Defying Limits in Leadership Development feat. Dr. Tom Kolditz

Show Notes

Dr. Tom Kolditz, founding director of the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University, joins host David Droogleever to explain why institutions of higher education don't necessarily deliver on their leadership development promises and what the Doerr Institute is doing to change that.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

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David Droogleever:
Today on Owl Have You Know.
Tom Kolditz:
While industry started working really hard to understand leader development, and provide competency maps, and doing all kinds of other things, colleges and universities were taking students on retreats and making some more and bringing in speakers that are inspiring, but have a half-life but 48 hours. Through
our measurement work, we've discovered a lot of things that just don't produce that are main stakes in leadership programs in colleges and universities.
David Droogleever:
Welcome into Owl Have You Know. This is another episode with your host David Droogleever, Rice Business class of 2012. And on the line with me today, I have Tom Kolditz. This is a lot to unpack here in terms of what Tom has done. So Tom is a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army. He's out of West Point. At West Point, he led the Department of Behavioral Sciences & Leadership at West Point. He also has a PhD in social psychology. So we can say Dr. Kolditz as well as General Kolditz.
David Droogleever:
He's the founding director of the leadership development program at Yale School of Management. And is currently the executive director and founder of the Doerr Institute of New Leaders here at Rice University. I'm sure we'll unpack that more and describe the charter there. That program was a top university program 2019 by the Association of Leadership Educators.
David Droogleever:
In 2017, Tom received the Warren Bennis Award for excellence in leadership. And more recently, January 2021, he has published the book Leadership Reckoning, subtitle, Can Higher Education Develop the Leaders We Need. Tom, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you today.
Tom Kolditz:
Thanks, David. It's an honor to be home.
David Droogleever:
Tom, I said a lot there. And would you like to introduce yourself and help us understand perhaps the skim across the waves that maybe adds color to what I just said in terms of how you got here today and why leadership development is your focus area today?
Tom Kolditz:
Sure. I'm a recovering academic. I am a really pragmatic person as you might expect after having 30 plus years in the military, but the last part in my military experience, 12 years, was at West Point working in the Department of Behavioral Sciences & Leadership. And it was in that role that I kind of figured out how leaders can be developed in higher education. So I took some of those learnings to Yale with me when I left the army and made some mistakes and had some big wins. And then I was asked to come to Rice to do the Doerr Institute, which is my fifth leader development startup.
Tom Kolditz:
And I think I was able to get well beyond what happened at Yale and even at West Point. I had always thought that if I have some resources and some freedom that I'd be able to build and lead a development enterprise in a private university, that would make it as good as the service academies, it would make it as good as other places that put a high emphasis on leadership. So, that's sort of what happened over the last 20 years.
David Droogleever:
Interesting. And one of the things that there comes out to me, and I know you're alluding to it, this focus on developing leaders in higher education instead of outside of those institutions writ large. Can you help us to understand why you feel that leadership development in higher education is a place to execute that charter instead of outside of higher education or in business or other areas?
Tom Kolditz:
Higher education has evolved with a focus on 18 to 25-year-olds, which, if you know much about developmental psychology, it's the perfect time to learn important things that you want to carry with you going forward, whether it's how to swim, or Mandarin, or in our case leadership. Higher ed graduates 2.2 million people a year. And our early research with the Doerr Institute has pointed out that just getting a four-year degree doesn't really equip you to lead at all, there's not even an incremental growth in a good leadership measure like leader identity or something else.
Tom Kolditz:
So we took it upon ourselves to focus on higher ed. Business schools just aren't big enough. Business schools graduated about a hundred thousand people a year and probably the University of Texas system graduates more than that. So really if we want to have strategic impact and improve the circumstances in our country with respect to leadership, whether it's presidential leadership or running a tee-ball team, we need to focus at higher ed, both graduates and undergraduates, as they pass new that developmental experience. And instead of merely equipping them with an education, we need to give them the tools to constructively apply that education in whatever field they're going to be in. Right now, higher ed fails in that.
