Stop Smooshing and Start Changing
Tools don’t inspire transformation. Humans do.
You’re at a party. The person next to you asks, “What do you do?” Instead of sharing your title and the college at which you work, you say, “I change lives.” How would that relentless value-based framing of your work (and the work everyone else at your institution does every day) change how you think about what happens on campus and in your class/office? How might it change how some are thinking about and responding to AI? Could it help institutions move from a focus on adopting tools to a focus on centering, supporting, and preparing students?
The ideas entangled in this post are influenced by my reading of Brené Brown’s latest book, Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit. Brown is a researcher, professor, and runs a successful business that guides companies through deep, transformational change. Her research has validated my experiences and seems to always tug against something I’ve felt or wondered about but struggled to translate into words.
One of her most impactful pieces of work is about vulnerability. Her grounded theory research suggests that vulnerability “looks like courage and feels like weakness.” Her later work that applies vulnerability to transformative leadership calls out the criticality of leaders to lean into vulnerability, which requires acknowledging its paradoxical nature and holding space for both ends. Leading with vulnerability as a core value requires leaning into uncertainty, making space for it, and calling out when things need to shift. It means recognizing that when we are facing the need to change, it is really common to tinker around the edges and smoosh these changes back into our usual structures again and again. In the end, these types of minimal shifts end up creating more work and emotional fatigue than designing and implementing new systems. I think we need more relational leadership and institutional cultures that encourage, support, and value continuous learning, reflection, and change.
Relational and Transactional Leadership
Vulnerability is also a core value of relational leadership. Relational leadership requires one to care about the people they lead and make intentional efforts to connect. Relational leaders prioritize building trust and designing social architecture into their organizations that create spaces for unpacking, processing, and rethinking — creating cultures with psychological safety that encourage all individuals to take off their emotional armor and have hard conversations. Identity and intersectional power are always at play in human interactions and structures. And those who differ from the dominant group carry more risk. Being self-aware of one’s own privileges, openly acknowledging them, and intentionally making space to bridge differences is part of relational leadership.
Transactional leadership is more associated with cultures that breed self-protection and, what Brown calls, “armoring behaviors.” Transactional leadership often looks and feels more like, “You will do this because I said so.” Transactional organizations shut down communication, fueling fear and exhaustion. When armoring up and self-protecting are the norm, experimentation goes by the wayside. Teams are more likely to become self-referential, which results in fewer cross-team collaborations (or cross-campus collaborations), fewer ideas coming from other places, and a replay of usual practices. Relational teams are more likely to have permeable membranes, seeking out new ideas and approaches and trying them out. In transactional environments, mistakes are failures; in relational environments, mistakes are more likely to be valued as opportunities to improve.
Chances are, you experience both leadership types in your work but organizational cultures often tend to wan more to one end or the other. And, yes, there are cultures within cultures too (a department within a division
Dancing with Systems
The video above has no sound. It shows a mobile in motion, representing a system of interconnected parts.
Systems thinking is a particular approach often utilized in organizational change and leadership development. It acknowledges interconnection between parts. A hanging mobile is a helpful metaphor. Tap one piece of the mobile and all the other parts respond, rebalancing itself. You can’t move one element in isolation. At its simplest, it means everything a person contributes in their work every day affects every other part of the organization. Looking at our work and approaching it each day through a lens of systems thinking begins to set us up for adaptability.
Donella Meadows, a late environmental scientist and educator, wrote in Dancing with Systems:
“In a world of complex systems, it’s not appropriate to charge forward with rigid, undeviating directives. Stay the course' is only a good idea if you’re sure you’re on course. Pretending you’re in control is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes. What’s appropriate when you’re learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as a you find out more about where it’s leading.
That’s hard. It means making mistakes and, worse, admitting them. It means what psychologist Don Michael calls ‘error-embracing.’ It takes a lot of courage to embrace your errors.”
One of the key ways to begin to introduce systems thinking is to ensure every person identifies with the organization’s mission and they recognize how their contributions influence the bottom line. For example, community colleges are open access institutions — they accept everyone. Period. As such, community college educators have the opportunity to change lives and future generations every single day. Ask any community college educator you know and you’ll hear inspirational stories of students that you will never forget.
Everyone in higher education changes lives — whether you’re a department chair, part-time or full-time faculty, a trustee, a gardener, a counselor, a janitor, a president, a financial aid specialist, an IT specialist, or an instructional designer. The next time someone asks me, “What do you do?” I’m going to say, “I change lives.” Will you start there with me?