I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Ryan Streeter, director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Our wide-ranging discussion on the issues facing the community college sector is available as part of AEI’s Viewpoint series.
Watch the video below or on AEI’s YouTube channel.
Inside Higher Ed published an interview looking back at my tenure at City Colleges. As with my book, the Q&A doesn’t shy away from the controversy that leaders like me often face when challenging long-established systems and structures. But to me, controversy can overshadow an important fact — that things simply have to change, and they have to change more quickly, to meet the needs of our students and our communities. As I said in the Q&A:
My biggest concern with the whole community college movement is not that people are not doing good things. People are doing good things and a lot of states are making progress, but my concern is that we’re not moving quickly enough … We see so much disruption taking place in so many industries, and higher education is not exempt. Somehow our traditional institutions have some level of complacency where there is a belief that this disruption won’t impact them as much, but I can tell you employers are not going to wait for institutions to get it right. There are people who every day are trying to figure out how to grab their piece of the American dream. They come to these institutions to figure out how to make that happen. We have to move out of our comfort zone and stop fighting things that challenge the status quo for our sake and understand we’re working on behalf of others.
Read the full interview here.
I recently had the opportunity to participate in an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) panel discussion on improving connections between higher education and employment. I was honored to participate in this panel with Davidson College President Carol Quillen, Monty E. Sullivan, president of the The Louisiana Community and Technical College System, and moderator Jeffrey J. Selingo. Watch the video below or on AEI’s YouTube channel.
Ever hear someone say, “you snooze, you lose?” To most it’s just a clever cliché, but companies like Amazon, Netflix, Uber and Airbnb have used it as a core business principle to disrupt entire industries. In today’s marketplace, disruption is the new norm. The common thread among the casualties of disruption has been a failure to recognize the need for innovation or moving too slowly to adapt to change.
Most of us know that the biggest risk we can take—professionally and for the organizations we lead—is taking no risk at all. While we encourage our employees to take risks, leaders are always keenly aware that it can be a double-edged sword. We are charged with protecting the institutions we lead, but doing so through risk avoidance can be a recipe for disaster. So, how should leaders think about risk-taking as a strategic imperative for their organizations?
As someone who has worked in both the public and private sectors, I’ve learned that cultivating risk-taking as a skill and creating a risk-friendly environment for your teams is paramount for survival and success. That is not to say there aren’t pitfalls; there have plenty of instances where the risk I took didn’t work out. At the time, I didn’t imagine that the failures would lead to the tremendous insights about innovation and resilience that guided my career.
My advice to leaders is to consider the following:
1) Hire good people, give them a framework to operate and get out of their way. In a previous article, I shared my perspective on the importance of hiring people who bring different skillsets and aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo or your assumptions. Once they’re onboard, how can you tap their creativity and experience to help drive innovation and change? First, ensure the team is aligned on the organization’s goals and metrics for success. Then, define your most critical challenges and offer the team a blank canvas to paint you a new picture packed with creative solutions. Encourage them to take risks that are free from the influence of tradition and other constraints. When you trust the knowledge and candor of the people you hire, it’s easier to let them take risks on behalf of your organization.
2) Use your goals to guide risk-taking. Throughout my career, I’ve been fortunate to work for and be mentored by some exceptional leaders. Over the years, I’ve observed them take a variety of risks—from what would be considered measured to potentially catastrophic. The common theme among them was that their decisions were always tied to the goals of the enterprise. That’s because at the end of the day, you must be able to demonstrate the return on investment or value of the risks you and your team have taken. If it doesn’t help achieve the goals of the enterprise, then it is not worth consideration or resources. My advice to leaders is to build strategies that not only provide a clear roadmap for achieving your goals, but also embrace and equip your team with risk-taking as a critical part of their problem-solving toolbox.
3) Think—and act—outside of the box. It’s not uncommon to hear leaders challenge employees to “think outside of the box,” but how many enterprises are prepared to have them act outside of the box? For many organizations, policies serve as invisible fences that restrict their ability to innovate. If the goal is to drive change through innovation, leaders must remove barriers by ensuring that existing policies can accommodate bold action. For leaders working in industries that are highly-regulated, I encourage you to find ways to educate regulators about policy changes that can continue to support needed innovation.
While there is no-one-size-fits-all approach to evaluating and taking risks, my hope is that these three lessons will be helpful as you lead your enterprises through this period of constant disruption. When you run into obstacles, remember this famous quote from Thomas Edison– “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
A senior leader is only as good as the management team that he or she assembles. I’ve learned that firsthand in both the public and private sector, and I’ve found that following three golden rules made all the difference for me when it comes to hiring the people you surround yourselves with.