David Droogleever:
Yeah, that's a lot in terms of calling out the failure. And I know that's the crux of your book, essentially, this reckoning of leadership. Before I go into that, which I think will be fascinating, I'm sure you get the question all the time, "What is a leader?" And I can see from the collaterals that are public the statement that everyone can be a leader, and also that at the Doerr Institute, you don't define leadership for people. You define that for yourself in terms of you becoming the leader that you want to be.
David Droogleever:
So what does that look like for folks? Because I think the traditional modality is, "Here's what a leader looks like, be this thing." But from what I understand is you're saying that you get to create that yourself. So what does that process and framework look like in terms of people that are learning from you, creating their own definition strategy of what a leader is?
Tom Kolditz:
After studying academic leadership for a long, long time, I'm pretty convinced that no one, and I mean no one can provide a constructive definition of what leadership is. We see leaders, we understand a lot about what good leaders do, what poor leaders do. And that turns into a constellation of individual qualities, behaviors, sometimes called competencies, which are easy to measure and relatively easy to train. Emotional changes like self-confidence and self-awareness and empathy. And we know how to measure that and cognitive shifts. The most important of which we think is leader identity or the sense that an individual believes their leader, has confidence in their leadership ability, will seek out leader roles later in their lives.
Tom Kolditz:
And so rather than participating in the academic food fight about what leadership is, what we do is work one at a time with individuals, and when you think of this constellation of qualities, they probably already have some. And then there are others that are perhaps weaker. And that gives us the opportunity to enhance their strengths in an intentional way. And also to remediate some of their weaknesses so that they come out of the experience, more capable to leave.
Tom Kolditz:
So what we're about in the Doerr Institute is not doing definitive research that says, this is what leadership is, we want to create more and better leaders. And so that's how we do it. We focus on individuals, we don't crowd people into classrooms. For the most part, we work one-on-one and we allow them to select the things that they want to do. And by doing that, a couple of magic things happen. First of all, we get the right people. When I was at the Yale School of Management, I made most of the leadership experiences mandatory. For all MBA, it's mandatory. Coaching, mandatory. Classes and so forth.
Tom Kolditz:
And there was always 30%, 40% of the people in the back of the room with their arms crossed saying, "Well, I'm going to be a finance guy. I don't need to work on teams. I'll cut my own deals. I don't need any of this leadership stuff." And it's a waste of time to bring people like that into a development program. So we benefit tremendously at the Doerr Institute by having people self-select in and choose the things that they think will be constructive for them. They will be good for them.
Tom Kolditz:
Academe has a tendency to think that if something is good for one person in a given field that it's good for everyone. So everyone takes the same physics test. Everyone's required to write poetry if they're in a poetry class. And in the Doerr Institute, that's not the approach we take. We don't just transfer knowledge. This is a human development project. And so the humans have to have a lot of input in order to make it work.
David Droogleever:
Yeah. So what I heard there is I think the self-selection is huge. And then after that, the part of, "Hey, this is something that you have to really engage and lean forward in terms of your own development and having your own ideas. And then your work helps essentially nurture and accelerate that process." Did I catch that correctly?
Tom Kolditz:
Yeah. I think you got it.
David Droogleever:
And just so we understand the scope and charter of the Doerr Institute, it's here at Rice University, of course, and is it focused on Rice students or is there other conversations and connections engagement opportunities outside of Rice University?
Tom Kolditz:
Well, fundamentally our charter focuses on graduate and undergraduate students at Rice. So they're our sweet spot. They're the people that we do most of our work with and for. But there are other groups that we've worked with that augment that. So for example, we've worked with Rice HR to help train people in Rice HR to do coaching and other kinds of developmental strategies with Rice staff. We teach an outward-facing leadership coaching certification course called Coach Rice. And that's for members of the Houston community and others. And we use the proceeds of that to plow back into our mission of developing students. We also have alumni programming that we have set up. It's very similar to what we do internally at Rice, but alumni can participate in it by giving a donation to the program. And that, once again, it helps us develop more Rice students, but also makes all of our programming available to two alumni who want to participate.
Tom Kolditz:
And then lastly, we occasionally work with others outside in industry. So for example, we have a multi-session workshop called Catalyst that we have designed and very successful at Rice. And Fortune Magazine has basically borrowed that from us, put it into their Fortune Connect platform when they teach and train Fortune 500 leaders. And they've invited us to that platform. So we've done work with them, with their leaders in a Catalyst module.
