Addressing the complex challenges of leadership.

Tina Seelig and John Hennessy delve into the challenges and strategies involved in leadership and leading a multifaceted institution such as Stanford University. From navigating conflicting goals and diverse constituencies to making tough decisions under scrutiny, John shares his insights on the importance of transparency, providing critical feedback, and fostering an environment where others can thrive. This conversation delves into the delicate balance of maintaining core values while adapting to the needs of different stakeholders, highlighting the nuances of decision-making, ethics, and the collaborative spirit essential for long-term success.

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Chapters:

(00:00:00) Introduction

Host Tina Seelig introduces the podcast and welcomes John Hennessy, discussing the episode's focus on leadership challenges.

(00:01:31) Conflicting Goals in Leadership

Managing conflicting goals with different constituents in the unique environment of a university.

(00:03:06) Addressing Housing and Rent Issues

The local community’s reaction to student housing and the complexities it created for university leadership.

(00:04:21) Dealing with Criticism

Handling criticism and backlash from key constituents when difficult decisions are made.

(00:05:31) Living Wage Debate

A memorable challenge involving a student-led hunger strike about living wages.

(00:07:54) Confidentiality in Leadership

Dealing with situations that require confidentiality and a lack of transparency in decision-making.

(00:08:59) Giving Critical Feedback

Advice on giving tough feedback, a critical skill in leadership development.

(00:11:04) Transparency in Leadership

The balance of transparency and discretion in leadership, especially in large institutions like Stanford.

(00:12:35) Decision-Making Frameworks

Different decision-making styles and their applications in leadership situations.

(00:16:12) Challenging Negotiations

The complexities of negotiation in leadership, particularly in university settings.

(00:18:34) Stimulating Innovation as a Leader

How leaders can create environments that foster innovation and creativity within their organizations.

(00:23:50) Leadership Across Different Domains

The similarities and differences in leadership styles across academia, government, and industry.

(00:25:18) Collaborating Across Sectors

Leadership across collaborations between different sectors, and the challenges that arise.

(00:27:03) Evolving Leadership Style

How John’s leadership style has evolved from individual contributor to leader of a large institution.

(00:28:31) Empowering Others as a Leader

The importance of empowering others and creating a space for them to thrive in leadership roles.

(00:30:37) Episode Takeaways

Five key lessons for listeners from this episode.

(00:31:19) Conclusion

Welcome to Leading Matters, a podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars, a multicultural and multidisciplinary graduate fellowship program at Stanford University that focuses on leadership.

I'm Tina Seelig, your host and executive director of Knight-Hennessy.

Throughout these six episodes, I'll talk with John Hennessy about his experiences in different leadership roles, including as a faculty member, entrepreneur, president of Stanford University, and founder of Knight-Hennessy Scholars.

Welcome, John.

Thank you, Tina.

Today, we're going to dive into leadership challenges and how to address them.

Have you ever had any leadership challenges?

If you've ever been in leadership, you've had challenges by definition, of course, and these things bubble up in any complex organization.

And the really difficult problems will bubble up to the top because they're hard.

And the people down below won't want to solve them because solving them will be a difficult journey for them.

So I've come to understand that solving problems as a leader is actually an honor.

It's a choice to take on this responsibility.

You choose to lead, you choose to take on the responsibility of solving these difficult issues.

So I'm going to run through some examples of leadership challenges to see how you've addressed them and how you think about them, both in academics and in industry.

Are you ready to dive in?

Yes, absolutely.

Okay.

Let's start with something that I think affects everyone, especially in being a president of a university, is conflicting goals with different constituents.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Surely.

You know, a university is an almost unique kind of entity in that it's got lots of different constituencies.

It has alumni, it has staff, it has students, it has faculty.

And it has the local community.

And one of the things we discovered, for example, along the way, when we were doing the plan for the university, we proposed to build lots of new student housing.

And we were surprised when some members of the community were opposed to that.

And why were they opposed?

Well, because these were students who were living in rental properties off campus.

And when they moved on campus, there would actually be more people in the Bay Area.

