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Career education is a vital pipeline to high demand jobs in the workforce. Students from all walks of life benefit from the opportunity to pursue their career education goals and find new employment opportunities. Join Dr. Jason Altmire, President and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU), as he discusses the issues and innovations affecting postsecondary career education. Twice monthly, he and his guests discuss politics, business, and current events impacting education and public policy.
Jason Altmire (00:04):
Hello and welcome to another edition of Career Education Report. I'm Jason Altmire, and today we are going to talk about leadership. And we have Melanie Ho, who is the founder of Strategic Imagination, which is a business consulting firm that focuses on organizational leadership and transformational change. And she has worked for all types of organizations, Fortune 500 companies, startups, universities, nonprofits, government groups. She's a noted and award-winning author, and she speaks all across the country on topics related to leadership.
(00:44):
So Melanie, thank you very much for being with us.
Melanie Ho (00:47):
Oh, thanks for having me. It's a delight to be here with you.
Jason Altmire (00:49):
Maybe we can start... Because I know whenever people hear about leadership consulting, they wonder, well, what are the credentials of this person who's lecturing me about leadership? So you have an incredibly impressive background. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what your expertise is related to organizational leadership.
Melanie Ho (01:08):
Yes, and I'm especially passionate about higher education leadership. I was one of the founding staff members of EAB, the research and consulting firm here in Washington DC, founded a lot of EAB's products and memberships that serve college and university leaders, so deans, provosts, presidents, chief business officers. Spent essentially 12 years out working largely with these leaders on strategic issues, and that was where they would usually start. They would come to us with cost-cutting, or revenue growth, or enrollment growth, or success, or some kind of strategy challenge. And quickly after hundreds of conversations, it was very apparent that no matter what the issue, there were actually leadership challenges that we needed to work through as we were trying to figure out how to implement the strategy.
(01:55):
And so after 12 years of that, and at the same time growing my own career, becoming a senior vice president at EAB, overseeing our research and product teams, I started to see just how much leaders needed a completely different way of thinking about these topics. And my background before that had been getting a PhD in literature teaching visual culture at UCLA, teaching fiction. And I started to bring these two... I think of these as sort of two halves of my life together, this interest in the imagination and art and literature and fiction and poetry and just anything that unlocks that right brain and a lot of the work I've been doing on strategy. How do we get people to think differently there? And so found this Strategic Imagination really to bring those two interests together and bring play and imagination to a lot of these really difficult entrenched leadership topics.
Jason Altmire (02:48):
Yeah, talk more about that. I was going to ask you because Strategic Imagination, your firm, takes a very unique approach to leadership based upon that other side of the brain that you were talking. So yeah, discuss how that comes together.
Melanie Ho (03:02):
What I find is that when it comes to a lot of these topics, and I do a lot in diversity, equity, and inclusion, but I think this is true for any kind of big change leadership, change management topic, we tend to get a little bit stuck sometimes without even realizing it. Our brains are imprinted on something that we were doing in the past. Okay, what would it be like to change? We start to envision the worst case scenario. We start to want to get deep in the data. Analysis paralysis can kick it. There are just all kinds of reasons why our brains can shut down when it comes to any kind of big change. And when I became fascinated by really starting in graduate school, or even as an undergrad, but more and more over the years, was, how can we use art to get people out of that?
(03:43):
And so I'll take executive teams and give them markers and poster board and have them draw comics, for example. It's something that I found really interesting among a number of Fortune 500 companies. Lowe's, for example, the hardware store, not the hotel chain, Boeing, Nike, a lot of these companies were using methods from science fiction, from comic book artists as a way to get their boards thinking bigger, and it's something I've been really excited to bring into higher education. Just you give people some arts and craft supplies and some markers and that inner child kicks in. I remember doing this once with a group of deans. And the president, who I'll have to say was a little bit skeptical of the approach, he agreed because his chief of staff is someone who had come to a session of mine and had been convinced. And I remember the president just walking around the room, seeing all of these deans make dioramas about the future of their university. And he said, "Wow, look at all these highbrow people and they're using scissors and stickers and they're having a good time." But it just really unlocks something.
Jason Altmire (04:43):
Is leadership something that can be learned and taught? This is a theoretical discussion that takes place of, how effective is it? Are people inherently good leaders, or is it something that's an acquired skill?
