leadership

Examining Trust

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One of my favorite parts of my morning walks is listening to podcasts. I get to learn while I get my endorphins.  I listened for a second time this morning to a Brené Brown conversation with Charles Feltman, the author of The Thin Book of Trust.

Lack of trust has been an area of concern in our annual Voice of the Employee survey, and it has been highlighted to me in many conversations in the last few weeks, so I have been thinking a lot about how to be better at building trust.

The definition of trust as “choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s action” is at the core of why this is so important and difficult. It is also complicated by the fact that trust is multi-layered.

  • Do I trust that you have my interests at heart in addition to your own?
  • Do I trust that you are being honest?
  • Do I trust you to do what you commit to doing?
  • Do I trust your competence?
  • Do I trust that you can keep a confidence?

In Brown’s conversation with Feltman, there was a marvelous exchange about whether you could trust someone in some areas and not others and both agreed that it is both possible and critical to do that.

I am still processing what I learned, but my key personal takeaway from the podcast was that it is often the lack of clear commitments and boundaries that create the foundation of distrust. I need to work on that!

I would love to hear what you learned from this podcast or about how to think about trust.

Finding The Right Tool

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Image of tools hanging on a wall

I love tools and am constantly looking for resources that help me do things more efficiently in every part of my life. My husband teases me that I have used the chop saw I bought him as a gift more than he has. At work, my quest has been for tools to help me manage change. This ultimately led me to tools that helped me grow as a leader because I learned that WHO I AM is my most powerful organizational change tool.

I believe that all of us are leaders if we choose to be. At a minimum, we are the leaders of our own lives. You choose to be a leader when you step up to improve the world around you.

I am just starting to dig into a tool that I am really excited about because I have found that in my new role, I don’t have the right tool right now for the level of complexity and ambiguity. The tool is a book called Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization by Kegan  and Lahey. The adult development model described in the book has already helped me. I am planning on doing all the exercises in the book for my own development and growth.

 

Here is the short list of other tools and why they have been so instrumental in my own leadership journey.

What tools have you found to be helpful in your leadership journey?

Through the Kitchen

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Cindy Leavitt with Buckeye Nut at Ohio State Football game

I have seen Colin Powell speak a couple of times and admire him as a leader. One thing that he tries to do when he goes to any event is to enter or leave through the kitchen to see and talk with the people who are supporting the event.

Last week, I got a chance to “walk through the kitchen” when I attended my first Ohio State football game in Columbus.

I started very early in the morning at the police station attending a series of coordination meetings watching the many branches of law enforcement work together to make sure everyone was safe as they attended the game and activities surrounding it.

I got a tour from the Ohio State IT team of the technical infrastructure that allows the game to be recorded. The vast wifi and cellular complex which supports electronic ticketing and enables fans to send pictures and texts from the stadium during the game. I toured the TV trucks and talked with one video technician who showed me how he compiled the video vignettes that I expect when watching a game. They were also broadcasting the game in 4D, requiring tons of additional cameras to be installed and synched.

I visited the locker rooms and recruiting room and saw the tributes to the scholar-athletes and winning teams. I talked with security guards and ushers (a couple of them were in their 80s) about their dedication and joy in working at the games.

I attended the skull session, which is free to the public, where the band puts on a mini-concert and the coaches rally the crowd. I was on the field as the band performed the Ohio script and the star-spangled banner. I was christened as a Buckeye by the Big Nut super fan as he gave me a Buckeye necklace.

The small part of the game that I actually watched was from the press box where dozens of reporters from around the world reported on the game.

Attending the game “through the kitchen” opened my eyes and made me aware of the incredible amount of dedication, hard work, and skill by hundreds of people that were invisible to me before.

How can you pass “through the kitchen” at work, at home, and in your community?

Who and what are you not seeing?

Passing the Torch of Positive Leadership

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A month ago, I announced I was leaving Temple after five years as VP and CIO. The outpouring of appreciation and well-wishes has been overwhelming and wonderful.  
The thing that I am most proud of during my time at Temple is the deliberate crafting of an empowered and positive work culture. This was a team effort with many people stepping up to help. 
The HR development team created and delivered the “Wiser Way” leadership training that taught common language with concrete tools to improve communication and habits. A self-nominated team developed the mission and later formed the culture committee that included me and our HR partners. A recognition committee developed the “Cheers for Peers” program. We dived into DevOps and Agile practices. We read and discussed books. We created “Wonderful Wednesdays/Whenever” to foster innovation and uninterrupted work time.
Here are a few of the comments from team members about the impact of these cultural changes.