And they were opposed to any growth in the Bay Area.

But it was something we never thought of.

We thought of how do we do the right things for our students and enable them to thrive as students here given the high price of rental in the university.

So that happens a lot and lots of decisions we have to make in the university are affected by how they affect different communities.

I think one of the key goals of the leader is to look out over multiple generations, years ahead, and say not only how does the decision affect current groups of students and faculty.

But how will it play twenty or thirty years from now?

Will it be a decision that people will look back on and say, well, that was a brilliant decision.

Or it will be a decision that people look back and say, that was a real mistake that was made.

I think that's really interesting because your constituents are not just the current community, it's also the future when you've got an institution like the university, you have to think about the students and the community, you know, hundreds of years in the future.

I know in our last episode, we talked about the negotiation for the general use permit and the question about selling land.

Which might've been smart in the short run, but certainly wasn't in the long run and was going to affect the community far into the future.

I also am really curious because I would have thought that the community members would be upset about building more student housing because it would drive rents down because there would be fewer renters.

Was that an issue?

That never came up.

I mean, at that time, rents were going up at such a rate, which is what drove us to build more student housing.

In fact, a key motivation, this happened when I was the Dean, actually, and Condi Rice was our provost.

The graduate students camped out in the quad to protest that they couldn't afford to live in the Bay Area anymore.

So we realized then that we had a real crisis with respect to graduate housing.

And today, Stanford houses a larger fraction of its graduate population than virtually any other university in the U.S.

It's like running a city.

It is like running a city.

Well, I mean, it's interesting because you make decisions and clearly not everybody is going to be aligned with the decision you make.

The second problem I want to just bring up is how do you deal with criticism of decisions?

How do you weather that storm when you make a decision that some key constituents disagree with?

Figuring out how you consult with all these different parties, all these different constituencies to try to arrive at some common understanding.

But we've had to make some difficult decisions.

So the last set of graduate housing we built, for example, is a high rise because we need to house that many more students.

We needed to add capacity for about two thousand students on campus.

The only way to do that was with a high rise and we had to explain to the local community why this made sense in this section of campus.

Perhaps not in the middle of the campus, that's the traditional campus that Stanford's originally built.

But at the section that houses housing.

Similarly, when we built a new hospital, we built a tower for the new hospital.

And that was critical to getting the ability to care for people in the local community.

I remember another debate about living wages for employees.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yes.

We had a group of students that began actually what turned into a hunger strike, focusing on the living wage.

And as we went through it, we discovered a number of different things.

The first was that one of the groups in the university that wasn't paying a living wage was a store that was run by the student organization itself.

So they were not living up to their own standards of paying a living wage in this local community.

And in fact, when they had to increase their salaries, because in the end, when we ended up adopting a living wage policy, it applied to them as well.

That caused their prices to go up, which made the students realize that there was a connection between those two decisions, they weren't independent.

But I think one of the most memorable things about that is that the students, in their activism, uncovered situations where people in the university were not following the university's laws and values.

They were complying with the letter of the law, but they were violating the spirit of the law.

And the students are the ones that uncovered that and helped us then modify our guidelines so that we would prevent future violations of our ethical values.

I have to say, I was caught off guard when you said the students were had a hunger strike.

How long did it last and how did you deal with that?

It lasted for a few weeks.

It started in the spring, so it was near the end of the year.

And the end of the year, usually, is an endpoint for these things.

We went and visited the students.

We insisted on sending in people with medical background to ensure that nobody was really in a hazardous situation.

People were not completely starving to death.

They were not eating during the day, for example, in a fasting like situation.

But it was very hard because they were really motivated by what were good ethical concerns and their concerns in talking to workers in the university.

But we came to a solution that was something we could implement and we could get the university to abide by and ensure that if we had a new set of rules about these things, we would be able to enforce them.

There are times, I know, where you have to make a decision and there are confidentiality issues.

You know, there might be people involved, human resource issues, things that you just can't talk about.

How do you deal with that lack of transparency when there's an issue that comes up that people disagree with?

I think there are some times when you can simply say, no comment, or you can't say anything, or this is a personnel issue.

