I want to start this reflection by sharing something with you: I have not agreed with every decision made by people up the chain. In some cases, I found the reasoning specious or self-serving or outright silly (and my supervisors have noted that one of my endearing traits is that I have never hesitated to say so). Moreover, I think many of our Administrative Rules are ill-conceived, poorly articulated, or vague — and that’s not an exclusive or.
Nevertheless, in my roles as DC and dean, I believe that my job as a leader is not to inflict my own assessment of decisions or rules on people who come to me for help, but rather, to help them navigate this institution as best I could. Yes, I have argued against what I considered poor decision-making, and I have lobbied for better ARs. But not to people who needed my help.
From my perspective, helping people navigate their circumstances and challenges as best you can is the core of owning your leadership. Consider an all-too-familiar story:
A student goes to a department chair with a problem. The DC, no doubt meaning well, tells the student, “There’s nothing I can do — X won’t let me”; fill in X with your favorite target — a dean, a rule, HR, A&R, etc. The student goes away disappointed.
More importantly, the student doesn’t get the DC’s message that they don’t agree with their dean, AR, etc. On the contrary, the student gets the message that the DC can’t or won’t help them. Will that student go back to the DC for help with another problem? Why would they? In this way, a well-meaning leader has undermined their own leadership.
This is not just an explanation of why many students end up in my office, though it is that, too. Rather, it’s an example of outsourcing leadership to someone or someone else, instead of owning it.
When confronted with this blunt point, the first dodge is usually something like this: “Students ask for things we can’t do.” That is undoubtedly accurate, but it’s also irrelevant to the issue at hand. Like the rest of us, students want what they want, and they want someone to give it to them. It’s a given that someone is going to ask you to give them what they want that they can’t have, but that isn’t a reason to outsource your leadership.
Let’s consider another situation: A student comes to DC with a complaint about a professor, and they’re pretty clear that what they want is for the DC to give them an A for the course and burn the professor at the stake. These are about equally plausible in our institution, but instead of “There’s nothing I can do,” this DC says, “I understand your complaint and the outcomes you want, so let’s talk about how this process works at ACC.” Note that in this scenario, the DC does not inflict their own assessment of the dean or the rule or A&R on this student; on the contrary, this DC engages the student around helping the student navigate the institution as it is.
There are all sorts of ways to dodge the obvious in this scenario, so let me disarm a few. This approach does not trivialize the student’s complaint; rather, if the student has a legitimate complaint, this is the best way to activate the institutional processes in place — however imperfect they may be — for addressing it. This approach does not condone stupid rules; rather, it puts the emphasis on navigating in spite of stupid rules or decisions. It is certainly less satisfying to help the student navigate without venting your own frustrations, but presumably refraining from using people who need your help for free therapy is a skill one picks up on their way to adulthood. This approach also doesn’t involve making up an answer so you can pose as an “authority.” In fact, asking for help when you need it is excellent modeling of the kind of leadership that’s worth owning. Finally, I am not saying that this institution is perfect and doesn’t need work. It should be abundantly clear to anyone who’s awake that we have a long way to go — and nothing about actually helping people navigate this imperfect institution negates that.
Now back to the obvious: This scenario is an example of a leader owning their leadership. In this particular relationship, the DC is more of an expert on navigating this institution than the student, and serving our students requires us to exercise your expertise — even when we know the student isn’t going to get what they want — to help the student learn how to navigate. It also means actually listening to a student’s particular situation with compassion, rather than viewing a student’s problem as another opportunity to vent.
Whether you like it or not, assuming a leadership role in an institution makes you an agent of that institution, and as an agent, you have some basic choices to make. I have never missed an opportunity to criticize decisions or rules that I thought were stupid, and I have worked very hard to change rules or decisions or processes that I thought were egregiously stupid. But the question I always pause to ask myself is before going into battle is this: Stupid for whom? The measure of a decision or rule or process should always be our mission, and in our institution, the mission is serving our students. We may, of course, disagree about how best to pursue that mission, but that’s a discussion that benefits parties on all sides. Genuine discussion of differing perspectives also happens to be the best way to reveal self-interest dressed up in the mantle of the mission.
This pattern of ownership applies to anyone who comes to you for help: faculty, staff, students. I have always believed that the best way to empower our students is to empower our faculty and staff to serve the mission, and that means, more than anything, that we’re in the business of individual success.
Owning your leadership means taking your role as an agent of the institution seriously, and that means both helping people navigate the institution as it is, and working to improve the institution for the sake of those we serve. Abdicating your leadership does neither; at best, it’s a tiny tantrum, acting out frustration on a captive audience: It may feel good in the moment, but it fails to serve those who need your help, and ultimately, it undermines your leadership, too.