“You’ve lit a spark and set things in a new direction. You’ve made a difference in so many ways starting with ‘seeing’ your staff and other Temple colleagues and encouraging us all to ‘see’ each other, too.” 

“I just wanted to say THANK YOU for everything!  ITS culture is more open-minded, more empathetic, technologically more forward-thinking, and it feels like our collective self-esteem is reaching upward.”  

“You’ve made a profound impact on my professional and personal life through your leadership and example of strength through vulnerability.”  

One colleague cited the book “Stewardship” by Peter Block and the value of service over self-interest. The sentiment summarizes the lasting impact that I and so many leaders in our organization desire to have.

“The book says that ‘Stewardship is to hold something in trust for another. It is the willingness to be accountable for the good of the larger organization or community of which we are a part, by being in service to, as opposed to in control of, those around us.’ I think the way you carry yourself, ‘leadership’ could directly replace ‘stewardship’ in that quote. You truly have left us in a notably better place than when you arrived on many levels that are not articulated by data and statistics. Now it’s up to us to make sure we continue the momentum and example you set. I believe that measure is the simplest yet most important aspect of successful leadership.”

I am now passing the torch of positive leadership to the Temple ITS team. Will the culture that we created together continue to thrive and improve?  I am leaving it in your capable hands.
 

Unplugging so your team can as well

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Photo by Cindy Leavitt – Lake Michigan at sunset near Grand Haven


This last holiday weekend was the first time in months that I unplugged from work and relaxed. I really needed it and felt that my team needed the downtime as well. I even took Friday afternoon off to get a head start.  
Just before I signed off on Friday, I got what seemed like an urgent email, which I should have planned on because it so consistently happens on Friday afternoons. Instead of forwarding the message to my team, I asked when a response was needed. When the answer was the day after the holiday, I arranged with the requestor and my boss to communicate the request to the team after the holiday.
Then I threw myself into the weekend, like I normally throw myself into work. I read three books, cleaned the deck, baked cookies, hiked with the family and listened to albums picked by family members. 
I have to explain about the albums. In an effort to connect with my family through this pandemic, we have started a quarantine family night. We meet every other week over Zoom to talk about a shared experience. We decide on what the shared experience will be and have two weeks to complete whatever we decide to do before we meet to talk about it.  So far, we have read a book, watched a series of movies and listened to albums that each family member selected. The music albums were the most fun. The variety was vast, ranging from rap to country to classical. Yesterday, we met to talk about the albums. Each person chose their favorite song from their selected album and explained why they loved it so much. After we listened to the favorite song, everyone talked about their reaction to the album. We had great discussions and all did not like all of the music but were able to disagree, have a ton of fun, and create shared experiences.
The long weekend gave me a chance to recharge and deeply connect with my family. I am grateful that I got it and that my boss supported me taking the time. Because of that, I was able to pass on that gift to my team.
My question for you to think about this week is: How good are you at unplugging so that your team can as well?  

Communicating when leaders make poor decisions

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As a cost cutting measure, I made the decision to eliminate Slack. It seemed like Microsoft Teams had the same functionality and I was hearing from several people that we had too many tools and needed to simplify. After making the decision, there was a groundswell of concern from the teams that were using Slack. 
After hearing the concern, I turned to my culture committee. This is a group of thought leaders from across the organization that I have been meeting with weekly. They have been helping to shape our culture and I know them very well and trust them explicitly. Every single one of the committee members expressed why they thought my decision was a poor one and how the tool was helping coordination and communication across teams. Based on that discussion, I reversed my decision.  
After talking about my decision and subsequent reversal at our all staff meeting, I got the following email from Michele Schinzel, which I am sharing with permission.
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Hi Cindy, 
First off, thanks for hosting the All Staff meetings, which allow us to talk together, and voice as much (or little) as we wish. 
Hearing that there were discussions to do away with Slack, I wanted to give another cheer of support for the product.  So, for what it’s worth, I thought I’d share my Slack story with you. 
I joined Slack on January 10, 2019.  Immediately, I received a silly animated gif from someone, welcoming me.  Rolling my eyes I thought, “Just what I don’t need.  A Facebook for work!”  Many months later….  I still felt that way.  I did not see the benefit, and it seemed like another thing to have to remember to keep up with. 
Time rolled on.  The channels became organized, and more people joined.  My team made a group to use for communication.  I checked in to see what was new on the “Random” channel.   Then I found myself wanting to see a new article, or a picture, or a quiz.  Gradually, other benefits became evident.  Such as….

