One of the great gifts of working in higher education is that you get to work with leaders who are mission driven. Almost no leader I work with was motivated by climbing the ladder. They were motivated by their research, by working with students, by contributing to a purpose bigger than themselves. Over time, their desire to contribute and their skill have led them to opportunities to lead at higher levels. And in each of these roles, they bring with them their positive intentions, ready to make a difference.
Unfortunately, positive intent doesn’t by itself equate to positive impact. In fact, there are times when leaders’ best intentions — paradoxically — lead to worse results. How can this be? Very simply their desire to make a positive impact and contribution leads them to spend their time in ways that on the surface make sense, but that in the end actually work against them.
Here are the three most common behaviors I see that start from good intentions, but that end with a negative impact on the leader, their team and the task at hand:
1. Disproportionate Focus on Dissenters
Perhaps the most common pitfall I see is the one in which leaders spend too much time and energy on individuals who resist change, rather than on those who support it. While addressing concerns and opposition is important, leaders often make one crucial mistake: they don’t distinguish between those who are skeptical, versus those who are cynical.
The 20-60-20 rule tells us that 20% of your people will readily get on board, 60% have a lot of questions, concerns and need support, and that 20% will actively resist. Where do leaders spend the majority of their time? You guessed it, with the 20% of resisters.
This “bottom” 20% are not just skeptical of the change, they are deeply cynical about your agenda. These are the folks that will disagree with the idea simply because it was yours. They will couch their pushback in logic and may even bring data to support their case. But in the end, their position is simply to oppose yours. These are the folks that sap your time and mental energy. No matter what you do here, you can never seem to get them on board.
Leaders with positive intentions want everyone to agree with their decisions and direction, and so there is a natural (and strong) inclination to try and convince this group of the merits of the change, to ensure that they feel heard, and to spend time with them helping them to adapt. This approach has a certain logic: these people are hostile to the changes and initiatives you’re trying to move forward. They also tend to be vocal. So it makes sense to respond to their criticism and if you can’t get them on board, at least get them to a neutral place. The problem is that it rarely (if ever) works.
This bottom 20% of your team aren’t bad people. And importantly, they didn’t start in the bottom 20%. Over time, they’ve experienced decisions and actions (or a lack of them) that have disaffected them. They may have been passed over for a promotion, were on the receiving end of broken promises, or they tried to provide input but weren’t listened to. Over time, these slights (real or perceived) add up and cause them to turn negative. Some simply withdraw and check out. Others get mad or are determined to get even—and that’s the trap. They often create enough issues that they force you to respond and spend more time on things that are not productive and won’t move your unit forward.
But what happens when you focus on the bottom 20%? Three things:
Erosion of Momentum
Focusing on dissenters stalls progress. When leaders concentrate their efforts on convincing a few naysayers, the momentum of change can slow, causing frustration among those who are already on board. These supportive team members may feel neglected and demotivated, as their enthusiasm and commitment are overlooked.
Neglect of Champions
By not giving adequate attention to supporters of the change, leaders miss the opportunity to leverage these individuals as advocates. Supporters can help to drive change by influencing their peers, sharing positive experiences, and providing constructive feedback. These champions are essential to engaging the middle 60% and bringing them along. Ignoring them can squander this valuable resource and weaken the overall push for change.
Negative Environment
Often during meetings, dissenters are quick to voice their views (often via innocuous but piercing questions). They take over the meeting and it quickly turns negative, even toxic. When that happens, the rest of the group—especially the top 20%– withdraw. They are not there to argue—they are there to work towards the common purpose. The unintended impact, however, is that the only voices heard are the negative ones.
The solution? Focus on 60%. They are the key- they can be convinced but they will make you work hard to do so. And that is ok. In fact, it’s a gift. If you genuinely hear their concerns and questions, they’ll improve the outcome. Think about their “resistance” as a learning resource and use it to improve the clarity of your thinking and decisions. But you must understand the difference between those in the 60% who are skeptical (asking hard questions but constructive and committed to the end goal) and those in the bottom 20% who are cynical (asking hard questions and putting up road blocks with no intention to help meet the goal).
