Don’t be the Detroit Lions

I’m sure your family has a number of Thanksgiving traditions. Some of those were no doubt disrupted this year by the virus. My longstanding tradition was not: I watched the Detroit Lions lose another football game on the way to another lackluster season.

Yes. I grew up a Detroit Lions fan. I did not choose this. I was born into it. For those of you who are not pro football fans, the Lions have been rebuilding since 1957. That’s the last time they won a championship. They have won exactly one playoff game since. They have ranged from mediocre to terrible. Mostly terrible.

It’s not a stubborn adherence to a failed philosophy. No. The team takes risks, changes coaches and general managers frequently. It’s not low standards. They replaced a coach who went 10 and 6, because that record wasn’t good enough, only to get a guy who went 4 and 12. He hasn’t done much better since. So they fired him and the general manager on Saturday. Wind and repeat.

The Lions fail to learn. They fail to learn, not because they are arrogant, but because ownership has no sense of what they want to be. They change for change’s sake in an effort to win. They borrow other team’s philosophies (e.g. the Patriot Way) rather than develop their own. In a game where the difference between winning and losing comes down to small differences in execution, the Lions are still in search of an identity. If you don’t know where you want to go, any path will take you there, and there is mediocrity at best.

Don’t be the Detroit Lions. Develop an identity — a sense of who you are, where you are going and how you want to win. Then relentlessly improve the skills you need to execute the plan.

Virtual Rituals Are Not a Thing

There have been a number of challenges for higher education leaders this year. Among the most important, in my view, has been the difficulty in managing the culture of the institution. There are a number of reasons for this: Zoom doesn’t allow for a lot of unstructured conversation that typically happens before and after meetings, walk-around management is impossible, and with people working from home, the culture is out of sight and too frequently out of mind.

But this week exposed what I think is the greatest challenge: the lack of dynamic, in-person, group rituals. In this weird year of 2020, we are saying goodbye to students before Thanksgiving. So, I have “attended” events to recognize the achievements and contributions of our Professional Sales Program students and our Ambassadors. While everybody, especially my amazing team, did their best to celebrate the moment, having people do so on-line, with masks seated six feet apart, or some combination of both, was no substitute for what we do in person.

Rituals are an important part of creating and maintaining a culture. The bigger the ritual, the more people in attendance, the more buzz in the room, the more important the event is to establishing and maintaining the culture. Nobody would choose to celebrate on Zoom or six feet apart wearing masks. It just falls flat. The culture suffers.

A lot is being written this year about how the pandemic is changing our lives forever. How things will never be the same, etc….It is my sincere hope that when it comes to rituals, that this turns out to be nonsense. Virtual rituals are neither compliments to, or substitutes for, the real thing. People want and need to experience rites of passage, celebrations and competitions together. Hopefully, we can get back to that soon.

Lessons in Risk Taking from Lonny

Today, I’m sharing an email Lonny sent me last week about risk taking…

This is the headstone for my great-great-great-grandfather, Amos C. Butcher.  It took me four trips to St. John’s cemetery in Lafayette, La., to find it.  I had to get out of the normal place where I’d stand to look at the family tomb and do some exploring.  It was hidden, wedged between the family tomb and the one behind it. 

Amos Butcher was originally a Quaker growing up in Hamilton Square, N.J.  His father, grandfather and great grandfather were all cabinet makers. At that time, cabinet makers also made coffins, so they were undertakers, as well.  People tend to die, so it was solid, steady work. 

Amos was the oldest son. When his father died, he was suddenly thrust into a paternal role for his mother and siblings. He was going to have to be the breadwinner. He could have simply continued in the family business. But he didn’t…. 

My ancestor secured a federal job as a lighthouse keeper for the new Vermillion Bay lighthouse on Louisiana’s Marsh Island.  He moved his mother and younger brothers more than 1,000 miles away, to a place that had only been a state for 20ish years, to do a job he had no training for. He married a woman he’d only known a short time. He was Quaker; the people in his town were devoutly Catholic. He spoke English; most of them still spoke French. He knew no one except the family that followed him while his new neighbors were pretty much all related to each other (hey, it’s Louisiana!).   

In other words, he was a risk taker! In a time when your “career” was usually based on what your parents did; when you lived where you were born, grew up and died; where your reality really didn’t change much, he stepped out on his own. There was no safety net. There wasn’t much of a Plan B. He had to make it work, because his family depended on him. 

It wasn’t a fairy tale. On the occasions when he’d come to town, his commute back to work was a multi-day boat ride to a tiny structure on a deserted island that was subject to Gulf storms and swarms of mosquitos. He maintained the lighthouse’s 14 oil-burning lights 24 hours a day. His wife died after the birth of their third child, before they’d been married eight years. He accidentally shot and killed his 17-year-old brother two years later. He died a year later under mysterious circumstances. 