    • Some teams built workflows into their channels.  These Slack workflows allow for quick requests of a team, with clear communication throughout.  The Portal team, for example, has a short form we can fill out when we need them to move code from DEV to the PRE portal.  I can see every request by anyone.  Fantastic!
    • Throughout the COVID experience, I’ve been reading the Helpdesk Slack channel.  They post questions and solutions quite regularly.  There are useful stats and notifications when calls are higher than usual on a certain service.  Impressive.   
    • Recently, when a certain database went down, several groups chimed in on the DBA Slack channel to confirm the finding.  It was addressed.  Now that we’ve had the correspondence, the history is all searchable.   A quick search showed a similar conversation just one week prior.  Hmmm.
    • I’m learning a little about teammates that I never had a reason to meet. 

MS Teams has its use.  I’m a member of 20 teams in Teams, and many of those Teams contain sub-channels.  When I want to work on a project, I look at Teams.  I don’t usually seek out updates, and I tend to only post information following a meeting.  The good part is, it’s all in one place, and we can tag one another with tasks. 
In the end, my view is that Slack stands out as a collaborative communication tool, and Teams is a project organizer.  Could our favorite Slacky features be fit into Teams?  Maybe. 
Slack seemed like a ‘Facebook for Work’, but silly gifs aside, it keeps us connected in a fun interactive way that we are naturally drawn to.  I WAS a doubter of Slack at first, but now I love it.   I wouldn’t have written this otherwise. 
Thanks.  
-Michele
Michele Schinzel | Assistant Director Systems | Banner Document Management | Temple University
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When I received Michele’s email, it confirmed to me that the reversal of the decision was the right thing to do. However, it made me pause to reflect on why I didn’t reach out for feedback before making the original decision. There were several reasons why I didn’t. 

    • The decision was made in a budgeting meeting with the upper management team under extreme pressure to cut our budget. 
    • I had gotten feedback at our all staff meeting that we had too many communication tools and should reduce the number. 
    • I had a bias against Slack because the couple of times I attempted to use it, I found little value and had stopped using it.

The bottom line is that as a leader, every decision you make is with partial information. Recognizing that and being open to adjusting decisions when you get more information helps you avoid analysis paralysis on one end of the spectrum and obstinate defense of decisions on the other end.
I am very grateful when individual team members openly share their experiences and concerns with me. Receiving this kind of feedback as a leader is like gold. 
A couple of questions to ponder this week:
Is there information that your leaders need from you that could help them make or alter their decisions? 
As a leader, how do you react when people give you this kind of feedback?

Instilling Hope for Deep Change

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I have been asked to co-lead the strategic planning for the university. This is both exciting and daunting. In trying to get clarity about the assignment, I had my first one-on-one conversation with Temple’s Chairman of the Board, Mitch Morgan. I came away from the conversation filled with hope. I have been playing back the conversation in my mind trying to understand what he did that left me with such positive feelings.
The first thing he did was introduce himself. He described his journey sharing personal details that clearly communicated his values and management philosophy. He talked about how much of his success was being a great people-picker.
Next, he invited me to share my personal journey and deeply listened to my answer asking questions in a caring way that made me feel comfortable.
He emphasized how great he thought Temple was and also why we needed to change. He articulated the urgency for a clear strategy for the university because of the increasingly competitive educational landscape that has been accelerated by the Covid pandemic.  
He honored every person he talked about. His first sentence about every person was that he loved them and I believed that he did. 
He indicated what he was not good at and what he needed help doing.
He clearly articulated the type of leadership he needed to make the change he was seeking at the university. Then he asked me if I would be willing to help and told me why he picked me for the assignment.  
After I said yes, we talked candidly about the challenges and the ways that he would support me as I did the assignment.
In a nutshell, he demonstrated the positive leadership traits that I have been trying to develop for many years and validated my decision to come to Temple. 
My challenge for you this week is to examine how you are interacting with others, especially when you are trying to activate deep change. 

