TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Hey there, welcome to the Uplift podcast, where we talk all things leadership for women in higher ed. I'm Carol Shabryus and I want to help make your leadership path a little easier, a bit brighter and a hell of a lot more fun. Here at the Uplift, we mash up real stories, real feelings, real theory and occasional f*** bombs, all to help you become the kind of bleeping awesome leader you would love to follow. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump in. Hello, summer session is over, welcome to August and welcome to back to school season. Here at Shea Shabryus Smith, we are in our last week of summer vacation. My colleagues in town are gearing up for their semesters to start in the few weeks after that, and before you know it, all of us will be back in the swing of a full semester. I thought we'd celebrate back to school season by exploring the relationship between the things we do when we teach and the things we do when we lead. So for the rest of this month, I'm hosting a series of conversations with folks who are excellent teachers, and I've asked them to reflect on what great teaching has in common with great leadership. Over the years, I've personally been struck by how powerful it is to translate what I do when I teach to what I do when I lead. I've been reminded of that every time I work, for example, on dog training, which I talked about last summer in episode 9. I'll link to that in the show notes in case you didn't hear all about our new puppy, bacon, who, by the way, is fully grown and totally awesome. In case you're wondering, training is another place where the skills that work for me are also skills I learned in the classroom and that I've refined as a leader. All of this makes me think that, underneath all the work we do, what really stays consistent are the behaviors that drive connection right brain to brain, heart to heart. How do we connect with others? And we sometimes forget to emphasize the work that takes in our leadership, but we know that those connections are what make for really memorable classroom experiences and they're what help us become the kinds of leaders people love to work with and even to follow. I think there are some basic ways that teaching and leadership are similar. This might be less true if teaching means to you standing in front of a room and lecturing and imparting knowledge to people who sit there and listen, but when you think about teaching as facilitating other people's learning, which requires their growth, development, their curiosity, their experimentation, occasional failure and, of course, some success, all with feedback and guidance from you. Then leadership is a lot like teaching. So I want to start with something we don't talk about much at the college level. I don't think we talk about this nearly enough, but it's commonplace for K-12 teachers. Great teachers are experts in two totally different domains. They are expert in their fields because they have to know enough to teach the content and they're expert in teaching because they have to know how to effectively teach all that content. My colleagues in education departments have talked about this forever, but outside of education departments, many professors and college instructors talk about learning to teach only on the job, once they're thrown into teaching their first course or maybe when they're TAs. But they learn it in the classroom and they learn it from modeling other teachers they've had. We don't actually spend a lot of time teaching college level instructors how to teach, although there's a rich body of knowledge on the scholarship of teaching and learning and yet it's unfamiliar to many new faculty members. You see that same thing in leadership. It's pretty common for someone to be promoted into administrative role because they were good at something else, without any real guidance or training or development in what it takes to actually lead people. In both cases, we tend to act as if, at least in higher ed, as if disciplinary expertise is sufficient. But once you start teaching, just as once you start leading, you're now engaged in different work. You have to know how to encourage people, how to set goals and boundaries, how to organize work so that people can get to the right goals within the right boundaries. You also have to know when it's okay to step out of bounds, when it's okay to experiment and test and design new things, when it's not okay. We don't question that in the classroom with a good teacher, right, we expect great teachers to be expert in their fields and we expect them to do things like listen, ask questions, provide follow-up, give feedback. When I picture a really engaged classroom, I see a teacher who is deeply engaged with the students and their learning. She's coaxing their ideas out of their heads, she's pushing them to think more or to think differently. She's prodding their curiosity, she's giving them feedback so they know they're on the right track, which is also what a great leader does. And yet in higher ed, we often find ourselves put into situations, leadership roles or classroom roles because we proved ourselves in a totally different arena. So now we find ourselves with a title that requires us to do less of the thing people know we're good at and more of the thing that we don't really have the formal training in. And if you're a leader on a campus, you no longer have what many great classroom teachers have, which is a big chunk of time dedicated to regular interaction with your students. Great teachers are expected to focus on their students, to spend time with them, to get to know them, to understand their struggles, to help them hurdle over obstacles. But once you're in a leadership role, if you're like many of us, you'll find yourself in sudden back-to-back meetings all day long. You may feel scattered, you may physically be far away from your team in terms of where you are on campus, or you may feel kind of