There are times where you just have to be silent.

And sometimes you have to be silent even when there are things that are said that are untrue about the institution or about your particular actions.

And that requires a bit of a thick skin.

You need to be prepared for criticism in that situation.

But the reality is that sometimes the university is prevented from saying something.

Either because of a personnel issue or possibly a legal concern that could be raised.

So that's something you have to be prepared to deal with and hold yourself to a standard.

You are protecting, in that case, the reputation of the institution.

And that may mean that you're attacked because of that.

Let's dive into another issue.

Oftentimes, when you're in a leadership position, you have to give critical feedback to others.

You need to tell people when they're not doing their job, when things aren't going well.

How do you go about doing that?

I think it's one of the hardest things to learn.

And I say, I learned it only bit by bit over time.

I had a remarkable moment early on when I was giving feedback to a younger colleague who I'd have helped hire and who was really a star.

But there were some issues in their teaching.

It became clear that despite how good their research was, if they didn't repair and improve their teaching, they were not going to be able to get tenure at Stanford.

So going to this colleague that I had helped hire, who was a research superstar, and convey that information was really difficult.

I realized if I didn't do it though, this was not going to work.

This was not going to end to a good outcome.

So I delivered the information.

It was really hard for me because it was the first time I had to do something like that.

We brought in some help from the center for teaching and learning.

They worked with the faculty member to improve their teaching.

Their teaching improved dramatically.

And they got tenure and went on to become a star in the faculty.

That taught me a really important lesson, the importance of giving that person.

Because if I had waited or if I had soft paddled the advice, it would have been a crisis, it would have resulted in a negative outcome.

That gave me strength that later on when I realized somebody was going off course and I needed to intervene and step in.

Often when people need to get that tough feedback they don't get it early enough.

People wait, they delay, they delay, they delay.

And then it gets to the point where so much trust has been lost that they talk about terminating the person.

When had they just intervened earlier and given the person the constructive tough love, tough feedback earlier, they could have salvaged the situation.

I know that it's really hard to do that, right?

It's always easy to give positive feedback.

You're doing a great job, but giving the feedback when someone needs to improve is always tricky.

We talked about sharing information about what's going on so that the community understands how decisions are made.

How much transparency should there be?

You know, when you're a leadership position, you get a lot of information that others in the community don't have.

How much transparency should there be?

I'd say there should be as much transparency as legally and ethically as possible.

So you want people to understand the rationale behind decisions.

Why you did them and some transparency about it.

I mean, the best example is probably the university budget.

We're completely transparent about what's in the university budget, what we're putting new money into.

And the reason this is so important is that there's a relatively small amount of money available every year for new things.

A small, small fraction of the budget, about seven tenths of a percent of the overall budget is available, given all the other costs in the university that you can't control.

So we need to be completely clear about what are we doing new.

What have we decided are the highest priorities?

And we decide that with a group that in the university is called the budget group, and it's a group of faculty from across the institution that look at that.

And have the very difficult job of advising the provost on what the highest priority should be across the entire institution.

Making those decisions has to be really hard.

I think about this all the time when we're making decisions at Knight-Hennessy is what type of decision is this?

I actually have on the whiteboard in my office a reminder that there are four different types of decisions.

There's the control decision where you tell people this is what we're going to do.

There's the consult where you gather lots of information and then make the decision.

There's the collecting votes where you've got a democracy and we're going to take the majority.

And then there's consensus where everybody has to agree.

I'm curious what situations in your leadership fit into these different decision making?

So what are situations where you're taking control, this is what we're going to do?

And we're really not getting any input.

There are times when you take control.

When it comes down to core values of the institution, how you're going to make a decision that gets to the heart of the institution.

That's where control is really important and where you're going to make a decision.

For example, when the provost and I would appoint deans, we would use consult.

But in the end, we made the decision in that case.

We made the decision about some key things like how we're going to do financial aid.

And that we're going to make enhancements, for example, to financial aid.

Those were decisions we could make.

There are other times when you use, probably consultative decision making is the technique I've used the most.

