Joe Sabado – Higher Education & Technology Leadership

Colleagues who telecommute from northern California and Oregon are in town for a two-day visit starting today. I only see them in person two or three times a year now, though through technology, I can interact with them every day.  Their visit reminds me of how the IT organization I work for has grown significantly since 1996 when there were about 6 of us to about 50+ today. The way we work has also been transformed significantly as well.   Their visit also reminds me of several things:

• When two of my colleagues needed to move out of Santa Barbara maybe four or five years ago, human resources told me we had no policy regarding full-time telecommuting and I was further told there was not a single employee in the entire University of California system who had this work arrangement. My department had to create our own telecommuting agreement which was then approved by HR. This leads me to thinking that just because there is no policy or that something has never been done before does not mean that will always be the case. Organizations need to evolve to meet the changing business demands and using the absence of policy or lack of precedence to hinder progress does not make sense.
• Dependence on technology in how student affairs conduct business is evident by the investment and commitment our senior management towards our IT department. There is not a single unit in our student affairs organization that does not rely on technology as evident by the number of systems we have implemented the last decade and a half.  The emergence of social media, cloud, and mobile computing has introduced new opportunities for the organization to further utilize technology in how we serve and communicate with students, parents, other customers as well as with our colleagues.  However, consumer technologies have also brought challenges to IT.
• Telecommuting and working in distributed environment has become an accepted arrangement and this became possible because of technology, an indication of the future of work. We are no longer located in the same physical building and the way we communicate changed from just telephones and face-to-face visits to now using video conferencing tools, emails, and other forms of social media. I remember how I had to drive to campus at night to work because technology to access my workstation and servers did not exist when I started working in my department in late 1990’s.
• Approach to leadership, management  and community-building needed to evolve to accommodate the distributed nature of work and teams. Communicating via instant messaging, email and even through videos have led to misinterpretations and physical/emotional reactions do not often get communicated as clearly compared to face-to-face conversations. While tasks and schedules can easily be communicated, building relationships and communities take more effort. When we hire new employees, they may not meet their colleagues whom they work with remotely for months and so even setting up a wiki profile page with personal information and outside interests can start the introduction and build connections based on common interests. Soft skills, including emotional intelligence, is more than ever required for leadership and management. Even for someone like me who is relationship-oriented, I sometimes fail to think about how my emails or what I communicate electronically may be received by my teams because I don’t see immediate reactions from my staff.

The importance of these visits go beyond work as these are the only few times a year when we can socialize in person. Those few hours when we go to a local restaurant and just catch up are what I certainly look forward to and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels the same way.

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Student leaders should play a greater role in any higher educational institution’s social media efforts towards engagement and dialogue with their student communities. This group includes (but not limited to) orientation leaders, peer advisors, student organization officers, campus tour guides and resident assistants.  These student leaders can connect with their contemporaries in a way that in some ways are more effective than even the most social media savvy staff, faculty and administrators can. It is not so much that students  necessarily know how to use social media more appropriately or with more fluency than those of us in our professional roles, but more so because they understand student culture and they are considered part of the student community. Their participation and opinions will probably be better accepted and more favorably by other students since they are members of the student community. These student leaders should already have the knowledge on campus resources, policies and acceptable community conducts gained through their trainings as part of their positions.

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There was this meeting I attended years ago. The  committee chair posed the question to the few individuals present as to why attendance had dwindled down to a few.  He was trying to figure out why and said he had no clue. I raised my hand to try to tell him what those who stopped attending told me –  it’s because he monopolized the meetings.  I was ignored.  Other members tried to talk but were also either ignored or ideas were dismissed.  He kept on talking for the rest of the meeting, proposing his solutions to the group. It became the typical monologue.  I stopped attending after that. I wonder if anyone ever told him what some of us were thinking.

I know I’ve been guilty of failing to realize my own shortcomings many times as well. As painful as it is sometimes to hear even things I’d rather not hear,  one of the most valuable decisions I have come to make is to welcome and seek feedback. The key for me has been to figure out who I can trust and those who I am willing to listen to, with reservations. I have  a boss who is really honest and it’s one of the reasons I respect him.  I have some co-workers whom I’ve built good relationships with, good enough that they can tell me even things I’d rather not hear. I have colleagues at other departments I have known for years, my customers, who will do the same.  My wife is my biggest supporter and I also appreciate her honesty. All of them have challenged me, forced me to think differently.  I learn from all of them. They keep me honest.

I know it’s so much easier to surround myself with those that always agree with me, a “yes” group. I doubt I would be learning us much though. Do you have your own inner circle of feedback?

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Google “leadership skills” and you’ll rarely find results that include “ability to connect” as one of the essential skills to be an effective leader. Most often, “communication” is listed as one of those skills. I would argue however that the ability to connect is one of the most essential skills for effective leaders, beyond communicating.  We all communicate, but we don’t all have the ability to connect. In my opinion, the most effective leaders can create  some sense of connection, even if perceived, with those they are leading.

I look at my mentors, those I consider effective leaders and what I think they all have in common is their ability to create a sense of connection with others.  This sense of connection starts with their interest in serving others and not for self-serving motives. They are genuinely focused on the other person, not themselves.  They speak in terms the other person understands. They also seem to find common grounds early in their conversations and these could be as simple as asking about a shared activity/interest.  They adjust their styles to match the person/group they are speaking with. This is in contrast with those who seem to only have one style no matter their audience. When I have conversations with them, I leave the conversation feeling as if I was the center of their attention. They ask questions, they are engaged in our conversations. I often leave feeling inspired.

Leadership in my opinion is about influence, not control. A leader’s ability to influence others ultimately comes down to how they are perceived by those they lead. Leaders who can establish connections, who can make others feel like they matter and they are understood are the ones who will have the most influence.

image credit – credit – blogcatalog.com.

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I suppose it’s so easy to get comfortable when we reach a certain level of success at personal and/or organizational level.  It is important to celebrate our accomplishments and all the things that got us to where we are, but there’s a danger in stagnating, being conservative.  But the world does not wait for anyone.  Specifically in student affairs, our world is changing quickly. Driven by our changing student demographics,  economic difficulties and technologies, the way our organizations operate must change, at least try to keep up, or we fail to serve our students.

I spend a lot of time following trends in how higher education and our students use technology, including social media and mobile computing.   This comes from the realization that if my organization (a student affairs IT shop) fails to realize the demands and wishes of our constituents, I would not be doing my job as a leader in my organization. Does that mean that we can and will always meet our constituents’ demands and wishes? Of course not. There are always more work to be done relative to our resources. It’s hard enough to provide day-to-day support and “keeping the lights on”,  tasks that while our users may not always see are critical. As difficult as it is to change our ways, to go beyond what we can support, the reality is that if we fail to look at what the customers demand of us, our organization is in danger of being replaced with other options. We no longer live in the world when our customers must go through IT for every single technology requests. Cheap or even free cloud based services are now viable solutions. Our customers use their mobile devices  to access the web and social networks.  As an IT organization, do we take the role of the department that is seen as obstructionist to a point where customers no longer want to work with us or one that is a willing partner to progress?

I feel considerably lucky that we have a person at the top of our organization, Vice Chancellor Dr. Young, who is a champion of change and a true student advocate. He is a visionary who will freely admit that while he may not always know how to get to where we need to get to, he does know when it’s time to change, to take a new direction.  An organization’s ability to be open and accepting to change is rooted in its culture and leaders like Dr. Young plays a huge influence on how the culture is shaped. As those working in our organizations, I also think we have personal responsibilities to be open to change. Failure to change has its consequences.