1. Hire people smarter than you. Your leadership team is an extension of you—it should extend and add to your skills and capabilities. And that’s doubly important if your goal as a leader is to drive transformational change in an enterprise that’s new to you.
2. Hire people who will challenge you. In an earlier article I shared that transparency isn’t just about being open about your challenges, but also about being open to the people around you. When it comes to hiring a leadership team, surround yourself with people who aren’t intimidated and can challenge your assumptions—and then give them the freedom to do so.
3. Hire people who complement you. Just like you should hire people with different skills and backgrounds to expand your knowledge, also look for people who complement your leadership style. If you have a strong personality, look for someone who can take a lighter touch in difficult discussions, or if you’re not an inspirational speaker, find the person who can fire up a room and have him or her engage with key stakeholders.
Of course, all this requires you to know yourself and exercise the kind of humility and soul-searching that comes with professional maturity. For me, it took mentors, friends, and family members who were willing to give me honest, judgement-free advice about myself, even when it wasn’t easy to hear. I also had to be willing to listen, accept the truth in their words, and do the work required for self improvement. This doesn’t mean losing your authentic self; instead just remember that if you feel like the smartest person in the room—or if you feel the need to make others on your leadership team believe that you are—you’re setting yourself up to be limited by the expertise and leadership style you already have.
While those skills and expertise landed you a senior leadership position, they’re unlikely to be enough to drive transformational change.
As we begin the new year, it’s natural to reflect on the ways that we as leaders can drive change in our organizations. The good news is that most leaders now see it as self-evident that they have to be more willing to try non-traditional approaches to innovate, particularly in long-established enterprises. But often, I see people trying to bolt non-traditional strategies onto very traditional ways of doing business. That may work, but chances are it won’t work as well as we’d hope. Nor will it lead to truly innovative solutions to deeply rooted problems.
The Value of non-traditional Assets
If we are to lead transformational change, we need to marry non-traditional strategies with non-traditional skillsets, skillsets that expand our organization’s collective capacity to drive change. In my prior role as the leader of one of the largest community college systems in the nation, that meant introducing people with business expertise to the City Colleges of Chicago leadership team to ensure that a $700 million enterprise could better serve its students. Into a world of PhDs, we introduced MBAs skilled in change management and measuring outcomes in new ways. It wasn’t easy to find people willing to trade private-sector salaries for a chance to change lives, but doing so brought us new ways to cut operational costs and increase spending on instruction and capital investments. That, in turn, gave us the space to innovate in many other ways that improved the lives of our students.
Bringing business leaders into an academic enterprise drew its share of detractors, but I had a good example to follow. Mayor Richard M. Daley assumed significant risk by appointing me—a seasoned business executive with no higher education experience—to lead the community college system I once attended. This decision was further validated by Mayor Emanuel, who instructed me to double down on efforts that would drive change. They knew my story and believed it mattered—a homeless high school dropout who, thanks to the community college system, found her way back and grew into an accomplished business executive. I’d like to think my non-traditional mindset helped drive the change I wanted to bring about.
Transparency should be a catalyst for change
Throughout my tenure as chancellor, we utilized transparency as a catalyst for innovation. With both internal audiences and the public, I was very open about the shortcomings of our efforts to make change at City Colleges, and data helped to make it clear where we were falling short and how far we needed to go. Being transparent and using objective data are essential to underscoring the need for change and building support for innovative ideas that take people out of their comfort zones. But then, how do you turn those ideas into action?
I’d argue that along with being transparent about the vital statistics of your enterprise, you must create an environment where its leadership team—and ultimately, everyone with a stake in its success—also can personally be transparent. I’m not just talking about creating an environment where people can be vocal about what they think, but one where they can be transparent about who they are—their personalities, their leadership styles, and the ways in which they see the world. There’s nothing less productive than a room full of people sitting around trying not to offend each other. Organizations thrive when leaders create an environment that goes beyond acceptance and includes genuine appreciation of candor and personal integrity.
Again, I was lucky enough to have a good example to follow. When I worked at the utility Exelon in the wake of a series of outages that contributed to chaos during one of Chicago’s blistering heatwaves, CEO John Rowe took full responsibility for the company’s failures. A billion dollars in infrastructure investments followed, but it was his honesty and willingness to seek new answers from a wide range of strong-willed individuals that turned the tide.
So as you look ahead to this year, I urge you to be intentional in your efforts to add non-traditional skillsets to your organization; they have the potential to unlock new ways of thinking, solving problems and driving transformational change.