORY

A fundamental truth that weaves itself throughout all Personal-Best Leadership Experiences is that they are never stories about solo performances. Leaders never make extraordinary things happen all by themselves. Leaders mobilize others to want to struggle for shared aspirations. As we have already said, leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. You can’t have one without the other.

To lead effectively, you have to appreciate the underlying dynamics of the leader-constituent relationship.¹² A leader-constituent relationship characterized by fear and distrust will never produce anything of lasting value. A relationship characterized by mutual respect and confidence will overcome the greatest adversities and leave a legacy of significance. Any discussion of leadership must attend to the dynamics of this relationship. Strategies, tactics, skills, and techniques are futile without an understanding of the essential human aspirations that connect people with their leaders and leaders with their people.

To balance our understanding of leadership, for nearly four decades we have conducted surveys about the personal values, traits, and characteristics that people indicate are most important to them in an individual they would willingly follow. A key word in this sentence is willingly. It is one thing to follow someone because you think you have to “or else,” and it’s quite another when you follow an individual because you want to.

What sort of person would you listen to, take advice from, be influenced by, and willingly follow, not because you have to but because you want to? What does it take for you to be the kind of person whom others want to follow, doing so enthusiastically and voluntarily? Understanding and responding to these expectations is essential to the exercise of exemplary leadership.

What People Look For in Their Leaders

Responses from more than 100,000 respondents—in higher education as well as in every industry and scores of countries around the globe—affirm and enrich the picture that emerged from our studies of personal bests. The survey results have been striking in their consistency over the years.¹³ Our evidence shows that a person must pass several essential character tests before they earn the designation leader from other people, as demonstrated by the data presented in figure 1.1.

All the characteristics receive votes, and therefore each one is important to some individuals. What is both most striking and evident, however, is that over time and across continents only four have continuously received the majority (more than 60 percent) of the preferences. What people most look for and admire in a leader has been constant. If people are going to follow someone willingly, they must believe the individual is honest, competent, inspiring, and forward-looking. Indeed, from the opposite perspective, ask yourself how willing you would be to follow someone who was dishonest, incompetent, uninspiring, and lost! Not very likely, right?

Responses from hundreds of faculty members—many of whom are department chairs, associate deans, and deans—over the past few years reaffirm these findings. Answers from student personnel administrators, registrars, admissions counselors, development staff, public safety officers, and recreation and athletic directors are strikingly similar to those from faculty. Students also indicate that these top four characteristics—honest, competent, inspiring, and forward-looking—are most highly valued in their very best teachers. Studies show that these four characteristics do not significantly vary across industries, cultures, nationalities, and organizational functions and hierarchies or by gender, ethnicity, level of education, or age.¹⁴

Figure 1.1 Personal values, traits, and characteristics that people look for in their leaders. Note that several synonyms were included in each category. The percentages represent respondents from six continents: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. The majority are from the United States. Because we asked people to select seven characteristics, the total adds up to about 700 percent.

These investigations of the characteristics of admired leaders reveal consistent patterns with the stories we learned from people telling us about their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences. The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership and the characteristics of admired leaders are complementary perspectives on the same subject. When they’re performing at their peak, leaders are doing more than just getting results. They’re also responding to the expectations of the people they are working with, underscoring the point that leadership is a relationship and that the relationship is one of service to a purpose and to other people.

You’ll see in more detail how exemplary leaders respond to the needs of their constituents as we weave these personal characteristics of being honest, competent, inspiring, and forward-looking into the text of the subsequent chapters on the leadership practices. For example, being regarded as honest is essential if you are going to Model the Way. The leadership practice of Inspire a Shared Vision requires your being forward-looking and inspiring. When leaders Challenge the Process, they enhance the perception that they’re dynamic and concerned about the future. Trustworthiness, a synonym for honesty, implies that you have others’ best interests at heart and is an essential component in both why and how leaders Enable Others to Act. In recognizing and celebrating notable contributions and accomplish-ments—that is, Encourage the Heart—you strengthen people’s commitment to shared values and underscore how collaborating is aligned with achieving the vision. When leaders demonstrate capacity in all of The Five Practices, they show others that they have the competence to make extraordinary things happen.