But, by taking a risk, he established my family in a place I consider home. He’s the reason I’m where I’m from and consequently, who I am. His orphaned son became a successful farmer. His son’s son (my great grandfather) followed his father as a farmer, but also mixed in a dose of his own grandfather’s penchant for public service getting elected to the police jury and joining community groups. His son’s son’s son (my grandfather) started a business with his brothers 100 years ago this month that is still in operation today. He also started a community service organization 70 years ago that is still in place today. My grandfather was able to send my dad to college, and my dad got to see me get a graduate degree and ultimately teach college courses. The cumulative effects of their work run through me to my own son.   

When you take a risk, you own the results. Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you fail.  But you also set in motion a series of events that will impact people around you, including those you’ll never know.  So don’t just sit there like I was doing the first three times I tried to find his headstone. Get out of your comfort zone and do some exploring. DO something.  If it’s good, do more of it. If it’s bad, don’t do that again! Learn from your mistake and try something else.

Be the impetus for things to come rather than an observer of things today.   

You need to meet people how they want to be met.

We recorded a podcast last week on virtual selling. I’m still trying to decide whether that is really going to be a thing or not. You’ll know by the end of the week.

Whether people realize it or not, you are always selling. Selling your ideas, products and yourself as the solution to someone else’s problem. Many of my students right now, especially our job seekers, are struggling to build connections and land an opportunity, especially if they didn’t do much networking before the pandemic. So I asked my guests, experts on selling in this environment, to give my job seekers some advice.

The most memorable line in that discussion was this: You need to meet people how they want to be met: virtually, in person, by text, phone or fax. You need to be flexible and adapt. One of our guests, a professional sales program graduate thought UCF business students should have an advantage in adapting to this new norm given the mix mode nature of our courses and the need to make connections with faculty and students virtually. She speculated that our students would adapt quicker to the new norm because they have had more practice at it.

My response was that some were adapting and that others were struggling mightily. Training might help a little (faculty get training on communicating in virtual environments, students less so), but mostly it requires a shift in mindset. The most useful lesson in sales training is that it’s not about you, it’s about them. It’s not about you needing to make a sale (or land a job), it’s about them needing to see you as the solution to their problem. To help them get there, you need to make them feel comfortable and to make them feel comfortable, you need to meet them how they want to be met.

Leadership in Uncertain Times

I met with some members of the President’s Leadership Council (PLC) last Friday for a coffee chat. The PLC is similar to the College’s Ambassadors in that they are a group of students who represent the university in a variety of ways. Typically one or two of these students are members of both groups. This year that person is Ethan Ancrum and he asked me whether my leadership style had changed in any way as a result of the Pandemic and it’s impact on all of us.

It’s a great question. One that I have wrestled with a lot during these last several months. I have asked this question to many other deans and leaders around the country I know and admire. I have also tried to redouble my efforts to understand how my messages are being received. It’s still a work in progress, but my short answer to Ethan was yes and no.

“Yes” in that my information sources have shifted somewhat. I have always believed in managing by a combination of data and walking around. At a place like UCF which emphasizes scale, you can find a hundred people who will agree or disagree with anything you do. So you need good data systems that let you understand the place at a more comprehensive level. Big data is invaluable here. At the same time, I like to walk around and “see” what the data is telling me. Where the data and the experience I see differ sharply, a deeper understanding is needed. The problem in our current environment is that walking around is a lot harder to do. I don’t “see” as much as I would like and zoom conversations haven’t completely closed that gap. I have tried to double down on talking to key people one-on-one, but it’s just not the same, especially with students.

“No” in that I already know that the ultimate enemy is uncertainty. In times like these, strong leadership is critical. People hate uncertainty. It upsets them because it threatens to erase their hard-earned accomplishments and brings the potential for hardships for themselves and their families. In the absence of good information and a clear plan of action, people will seek to fill any uncertainty gap by going elsewhere for answers. In my case, that means people will look at what other schools are doing and assume it will happen here. Or if that doesn’t help, they will make stuff up based on their fears or personal preferences. None of this is good: Both civility and productivity suffer.

Good leadership in these times is really very simple. It requires bringing good information to people when you know it, as openly and honestly as you can. You don’t sugar coat it. You lay it out there. You need to follow this up quickly, if not simultaneously, with a concrete plan to deal with this information. Not everyone will like the plan, but they need to know the plan, respect it, and believe it can be effectively carried out. In situations where you don’t have good information, you rely on your shared values to make necessary choices and form a plan. Example: We are about engagement here. We cannot have traditional face-to-face classes and co-curricular activities right now, so we are going to execute an engagement plan that recognizes these constraints, focuses on what we control and uses what assets we have to deliver on this key value and promise.

Leadership is always about transparency, listening to what the data is telling you, focusing on what you control and developing a concrete plan of action that gives people certainty, purpose and hope. In good times, this is easy because the data is telling you prosperity lies ahead, choices are filled with opportunity, resources allow for some mistakes and goodwill is contagious. Only incompetence lies between the leader and success. Today, leaders need the courage to admit some pain is coming, remind people that our purpose is noble, and show confidence in the plan so everyone knows what to do, and believes that the sacrifice will make the institution and its values stronger in the long-run. Easy to articulate. Hard to do.