Presidential Anticip-a-a-tion

The writer is just about to be a president

Very soon I will start my first presidency.

The institution knows what it is, has resources, and I can see various strategic ways to catalyze its impact in the world. 

And, the students are protesting in tents, the faculty are burned out, and there are leadership vacancies on the senior team. The staff are tired and underpaid. 

I hear from many in higher ed that this has been one of the most difficult years in their careers. And I’m going to approach these advanced problems as a beginner? What have I just agreed to do?

In early morning moments, sometimes excited, sometimes full of dread, I think about my emerging team. Not the team at the new institution but my developing kitchen cabinet, the people up and down the higher ed hierarchy I’ve learned from over the years. I hear the presidency will be lonely, and I can’t even approach July 1 (let alone get out of bed) without drawing strength from current and former colleagues and this emerging personal team. 

In the early part of my career, starting as a graduate student, I sought out mentors. I had long phone calls with a distinguished retired faculty member who rarely left her apartment. A giant in my sub-field let me come to talk with him in his office. There were others.

I grimace at the fakeness of professional networking, and I loved each of these people and approached them to learn, not to make my way up the ranks (though I don’t know if anyone believes me when I say that).

As I approach the presidency, I am looking for retired and soon-to-retire people in higher ed administration to love. Not in the slimy way that will get me fired but in the share your wisdom so we can collectively move our industry forward and change the world way. 

Already I have some, including what everyone told me is essential: a former president turned professional coach. She supported me through the job search and brings to our relationship foresight, emotional insight, and an awareness of the landscape I am still learning. She is the quarterback of my emerging team, which includes a finance and strategy expert I worked with on a board, a development professional with whom I built a program, an operational expert who has been my right hand, and several old friends with whom I can speak bluntly and confidentially.

If this new presidency were a vehicle, it’s not a sports car my coach and I cruise around in looking cool. It’s a minivan—or maybe a small bus—that holds everyone on my team, has music blaring out the open windows, probably a bathroom, and definitely a lot of snacks. It is only with the help and support of a group I will navigate the potholes, detours, and natural and human made disasters sure to be in my path.

From the president’s coach 

When I was a sitting president, I used to meet with peers to talk about what we wished we'd known before we had the job. These information items were occasionally funny (no one told me where the presidential bathroom was); poignant (the effect on my family); and anger about some major omission by their new institution about finances (BTW, there’s a multi-million dollar deficit), about the culture (No, we don’t discuss that with the faculty!), and about the lay of the relationship land (the board promised the past president an office across the hall from yours and that he would sit in on all executive committee meetings. “But it’s ok. Really”).  

As a coach, I can’t save new presidents from those surprises, but I can help them navigate when challenges inevitably arise. I can help them ask good questions, get the right data, and manage the emotional and practical aspects of transitions. 

A coach can offer help on how to work with a board, how to build a senior team, how to ask for major gifts, how to understand finances, how to design retreats and cabinet meetings, how to sniff out the charlatan companies promising to fix your problems for a few million. That is one essential part of the relationship.  

But the president also needs to pursue their own agenda. Coaches can provide ideas for further resources and be strategy colleagues, but they need to support and not get in the way of the president’s vision. Retired presidents who think they can coach shouldn’t try to relive their past successes or correct their previous failures through their clients.

Coaches can be like the invisible fences some people use to train dogs. The poor dogs can’t see the fence, they just know if they step in the wrong place, they get zapped. New presidencies are full of invisible fences. Coaches know where some of the edges are likely to be and can help a new president find their way, hopefully with a few less zaps and a few more treats.

If we have gotten nothing else from The Sandbox, we have certainly learned that the presidency can be a lonely job. The coach, and wise senior colleagues and mentors, can help make it a bit more interesting and a bit less lonely, partly by cheering successes and honoring pitfalls, And by reminding the president that their work has meaning.

And that it is worth the angst in your gut and still getting out of bed in the morning. Although I do wish we were doing it in a cool sports car and not a bus. But I’m excited about the snacks. [Ed’s note: I wanna be in the backseat.]

The writer is just about to be a president