The Magic, Mystery and Mission of Leadership

Remarks by Interim Chancellor Richard Herman to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, Academic Leadership Program

I have been, in my own way, a leader for decades now—as the head of the mathematics department and then as the Dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Maryland. Then as Provost and Interim Chancellor here at Illinois, and now as Chancellor.

Yet waxing philosophical about the nature and meaning and substance of leadership still makes me uncomfortable. It is as if talking too much about the qualities that make for a good leader in an academic culture might, to be honest, jinx me.

Maybe it’s like Samson cutting his hair, or Dumbo losing his magic feather. Talking about how I think about leadership makes me worry that sharing my secrets might somehow steal from me my Merlin’s magic—or at least whatever Merlin’s magic I have.

After all, the famous blues man, Robert Johnson, when playing his soulful tunes in the roadhouses of Mississippi 75 years ago, would hunch over his guitar so no one could see how he ran his cords and picked his strings. So nobody could steal his magic!

My worry is irrational, I know, because leadership does not allow for Robert Johnson’s furtive posture.

Leaders are out there. Always on display—and always on.

We in academia do not get the attention and the press lavished on mayors and governors, congress people and presidents. Thank goodness! But when you are a leader at a large university such as Illinois or even at a little college in a country town, you know that renting, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s classic “Terminator” trilogy at Blockbuster could generate gossip if the kid who rented you the vintage collection turns out to be an intern down the hall.

Or, worse yet, a part-time reporter for the student newspaper!

I say that with humor, but in the jest is truth. Because one of the great personal challenges of leadership is to figure out how to be yourself—the person you were as a child and college student and young mother or father, the person who likes schlocky action films—and yet also be the role that leadership imposes upon you.

This is not unique to university leaders. Little League coaches and elementary school teachers face the same challenge. Yet it is one of the adjustments of moving from being a professor and a scholar to being an administrative leader.

You are now what is euphemistically called in the public eye.

From now on, nothing you do will go unscrutinized. Flip comments that were mostly unnoticed in the past will now be deconstructed like a passage from Moby Dick for their hidden meanings and messages. Every choice you make will anger somebody, sometimes a lot of somebodies. I recommend you try to minimize the frequency of that particular outcome.

No matter how hard you try to involve every relevant person in an important decision, you will always forget—and hence offend—at least one person, probably more. It will hurt your feelings that people believe you have done this on purpose.

People will talk to you differently, with deeper interest etched on their faces. Indeed, people who never talked to you before will begin talking to you now. Your odd sense of humor that often left people blank-faced will suddenly elicit hearty laughter. People will stop talking and listen when you speak, which can be a heady experience. Hence the truism: “The power went to his head.”

Fortunately, as the new department head of, say, geology your opportunities to become a megalomaniac are somewhat limited. Yet even in that job, you are now different, and you are different because you now exercise power—no matter if it is as trivial as determining who teaches at 8 a.m., who gets the office with the window, or who will teach that lucrative summer class.

Power is power.

Even in its least of expressions, it is real to those whose lives and statuses, opportunities and futures are being shaped by it.

As a leader, you now have power.

You are no longer on the getting end. You are on the giving end.

And it really can go to your head.

I recommend reminding yourself every day how it felt to have a boss who didn’t listen when you offered advice, who played favorites for petty reasons, who seemed more worried about her own career than your career or even getting the job done well.

Remember the boss who demanded more work of you than he did of himself? Who denigrated people behind their backs? Who didn’t give a damn about the illness in your family? Who never asked about your aspirations or ambitions? Who noted everything you did wrong and nothing you did right?

I recommend you remember all the bad bosses you ever had.

And then not be one of them.

There is no one-size-fits-all-way to be a leader. Different conditions require different kinds of leadership. If the ship is sinking, somebody had better order up the life rafts without a committee meeting.

Yet you are or will become leaders in institutions with steady and practiced methods of getting things done. Our organizations are large and cumbersome, not lean and quick on their feet. We inherit staffers who often know far more about their particular areas of expertise than we ever will. We are supposed to be in charge but we need those people as much as they need us.

So who is in charge of whom anyway?

We inherit a faculty that is rightly strong-willed and smart and not demure about sharing its views. And many of them have tenure.

We in academia also inherit centuries of tradition that rightly demands that our universities be hotbeds of free and open debate. We are surrounded by faculty and students who should and do speak their minds. Many people just don’t accept the notion that you are the boss and they are the employees. Our universities are just not your classic hierarchical corporate organizations in which the CEO speaks and the minions fall in line.

And that is what we love about our difficult, vexing, noisy, raucous, impolite, brilliant, iconoclastic universities. From this bubbling brew emerges knowledge and creativity in research, creative endeavor and teaching—the very product we create for society, the very reason we exist. And we could not achieve that goal without our troublesome, dynamic university organizations.

