CHAPTER 2
Model the Way

TONYA NILSSON, A SENIOR LECTURER in the civil engineering department, recalls that her mother, who was a manager at a local library, would often remark that “she would never ask her employees to do something she wouldn’t be willing to do herself.” This mantra is firmly ingrained in Tonya, who feels that it isn’t right for her “to judge someone for being an ineffective teacher and for being unwilling to step it up if I am not willing to model better teaching myself.” This is just one of the reasons why Tonya routinely equips herself with various teaching tools to better engage with her students and participates in university committees focused on improving student learning. In these venues she shares her values and beliefs with colleagues and encourages them to use more-effective teaching methods. She believes that all teachers are leaders who should not restrict themselves to merely managing content delivery but should also be nurturing and prepare the next generation of engineers and scientists.

Tonya makes sure that she aligns her values and actions in her own classroom. For example, she believes that one way teachers demonstrate respect for their students is by starting class on time. She makes it clear at the onset of her courses that being late for class is unacceptable. She holds quizzes at the very beginning of class to make the point that being late can have negative consequences. She follows this up in her own actions by indicating that she’ll give students extra points if she is ever tardy.

Tonya also believes that it is imperative that engineers communicate well because doing so not only ensures safety but also maintains project progress. She stresses the development of communication skills and demonstrates the same in her lectures. She begins class with an agenda or overview, informing students of her learning objectives and what she is going to cover. She takes care to ensure that her board notes are legible and clearly stated and that problem-solution handouts are easy to understand. “Everything I do must be clear long after the class session is over,” she says.

Leaders like Tonya understand that they must fully comprehend the values, beliefs, and assumptions that drive them. They have to freely and honestly choose the principles they will use to guide their actions. Before you can clearly communicate your message, you must be clear about the message you want to deliver. And before you can do what you say, you must be sure that you mean what you say.

Words themselves, however, aren’t enough, no matter how noble. You must find your voice and authentically communicate your beliefs in ways that uniquely represent who you are so that others recognize that you’re the one who’s speaking and not someone else. “Above all else, academic deans—and all leaders—must come to terms with themselves,” explains Deryl Leaming, former dean and the author of several books on academic leadership. “They must understand their own inclinations and motivations and be comfortable with who they are.”¹

The most effective leaders in higher education are those who most frequently Model the Way. We asked direct reports how often their leaders engaged in the six behaviors associated with Model the Way on the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI), 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). The analysis showed that the effectiveness ratings of leaders by their direct reports increased systematically (p < 0.001) as leaders were observed engaging more and more frequently in the behaviors associated with modeling the way. There was a 63 percent bump in effectiveness from the bottom to the top quartile.

CLARIFY YOUR VALUES

What stands out when we ask people to think about the historical leaders they most admire and could imagine following is that they chose individuals with strong beliefs about matters of principle. The leaders most often named all had an unwavering commitment to a clear set of values. They were all passionate about their causes. They were self-assured and comfortable with who they were. The lesson is unmistakable: becoming a leader people would willingly follow requires being a person of principle. “The simple truth is that we cannot be leaders,” Deryl explains, “unless others look up to and want to follow us, and the likelihood of that happening when we are insecure in who we are is remote.”²

People expect their leaders to speak out on matters of values and conscience. But you can’t speak out if you don’t know what is important to you, what you care about deeply. To speak effectively, you must find your authentic voice. Earning and sustaining personal credibility requires that you can clearly articulate your deeply held beliefs.

Lillas Marie Hatala had a successful career as a human resource development manager at a large Canadian retailer, but she was seeking a more meaningful way to work with people. “I wanted to make a difference,” says Lillas, “in the lives of leaders and their constituents in the educational workplace.” She was recruited to start-up operations as director of business and leadership programs for a large public university.

Like any new leader, Lillas realized that she “had to earn credibility. In any organization, credibility building is a process that takes time, hard work, devotion, and patience.” Additionally, she realized that coming in as an outsider to higher education can be especially trying because there’s some skepticism about intentions and the transferability of competencies. This was even truer in her case because one of her initial projects was a leadership development program for department chairs. Imagine their rumblings: How can someone from retail possibly help develop the skills of those in academia?