If you can get the middle 60% aligned with your “top” 20% of supporters, you now have 80% of your unit moving in the same direction. And with 80% you can accomplish most anything you want to do. Find ambassadors in your top 20% who can also help you to engage the middle 60% — peer-endorsement and support is often more effective with this group.
2: Focus on Solving Problems Instead of Pursuing Opportunities
Well-intentioned leaders, especially those new to their positions, want to be responsive to their team members and have been taught to remove obstacles from those they lead. They have a strong sense of responsibility for their unit and to their people and so they are keen to address issues. They are also highly attuned to the expectations of the leaders they report to and in today’s higher education, that means being focused on short-term issues: finding efficiencies and incremental gains. These dynamics all combine to create a problem-solving orientation.
There is another powerful dynamic that tends to keep leaders in higher education in problem-solving mode: smart people tend to take their successes for granted and instead focus on fixing the things that aren’t working. Think about the team you lead or are a part of and take a moment to reflect on your biggest success over the last 12 months. Have something in mind? Did you and the team spend time evaluating that success to see what factors, conditions and behaviors enabled it? Did you solely focus on what worked well, or did you also spend time evaluating what went wrong? It’s not that we shouldn’t debrief efforts that don’t achieve our desired results, but too often we only focus on fixing problems rather than replicating successes.
The pernicious part of problem solving is that every time you solve a problem, you feel successful. You feel like you’re making a difference and contributing. In fact, you can very quickly end up in a reality where your entire days are consumed by problem-solving. And most often, when we’re caught solving problems, new ones emerge very quickly. That’s because when we’re quick to solve problems we often end up solving the symptom and not the underlying cause. And so problems recur and our “solutions” actually end up causing more problems.
What happens when we are stuck in a place of solving problems?
Inattention to the big picture
Problem-solving is a “fix it” orientation and often inhibits creativity. We lose the agility to see a situation from multiple perspectives, we may feel pressure to come up with a solution rather than to deeply understand the challenge, and we tend to focus more on minimizing what can go wrong instead of pursuing opportunities and risks that could have a higher pay-off for the future.
Demotivation
Constantly highlighting problems can demotivate employees. When team members feel that their successes are overlooked and only their shortcomings are noticed, it can lead to decreased morale and engagement. They may start to see their efforts as futile, reducing their overall productivity and enthusiasm.
Missed Opportunities
By not recognizing and analyzing successes, leaders miss the opportunity to replicate and scale effective strategies. Successful projects and initiatives offer valuable lessons that can be applied to other areas of the organization. Focusing solely on failures means missing out on these insights and the chance to build on what works.
The solution? Focus on what’s working as much as what’s not. Doing so has multiple benefits including: normalizing feedback and making mistakes. When we learn from our successes, it becomes easier (not easy) to learn from our mistakes too. We also come to realize and codify the behaviors that lead to better outcomes. Making good decisions isn’t innate—it is learned behavior. Assessing what works will encourage a more proactive mindset by focusing on how can we replicate these successes, it deepens self and team-awareness by examining the work from multiple perspectives, and builds trust and psychological safety by making it safe to learn and celebrate each other’s accomplishments.
3. Shouldering too Much of the Load
Leaders don’t get to their positions without being responsible and productive. They were usually star individual-contributors, were team players, and demonstrated deep commitment to the mission. Unfortunately, the same skills and behaviors that got them to the leadership role may prevent them from excelling at the next level.
Leaders often shoulder too much of the load for a variety of reasons. They feel this demonstrates their commitment to the team, and they want to lead by example. If they are working with a team that is overworked or overwhelmed, they may shoulder more in order to protect the team. They may also want to protect the team from the pressure they are experiencing from their boss, and take on more of the workload to enable the team to do what they do best. And likely, they may have a strong affinity for the work.
I work with a lot of Presidents who also love being their institution’s Provost, who love to work closely with the deans on new program ideas and initiatives. I know a number of VPs of Advancement who are at their best when they’re on the road, meeting with and engaging donors; their energy is a lot lower in the office when meeting with and engaging their teams.