Tom Kolditz:
And we're also consulting mostly on measurement. We're really focused on measuring outcomes and making sure that we're not just entertaining people, that we're actually developing them. And so recently the Obama Foundation reached out and we're working with them on how to measure growth in Obama Fellows.
David Droogleever:
I like the idea of measuring outcomes. And I think for business leaders, especially, it's a conversation around, "Hey, if we can't measure it then there's no progress or we can't validate this effort was worth it." So can you unpack that a little bit more? What does it look like to measure those outcomes? What do those performance indicators look like and how has progress shown inside of those outcomes that are measured?
Tom Kolditz:
Step one is to forget the truism that leadership or the ability can't be measured. It can definitely be measured. And the people who usually say that just don't know a lot about measurement. They just don't understand how to do it. It's a mistake to try to measure leadership as a fully integrated concept. For reasons we've already described, it's impossible to define, it doesn't mean the same thing to every person. And consequently, we measure known psychological variables that, we know if a person grows in their capacity to lead they're going to increase on those variables.
Tom Kolditz:
So behaviorally, we measure skills like delegating, or getting feedback, or any other communicating, a number of leaders skills. And we measure it, not only in the person who is learning to leave, but also the people around them so that we can get a more valid representation of how they're presenting. Emotionally, we measure things like empathy, self-regulation. We give most of our students, say an emotional intelligence measure, which is fed back to them by a professional coach who's trained in that
measure. And then we can work on some of these limiting emotional characteristics, fear and a lack of confidence and so forth.
Tom Kolditz:
And then we also measure cognitions, what are people's beliefs about their own leadership? Do they have an identity that is increasingly one of being a leader or do they not? And we have an identity scale score on every student that writes because we've integrated it into the survey of all students. So we know about students who go through our programming and students who don't go through our programming, and we can use that for some really sophisticated management.
Tom Kolditz:
We also measure psychological variables that are better described as wellbeing variables. So for example, sense of purpose, life satisfaction, psychological distress. And we see big changes on all of those variables. And so we're using validated, published existing, psychological measures that are in alignment with leader growth. And that is the best way to measure leader development.
David Droogleever:
That's an absolute game changer. The fact that we can confidently communicate that those are measurable and anyone that wants to improve it can enter into that, that space where it's like, "Hey, here's where I am now and I can actually improve." There's a way to put your finger on that improvement. One of the things that popped out to me when you talked about giving feedback. Thinking about my manager, I was like, what about receiving feedback? Is that one of the measures as well?
Tom Kolditz:
Well, I don't know if we measure receiving feedback as much as we deliberately work with it. When we're, one-on-one with a student who got some difficult feedback the ability to work one-on-one allows you to go straight to the root causes or the real challenges for that individual. And there are some really exciting indicators that we're having an impact. For example, we've just started doing work on retention at Rice. Who stays, who goes and so forth. And what we found is that black, Latinx and Native American students retain at a 10% higher rate at Rice if they've gone through Doerr Institute programming. And we have a lot more work to do on that, but it's really promising that we can make these kinds of changes that impact diversity and inclusion by developing people, rather than having them sit through lectures or speakers or panels or any of the things that usually get thrown at them.
Tom Kolditz:
And we also see big changes in individuals that are in a certain degree of psychological stress, but perhaps not really needing full-blown psychological or psychiatric counseling. And we did an ROI study that suggested that 90 to 120 fewer students are going to the counseling center because they've gone through Doerr Institute programming. And it is a causal study in a causal link. So it's not just a correlation. And what we can do then is we can go back and it's better for the counseling center to not be overwhelmed. It's less expensive for Rice if they don't have that extra a hundred people to work with. And we're probably reaching a lot of people who wouldn't go to the counseling center, but they're willing to have a professional leadership coach.
Tom Kolditz:
So all kinds of really good second and third order effects here when you start measuring outcomes seriously. And most schools don't. Most of them measure process. Did the students like it? Was the food good? Would they recommend it to other people? That sort of measurement. And that's really not useful.
David Droogleever:
I think that's a great segue into leadership, reckoning your book. And I like how it's described it's taking to task a higher education. So this idea that higher education has made this fundamental claim to develop leaders. And I think that narrative is baked in for most folks. Right? So even when I think about my own parents, they want me to go to American higher education to improve myself and go make an impact out in the world.