Melanie Ho (04:57):
So I think that there are different styles of leadership needed for different types of organizations in different moments, say in history, and that probably each of us... I believe everybody has leadership potential and leadership capacity, that each of us probably has a different style that makes the most sense for us and just our personality, maybe the different competencies that we've developed since we were younger. So I think everybody has the ability to be a leader, but we all probably need to grow in the leadership styles or competencies that are needed for a particular moment or particular organization.
Jason Altmire (05:34):
When you think about organizational culture and how that fits in, how much of the culture of an organization is driven by leadership? And what can leaders do to positively influence that culture?
Melanie Ho (05:49):
I don't know if I can give it a percentage, because in some ways, probably one of the most destructive forms of leadership... You could have two forms of destructive leadership. There's leadership that tries too hard to set the culture top down when it's going to happen bottoms up anyway, and there's leadership that's absentee. There was this great article in the Harvard Business Review, I think it was a few years ago, on how people don't actually even realize that the most destructive kind of leaders is the completely absentee one, and the impact that has on morale and engagement. And so it really is this difficult tightrope of ensuring that the leader is setting the tone, communicating properly, understanding from the ground up, all the barriers that staff are facing, especially now, but also really allowing the solutions and the ideas and the culture to be set from those who are closest to the ground.
Jason Altmire (06:43):
And how much has this changed and evolved since COVID now that many businesses are in at least a hybrid environment or somewhat virtual business setting? Has it changed the way that leaders have to operate to be successful?
Melanie Ho (06:58):
I don't think it's changed enough. I think that during the pandemic and kind of the height of it, that leaders were trying a lot of different new things, were kind of willing to throw out the old playbook and say, "Okay, we've got to listen to everyone. We've got to over-communicate. All of this is really important. We have to take into account the whole person. Our staff are burnt out. They're trying to get their work done while in their home in the middle of this crisis." When I talk to both leaders and just folks on the ground now, it feels like over the past year, there's just this desire to return back to how it was before and kind of a lack of recognition that we are still facing change fatigue, that there's still considerable uncertainty that we've all gone through this collective trauma together, and that staff are all feeling very skeptical and very burnt out. And I think there is this desire to pretend that's not the case.
Jason Altmire (07:52):
How much, with large organizations where you have multiple different functional areas, how much is the effectiveness related to the collaboration of those functional areas? And what can the leader do to facilitate that?
Melanie Ho (08:08):
The biggest problem I think for any organization, but especially in higher education, when it comes to the bigger or bolder changes we need moving forward, to me, comes down to silos. And that a silo can be the office literally next door to you. It can be folks on the same team even in the same reporting line, and they can feel siloed, not to mention the silos that we have across functions, across campuses, branches, and any kind of multi-campus, multi-institutional institution. So I definitely think that that is probably one of the first places any leader needs to look, is where do we have a silo problem, and how is that silo problem even worse than it used to be because of the challenge of the hybrid environment, the kind of entrenching that has happened through the pandemic?
Jason Altmire (08:55):
How much more difficult does that become when you have a school that has multiple campuses? Many of the career schools that we represent have campuses scattered across large regions or even across the country.
Melanie Ho (09:09):
That's been an interesting thing for me to watch across the last few years, because in some ways, I think that organizations and institutions that already had multiple locations were better prepared for the pandemic. They already knew how to work across time zones. They were probably more likely to have some of the technologies in place. And so on the one hand, I think there's this advantage to those who already had a distributed workplace. On the other hand, right now, so many of the types of challenges and tensions that we need to work through, if we think about any kind of challenge right now and how easily a new initiative can turn from productive conflict to high conflict, often, it's best if people are actually in the same room together, and the extra effort that it takes for those with multiple locations to make sure, hey, do we have the right retreat days and in days where we're all coming together?
(10:01):
If we're doing virtual retreats, are we structuring those really to best effect, not just the way that we've always done them? So I think for multi-location places, there's both this competitive advantage compared to those who haven't had to deal with that and suddenly were into hybrid, but also some extra work and thinking that's probably even needed more now for when are we bringing people together and how do we do that intentionally.
Jason Altmire (10:24):
You've partnered with the Chronicle of Higher Education on a project specific to Women in Leadership, something that you have written about. I know you wrote a book largely on that topic, and you have a lot of expertise. Talk about your interest in that subject of women in leadership and what that project with the Chronicle is all about.
