Neither showed any interest in learning about the other's point of view. Sarah never directly asks George for his perspectives on her claims and avoids or rejects almost everything he says. George does largely the same: the only question he asks (“What makes you feel qualified to make such a judgment?”) is an attack rather than a request for information. Sarah saw George as dominating and arrogant without realizing that he could easily feel the same about her.
Model II counsels Sarah to be open with George about her thoughts while testing her assumptions about him and the situation in order to learn about both. This is not easy. Openness carries risks, and it is hard to be effective when you are ambivalent, anxious, or frightened. It gets easier as you become more confident that you can cope with other people's responses and that you have a range of workable options for doing so. How do you build both? Practice. Experiment in low‐risk situations and test out new strategies. Work on strengthening advocacy and inquiry in everyday conversations. Write out and rehearse in advance new responses to situations that are likely to trigger nonproductive reactions. Role‐play with a coach or a trusted colleague. Sarah's ability to handle the difficult conversation with George depends on her confidence in herself and in her interpersonal skills. Beliefs can be self‐fulfilling. If she tells herself that it is too dangerous to be open and that she does not know how to deal with difficult people, she will probably be right. A more optimistic prediction, however, can also be self‐fulfilling.
Learning and Effective Action: Habits of Learning for Daily Practice
The larger lesson from Sarah's meeting with George is not that a particular meeting didn't go very well. We are all imperfect humans, and academic administrators work in a complex and challenging environment: it's inevitable we'll get some things wrong. If we recognize and learn from those mistakes, things should work out better over the long run. But Sarah didn't learn, and the same is often true for other leaders. Why might that be so?
Learning about ourselves and our effectiveness can seem deceptively simple: we act, assess the results, and decide what to do next. When the link between act and outcome is easy to see, we learn quickly. Most of us learned to ride a bicycle – a set of skills too complex and subtle to be rendered in simple English – because the feedback was immediate, consistent, and clear. Some things work, others don't – and we learned to distinguish which was which. Decades later one of the authors still has vivid memories of rolling downhill and crashing painfully into a wooden barrier before fully mastering the intricacies of the coaster brake. He still bikes, but only made that mistake once.
Learning is harder in interpersonal transactions because they are complex and fast‐changing, feedback from others is elusive and ambiguous, and the same behaviors that work in one situation may fail in another. In her meeting with George, Sarah knew he wasn't responding as she would have preferred, but she had to infer her impact from George's comments, which were anything but direct. It was easier to conclude that George was annoying than to see how she might be fostering the very thing she hoped to avoid. George offered little help.
Interpersonal learning is also difficult because egos and defenses get in the way. Chris Argyris reminds us that in threatening or emotionally awkward encounters we automatically seek to protect ourselves against vulnerability, embarrassment, or the appearance of incompetence (Argyris, 1990, 1994). The result is a recipe for how not to learn about something we need to understand: how our choices and actions fail us. In the complex world of higher education today, such blindness is potentially fatal. Leadership lies in the eyes of the beholder – and if academic leaders don't know how their constituents see them, they're in trouble. They need information to recognize when they are off course, as well as strategies for improving their ability to learn from experience. Both enable them to bring more confidence and authenticity to their leadership. We suggest four learning routines that academic leaders can build into daily practice.
Four Habits of Learning for Leadership Effectiveness
1 Be proactive and persistent in seeking feedback from others.
2 Test assumptions and attributions.
3 Work on balancing advocacy and inquiry.
4 Learn about your theories‐in‐use.
Be Proactive and Persistent in Seeking Feedback from Others
We see our leadership from the inside. We know what we intend, and we are all sometimes blind to the gap between our espoused theories and theories‐in‐use. Feedback from those who know and work with us is the best way to determine how well our intentions match our actions. Few academic leaders, for example, seek feedback from faculty – often because they fear what they would find out. The result is that many crash into walls of faculty mistrust or anger that they don't see until too late. Two basic principles of interpersonal feedback can remedy that.
Ask and You Shall Receive
This sounds simple and obvious, but it's surprisingly rare. Feedback mostly occurs in structured, high‐stakes situations, like Sarah's annual review meeting with George or when debriefing major failures or special events. Experience makes people leery of offering feedback at other times unless they're sure the recipient wants it. Asking is the easiest way to encourage them. Getting the information you need takes persistence and skill in framing the right questions. If you simply ask a colleague, “What did you think about my report/speech/ … ?,” the first responses will often amount to vague reassurance (“Seemed fine to me”). Comforting platitudes feel safe, but they don't help. You'll need to keep at it to get the kind of information necessary to expand your learning. Help others help you by following up with more specific probes:
“What do you think worked best?”
“What could I have done better?”
“What would you suggest I do to strengthen it?”
“What message do you think the audience took away?”
People are reluctant to risk telling us more than we want to know. Persistence makes requests for honest feedback clear and credible.
Stay Appreciative
The risk of asking for feedback is that you may not like what you hear. If that's true, say so – the other person will sense it anyway. But don't defend your actions or explain why the feedback is wrong. You don't have to believe or act on everything that others tell you, but you want to hear them and respond in ways that encourage them to keep communicating. Be sure to thank anyone who tries to help. If you respond to feedback by rejecting it, criticizing it, or inducing guilt, the flow of future offerings will dry up quickly.
Skilled and confident academic leaders make it a point to regularly seek feedback from peers, subordinates, bosses, and other key stakeholders. Colleagues can also agree to support each other with open feedback. A seasoned coach or mentor is another alternative. Deep learning, the Talmud teaches, is only achieved in company.
Test Assumptions and Attributions
When others do things we find puzzling or infuriating, the temptation is to attribute unfavorable motives and thoughts to them and then to act on those attributions as if they were true. But none of us is 100 percent accurate in interpreting why others do what they do, and we often make difficult