Because in a large organization, getting to consensus is not going to happen easily.

And it's not clear how you would use a vote process in many of these cases.

So a consultative approach is what we would normally do.

Give everybody a chance to put their opinion in, argue through all the possibilities, and then decide where you want to go.

But even in a university, there are times we do use voting.

Faculty members get voted on for tenure or hiring by their department.

So there is a part where institutionally the university says that is a faculty decision and it happens by vote.

Where we do consensus is really in smaller groups.

But even in search committees, for example, looking for a new faculty member to hire, generally they're consensus, right?

It's a small group, six to eight people on the search committee.

They can come to some agreement on who the best candidate is and move forward.

It really is quiet important to know what type of decision you're making and who gets to make those decisions.

I know that was one of the important things I learned when I took on leadership roles was who gets to make this decision.

If you're in a meeting and let's say you're making a hiring decision and everybody in the room thinks that they get to make that decision, you're going to have a problem.

So understanding before you start, okay, this is who is making the decision for this, who is going to be consulted, whose input is important here.

But who's going to ultimately make that decision?

I agree with that, Tina.

I think it's also important you'd like to have the community involved participating as much as possible.

So there are times when it may be a controlled decision, but that's not what you want to do all the time.

I think if you look at people, whether they're a leader in a university or a non profit, or even in a CEO.

Most CEOs are not controlling command style decision making because it wouldn't fly.

What would happen is their very best employees would decide this is not an organization I want to work for and they'd lose them over time.

So figuring out how to navigate that I think is a crucial thing for any leader.

So let's talk a little bit about negotiations, because often you're in situations where there are different parties who have different perspectives, and you actually have to negotiate.

This is not, I just get to make the decision.

There are many people who have an interest in the outcome.

Can you talk about some situations where there were challenging negotiations and how that played out?

Well, we touched on the general use permit, which then turned into a long negotiation when we wouldn't agree to dedicate land as open space.

And it was a fascinating negotiation because, I remember at one point, one individual said to me, well, we needed you to get the valley started, but we don't need you anymore.

Oh my goodness.

I was kind of surprised because this was as Google was just starting, right?

And if you look at the first few years of Google, hundreds of people came from, graduated from the university and went to propel that company forward.

So I was shocked.

One of the things that happened in the negotiation was we found that various communities in Santa Clara County had different feelings about the future of the university.

San Jose said, you know, this is a critical magnet for generating talent and bringing talent into our area that we really need.

And Palo Alto said, well, we're worried about the local traffic.

That's all we care about is local traffic.

You had different groups and you had to negotiate and you had to help these groups come together and say, okay, here are a reasonable set of things.

Stanford will do certain things to ameliorate its traffic burden that it generates in the local area.

Meanwhile, we'll continue to thrive as a university.

We'll enhance the medical care we give at the hospital and continue to be an important role in the community.

That was a complex negotiation with different, even within the community.

Different parts of the community had different feelings about what we needed to do.

And even our own students.

I mean, this was a time when the graduate students said, we want the university's plan to include more housing for us because they were worried about it.

So we had to find a complex solution to all these different problems.

And in the end, we found one we could live with, and I think it was a very successful time for the university as a result.

But it was a long, long, complicated process.

So complicated, exactly.

Well, one of the things I often think about is the levers that leaders have at their disposal to stimulate innovation, to stimulate all sorts of things that they want to happen in their organization.

I wrote a book called Ingenious where I created a framework, I called the innovation engine and in it, I described the levers that I saw.

The levers that an individual has is their knowledge, their imagination, and their attitude.

But an organization has parallel levers, which is the resources, the habitat, and the culture.

Now, in the role of a university president, you have these resource, these levers at your disposal.

How did you use them?

How did you use them to develop recognition, rewards, incentives?

Even physical space to create a habitat where people would do the things that you hoped that they would do?

Let me give you a couple of examples here.

One is an annual award we give called the Amy Blue Award.

The Amy Blue Award is given to everyday staff members, not people in senior leadership positions, but people who really support the core mission of the university.

And I would, when I was president, I would go every year to give these awards.

