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Leadership in today’s organizations requires skills beyond technical and theoretical expertise. As someone who has held multiple senior-level positions and taught numerous leadership courses and workshops throughout my career, I must admit as I tried to think about “what I would say about leadership…” I over-thought this column.
Aldous Huxley, an English writer and philosopher, said, “It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.” I feel similarly — like I should have something more complex to say. However, after nearly 30 years as a practitioner, I am convinced that the most powerful contributions a leader can make to a team are to be present and inspire hope.
Being Present
Being present in leadership means giving your full attention to the people or group you are interacting with, without being distracted or multi-tasking. It’s a scientifically backed approach that can help leaders make better decisions, foster connections with their team, and optimize brain function.
Being present is more than simply showing up. It requires focusing and actively engaging others, actively listening, and seeking to understand. It involves being open to feedback, deeply self-aware, and understanding our own strengths, weaknesses, and biases.
It means understanding that whatever we are working on must include giving our full attention to those with whom we are working, reading the room to identify who is included or excluded. Being present means engaging in continual learning from your daily practice.
Over the past few years, I have worked with senior administrators in organizations across the country, and I know that the work of a leader has become increasingly complex. Many leaders are pulled in multiple directions, moving at a fast pace from one thing to the next, often resulting in more frequent transactional interpersonal interactions. We continue to get work done but with less and less individual engagement, leading to less fulfilling experiences and potential burnout.
Many leaders live with the weight of increasing pressure to be everything to everyone. As a leader, I feel the weighty, unspoken expectation to make “perfect” decisions, and the measure of success applied to my decisions is that everyone is satisfied and happy.
While we cannot control the expectations, by focusing on being present in the moment, we can provide an alternative approach to frenzied achievement. Being present allows us to focus, provide support, and increase the chances that the people we work with will be a part of creating more vibrant and authentic environments and developing their own leadership skills.
Many organizational cultures — liberal, conservative, mixed, as well as internal and external audiences — have become intolerant of any perceived mistake, big or small. Cancel culture is affecting leaders across the spectrum. Modeling focus and active engagement can lead to deeper exchanges as well as broader understandings about difference and what it means to work together. Ultimately, we can influence organizational culture and power dynamics and set up the organization for continued success.
More than once, I have found myself facilitating conversations on complex issues. It felt like surfing a 15-foot wave: We could have an amazing ride, or we might crash spectacularly. A leader’s role is to support the team as it navigates the nuances of organizational culture and sometimes, intense conversations, encouraging faculty and staff to stay present and communicate compassionately and respectfully, engaging in ways that everyone feels invited to participate.
Power dynamics play a significant role in organizations, and a leader must navigate the complex web of relationships and power structures. Understanding the power of one’s positionality and how that plays out in relationships across the organization is critical. Senior leaders whose skills allow them to stay present with the group, set the tone for others to stay present and engaged. Focusing on the moment helps a leader utilize their positional power to model being present to the task at hand and attentive to those in the room.
Inspiring Hope
Organizational life has faced multiple challenges in the last few years, and our leadership environments are increasingly complex; hope is essential to growing or sustaining organizational success. Dr. Shane Lopez described hope as “the belief that the future will be better than the present, along with the belief that you have the power to make it so.” If anything can impact an organization, it is the belief that we can make a difference. Many higher education professionals will tell you that they chose their work because they wanted to make a difference. A leader who is present and attentive can inspire authenticity and hope.
Mission and vision statements are often filled with hopeful aspirations. Leaders must articulate alignment between their vision, the institutional mission, and goals and inspire their team to work towards them. Our employees see hypocrisy when actions are not aligned with vision and mission. They expect better of us. When organizations are not serving their mission, staff members feel underappreciated and invisible.
Being the Leaders Higher Education Needs Today
Effective leadership is critical at this moment. We need skilled, present leaders who can nurture hope. When leaders are successful, organizations and individuals are more productive.