Supporting team members who have ideas for improvement

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“Dreaming and Doing” by Sam Howzit is licensed under CC BY 2.0


One of the foundational practices in DevOps and Agile is to support team members who have ideas for improvement. This is difficult to do because we have a lot of work to get done and trying out new ideas creates more work. When the idea crosses organizational lines and normal job duties, it is even more difficult to take action. We have implemented Wonderful Wednesdays as a way to give time to explore ideas and practice creating self-organizing teams. A recent example reaffirmed to me why this practice is so important, especially when you are trying to transform the way that your team works.
Like most organizations, we have a help desk with software that we use to track all of the requests for support. This software is managed by the help desk team. One of our new help desk team members, Dominic (Dom) Malfara, was looking for ways to be more efficient in updating the software. He wanted to be able to upgrade the software in the middle of the day and be able to quickly recover if any part of the system went down. He reached out to our infrastructure engineering team, who were investigating how to use Kubernetes containers to automate and modernize our server environment.
That team embraced Dom, recognizing that if they could containerize our Remedy environment, which consisted of many servers with a vendor that didn’t support containers, it would be an ideal environment to learn for the entire team. The team leader invited Dom to the team’s daily stand-ups, Trello board, and Teams channel. Throughout the project the entire team was inclusive and accommodating. Despite org chart lines, Dom felt like he was part of their team and it was exciting working towards a goal with them. The infrastructure team reprioritized their work and helped Dom identify all of the layers of systems and management tools needed to fully automate and containerize the Remedy servers. 
This took several months and required full support from the leaders on the help desk and the infrastructure engineering team. Doing this required more time and more people than a traditional upgrade of the Remedy servers. It required making the time to experiment. 
Dom was successful in containerizing the Remedy environment. It did not go perfectly.  We had a bit of user interruption throughout the day as we made the transition. Through the problems, the help desk leadership team didn’t yell or blame anyone, but instead asked what they could do to help. Various team members posted screenshots or descriptions of things that were broken, allowing Dom space to focus on calmly fixing things so they would not happen again.
The results have been everything that we hoped for and worth the investment of time. We halved the needed hardware. Upgrades are now done by building parallel environments which mean we can fully test the new production environment and roll over and back between the old and new environments in seconds. All the hard work now occurs up front, and not during a maintenance window where people are prone to rush/make mistakes. Because the work is now automated and reproducible, bringing up a new test environment takes minutes instead of days. We can monitor the system load and scale instantly when needed. 
A couple of weeks after the transition was done, Dom did a presentation during Wonderful Wednesday teaching others across ITS. I went to the presentation and was in awe of the amount of learning and technical knowledge that was required to make the transition. It was one of the highlights of my year.
Thanks to Dom raising his hand and the infrastructure team fully supporting him, we have a roadmap on how to make the rest of our infrastructure more efficient, modern, and scalable. As a leader, it reinforced to me how important it is to support those individuals and teams who raise their hand and give them the time and resources to learn and make your organization better.
Here are my questions for you this week.

  • How do you support individuals who raise their hands with an idea? 
  • How do you treat others who come to you with an idea that requires you to change what you are doing? 
  • Is there a project you are working on currently that someone could collaborate with you for mutual benefits if they only had some way of knowing about it?

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Epilogue: As part of the process of writing these blogs, I always ask for feedback from the people who are mentioned in the blog. I wanted to include this email from Dominic to me about his view of the experience.
Hello Cindy,
Thanks for sharing, I just wanted to share some quick notes on the overall experience because it was really special to me. Our self-formed team was definitely influenced by all of the changes made to the culture and how ITS members are reacting to that: 

  • Wonderful Wednesday allowed me the freedom and time to invest in pursuing something innovative instead of doing things how we always have, WW got me quick buy-in from Jim and Paul because instead of battling with scheduling time to prove value in something and how it prioritized with our other work, I was able to use that reserved WW time to learn skills and proof of concept this project. I was excited to work on new technologies and make life better for us and that energy didn’t go to waste having to meet and debate and formalize things. Natural experimentation took its course and we got to follow an informal guideline of what we wanted to accomplish and how we were going to do it
  • Slack/Teams promotes open communication across the organization so it is now commonplace to talk to others in ITS, I get to interact with members of IT that I might not even meet otherwise. Help or knowledge with something is a message away, and with group chats I get visibility into what people are working on, instead of knowledge being hidden in email chains that I wasn’t CCed on or meetings I wasn’t a part of (the all-staff meetings, summits, and What’s New newsletter all influence this as well). I heard that Infrastructure Engineering was already exploring Kubernetes and we got to learn that together.
  • Leaders like Jorj, who doesn’t have a reporting relationship with me, but acted as a strong mentor and helped break down any barriers I faced along the way anyway. People like him that are genuinely interested in the technology and making Temple a better place are really inspiring and I hope I can pay that forward and influence those around me

