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What does courage look like when there is no guarantee that a decision will work?
In this fifth video essay from She Leads the Way: What Women Leaders Teach Us About the Leadership Higher Education Needs Now, Melissa Morriss-Olson draws from conversations with five women leaders who made consequential choices without the comfort of certainty.
Kate Smith recalls the night she stood alone after speaking up at a campus forum. Carol Christ describes moving forward with plans to build student housing on People’s Park at Berkeley despite intense opposition. Pat McGuire reflects on opening Trinity Washington University to students from the city’spublic schools, even as critics accused her of abandoning the institution’s mission.
Lisa Vollendorf shares what she learned while leading through devastating wildfires at Sonoma State University. Lori Carrell remembers leaving a safe and familiar teaching position, buying a truck, and driving the Alcan Highway alone toward an uncertain future.
Their decisions were different, but they shared the same leadership discipline: moving before certainty arrived and accepting responsibility for what followed.
At a time when higher education’s old playbooks no longer provide reliable answers, waiting can feel prudent. But delay is also a decision, and sometimes it is the more dangerous one.
Read the full essay, “Decide, Not Delay”:
https://ingeniousleadership.org/Hear the full conversations:
Lisa Vollendorf
Lori Carrell
As Melissa concludes:
“Courage in higher education right now rarely looks like certainty. The old maps for a lot of these calls don’t exist anymore, and waiting for one to appear is its own kind of choice, usually the wrong one.”
Decide, not delay.
She Leads the Way: What Women Leaders Teach Us About the Leadership Higher Education Needs Now is coming soon from IngenioUs Leadership Press and will be available on Amazon.
About the series
She Leads the Way brings together ideas and voices from Melissa’s conversations with more than thirty women presidents and senior leaders featured on the IngenioUs podcast. Each essay asks what their experiences can teach us about the leadership higher education needs now.