Compounding this dynamic is the leader’s expectations of themselves. As leaders accomplish more, they have more confidence in themselves. And they take seriously the confidence that others place in them. As they climb up the ladder, the challenges naturally become harder and more complex (which makes it easier to focus on the job they used to have). And so the leaders place more and more pressure on themselves to rise to the new challenges. In fact, many leaders seduce themselves into thinking that they can take it all on and fall into the destructive patterns of working too much, taking on too much stress, and burning themselves out rather than asking for help or building a team around them.
These are positive intentions—leaders want to help. They want to contribute in meaningful ways. They want to protect their teams. But too often, the default patterns backfire. They quickly become bottlenecks as all decisions flow through them, they limit opportunities for their teams to grow, and they reduce the overall creative capacity of the team.
What happens when leaders shoulder a disproportionate amount of the load?
Reduce Team Ownership and Accountability
The most vexing consequence of this pattern is that when the leaders take on too much responsibility, team members may feel stifled. They may not know what level of autonomy they have and whether they can influence decisions, so they may withdraw, only focusing on what the leader explicitly asks them to do. They lose a sense of ownership, and are more likely to defer and kick issues and decisions up to the leader to solve — which, ironically, continues the cycle.
Reduced Resilience and Problem Solving
When leaders feel overly responsible, they drive everything forward—they set and run meetings, identify what issues matter, make the decisions, and step up when others won’t. This creates a dependency on the leader which reduces the team’s overall resilience and problem solving skills. As issues become too complex for one person—even the leader—to solve on their own, they don’t have a team to draw on for help because they haven’t built their capacity. When difficult issues emerge, they find their teams operating from a disempowered place (complaining and focusing on what they can’t control) rather than on stepping up and focusing on what they can influence.
Increased Risk of Burnout
Leaders who take on too much tend to work too hard, lack work-life balance, and take on unhealthy levels of stress. They don’t just risk burning out, they create significant health risks for themselves. But burnout is a gradual process that happens over time. So beyond the significant individual risks, as leaders burn out more they become less effective. The quality of their decision making goes down. Their capacity to think clearly and strategically diminishes, leading to worse outcomes for themselves and for the work.
The solution? Build highly effective teams. Learning how to build a team is one of the hardest leadership skills and requires leaders to already have strong self-awareness and interpersonal skills (not a given). But building a high performing team is not easy. Most teams I work with are a collection of smart individual contributors who largely work independently and who regularly meet to share information and coordinate their work. They are not true teams where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
One of the most difficult aspects of building a team is that it’s not a one-and-done process. The conditions that enable or hinder team performance are always changing. High performing teams build environments of high trust and psychological safety. They have a clear purpose and constructive group dynamics. They also have a learning orientation. These factors enable a culture of ownership where each person feels agency and responsibility for the team’s performance. And they create an environment where everyone is expected to contribute in meaningful ways. Opportunities for growth, skill development and learning abound.
Summary
Taken together, you can see how these dynamics combine in deleterious ways to make it difficult, if not impossible, to thrive. Positive intentions quickly fade into unintended consequences.
When we give too much time and attention to those who criticize ideas and initiatives, when we focus more energy on solving problems than pursuing opportunities, and when we shoulder too much of the work, we create negative work cultures that resist new ideas and reinforce the status quo. What’s more, this creates disillusioned leaders. Leaders who started with positivity and enthusiasm quickly become overwhelmed and discouraged.
As higher education contends with unprecedented challenges, we need to combine those positive intentions with proven leadership skills and abilities. We need to invest in our leaders to be as effective as they can be. We need leaders who are self-aware of their own patterns—productive and counterproductive, we need leaders who can build strong interpersonal relationships with others—especially the difficult personalities, and we need leaders who can build strong teams in order to take on challenges we’ve never faced before.
There are no silver bullets to address the confluence of challenges facing higher education, but good intentions aren’t enough. We need the best leaders we can develop.