David Droogleever:
So what precipitated... And I know you're alluding to it, but what precipitated the effort to write this book out and to make that the focus area, and to make that so public? Because you could argue that could be an incendiary statement. Right? Saying that, "Hey, you all have failed. You say, you're going to do all this stuff, but you failed at it." So can, can you help walk us through that thought process to where this is what you wanted to get published?
Tom Kolditz:
Well, sure. The first step in fixing something that's broken is recognizing that it's broken. And I have huge faith in higher education once they recognize a need and put their minds to it. There's nothing, there's no problems that can't be solved by higher ed. But for some reason this notion of leader development has taken a back seat to just plain old education making a better physics graduate or a better music graduate or what have you. And universities are individual performer cultures unless it's in the athletic department, they're really not team-focused. There are some labs and some engineering projects courses, but for the most part, you get graded on your work.
Tom Kolditz:
Faculty members get promoted on their research, their teaching, their service. And so while industry started working really hard to understand leader development and provide competency maps and doing all kinds of other things, colleges and universities were taking students on retreats and making s'mores and bringing in speakers that are inspiring but have a half-life of about 48 hours.
Tom Kolditz:
Through our measurement work, we've discovered a lot of things that just don't produce that our main stakes in leadership programs in colleges and universities. Leadership speakers, they've very little effect. Ted talks, very little effect on people in terms of their capacity to lead increasing. Single-session workshops, academic instruction and leadership, which we promote and we approve of, but sometimes people are tricked into thinking that by going to a leadership course, you're going to become a better leader. And that does not generally happen.
Tom Kolditz:
There's a knowledge transfer like in any organization behaviors psychology course, but in order to get better as a leader, you have to work at it with some help. You do it and you get better at it. And if you
have someone that's really professional working with you, they can shape you so quickly, and you can get so much better. So quicker.
Tom Kolditz:
I can remember the same thing, when I was a kid my dad used to take us to play golf and I was a baseball player. So I could hit the ball a mile, but usually in the wrong direction. And it took about half an hour with a golf pro, and I was twice as good. And that's what we're seeing with leadership in universities when we use professional people. Not untrained mentors, not peer coaches, total pros from the Houston business community that are certified by the International Coach Federation and that they have a very specific skillset. People who are educated, trained, and experienced at something are better than people who are not. And universities have not discovered that in leader development yet.
David Droogleever:
Wow. Yeah. Thank you for that color, and I can hear the passion in your voice in that. So I love it. I absolutely love it. I want to give you a shout out as I go through the list of endorsements for leadership reckoning, Al Gore's at the top of the list, which is awesome. I don't know how you pull that off, but that's fantastic. And then the other one that really popped out to me was Klaus Schwab is the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum. He said that the book gave a directional compass, I'm paraphrasing little, directional compass and framework for the fourth industrial revolution.
David Droogleever:
And the reason that popped out to me is because I myself has spent most of my corporate career in big tech. And so as we think about things like AI and machine to machine interactions, the pace of technology moving, that makes sense to me in terms of the need for leadership, because now you start talking about morality and ethics in big tech, and that's of course been all the rage to talk about for many years.
David Droogleever:
So not to get too myopic on tech, but as you see this process of being better or higher education being better at developing leaders, and as we look forward into how the world is evolving, being more interconnected, what do you see that impact in how the future leaders are going to engage in this fourth industrial revolution and this age where everything is about tech and how tech intersects with humanity in organizations?
Tom Kolditz:
Yeah. A lot of education has been focused on tech. And one of the things I learned actually through my own hiring to Rice is that sometimes the people who know the most about a new concept or product or technology are among the least equipped to create a company or to otherwise make that technology available to other people. I was hired in a process involving executive search, a head-hunter, and the head-hunter worked for John Doerr.
Tom Kolditz:
And as I talked to him, we're friends now, I know him pretty well, the process that he described, that he does for Mr. Doerr, is really Kleiner Perkins or John Doerr's venture capitals, or you'll find a very promising young tech ops entrepreneur, somebody that has a big idea, somebody that has a technology
that's going to potentially change the world. But in most cases, those people aren't prepared to lead or to create a company.