“In the early years,” Lillas says, “some naysayers scoffed at my work, saying, ‘You’re talking about business, and this is a university,’ or ‘You can’t herd cats,’ or ‘Watch the fluff,’ and so on. Painful as some of this was at the time, it not only contributed to my challenge but it caused me to persevere.…It reinforced my intent to contribute to developing a more encouraging and nurturing culture than what I was experiencing.”

Throughout this challenging project, Lillas turned to a simple method to aid her in staying the course. Every day she used personal journal writing for reflection and contemplation. “I use my journal to dialogue with the small still voice within,” she says. “Every evening I’d ask, What have I done today that demonstrates this value that is near and dear to me? What have I done inadvertently to demonstrate that this is not a value to me? What do I need to do more of to more fully express my values?” By daily clarifying and reaffirming her values, Lillas was able to strengthen her resolve to make a difference in the institution’s culture and the way that people related to and respected one another.

As Lillas’s story illustrates, values are your guides, your personal bottom line. They equip you with a moral compass by which to navigate the course of your daily life. Clarity of values is essential to discerning which way is north, south, east, and west. The clearer you are, the easier it is to stay on the path you’ve chosen. You especially need this kind of guidance in difficult and uncertain times. When there are daily challenges that can throw you off course, it’s crucial that you have some signposts that tell you where you are and keep you on track.

Values also serve as guides to action. They inform your decisions on what to do and what not to do, as well as when to say yes or no and understand why you mean it. If you believe, for instance, that heated debate can stimulate thinking and creativity, you should know what to do if people with differing views keep getting cut off when they offer up a fresh idea. If you value collaboration over individualistic achievement, you’ll know what to do when your most experienced career center adviser skips team meetings and refuses to share information with colleagues. If you value independence and initiative over conformity and obedience, you’ll be more likely to speak up and challenge a policy when you think it’s wrong.

As the data in figure 2.1 shows, there is a dramatic relationship between how people rate the effectiveness of their leaders and the extent to which they find them clear about their leadership philosophy. Only 3 percent of people rate as effective those leaders who are viewed as almost never/rarely being clear about their personal leadership philosophy; the effectiveness percentage goes up by a factor of more than 30 for those leaders reported as very frequently/almost always clear about their leadership philosophy.

Figure 2.1 The effectiveness ratings of leaders increase systematically with the extent that they are seen as having a clear leadership philosophy.

Explore Your Inner Territory

We were talking about where leadership begins, and our conversation went something like this:

Jim: I think leadership begins with discontent. You are dissatisfied with the status quo, the ways things are currently going.

Barry: True enough, but that’s too dismal a view for me. I think leadership actually begins with caring. What do you care enough about to see if it could be any better?

Jim: Okay, then, let’s look up the word caring in the dictionary.

We grabbed one off the shelf and opened it to care. The first meaning: “suffering of mind: GRIEF.” There it was. Suffering and caring, discontent and concern—all come from one source. Deep within all of us, there is something we hold dear, something we’ll fight hard to secure and celebrate joyfully when we achieve it.

In time we realized that what we both were saying is that leadership begins with something that grabs hold of you and won’t let go. Something isn’t working, and you care enough to change it. Finding your voice requires exploring your inner territory. You have to take a journey into your heart and soul to discover your values. You must wrestle with them enough to determine what’s really important to you, what’s underlying your choices and the boundaries and standards you set, and what motivates you to take the actions you do.

You must know what you care about. You can be authentic only when you lead others according to the principles that matter most to you. Otherwise you’re just putting on an act. If you don’t care, how can you expect others to do so? If you don’t burn with desire to be true to something you hold passionately, how can you expect that commitment from others? And until you get close enough to the flame to feel the heat, how can you know the source?

The fact is that the first person who must follow you is you! To lead others you first have to believe in yourself. If you do not, others will not believe in you or have confidence in you and consequently will not willingly follow your lead.³ One staff member told us that she could seldom, as she put it, “get on board” with her supervisor because she found it impossible to know what he stood for: “I was unsure about what he really felt was important and hesitant to follow his suggestions.” The counterpoint to this observation, as voiced by an incoming department chair, was his realization that “any changes I wished to see in the faculty or staff needed to start with me, as I am their example. If whatever I’m trying to implement I don’t believe in first, why should my colleagues? If I don’t demonstrate the values I am expecting from others, why should they follow me or those values?”