CREDIBILITY IS THE FOUNDATION OF LEADERSHIP

While the fact that what people look for in their leaders has remained consistent over time, despite the ever-shifting forces affecting higher education, there is another profound implication revealed by this descriptive data. These survey results have a solid conceptual foundation in what social psychologists and communication experts refer to as “credibility.” In assessing such questions as why some people are more believable than others, how reputations are formed, what constitutes opinion leaders, or what factors create role models, researchers have demonstrated that the key dimensions of credibility are remarkably similar to the four characteristics people most desire in their leaders.¹⁵

If you are going to ask others to follow you to some uncertain future—a future that may not be realized in their tenure or even their lifetime—and if the journey is going to require hardships and possibly sacrifices, it is imperative that people believe in you, the person they will be following. The countless programs to develop leaders, the courses and classes, the books and CDs, the blogs and websites offering tips and techniques—all are meaningless unless the people who are supposed to be following believe in the person who’s supposed to be leading. The bottom line is that more than anything people want leaders who are credible.

People must be able to believe in their leaders—that her words can be trusted, that he will do what he says, that she is personally excited and enthusiastic about the direction in which the group is headed, and that he has the knowledge and skills to lead. This is the First Law of Leadership: If people don’t believe in the messenger, they won’t believe the message.

What does it take to “believe in the messenger” and be viewed as credible? When we ask people, “What does credibility look like in action? How do you know if someone is credible?” their answers do not vary by the nature of their institution or by what they do or even by who they are (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, faculty, staff). These are the most common phrases people use to describe the behaviors and actions of people who are credible:

“They practice what they preach.”

“They walk the talk.”

“Their actions are consistent with their words.”

“They put their money where their mouth is.”

“They follow through on their promises.”

“They do what they say they will do.”

That last response is the most frequent. When it comes to deciding whether a leader is believable, people first listen to the words, then they watch the actions. A judgment of “credible” is handed down when words and deeds are consonant. If people don’t see consistency—if, for instance, special favors are alleged around admissions, popular or favorite students aren’t disciplined for honor codes violations, misconduct by alumni donors is overlooked, staff are maligned, colleagues are denigrated—they conclude that the leader is, at best, not really serious or, at worst, an outright hypocrite. When leaders do practice what they preach—and do so consistently—people are more willing to entrust them with their careers, their security, and their future.

This realization leads to a straightforward prescription for establishing credibility: DWYSYWD, or Do What You Say You Will Do. This commonsense definition of credibility corresponds directly to the leadership practice of Model the Way. To Model the Way and be credible in action, you must be clear about your beliefs; you must know what you stand for. That’s the say part of DWYSYWD. Then you must put what you say into practice: you must act on your beliefs and do. It is when leaders’ words and deeds match up that people see them as believable and credible. To be authentic, to gain and sustain the moral authority to lead, is essential to the practice of Model the Way.

Because of this important connection between words and actions, we begin discussing The Five Practices with a thorough examination of the principles and behaviors that bring Model the Way to life. In the chapters that follow, we introduce you to people at colleges and universities who put the five leadership practices into action and made extraordinary things happen within their institutions.

*The names of people quoted throughout the book are real. They are individuals we have interviewed or worked with. We’ve not identified their institutional affiliations for two reasons. First, some of them have or will change positions and organizations, so their affiliations would not be uniformly current. Second, because the example is meant to be about the individual—his or her actions—it should not be confused with any reputation or special circumstances associated with the institution. We’ve generally described the institution to give some context to the example, as well as to provide validity to the experiences (that is, generalizability) by demonstrating the breadth of college and university settings.