Three Surprising Leadership Skills

MIT is looking ahead, trying to figure out what skills the next generation of scientists, engineers, applied social scientists, designers and managers will need.  After careful consideration, and a close review of numerous studies of the future of work, MIT believes it will have to complement the depth of the training it currently offers in dozens of technical fields with an equal commitment to developing the breadth of each individual’s leadership capabilities. To build this necessary breadth, it will be necessary to focus on helping learners know themselves (e.g., improve their emotional intelligence, adaptability, resilience, ethnical awareness, reflective capacity, etc.), work with others to get things done (e.g. motivate others, give and receive feedback, build teams and networks, communicate effectively, resolve conflict, and negotiate with difficult people); and build organizational capacity (e.g., manage change, manage crises, help organizations learn, implement user experience design and better marketing, and commit to process improvement).  No one can learn all these things at once; so, we’ll all have to commit to life-long self-improvement. The university’s job will be to make it easy for everyone to acquire both technical depth and leadership breadth as they need it.  In all likelihood, this will involve a range of new teaching and learning formats.

As I listen to successful individuals say what it took for them to achieve their goals (at every level, in every sector), many seem to be stuck on an old-fashioned view of a leader as someone with a strong personal vision who can command others to do what needs to be done.  In my view, this model -- derived mostly from accounts of military, sports, political and business victories -- is not likely to work in the future. More distributed or facilitative models of leadership-- that emphasize knowing how to work in partnership with others and build organizational capacity -- are likely to be more valuable.  When I look at the way ideas about leadership are changing at MIT, shifting from top-down to facilitative models, three specific leadership skills stand out for me: setting a constructive problem-solving tone, facilitating group efforts and negotiating in a value-creating fashion. These are likely to surprise traditionalists, but I think we can already see how these capabilities will define a new generation of leaders.

Setting a constructive problem-solving tone

What do leaders need to be aware of at the outset of a venture?  Not just their own goals and vision, but the way their behavior influences others. Efforts to establish one’s firmness or strength are less important than an ability to model or set a joint problem-solving tone. Whatever the organizational context, technical managers, team leaders and CEOs must be able to motivate and inspire others to work and think creatively. The more everyone is ready to share responsibility for the success of the group, the lighter each person’s load will be, and the greater the collective wisdom available to apply to problem-solving.   Leaders are people who are able to put themselves in the shoes of others.  They are in sufficient control of their ego to be able to share responsibility and applaud the good work of others. Emotional intelligence and self-awareness are crucial to the ongoing success of teams or organizations in an era of flattened hierarchies and distributed leadership. If a leader can’t inspire a problem-solving tone, commanding that everyone perform is likely to backfire.

Facilitating group efforts

The general presumption in the world of management is that technical experts will be able to collaborate with each other; it turns out, though, that collaboration is a learned, not an innate capability. Launching multifaceted high-performance teams is an important leadership responsibility, and it involves being able to facilitate group interactions, not just leaving everything to the team members.  In my view, facilitation is a crucial leadership skill. Those of us who teach facilitation know that it involves selecting the right mix of team members, designing the work plan properly (including parceling out assignments and setting ground rules regarding the way members will interact with each other), holding a mirror up when the group members are not working well together, mediating among contending individuals and serving as a scribe so there is a reliable record of what transpired.  While it is possible to contract out for many of these facilitation services, leaders better understand exactly what the facilitation assistance is that they want and need. And, sometimes, only the leader can resolve internal team disagreements.

Negotiating in a value-creating fashion

The success of many organizations hinges on the ability of their leaders to negotiate effectively with representatives or leaders of other organizations. Supply chains work that way, as do inter-organizational partnerships. Leaders who think that these kinds of negotiations are like traditional win-lose bartering in the market place, do their organizations a terrible disservice. Negotiating when long-term relationships are important, requires a different (i.e., “mutual gains”) approach to deal-making. The Mutual Gains Approach (MGA) to negotiation requires finding trades or ways of reframing disagreements that add to, rather than just divide, value. The most successful leaders know how to do this.

As colleges and universities re-organize to enhance the breadth of the leadership skills they are imparting, I hope they will realize that the learning involved is probably not best presented in traditional semester-long courses, nor delivered in lecture format. Helping students learn from their own experience, and engage as co-learners with others (often online), will require new pedagogical strategies.  And, when this happens, learners are likely to demand certification: not just an indication that they have completed the required work, but a guarantee that they have achieved mastery of the skills involved.

Universities are underinvesting in efforts to improve the quality of teaching

My friend and colleagues, Michael O’Hare (a Professor at UC-Berkeley), points out in a recent paper entitled The 1.5% Solution: Quality Assurance for Teaching and Research that major research universities underinvest in continuous improvement of their teaching efforts. Given that universities have only two primary tasks -- teaching and research – they ought to be willing to invest as much in improving the quality of their teaching as they do in providing an elaborate infrastructure to support basic and applied research. But, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

O’Hare calculates that major universities devote something like $300,000 to present a semester-long course (i.e. student time, rooms, professor’s salary, web, teaching assistants, etc.). This is what it takes to ensure that faculty and students are present in the right place, at the right time, with the resources they need. He assumes, for planning purposes, that a course is taught to 50 students; faculty at research universities carry a three-course-per-year teaching load, teaching is half a professor’s academic year time, and fringes and benefits are included. To increase student learning by 5%, therefore, O’Hare estimates that it ought to be worth spending $45,000 per year, per professor, to improve the quality of teaching and student learning. Unfortunately, nothing close to that is currently being spent.