Alan Glassman had to explore such questions himself when he accepted the university president’s request that he lead the institution’s first strategic-planning process after a natural disaster had destroyed much of the campus. Why did Alan accept this invitation, especially after several “highly paid and well-credentialed” external consultants had been dismissed from the project? Alan explained that he stepped up to the challenge because he felt that he “wanted to give something back to a campus that had supported me very well during my career.” Additionally, it was a chance, he said, for him to participate and see firsthand the creation and development of “a high-involvement framework for organizational change,” which he had been teaching about for several years in his classes.

This experience would test both his belief system and how well he could model his expectations. He designed a high-involvement process that offered faculty and staff the opportunity to “create the future” for the institution. By appealing to people’s desire to give back to the campus, Alan “created space for volunteers to come forward, offer their services and perspectives.” The process confirmed one of Alan’s most deeply held values: given a chance, people will contribute and do the right thing.

Like Alan, people discovered from their Personal-Best Leadership Experiences that becoming a credible leader requires learning how to express yourself in ways that are uniquely your own. You cannot lead through someone else’s values, someone else’s words. You cannot lead out of someone else’s experience. You can lead only out of your own. Unless it’s your style, your words, it’s not you; it’s an abstraction.

It’s one thing to give voice to your words; it’s another to give voice in tune and with a personal style. If you’re not the genuine article, can you expect others to respect you? People don’t follow your technique. They follow you—your message and your embodiment of that message. To be a leader, you must confront this central issue for yourself. You don’t have to copy someone else, you don’t have to read a script written by someone else, and you don’t have to wear someone else’s fashions. Instead you are free to choose what you want to express and the way you want to express it. We’d argue that you have a responsibility to your constituents to express yourself in a singular manner—in a way they would immediately recognize as yours. Researchers have consistently demonstrated a significant relationship between a leader’s clarity and commitment to a set of core values and their likelihood of being successful.⁴

Build and Affirm Shared Values

Clarity about personal values is an essential part of finding your voice. Leaders don’t stand up for just some personal or idiosyncratic values. In the process of setting an example, leaders endeavor to lead their constituents from what I believe to what we believe. In other words: Do What We Say We Will Do. A leader’s promise is really an organization’s promise, regardless of whether the organization is a team of two, a department of 15, a program involving several hundred, or a school of many thousand.

Nicole Matouk was a student records analyst in the law school when the university implemented a major transition from the semester to the quarter system. Because of all the necessary preparations in advance of the change—for example, overhauling the computer systems—and because of the quarter system itself, which required an additional term of work, by the end of the school year everyone was exhausted and in need of encouragement. The associate dean sent an email to the people working in the registrar’s office, asking for their feedback about the transition and inviting them to meet with her over coffee and talk informally about the transition process.

Everyone had the opportunity to address the topics they felt strongly about, and all had equal and ample time to express themselves. No one felt pressured, and the staff felt free to voice their opinions without fear of retribution. The associate dean asked directly about what things they could do to provide students with faster and more accurate answers and to give students an enhanced, more hassle-free experience. Nicole commented that “not only did the associate dean’s questions keep us from taking a bath in the negative emotions we were feeling but they helped us refocus on our goals as an office.” Some of the dean’s questions had to do with making their jobs more efficient; others dealt with new systems that could be implemented to make procedures easier for both the students and the staff.

Nicole went on to explain:

She used these questions to affirm our shared values. She didn’t have to struggle to think of the questions she wanted to ask or how she would connect what we were discussing to our goals; her values were guiding her questions. As we talked I could tell she was leading me in a certain direction, but it didn’t seem manipulative. This was so much more powerful to me than reading about the values in the handbook. I was generating the answers to her questions, so I felt this is what I believe, not just what I am supposed to agree with. Not only did this meeting help our team individually generate answers that were in line with our values and the office’s values but it also helped us affirm our shared values as an office. We came out of that meeting more united and with the knowledge that we were all working to achieve the same thing instead of pulling against each other for time and attention.

Nicole’s experience reaffirms that people are more loyal and committed when they believe that their values and those of the organization are aligned. They can be more creative and engaged because they become immersed in what they are doing. The quality and accuracy of communication and the integrity of the decision-making process increase when people across the campus feel that they share common values.