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intellectually or practically disconnected because your projects are different, you're working on different initiatives, you're interacting with different clusters of folks across campus, so it can be hard to recreate what you get in the classroom, which is regular, ongoing, deep and meaningful interaction. So the first leadership lesson to borrow from teaching is this spend time with your people. Just as a teacher must be with her students, not only conveying knowledge, but also giving them feedback, pushing ideas, correcting errors, a leader must also be with her team. Once you're with your team, then what? Here are three things you can do. There are many more things you can do, but here are three you can do when you're with your team to help create the same kind of dynamic learning environment that we see in really great teaching. The first is to practice listening and empathy. Teachers use empathy to connect with their students. Empathy helps them understand their students' experiences and perspectives, and it is key to building trust, and we know that students whose teachers demonstrate that they care about them learn better. They feel safe and valued, which makes it easier for them to relax and focus and learn. That's just human, which means the same thing is true for your team. Leaders who show empathy help their team feel engaged and inspired, and then people who are engaged and inspired are more likely and better able to dig into their work, to push themselves and to try to succeed. So, yes, you're listening to your folks and you're working with empathy to build relationships and trust, which is just a nice thing. Human to human right. We like trusting each other, we like having good relationships, but their research shows us that when there's trust, there are better results at work, just as when there's trust in the classroom, you see better learning. So as you step into your leadership role this fall, think back to times with your students when you really developed trust with them through listening and empathy. Think about what you said and what you did to build that trust how you spoke, how you behaved, how you listened. Think about what you actually did that helped your students feel comfortable with you and to have confidence in you, and then see if you can bring some of those very same behaviors into your leadership practice. Another practice teaching and leadership have in common is providing feedback. Now, my first formal training as an academic instructor was in a course where I learned how to teach composition, and composition studies is huge on feedback and I know this shaped me as I stepped into leadership positions. In the composition classroom, feedback happens all the time. In virtually every class session Students get feedback from the instructor and also from their peers. They are asked to push and explain their ideas further. They are asked to clarify the connections they're making between points. They're asked to defend their propositions. They're shown what's working in their writing and they're encouraged to replicate it. They're shown where their writing is not working, where it confuses the reader or leaves questions unanswered, and they're helped to fix those moments and prime to avoid recreating them in the future. I personally think feedback is one of the most powerful practices we can carry into our leadership Constant supportive feedback that's designed to move a person forward. And yet it's one of the biggest, most consistently missed opportunities I see on college campuses. Take the annual review cycle, for example. We all know that presenting lectures, asking students to read chapters in textbooks and then giving them a single high-stakes exam at the end of the semester is not only terrible teaching, it's a terrible way to measure learning. So why would we expect that same process to work at work? Why would we have a single annual review where everything is high stakes? Instead, think about the folks on your team and the work they're doing and consider how you can give them the sorts of feedback you would give your students. Give them both formative feedback feedback as they're going, feedback that helps them get better and summative feedback, kind of capstone feedback on individual moments of completed work. If you're looking for a resource on this, I highly recommend Teresa Amable's book the Progress Principle, which is, hands down, the best book I've ever read for helping leaders understand how and why, to give people consistent feedback on meaningful work. And in case you can hear that, yep, that is our friend Bacon barking in the background, alright, another thing teaching and leadership have in common is differentiation. So I know the idea of differentiated instruction can be a little contentious and carrying this idea into leadership might seem counterintuitive, especially if you believe that everybody needs to be treated exactly the same way. But let's be honest, right, treating everybody exactly the same way isn't really helpful for anyone and it's not equitable. Good leaders, like good teachers, meet people where they are, which means there will be times when treating your team members differently is exactly what those team members need. They don't all need to learn the same things, so they need different professional development. They don't all have the same goals, so they need different support. Think of differentiated instruction as a way of providing individual attention to promote each person's growth and development. And that's the thing you do consistently. You consistently and equitably provide individual attention for everyone on your team. Skill teachers personalize instruction to help students capitalize on their strength and also address the challenges. So to do this in the classroom, you might adapt your teaching methods. You might provide slightly different content. You might push some students who are at one level but
