Stick with a core value. Working with [former U.S. presidents] Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton was a lesson in working with two very different types of leaders. Jimmy Carter was highly disciplined, trained as an engineer and always very deliberate.
President Clinton was more intuitive, more instinctive in his leadership. But he also loved facts and loved good analysis. They were very different personalities, but from each I learned that enthusiasm and focus makes the biggest difference in leadership.
I know that I have to keep that daily. You have things that make you feel accomplished, like graduation day when you see the students walk across the stage, but you never know if you’re really successful, so you have to stay focused and keep working every day.
Balance different personalities. You have to be a juggler; you can’t be a compulsive personality with a single vision. That means you have to keep impatience in check and work on many things.
You have to understand that there are multiple cultures in this work atmosphere. At our university, for example, law schools are different than business schools; arts and science faculty is different than medical faculty.
And you have to not be a person that has to always have everything neat and clean because of that. You have to be willing to manage conflict that comes up because of all these different groups — everybody is not always going to agree with you or with each other.
My strategy is always to keep the idea in mind of trying to constantly move the institution forward. I like to think of myself as a tugboat captain. The challenge is always to handle 12 things at once, and to do that, I have to listen very carefully to see what the different groups’ agendas are and try to work with multiple agendas at the same time to fold that into the university’s plan.
The university agenda is pretty straightforward; we want to get better. So I have to hear what they’re saying to see if their agenda is something that can be part of that plan.
