Reframing Academic Leadership - Lee G. Bolman

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merits of your point of view); (2) indirect influence (ease in, ask leading questions, cajole or manipulate the other person); or (3) direct critique (tell the other person directly what he or she is doing wrong and how he or she should change). Sarah made a half‐hearted and somewhat clumsy stab at easing into the conversation with George. The results were less than stellar. She then shifted to facts and logic, arguing the merits of her case. George riposted with disparagement of Sarah's reputation and experience. It was all downhill from there.

      4 If the other person resists or becomes defensive, it confirms the initial diagnosis that the other is the cause of the problem. George's reactions and resistance to discussion of his performance proved to Sarah that her pessimism was justified and her diagnosis was spot on: George was as defensive and exasperating as expected. It is likely that Sarah's raised voice and rising emotionality confirmed George's perception that she was in over her head.

      5 Respond to resistance with some combination of intensifying pressure and protecting the other person or with rejection. Sarah responded to George's resistance by intensifying the pressure when she told him to open his mind and “listen to someone else for a change.” That led George to reject her before she could figure out what to do next – or to reject him first.

      6 If your efforts are less successful than hoped, it is the other person's fault. Sarah sees the meeting as a failure and regrets that she couldn't do anything to make it go better. In her mind, it's still George's fault: he kept “trying to change the subject,” and he was “infuriating,” “arrogant,” and “totally uncooperative.” Sarah does not see how her behavior might have encouraged or allowed George to act in the very ways she feared he would.

      Model II Assumptions

      Model I survives because it enables us to get things done, but at a price that often includes wasted energy, strained relationships, bad decisions, and little or no learning. We continue to pay the price because we don't see our contributions to the bad results – and even if we do, we often don't know a better option. Argyris and Schön (1974) propose Model II as an alternative. The basic precepts of Model II include:

      1 Emphasize common goals and mutual interests. Even in a situation as difficult as Sarah's meeting with George, shared goals are possible. They both want to be effective, and neither will benefit from mutual destruction. Creating a shared agenda is a good starting point. Sarah could, for example, have said, “George, you've been in meetings like this before. What do you hope we can accomplish, and how should we proceed to make that happen?”

      2 Communicate openly, publicly test assumptions, and be willing to discuss the undiscussables. Sarah dreads the meeting because she believes George will respond negatively to any questions about his performance. Her reasoning puts her in a hole from the beginning because she begins the meeting feeling anxious and fearful. She does not realize that she has built her approach to George around trying to avoid what she suspects is unavoidable – an unpleasant battle with George.Model II suggests that Sarah openly test her assumption with George. She might say, for example, “George, let me tell you what I worry about. If I raise questions about your work, you'll get angry and the meeting will go downhill. Should I be worried about that?” Such directness may seem surprising and risky. But Model II argues that Sarah has little to lose and much to gain. One advantage is that the question subtly calls George's game. It moves the discussion away from terrain where George is prepared for battle to a question that is more difficult for him to answer. It is easy for George to attack when Sarah suggests that his productivity is in decline, but much harder when she asks if he might get annoyed by a discussion of his performance. Even if George does not respond positively to her question, she is following a simple and surprisingly useful precept: “When in doubt, try telling the truth.” That would give George fuller information about her thinking and might enable them to talk about the elephant in the room. It is almost always easier to address something that you can discuss than something you can't.

      3 Combine advocacy with inquiry. Advocacy includes statements that communicate what an individual thinks, knows, wants, or feels. Inquiry seeks to learn what others think, know, want, or feel. Successful exchanges need a balance of both. Figure 3.1 presents a simple model of the relationship between advocacy and inquiry and a way to think about the meaning of choices in using both.

      Model II emphasizes high advocacy coupled with high inquiry. It asks academic leaders to express openly what they think and feel and to actively seek understanding of others’ thoughts and feelings. The Sarah and George meeting consisted almost entirely of bilateral advocacy. Sarah opened with an attempt at inquiry when she asked George how he saw his performance, but was flummoxed by his response, which Sarah could easily have predicted. She pivoted to advocacy and tried to get George to look at evidence of his declining performance. George tried to persuade Sarah through his attacks that such a conversation was not a good idea. 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.

      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.

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