Thanks again to Jorj for all his help and mentorship, and to you for the culture you are creating in Temple ITS! This project wouldn’t have been possible without it. I have learned a lot of valuable career skills and the failures/mishaps along the way that gave me real world lessons and I honestly had fun doing it! 😄
Thanks again, 
Dominic Malfara

Reframing Frustrations to Facilitate Difficult Conversations 

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Last week at our planning retreat, I wanted to make sure that the leadership team was able to talk openly and constructively about some chronic problems across the teams. I found an exercise from Mark Gorkin that helped do this in an amazingly effective way.
Before we started the exercise, I wanted to shift the way that people thought about frustration. In The Enemy of Engagement, Mark Royal and Tom Agnew assert, “The more loyal and engaged employees are, the deeper their frustration will run in the face of obstacles.” So instead of labeling frustration as bad, we labeled it as a sign of the most engaged and loyal team members. That made it okay to express the frustrations because it meant that you cared deeply and wanted to make things better.
With that framing, each person took a few minutes to identify sources of everyday workplace stress and conflict or to list barriers to more effective and creative team coordination. At each table, we spent ten minutes sharing our frustrations. Then came the creative and team building part of the exercise. We asked each table to draw their frustrations. They could make as many posters as they wanted in ten minutes.
Everyone jumped in with both feet. The teams were working together intently around their posters and there was a lot of positive energy as the teams brainstormed about how to communicate their frustrations in a visual way.
After everyone was done, we created a gallery and everyone looked at all of the posters. Then each group got a chance to explain their drawings. After the explanations, we took some time together to dive into the problem and talk about possible ways to make it better. 
It was intense and uncomfortable.
And very productive and necessary. 
We had conversations about frustrations that spanned years. Information and background was provided that gave the individuals and teams perspective and insight they didn’t have before coming into the room. 
After talking with several different participants immediately after the exercise ended, I discovered that several people thought that getting into the specifics in a group setting felt like blame and was inappropriate. After discovering this, I immediately facilitated a discussion with the entire group about how we could have these difficult conversations with details without blame. Many people indicated that without specifics, the problem was theoretical and not clear. Through the exercise and discussion, we established norms about how we would talk about difficulties that allowed us to get to the specifics.
We still have room for improvement, but this exercise was a good way to prompt and practice having difficult conversations.
What have you done in your teams to hold difficult conversations that are healing and helpful?

Creating a safe learning community

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“What does respect mean to you?” by retrokatz is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0


I am teaching a leadership class at Temple for the first time. Since I agreed to teach the class, I have been vacillating between anxiety and excitement. It is definitely outside of my comfort zone and I have been worried about whether I am good enough. Since overcoming feelings of inadequacy and stretching has been at the heart of my leadership journey, I realize that I am not only the teacher, but this is an incredible opportunity for me to learn how to be a better leader.
The first class was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. After a quick summary of the structure of the class, I asked the entire class how we could create a safe learning community. Using the 1-2-4-All Liberating Structures, we established as a group how we would act and support each other on our growth journey. The list that the class created together was more comprehensive and better than the list that I would have created. They wanted to be able to be open and vulnerable and know that others would listen without judgment, as we practiced living the leadership principles that we would be learning.
Then we spent the rest of the class getting to know each other by telling our core stories. We arranged our chairs in a circle and each of us shared three core stories from our life and what we had learned from those experiences. 
Several people in the group got emotional, including me. We were sharing deeply about our struggles and our ability to overcome those struggles. We talked about health challenges, close relationships, death of loved ones, physical injuries and having to give up our identities of who we thought we were when unexpected challenges arrived. 
It was one of the most powerful experiences that I have ever had. There was so much wisdom and leadership in that room that had already been developed. I was reminded again that leadership is not about telling others what to do, but about creating an environment where the best ideas can surface and be shared.
At the end of the exercise, we talked about how differently we felt about the people in the room and the implications for leadership and life. As I was leaving the room, I realized that I don’t necessarily know the core stories of the people that I work with on a daily basis, and I am not sure how to do that in a safe and non-invasive way. 
I would love to hear about how you have created safe learning communities.