People would show up, their families would show up, their fellow employees from their office would show up.

And I remember that one year we gave it to a woman who had worked for more than twenty-five years in the residences with students, helping to organize and clean and get their residence operating and things.

We gave it to an individual who had worked in one of the dining halls for many years.

What this award did was it said ,we value the contribution that you give because it's crucial to making this entire community work.

A second instance, when I was president, we established an award.

At the time, issues of diversity, equity, inclusion were really growing.

It was really the beginning of a movement towards this.

So, we establish an award to be given to either a group or an individual for work that they had done in the university that promoted greater diversity, greater equity, and greater inclusion.

We still do that today.

It's now twenty-five years later, and we're still giving this award.

A final example is, it relates to faculty.

In a research university, faculty are often recognized by external groups for their research contributions.

They're given awards, they get best papers, they win various recognition, they get elected to national academies.

But the role of teaching is something that's vitally important, and particularly teaching of undergraduates is vitally important to the university.

And so to recognize that, that's the job of the university and the university leadership to recognize that.

So we established a recognition called Bass University Fellows that recognizes people that have made extraordinary contributions to the undergraduate experience at Stanford.

And that way we elevate an important role in the university, but one that's very different from the research role that the external world rewards.

Yeah.

I also know the university has all sorts of really interesting seed grants they give people to encourage different types of cross disciplinary research and some really, really interesting projects come out of it that wouldn't happen otherwise.

That's correct.

When we decided early on in my presidency that we wanted to move in the direction of supporting interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research, we immediately encountered this difficulty that faculty often had a hard time finding the money to sponsor research that was collaborative.

They didn't have a working relationship with somebody in another department of the university, for example.

And their funding was along traditional disciplinary lines often.

So we thought about a seed research program that could bring people together and have them achieve a breakthrough they couldn't otherwise achieve.

And when we first started these as part of the Bio-X project at Stanford, one of the early ones we funded was a collaboration between somebody in chemical engineering, and somebody in ophthalmology.

They had never met each other, they had never met each other.

But they came together to work on a project building artificial corneas for people who had corneal damage in some way.

Their project went on to get lots of follow on funding to be very successful.

It was that little bit of seed funding that brought them together and got them started.

The fact that we could do that could create change in the university.

It reminds me of Knight-Hennessy.

We bring all these students together from all these different disciplines, bring them together, and really interesting things happen.

For example, in the KHeystone Projects, where students come together from different disciplines and identify opportunities that would not have happened independent of that.

Yeah.

And one of the things I love about the KHeystone Projects is you look at the team working on any project.

And it'll have a lawyer, it'll have an engineer, it'll have a scientist, it'll have somebody in the business school, that kind of collaboration.

Which of course is what happens when you solve problems in the outside world, but it's really wonderful to see it inside the university.

Yeah, it's great.

Now, speaking of inside the university, there are lots and lots of different types of institutions and places where one has to lead, right?

It's in academia, but also in government and in industry.

How different or similar is leadership in these different contexts?

Well, I think there are some similarities.

I think each group has multiple constituencies of different types.

Perhaps the university constituency community is the most complicated.

But even people in industry, if you're running a company, you've got your stockholders, you have, the public at large, you've got your customers and your employees, of course, who are key stakeholders in the organization.

So you're trying to balance a set of things across those different groups, but there are differences.

I mean, there are differences in how they operate.

Only university have alumni and they have a unique relationship with the institution.

Government is also very different because of course, you've got the people who are electing you.

You've got the, if you're in government, you've also got the national press looking over your shoulder.

So you've got a variety of different groups you're trying to work with to get changed to occur.

And of course, all those lobbyists who have their own.

And all those lobbyists there on K street coming in with advice and things like that.

It's very hard.

We see this now in government, how hard it is to get changed to occur.

That should cause us to question whether or not we're operating in the way we should operate.

Well, I'm curious.

We often collaborate across these different domains, right?

You've got academics who work with government, right?

We get so much funding from the government at the university.

We have industry that works with the government.

We have academia and industry.

