The best teachers are the ones who are always learning. It’s a universal truth of leadership that David Hodge says he has seen proven
time and time again in his years as an academic administrator. Hodge, who has been president of Miami University in Oxford since
summer 2006, says the best leaders are always seeking input — always tapping the potential of others in the organization. And he says
the only way you can do that is by reaching them, which means you must have finely tuned and well-polished communication skills —
and you must use those skills to challenge your people to think. It can be a difficult task when you’re leading an institution of 4,000
employees and more than 20,000 students, as Hodge does. Smart Business spoke with Hodge about how good communication gets
employees involved in setting the course for an organization.
Start building a fire. I’ll give you a quick
story about how this works. I was meeting with a group of classified staff in May
at a half-day workshop. I gave to them a story — it probably
never happened, but it doesn’t really matter. A group of visiting executives were
wandering one of Boeing’s plants, and
they came to a custodian. They didn’t
know the person was a custodian, but they
asked him, ‘What do you do here?’ And the
custodian responds, ‘I build airplanes.’
I thought, ‘What a great statement,
what a great story that demonstrates
what you’d like people to think about
what they do.’ So I turned to our group
and asked, ‘What do we build?’ It was a
rhetorical question. I wasn’t looking for
an answer, but almost immediately from
the left side of the room, someone said,
‘We build students.’ But no more had
that person stopped speaking than
someone from the other side of the room
said, ‘We build the future.’
There are classified staff doing what is
usually most of our more routine jobs in
the university, and they got it. And others
in the room are agreeing. So I don’t
know if it’s more to teach or unleash the
passion that is in people, but I think that
I love that story because it says so much
about our staff and how the bigger picture is part of what motivates people.
Communicate in more than one way. You
have to have multiple ways of communicating. There is no one absolute way.
People will listen to certain kinds of
messages, and other people listen to
other kinds.
Some like to read things, others like to
be told things, some like to be in a meeting and have a conversation back and
forth. So for the message to be heard,
you have to say the message over and
over again in multiple ways, in every
way possible.
Know what your core message is, and
say it again and again. Use examples to
illustrates those core messages every
time out. Examples might be praising somebody or drawing attention to somebody else.
A mistake many leaders make is
they’re afraid that they’ve already said
something once and thinking that people
are going to get bored if they say it again,
simply to say it again. However, first of
all, we’re typically talking to different
groups all the time.
Secondly, all good messages need to be
repeated over and over and over again to
reinforce that notion. Each of us has our
own ‘a-ha’ moments where we finally get
it. That just takes time and a relentless
commitment to communicating the core
messages. You can’t be afraid to keep
communicating, even if you’ve said the
message once before.
The second point is all of us deepen the
level of learning and our level of understanding by continuing to grapple with
the same core issues. There is a superficial level of what is the mission of your
organization and what is your identity if
you can give a one- or two-sentence
answer in all of that. But for us to feel
that in our bones and to understand how
each of our actions actually plays a role
in that is a continuing process of discovery. That’s why core message plus an
evolving set of examples leads to a deeper understanding of who we are, where
we’re going and how we each can make
a difference.
Make communication a two-way street.
You have to ask good questions to get
good feedback. Setting up a complaint
box or suggestion box is a pretty ineffective way to do that.
You have to be with groups of people
and ask real questions. I come back to
that example with the classified staff
when I asked, ‘What is our product?’
and I didn’t think about it as a real question but a rhetorical one. But the more
we ask questions, the more chances
people will have to actively think about
something.
Telling people stuff is a very passive
process, and we know that it doesn’t
lead to very deep learning. But posing
questions that we’re trying to solve
together, the literature is overwhelming
that it is a much deeper level of learning,
plus you get commitment and passion
and vision.
It’s about active versus passive learning, right there, that dichotomy. You can
see this in teaching all the time. You get
up there and just lecture to people, their
brains are not engaged in a deep learning
way. It’s a very superficial learning. Even
if they’re not given a chance to answer
the question, if you pose it in a way that
everyone in the room is wrestling with
the question, you’ve gone a long way
toward achieving active learning.
HOW TO REACH: Miami University, www.muohio.edu or (513)
529-1809