Tom Kolditz:
So a head-hunter will go out and find a CEO, find a COO, find a CFO, and they will build a company around that person. And the reason they have to do that is because higher education does not equip people to move forward with their education. They give them an education, they do a great job at that, but they don't give them the tools to apply it. And we see this all the time with young people who want to do things but they just can't seem to get others behind it, they just can't seem to make it happen. And we want to eliminate that.
Tom Kolditz:
It's true that businesses that do leader development do better, but they shouldn't have to. Businesses sell services, make widgets, develop technologies, they shouldn't have to run a developmental enterprise because higher ed failed to do it. They should get at least a partially baked product from higher ed. And that is not happening right now. And it hurts society writ large to have people who are well-educated but not interpersonally adroit enough to get things done.
David Droogleever:
I love that, because I'm thinking about my own career and how many different leadership development programs I've been through after school and seeing, to your point, the amount of resource, time, and energy that businesses devote to developing leaders and different rotational programs and other classes or bringing in consultants, et cetera.
David Droogleever:
So, Tom, maybe one or two more final topics and I want to leave you some space for a call to action here. I'm going to call this a movement that you're creating, and it's a big movement, right? To change the way that higher education is thinking and not just that, but also the approach of higher education towards developing leaders. What does success look like for you? Or maybe what are some of those milestones as you look forward in this movement that you are leading and shepherding forward?
Tom Kolditz:
In the institute, we think it's an attainable goal for us to improve a thousand schools, thousand colleges and universities and constant enhanced developmental experience for a million students a year. We think that's attainable. And the way that we're going about it initially is we have a relationship that we built with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Tom Kolditz:
And so we are building and administering an optional or elective classification. Carnegie classifies all universities, R1, research universities, R2, community colleges, whatever they are. But there are also elective or optional classification. So we've built one for leadership education and development called Leadership for Public Purpose. And we're pretty much finished. It's in the later stages of the pilot phase. And in late-2021 and early '22, we will feel that to 4,500 schools in the U.S, Canada, and Australia, as an option. And most of them will not exercise that option especially in the first year or two. But most of those schools have developing leaders in their mission statement or in their vision.
Tom Kolditz:
And consequently, when stakeholders look at their university, whether they're an alum or a prospective student or even a faculty member, and the school says it's developing students as leaders, but they haven't achieved this Carnegie classification in leadership. It's going to be dissonant. And it's going to create a lot of pressure for schools to self-examine and improve. And that's all we're really looking for. We don't want to tell them how to develop leaders although we share everything. We share our data, our measurement instruments, our process, business practices, all of it.
Tom Kolditz:
But what we want are for universities to self-examine, to look at themselves and say, "Are we doing silly leadertainment things, Navy SEAL-ishness? Are we doing some of these crazy ineffective things and are there better ways that have emerged in leader development science for us to graduate more and better leaders?" And that's what we want at the Doerr Institute. We want an honest self-examination.
Tom Kolditz:
And then this is not rocket science. Any university can do the right and valid things. It's just there's been a tradition of sort of bottom feeding that has grown into something that's deeply embedded in these schools now. And they just have to shake it. They just have to look at themselves with an intellectual honesty about what they're doing for their graduates. And then do that. That's it. And we think we can get a thousand schools involved in the next five to 10 years.
David Droogleever:
Love that. And that answers my question on my list here about your big, hairy audacious goals or your bee hags, as they say. The audience here that's listening as of now is primarily focused of the Rice Business alumni community, and students. So I want to the past the conch shell to you to give some parting words or call to action, keeping in mind that a lot of the Rice Business graduates are listening. So what is your call to action for the folks that are listening given that audience and what else would you like to provide in terms of how to learn more about your book or the Doerr Institute and how to connect with you?
Tom Kolditz:
Well, our real call to action is raising awareness. So when Rice Business grads are talking to graduates of other fine institutions, it would be great if they brought up this issue and got people talking about how leaders are developed in other business schools or in other university settings. I've talked to multiple boards of trustees from universities, Simmons in Boston and Seton Hall on the East Coast. And usually, when we get to that level, magic starts to happen, because boards of trustees can ask hard questions and they can get things done.