O’Hare suggests that universities ought to invest 1.5% of their faculty payroll in quality assurance to improve teaching performance – in much the same way that almost every industry invests in quality assurance as it seeks to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.

O’Hare points out three ways that any and every university department could try (at very modest cost) to improve the quality of its teaching. These follow closely what other segments of the economy have learned about quality improvement. While teaching is not the same as producing most other products or services, I’m convinced (after almost 50 years as a teacher at MIT) that the most basic quality assurance strategies do apply equally well to the university.

Instructors should talk more with each other. You might not believe it, but it is very rare for MIT faculty to sit in on each other’s courses to observe and offer advice on possible ways of improving teaching. And, similarly, faculty members almost never compare notes before classes begin on what they are proposing to cover in their classes and how they intend to go about teaching the material. Everyone is presumed to be a subject matter expert; although why this is presumed to carry over into teaching expertise is beyond me. If a Department made it a policy that every faculty member should expect one of their colleagues to sit in on at least one of their class sessions each semester, then no one would feel singled out. While such assignments could be made absolutely randomly, I don’t see a problem asking the faculty to choose the colleague they want to have sit in. In an after-class discussion, I would hope that the person observing would suggest (1) things I saw you do that I’m going to try myself (and why), and (2) things I’m going to suggest you might find helpful. I don’t think such reports need to be submitted in writing to the relevant Department, but it might be valuable if the person being observed wrote a short summary of what they heard and how they intended to take the feedback on board.

Instructors should make a greater effort to help students learn to teach each other more effectively. Faculty are used to giving students formal feedback (i.e. graded tests and quizzes) on how well they have mastered the material presented in class. It seems to me that faculty could also observe each student giving feedback to a fellow student, and translate that into an occasion to help every student get better at giving constructive feedback and advice to their peers. We need to make it easier for our students to learn from each other. In one of my classes, I ask a few students to make six minute oral presentations -- in a hypothetical work situation -- drawing on what they have learned that week in class. As soon as they are done, every student in the class is asked to use a one page printed template highlighting five or six aspects of the presentation to provide the presenter with immediate feedback. In addition to noting what was done well and what could be improved, each student provides several sentences of commentary. This is all done in five to seven minutes. Each presenter that gets 25 separate sources of feedback on their presentation. This has nothing to do with their grade. Everyone in the class makes at least three oral presentations throughout the term. Each bit of feedback is not anonymous. We always say students learn as much from the other as from their professors, but what do we do to make sure that happens? Nothing. I think faculty should commit to make sure that students learn (as part of every course!) how to help their fellow students learn as much as they can from the class. It should be the faculty member’s responsibility to instruct and support students as they help each other learn. I think that academic departments should insist that faculty make an effort to get better at doing this.

Academic departments should measure everything they do on a continuous basis. There’s nothing new about this idea. Arthur Demming pointed out many years ago, in the context of industrial activities, that anything not measured is not likely to be improved. What to measure, though, in the context of university teaching, is not clear. Most universities currently measure student satisfaction immediately at the end of a semester-long class. More than anything else, this tends to gauge the popularity of the professor. I’ve rarely seen student course evaluations lead to improvements in teaching strategy or performance. What else might be measured? It seems obvious it would be a good idea to measure student knowledge about course material before and after each segment of a class, as well as before and after the entire course. This works if a class is mostly aimed at helping students master substantive knowledge. But, if a class is supposed to teach students how to do something, it makes more sense to give students simulated opportunities to see whether they have mastered the relevant skills. Digital simulations are expensive to build, but they work. Face-to-face role play simulations are not expensive to create, and they work as well. When groups of students in a class play the same game separately, comparisons of the results and student reflections on the experience can give faculty a clear idea of what they are conveying effectively and what needs improvement. I’ve found that saving the last three minutes of a class to ask students what they took away from the session often generates surprising responses. It certainly helps me recalibrate when what they report don’t correspond with what I thought I was teaching! I’m in favor of asking each faculty member what they intend to measure so that they can improve their teaching performance. A university department should provide technical support to make this happen. Then, with the relevant data in hand, each faculty member should commit in writing to experiments or reforms in their next round of teaching, along with a clear indication of what they will measure next time.

I know that there will be substantial resistance to these three simple ideas. Non-tenured faculty will be worried that admitting there is room for improvement in their teaching may somehow jeopardize their reappointment. Tenured faculty have little or no incentive to invest in getting better at teaching. To date, most faculty members at most research universities have not been asked to focus on teaching their students to teach their classmates. This will be seen as an (uncompensated) expansion of the faculty’s role and responsibility. Most faculty won’t know how to do this. Departments will complain that arranging a system of faculty visits to each classroom is a new administrative task for which they are unprepared. Systematically measuring teaching performance (and improvements in teaching performance) is not something that academic administrators know how to do. Nevertheless, I would argue that University leaders should pursue Professor O’Hare’s 1.5% solution to the problem of improving teaching effectiveness. There’s really no good excuse for not getting better at what we do.