actually provide additional resources to students who are at another level. You might offer different kinds of assignments. You might offer choice. Differentiated instruction is less about teaching and evaluating students differently and more about seeing what each student needs to do and learn in order to achieve the course learning outcomes in your course goals. That translates to leadership. Really well, and let me share a personal story here as an example. This is a super low-stakes story. So I was in a role once. Well, this happened a lot. My portfolio got expanded, but one time that my portfolio was expanded, I had new members added to my team, and one of these new team members was someone I didn't know very well and they spent a lot of time in small talk. Now, if you know me in real life, you know I'm not a fan of small talk and I don't encourage it and I don't promote it. I'm fine if it happens, but oh, it's not my thing, so there's not a lot of it in my meetings. But this new person was like small talk, small talk, small talk and I was like what is going on? Are they nervous? Are they unfocused? Ooh, are they incompetent in hiding it? I spent a lot of time like trying to figure out why this person was doing this and I felt like we were wasting a lot of time on inconsequential conversation. That made me impatient and everything I was doing to try and turn the small talk off was failing. This person really needed the small talk, so I stopped trying to change it and I just took some time to watch and after a little bit of time I realized that what this person was doing was not actually like trying to waste time or whatever. This person was actually trying to get to know me, and here's why I don't like small talk. I don't think small talk is usually about trying to get to know each other. I think small talk is space filler. I think small talk masks what could be really useful conversations. I would just rather get the useful stuff. What was useful for this person in their small talk was that they were trying to get to know me, actually genuinely getting to know me. They didn't want the conversation. They're like hey, how are you doing Nice, the weather's great, my shoes. They didn't want that. When they asked how was your weekend, they actually wanted to know how my weekend was. That, to me, is uncommon in small talk, so what I was perceiving as idle, unnecessary, was actually really important to this other person as a way of establishing rapport. It wasn't small talk to them, or it wasn't my version of small talk to them. It was actual foundation building. So when I think about this, I think it sounds really obvious, right, but it was a shift for me. I had to pause and welcome these conversations instead of automatically trying to shut them down and get past them. And then what happened is exactly what you would think would happen. This person and I got to know each other better and it happened faster and it made it easier for us to start working together. So this isn't exactly differentiated instruction, but it's a good example of how, as a leader, I had to shift what I do in order to meet somebody else. Where they were, what I was accustomed to doing was not working for this person and they were trying to show me what worked. I just had to get over myself and pay attention. My key goal as a team leader is to build trust with folks, because I know that that trust is what will make everything else work, and for this person, an abundance of small talk was key to building trust. So if I wanted to get to my goal, I had to shift and meet this person where they were. I had to change the context of how I worked in order to get us both to where I wanted us to be. So it was different, but it wasn't unfair and it was not inequitable. It was just what this person needed. So I hope this is enough to get your wheels turning about how what you know works in your teaching contexts and how you can pull that in to your leadership practice. I want your wheels spinning as we head into rest of this month's episodes, because in the coming weeks you're gonna hear from three very gifted teachers about their thoughts and experiences bringing teaching and leadership together, and I want you to be able to reflect on your own experiences and what you know as you contemplate what to adapt and practice in your leadership this coming year. All right, my friend, you have two jobs now that the episode is over. First, choose one thing we talked about and put it into practice this week. Take action. Imperfect action, inspired action, scared to try this new thing out. Action, just take action. Second, tell me how it goes. Dm me on LinkedIn or Instagram or shoot me an old fashioned email at carolattheclariogroupcom. Everyone who tells me what action they put into practice will be entered into a monthly drawing for a $20 gift certificate to bookshoporg. This way, you get to expand your learning and you let me help build your library. It's a win for both of us. So once again, you got two jobs. Try something out and then drop me a note to tell me what you tried and how it went. I can't wait to hear from you.