That’s the Catch-22 of your lives from now on: what makes your lives as leaders difficult is exactly what makes your institutions vibrant. So, you must believe sincerely in the goals and vision of our universities—knowledge, creativity, learning, the betterment of humanity. These must be the reasons you aspire to leadership. It should not be for status or money or power. If those are your motivations, you will be miserable and probably lousy at the job.

I think of Denise Shekerjian’s study of men and women who have won the MacArthur Prize, the so-called genius award. Ms. Shekerjian discovered that MacArthur winners universally invest their work—whether they are scholars, novelists or furniture makers—with a vision of purpose reaching beyond personal goals.

“Get yourself out of the way in pursuit of some greater good, in response to a strong pull of mission, and you’ve liberated the mind,” Ms. Shekerjian writes. “It’s the vision that generates the ideas and carries forth the work, not the hope of praise, reward or glory.” What is true for MacArthur winners, I believe, is also true for the rest of us. We must believe in the mission of knowledge and betterment that is at the heart of the university mission—and you must be able to make others believe in that mission, too.

Yet we do not as much lead people to our vision as we unleash them—their insight, ability, potential and ambition.

To truly lead is to unleash the leadership in others.

That’s easy to say, not so easy to do.

Leaders have their own styles, of course. Some men and women who would lead us enter a room with long, confident strides, with a swagger. Heads turn, conversations stop, people go mute. Some men and women who would lead us suck the oxygen out of the space around them. They send the signal that they are the smartest man or woman in the room—and they want everyone to know it.

I have never been a great fan of that kind of leadership. Because over the years, I have watched others lead in a different fashion and seen that fashion better accomplish the goal I mentioned earlier—to lead in a way that unleashes the leadership in others.

Think of it as the human version of what Harvard’s Joseph Nye has dubbed the “soft power” of international diplomacy—the ability to achieve a nation’s goals through projecting a sense of the rightness of democracy and human rights, maintaining a respected public image around the world, offering economic help. Even in the hard-ball dealings among nations, Nye argues, the hammer of economic or military coercion is far less effective than moral persuasion.

I believe that “soft power”—the ability to bring people to a shared vision, to convince them of the rightness of your beliefs and actions, to model through your own behavior the behavior you hope to engender in others, to persuade people—is every leader’s first and best tool for getting things done.

Many times over the years, I sat in meetings and watched the man or woman in charge do far more listening than talking. These people did not only seem as if they were listening to what others were saying. They were not listening in order to figure out how to maneuver others to their side of an argument or debate.

They were actually listening because they really did not believe they were the smartest person in the room—or the wisest, or the most caring, or the most visionary. They listened because they had an abiding respect for each and every person around them.

Listening—and hearing—were simply part of their make up.

I saw in these leaders an inherent faith that most people want to be better at what they do, want to be the best that they can be. I saw in these leaders a true-believer faith in the worthiness of people.

These leaders were thoughtful and aware of their own weaknesses and strengths. They did not need always to be right. They did not have that irritating craving to be better than others by being hypercritical. They were comfortable in their own skins. They were truly self-confident people without the insecurities that so often lurk just behind the veneer of gaudy and grandiose self-confidence.

I noticed that these leaders were never bullies. They did not have childish, peevish outbursts. They were careful not to humiliate or harshly criticize people in front of others. Because they were self-aware, they had a way of helping others be self-aware.

They sent the signal that excellence was expected but perfection was not. They understood that, yes, after all the listening and conversation, they had to make the final choices.

And they did.

And they inevitably angered and upset people.

But I don’t believe any of them ever enjoyed that. They had power, and they used it. And yet they were humbled by its exercise.

The leaders I came to admire were honest with themselves and, therefore, honest with others. They were never duplicitous, never talking out of both sides of their mouths, as the saying goes. They were not naïve, but they had a kind of guilelessness about them that inspired trust and dedication and hard work.

Looking back, I think these people were, simply put, mature.

They were emotionally secure, respectful of others, open to reflection and criticism, and, importantly, they were hopeful and optimistic. Not Pollyannaish, I must add, but hopeful—they just believed that their efforts and the efforts of the good people around them would more likely than not result in making things better.

I have come to believe that true leaders do not demand power or have it bestowed upon them. True leadership is an honor that must be granted by those who agree to be led. A leader who assumes that each person, down deep, wants to contribute, wants to excel, wants to be their best—somehow, a leader who truly believes these things allows others to find those beliefs in themselves and to unleash their own insight, ability, potential and ambition.

It may seem like a tautology to all of you intellectuals in the room but thinking the best of people somehow finds the best in people. It is not a warm and fuzzy truism. It is a strategy rooted, I believe, in understanding a deep mystery of the human heart. And the results are not metaphysical, they are tangible: we all do better–and our institutions do better. Any true leader should be happy with that.

Now that I think about it, maybe effectively exercising the mysteries of leadership is a kind of Merlin’s magic.

So, may you all go forth with the vision, strength, respect, self-awareness, honesty, maturity, hopefulness, optimism, humility, and faith in the worthiness of people that will make you true leaders.

May you go forth and use Merlin’s magic wisely and humanely.

Thank you.