How do these different collaborations work when they're very different ways of leading in these different organizations?

I think they work best when they're really symbiotic relationships between them.

Where people have respect for the roles that individuals have in this situation.

People understand how the university operates.

They understand, for example, the difference of the work we do in the university versus the work in industry, where the work in industry is usually more short term oriented towards a product that's not that far away.

While most of the work in the university is more basic and more aimed at long term breakthroughs.

When they understand each other and they understand the roles, I think it makes it a lot easier to construct a successful working relationship across that.

We've also had long, obviously universities have a long working relationship with government because most of the research funding at the university comes from government.

And there it's important to understand how the universities work and how to fund that research in an appropriate way.

One of the remarkable things about the United States system is it's largely merit based.

So awards are given to research on the basis of possibility and merit and what can come from this work.

And I think that means we've got a better, and we, you look at the productivity of the U.S.

research universities and you understand why we're the envy of the world when it comes to higher education.

John, you've had so many different leadership roles, starting as an individual contributor and ultimately running very, very large organization.

How has your leadership style changed over time?

Well, when I was young, Tina, it was very much a consensus based kind of decision making.

I was one of a group of young faculty members.

You're finding consensus, you're not the key decision maker, you're not even the influencer yet in a big way.

And then over time, it moved to more consultative decision making.

Not that even in the role, my early leadership roles, I made a few tough decisions that had to be made about hiring faculty members or taking the department in a certain way.

Those developed over time and what my observation is, hard decisions are really difficult to make.

You have to learn how to make those step by step.

So you make some that are a little easier and that helps you understand how to do that, how to deliver the message to somebody.

It's still hard for me to deliver a negative message to anybody.

I think it's hard for all good people that have empathy to deliver a tough message to somebody.

But what I was able to do over time is learn how to do it better, learn how to do it in a more humane fashion.

And realize that avoiding that tough decision, avoiding that consultation that I need to give to somebody wasn't the right solution in the longterm.

Instead, think about how to do it better.

I have to say, as someone who was a member of the Stanford community during your entire leadership as president.

One of the things that I was so impressed with, and that really affected everybody in the community was that it felt as though your job was to bring in people who thought were very talented, or that the university thought were really talented, and then giving them the space to do their work.

The philosophy felt like, I trust you.

I want to empower you.

I want to create an environment that allows you to do your very best work.

Is that something that you thought about when you were a leader?

Was that very explicit in your mind?

Certainly.

Certainly.

I think when you move into those roles, and as I moved from department chair to dean, to provost, to president, you realize that your job is to make a other members of the community successful.

You can't do everything, you can't do the full work of the university.

Your job is to find really great people.

And as you said, empower them, help them be successful.

And what I discovered when I moved into those leadership positions is that I could celebrate their successes.

I could feel that something had been achieved when one of our faculty members made a major breakthrough or when they won a major teaching award.

I could feel, well, I didn't do the work, but I helped create an environment where this person could go on to do something really terrific.

John, it was such a pleasure talking to you over the last six episodes.

We covered so much ground, including how do you build a vision.

How do you remain courageous, especially in the face of opposition.

How do you remain open minded and curious.

How do you collaborate.

How do you make hard decisions.

And especially how to think about ethics and building trust in complex organizations.

All of these are things that we teach in Knight-Hennessy Scholars.

I'm delighted I get to do it with you.

Thank you, Tina.

I've really enjoyed our conversation and I look forward to many more.

There are five takeaways from this conversation.

First, leaders must have a vision and consider its ramifications far into the future.

Second, it's important to give people direct feedback early on their performance.

It lets you intervene compassionately and develop solutions together.

Third, the decisions you make are a reflection of the values you have.

Fourth, different challenges call for different kinds of decision making.

Whether it's control, consultative, consensus, or collecting votes.

And finally, as a leader, your job is to help other people be successful.

And you need to celebrate their successes because you've helped create the environment to make it happen.

Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Leading Matters.

Please follow and like us wherever you listen to podcasts and stay engaged with Knight-Hennessy Scholars through social media @KnightHennessy and on our website KH.Stanford.Edu.