Discovering and affirming shared values is the foundation for building productive and genuine work relationships. While credible leaders honor the diversity of their many constituencies, they also stress their common values. Leaders build on agreement. They don’t try to get everyone to be in accord on everything—this goal is unrealistic, perhaps even impossible. Moreover, to achieve it would negate the very advantages of diversity. But to take the first step, then a second, and then a third, people must have some common core of understanding. If disagreements over fundamental values persist, the result is intense conflict, false expectations, and diminished capacity.

Recognition of institutional values that everyone can embrace provides the campus community with a common language and framework for communicating the premise for making key decisions. Research clearly shows that alignment of individual, group, and institutional values generates tremendous energy.⁵ Agreement intensifies commitment, enthusiasm, and drive; individuals have reasons for caring about their work. When people can care about what they are doing, they are more effective and satisfied. They experience less stress and tension. Shared values are the internal compasses that enable people to act both independently and interdependently.⁶

Important as it is that leaders forthrightly articulate the principles for which they stand, what leaders say and do must be consistent with the aspirations of their constituents. When university administrators, at whatever level, advocate or speak out about values that aren’t representative of the collective will, they are ineffective at mobilizing people to act as one. Leaders set an example for all of their constituents based on a shared understanding of what is expected. This means they have gained consensus on a common cause and a collective set of principles. This gives them legitimacy in building and affirming a community of shared values.

Renew Shared Values

Periodically taking the institution’s pulse on the clarity of and consensus around values is well worthwhile. Whether through surveys, forums, town hall gatherings, coffee chats, webinars, or other methods, the process of assessing current sentiment engages the entire campus community in discussing values and helps ensure that they are inclusive of an ever-changing constituency. Once people are clear about their leaders’ values, about their own values, and about shared values, they know what’s expected of them. They are better able to handle higher levels of uncertainty and ambiguity, and they can better deal with any conflicting demands between work and their personal lives.

But questions such as What are our basic principles? and What do we believe in? are far from simple. Even with explicitly stated common values, there may be little agreement on the meaning of each statement of belief. At our own institution, not an academic year goes by without everyone—or at least some significant portion of the campus—getting engaged in discussions about core institutional values. We talk regularly about such core principles as “educating for competence, conscience, and compassion” and determining what it means to be a “Jesuit, Catholic” university. A common understanding of values comes about through that dialogue; it emerges from a process, not a pronouncement. Leaders must engage their constituents in conversations about values issues. After all, if there’s no agreement about values, what exactly is the leader—and everyone else—going to model?

Shared values must be more than campus or program advertising slogans. They must be genuinely supported and broadly endorsed. Faculty and staff must be able not only to enumerate the values but also to provide relatively common interpretations of how those values are put into practice. They must know how the values influence the way they teach, address issues, recruit faculty, hold ceremonies, provide services to students and alumni, and so on. They must also know how these values contribute directly to making their college or university unique and distinctive.

Shared values emerge from listening, appreciating, and building consensus. We observed one student union director who spent his first months going around both the building and the campus, talking with people. He listened as people told him about what was working and what needed improvement or fixing. In these conversations he also had an opportunity to share information about himself, his values, and his experiences on other campuses. When changes were made, he referenced them against much of what he had heard in these conversations, and people could tell that he had been true to his promise to listen and be responsive.

For people on campus and within various departments and programs to understand the values and come to agree with them, they must participate in the process. A unified voice on values results from discovery and dialogue: unity is forged, not forced. You must provide a chance for people within your department, program, or unit to engage in a discussion of what the values mean and how their personal beliefs and behaviors are influenced by what the institution stands for.

You must also be prepared to discuss values and expectations in the recruitment, selection, and orientation of new people to your team, department, or program. On this exact point, a research center Fellow lamented that “values are, unfortunately, often communicated very poorly, not just in academia. They become another item to check off the list, along with how to fill out forms for parking, selecting health-care options, and where to get office supplies. With so many tasks to accomplish, discussion of values and beliefs often falls by the wayside.” He believed that values “cannot be defined and then set aside to gather dust. They need to be lived and their importance demonstrated overtly in decisions.”

LEAD BY EXAMPLE

Leaders enact the meaning of the organization in every decision they make and in every step they take toward the future they envision. Leaders understand that they bring shared values to life in a variety of settings—in weekly department meetings, one-on-one conferences, donor telephone calls, faculty and staff council sessions, and visits with alumni, vendors, suppliers, and community members. For example, the data in figure 2.2 shows that the more often leaders are observed setting a personal example of what they expect of others, the more their direct reports indicate that they trust management.