Tom Kolditz:
It usually does not start at the individual professor or program level. They're too far down the food chain. So for those that have influence with other schools, we'd love some buzz. Leadership Reckoning helps. We took three copies of Leadership Reckoning and sent them to the provost and presidents of the top 200 schools in the country. So we've got thank you notes from how our university and the University of Pennsylvania and all kinds of places for doing that.
Tom Kolditz:
And so that part of the movement has already begun, and we'll take any kind of help we can get on that visibility. You can by Leadership Reckoning by going to our website at [e-mail] or going to Amazon, or wherever you want. And we're proud of the book. We think it's an exciting book, but we're not... We didn't do it to sell books, we did it to raise awareness and we'll probably give away as many books as we sell.
Tom Kolditz:
So look the book over, if you have the time, there's a pretty good audio book that was read by a guy named Tom -
David Droogleever:
I know that guy.
Tom Kolditz:
So you'll be able to hear it if you prefer that. But that's something that you can do. The Doerr Institute runs solely on gift funds, and we have ways for alumni to donate to the Doerr Institute and to participate in it that way. If an alum would care to do that, we appreciate it. And we will turn that into development for students. We just did our budget analysis with the provost and the budget people and one of the things we're really proud of is that we spend more money delivering the students than we do salaries. We will develop 800-850 Rice students this year with nine full-time people. We're probably the most efficient delivery mechanism on campus in that way.
Tom Kolditz:
Now we have probably 80 other people who are vendors, or volunteers, or grad student workers, or what have you. In terms of its impact, it punches way above its weight. In particular, we have an opportunity now where we give stipends to students who have financial needs and who couldn't do a leadership role on campus like student association president or something. We give them stipends. They compete for them and we give them stipends.
Tom Kolditz:
And this year, we're going to name each stipend after a donor. And these are not gigantic gifts, three to $5,000 kind of gifts, but they have huge impact for a young person who instead of being a waitress, now she can go and be on the student council, or run a Rice club, or something like that. And it's one way for people to deliberately and directly impact a young person's development as a leader at Rice. So I just mentioned that. It's something that we're just starting to do. We've done the stipends for awhile, but allowing them as the naming opportunities is new.
David Droogleever:
Yeah, that's fantastic. I believe before, you had mentioned some programs for folks that either in the MBA program or maybe post-MBA at Rice. Would you like to call that out as well?
Tom Kolditz:
Yeah, it's very exciting. And of course, we have outsize participation by MBAs in all of our programming. We also have a custom-designed coach training course just for MBAs at Rice. We're looking to do possibly a second one. Two a year. I already mentioned the coach training that alumni could come to. Ad
we've train many, many Rice alumni as professional coaches. And they augment their income with that. And it becomes a professional credential and a skill set.
Tom Kolditz:
We offer professional coaching to Rice alumni. Again, on a donation basis, but by the time we give those alumni about 10 to 15% discount. And they can deduct the donation from their taxes. It's the cheapest way it used to be get a coach without a doubt. And again, these coaches are well-developed coaches in the Houston business community. They're coaching oil execs in the morning and Rice students in the afternoon. So they're very high quality people delivering measurable results.
David Droogleever:
Thank you for that. And so I think that wraps up for today, Tom, slash Dr. Kolditz, slash General Kolditz. So this has been an absolute pleasure. I have goosebumps right now just thinking about the movement and just changing the game. That's what you're doing. I think it's so cool. So for folks listening, if you don't see it in the show notes, you can find out more about the Doerr Institute at doerr.rice.edu that's D-O-E-R-R.rice.edu. Or similarly, you can go to leadershipreckoningbook.org to check out Tom's book. So Tom, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure and I cannot wait for folks to tune in.
Tom Kolditz:
Thanks, David.
Christine Dobbyn:
This has been Owl Have You Know. Thanks for listening. You can find links and more information about our guests posts and announcements on our website, business.rice.edu. Please subscribe to this podcast wherever you find your favorite podcasts, and leave us a comment while you're at it. Let us know what you think. Owl Have You Know is a production of Rice Business and is sponsored by the Rice Business Alumni Board. The host of Owl Have You Know are myself, Christine Dobbyn, and David Droogleever