How you spend your time, how you react to critical incidents, the stories you tell, the questions you ask, and the language you use—all are leadership tools for setting an example. How you apply these tools should not be haphazard and left to chance. Although serendipity may play a role, you must continuously be on the lookout for ways to establish yourself as a leader by demonstrating how core beliefs shape and govern your actions.

Modeling the way may appear rather basic and obvious, but it’s all in the attention and the doing. Each tool enables you to make a conscious commitment to a shared way of being visible and tangible to others. Conscientious application of these tools can often challenge aspiring leaders, but failure to use them will foster cynicism. It’s always useful to keep in mind that sometimes the longest distance you have to travel is the distance from your mouth to your feet, from what you say to what you do.

Figure 2.2 Setting a personal example of what leaders expect from others increases the extent to which people trust them.

Spend Time and Pay Attention

How you spend your time is the single clearest indicator, especially to others, of what’s important to you. What do you say is your top priority? Whether it’s faculty, students, staff, or alumni, the question is, How much of your daily time do you spend with them? When Jeanne O’Laughlin, OP, was president of a small religious university, her vision was to create a caring environment on campus. To back that up, she routinely stopped and talked with students she met as she walked across campus. The first day on the job, another college president pedaled to work on an old bicycle and chained it to the sign that said “President’s Car”—providing a simple statement about the values of sustainability and frugality.

Leaders make obvious connections between how they allocate their time and what they consider to be their priorities and core values. What does it mean when the provost comes to a meeting of the student senate or conducts a meeting with students in the administration building versus the student union? What signal does it send when the vice president for business services comes to a school’s faculty meeting to discuss the budget rather than sending a budget analyst? If you say alumni are important, how much time goes by without meeting with them? If you say students are important, when’s the last time you sat in on a class, attended a student presentation, or joined in a student-sponsored event?

Setting an example often means arriving early, staying late, and being there to show you care. Faculty members who show up early to their classes and linger afterward to answer questions and chat with students successfully communicate their own and their institution’s commitment to caring about students. Learning the names and areas of study and interest of the students who work in your office sets an example of how people should be treated—and valued—in the work-place, even if they are part-time or temporary.

Calendars never lie when it comes to sending a message to others about how you prioritize your time and how this allocation aligns with your values and priorities—or not. Time, obviously, is a finite quantity, so make sure your distribution of it is in synch with where and what you want people to pay attention to. Don’t be too busy to take a moment to chat and get to know the people who work with, and around, you.

Turn Critical Incidents into Teachable Moments

Choosing to spend time on core values is essential in sending the signal that you’re serious about an issue. But even the most disciplined leaders can’t stop the intrusion of the unexpected. There are constant interruptions, brief interactions, and extraordinary variety in everyday life on a college campus. Critical incidents—chance occurrences, particularly at a time of stress and challenge—offer significant moments of learning for leaders and constituents. Critical incidents present opportunities for leaders to teach valuable lessons about appropriate norms of behavior.

Jim Lyons, dean of students, was always on the lookout for critical incidents that he called “teachable moments” for the campus. These were the times that something unexpected happened, usually (but not always) negative, and campus administrators had a leadership choice to make about how they wanted to frame and respond to the incident.

For example, when a violation of the university’s honor code occurs (as it will inevitably), is the focus narrowly on dealing with students caught cheating or is it more broadly focused on bringing the entire campus community (students, faculty, and staff) into a discussion of what it means to have, and live by, an honor code? What does it mean to be responsible and accountable not just for your behavior but also for how others behave? Incidents will happen, and the question for leaders is more than what the punishment will be. It’s bigger than that. It’s about the lessons they want to teach as a result of their response. Housing departments and programs, for example, have moved from simply penalizing people for breaking the rules to encouraging people to follow the rules determined by the residents themselves—these “rules” then represent the shared values of the community.

Critical incidents are those events in leaders’ lives that offer the chance to improvise while still staying true to the script. Although they can’t be explicitly planned, it’s useful to keep in mind that the way you handle such incidents—how you link actions and decisions to shared values—says volumes about what’s important.

For example, some deans and departments make it a big deal when a faculty member’s book receives an award, and others don’t. One university advancement officer vigorously rings a bell, located in the center of the office, and calls everyone together whenever anyone successfully solicits a donation over a certain amount; many just take such accomplishments for granted. Some athletic directors make a personal appearance in the team’s locker room after a narrow overtime defeat to remind the players about being proud to play at their best in spite of the scoreboard. After a particularly disturbing racial incident, the campus police chief made a personal appearance at a meeting of the student senate to talk about such tensions and the need to reach out and ensure the safety of each person (students, faculty, and staff) on campus. He also held individual discussions with each public safety officer, over three shifts, to share similar beliefs and to learn about their concerns.

Tell Stories to Teach Virtues

Critical incidents are often the most dramatic sources of moral lessons about how people should and should not behave. They become stories to pass along, whether around the classrooms and residence halls; among faculty, staff, and students; or even from generation to generation. To understand the teaching power of stories, all you have to do is listen to the tales that alumni relate when they are together during homecoming events:

The story about an administrative assistant who enabled them to graduate on time by approving their petition to add a class after the enrollment deadline

The faculty member who made a point of coming to their volleyball games, visibly cheering, and talking about how they played when they came to class or bumped into each other in the student union

The counseling center director who always made time in his schedule to speak with them whenever they were feeling stressed-out

The department chair who found the resources to send them to an overseas (expensive!) conference, which enabled them to make connections with colleagues that otherwise would not have been possible

The residence hall director who spent hours listening to them complain about a roommate and eventually helped them find a better place to live

While the leader’s message is vital, and how it is framed is critical, the process by which it is communicated is just as significant. Stories can serve as mental maps that help people make the connection between what is important—the purpose and values—and how to put those things into practice. When people hear a story about how someone like themselves enacted a value, they are more likely to see themselves doing the same.

Judith Ramaley, a former biology professor and university president, suggests that aspiring leaders can become good storytellers by inviting members of their college community to tell them about the good things that are happening and what they believe contributes to the quality of the institution. Armed with this material, she says, “you can be a storyteller…and your stories will help create meaning and direction for the institution.”⁷

When a leader is trying to communicate the values of an organization, what would have more of an impact: a policy statement that says “Thou shalt establish personal relationships with alumni” or a story about the dean attending the Alumni Association’s monthly TGIFs? Similarly, what would be more persuasive: seeing statistics about how much stress students experience while at college or hearing a story about a student on your campus—who might have been in your class or worked in your office—who had committed suicide? If you said the story, your answer is consistent with the data. In fact, information is more quickly and accurately remembered when it is first presented in the form of an example or a story, especially compared with facts, figures, and formal policy pronouncements.⁸ Stories are far better able to accomplish the objectives of teaching, mobilizing, and motivating than bullet points on an overhead. Well-told stories reach inside people and pull them along. They give everyone the sense of being there and of learning what is really important about the experience.

Choose Words and Questions Deliberately

It’s been said that people are “prisoners” of their organizational vocabulary.⁹ If you disagree, try talking about the personnel in your college or university for even a day without using the words employee, manager, boss, supervisor, staff, subordinate, or hierarchy. We’ve all come to accept certain words as the reality of organizational life. Those words can trap you into a particular way of thinking about your roles and relationships.

Leaders understand the power of words and are attentive to language. The words we choose to use are metaphors for concepts that define attitudes and behaviors, structures and systems. Our words evoke images of what we hope to accomplish and how we expect people to behave. Too often on college campuses, some people hold tightly to designations that set them apart—and frequently above— others. Such distinctions make it challenging to find common ground.

Consider the simple shift in language and meaning when the vernacular extracurricular—describing those activities on campus directed by the student affairs divisions—was dropped in favor of co-curricular, recognizing the holistic notion of the educational and learning process on campus. The shift in thinking on college campuses from building “dormitories” to establishing “residential learning communities” is another effort in this same direction. This shift in language changes how many staff members and faculty understand the role they play on campus in the education of young men and women.

Questions too are quite powerful ways to focus attention. Just like professors do in a classroom with students, when leaders ask questions they send people on mental journeys—quests—in search of answers. The questions that leaders ask send messages about what’s most important to them and reinforce the focus of their department or program. Questions constitute one more measure of how serious you are about your espoused beliefs; the nature and substance of your questions reveal the values that should be attended to and how much energy should be devoted to them.

The importance of raising questions was a key leadership insight for Jackie Schmidt-Posner in her job in the public service center and as the institutional adviser for a large student-run conference. She purposefully asked questions that “brought the student coordinators back to the vision and purpose of the project. Once they had their eye on the ball, they could develop the necessary strategies.” Jackie realized that a significant part of her role was often “to focus the group through asking the tough questions.” Think about how your questions can frame the issue and set the agenda.¹⁰

Questions can help people escape the trap of their own paradigms by broadening their perspectives and enabling them to take responsibility for their own viewpoints. Asking questions can do the same for you. The process forces you to listen attentively to the people around you and what they are saying. This action demonstrates your respect for their ideas and opinions. If you are genuinely interested in what other people have to say, you need to ask their opinion, especially before giving your own. Asking what others think facilitates their participation in decision-making and often increases support for the resulting choice. Asking the right questions reduces the risk that a decision might be undermined by either inadequate consideration or unexpected opposition. Of course, you must not only listen to their responses but also be open to giving their feedback serious consideration in subsequent decisions. Sincerity must underlie the asking.

Develop Your Competence

Words alone do not make a leader credible. Having a clear and authentic message is a necessary first step, but the ability to consistently deliver the message and act on it requires a high level of skill. Before you can do the right things, you have to know how to do them. You cannot do what you don’t know how to do, no matter how moral or noble the purpose and regardless of whether others affirm the direction.

To commit to doing something without the capacity to perform it is either disingenuous or stupid. There’s nothing courageous about boldly saying you’ll successfully launch a new curriculum or turn around a residential learning community if you have neither the skills nor the resources to do it. Leaders must be aware of the degree to which they have the capabilities to do what they say. And if they lack the competence, they must dedicate themselves to continuous learning and improvement.

This is something Jackie kept firmly in mind when working with the students on the conference. As she said, “I shared my own learnings with the students—including past mistakes—and I was willing to change direction based on new information.” She made sure that she was part of the learning community and, rather than frame herself as an expert, she acknowledged areas (student culture and schedules, as just two examples) about which the students knew more and could teach her.

Acquiring competence involves being honest with yourself about your abilities. People who exaggerate their abilities to perform a task or achieve a goal, or who inflate their claims of possessing admirable qualities or desirable material goods, are called phonies and fakes and are seldom followed for very long. Your value as a leader is determined by your guiding beliefs and your ability to act on them.

To be genuine requires that you honestly and continuously assess your existing capabilities and are willing to learn new ones. Keep in mind that left untended, everyone’s skills and abilities, like any other asset, deteriorate over time. And it should come as no surprise to anyone on a college campus that learning takes time and conscious attention. If leaders expect others to do things that they have never done before, which is the basis for any improvement or innovative effort, fostering a climate in which people can learn and be unafraid to admit what they don’t know is essential. Such a climate occurs only in those situations in which leaders also Model the Way by participating in the learning process themselves.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION: MODEL THE WAY

The first step you must take along the path to becoming an exemplary leader is inward. It’s a step toward discovering and owning your personal values and beliefs. In finding your voice, you’ll discern the principles that guide your decisions and actions and be able to express yourself in unique ways. And in affirming shared values, you’ll strengthen commitment to principles that everyone should uphold.

Setting the example is the doing part of what you say you will do. Walking the talk is the first test of your credibility. Leaders are measured by the consistency of their deeds and words. You must show up, pay attention, and participate directly in the process of making extraordinary things happen. It’s the consistency between words and actions that builds credibility, and you earn it moment by moment. Leading by example is how you make visions and values tangible. It’s how you provide the evidence that you are believable, competent, and personally dedicated.

In developing your competence in the leadership practice of Model the Way, 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 your three most important values? What are the most important values of your work team/organization? Where is the common ground between your values and theirs?

How do your values influence and guide your leadership actions?

How do your daily actions and calendar reflect, or not reflect, your espoused values? How can you make explicit the link between your values and the decisions you make? What can you do to reduce any gaps between your espoused values and your actions (or those of your team)?

In this academic year, what are the differences (changes) you aspire to make? How can you ensure that these are connected with shared values?

What do you hope people will say about you when your term is completed? What do you need to be doing right now for this to be true in the future?