Melanie Ho (10:43):
It's a program I'm really excited about that we launched this year and we'll be running again next year called Women Leading Change, bringing together women at different levels of leadership to come together to talk about the unique challenges that women in higher education face. And also, we had a summit for women and allies to talk about gender equity in higher education. And it really came about as I was writing my book Beyond Leaning In, which looks at challenges that women face across industries. I interviewed women in countless interviews, industries, organizational types, but also many in higher education, because at the time, I was also working as a higher education consultant. And what I found was that women in higher education expressed these really unique challenges, and they were the challenges of being underestimated rather than underrepresented.
(11:32):
I would talk to women who were in, for example, finance or tech or construction, and they were dealing with representation issues and just getting a seat in the table, but they actually also would talk about how their employers had really dedicated women in leadership initiatives. Often, there were men at their employers that had male ally groups trying to figure out how to solve these problems. In higher education, I kind of heard this frustration, this was actually also true in healthcare nonprofits and government groups, with women saying, because there is decent representation here, there are women leaders, there are women presidents, there are women VPs, there are women on our boards, there's this perception that the gender gap has been solved. And still, we don't have as many women in the highest level positions. It can be even harder for women of color. But also just that at any given level of the organizational chart, if a entry level person is facing unconscious bias based on gender, that doesn't change because there's a woman president of the organization.
(12:37):
And I would also talk to women presidents about a lot of the challenges that they were facing, and it really led me to go deep into just understanding, okay, even in industries like higher education, healthcare, where women are well-represented, what are the extra challenges that are there as women advance the ladder, but also what can be very frustrating about it, because this conversation is often behind closed doors.
Jason Altmire (13:02):
I've seen commentary and thought leaders commentate on the fact that some of the issues with women in leadership position are how they relate to one another versus how they relate to men in leadership positions. Is there anything to that? Do they relate to one another differently when they're both leaders?
Melanie Ho (13:24):
I tend to think that there's probably a little bit too much emphasis on what's known as the queen bee phenomenon or the idea that women leaders aren't as kind to other women leaders. There's always some of that there in some organizations, but I tend to not think that that's the main problem. I kind of look at that as there are just these systemic and cultural biases that we all have no matter our gender, and that as women are advancing in that, for example, maybe a comment that a man might make would be considered as confident. The woman making that same statement is considered aggressive. And it's both women and men who are judging that woman on that. It's not that women are judging the woman by that standard because they don't like other women.
(14:14):
It's just that we've all been subject to the same cultural landscape. I think of it as that David Foster Wallace commencement speech. This is water where you've got the two fish, and the older fish goes by the younger fish. And how's the water? And the younger fish say, "Well, what's water?" Right? And that's kind of it, that we are in this water of biases and we don't necessarily know it.
Jason Altmire (14:39):
So what is the solution to that problem?
Melanie Ho (14:39):
I tend to look at it two ways, and this is how I set up the Chronicle program, was to have both a part of the program where we look at, for any given woman in a leadership position, on an individual level, how do you find your voice in a system that's already challenging? How do you figure out how to navigate these biases? But that fundamentally, the answer is to also look at systemic and cultural change. And that can range from trying to figure out what policies we have that might be biased, say in looking at hiring decisions, but it can also just be how do we help everybody with comfortably calling out if there's bias going on in an informal meeting? If everybody in a meeting means well, and we know the intent is good, it can be really uncomfortable to say, "Oh, wait, are we evaluating that man and that woman by different standards? And what do we need to do about that?"
(15:37):
And so I do a lot with organizations on how do we identify red flags? How do we think about bystander intervention tactics? And how do we not call people out, but call people in to the conversation?
Jason Altmire (15:50):
Another thing that you focus on is reputation and how to deal with challenges that occur. And as you know, we represent the career college sector, primarily proprietary schools, and there have been reputational challenges due to some very large and well-publicized examples of wrongdoing that have occurred in the past. How do you recommend that businesses and nonprofit organizations and schools, whatever the organization might be, address issues of reputation that are not directly a result of their own actions, but are the actions of others within their sector?
Melanie Ho (16:29):
I think it's so hard right now for really in all industries because the customer is so skeptical and the customer feels often a loss of trust. In institutions as a whole, I think we're coming to a point where people just kind of feel that sense of, do I trust institutions the way that I used to? And so I think it comes down then to trust and how to build that with customers by really showing how much we understand what's challenging for them in a way that's different from the past. I was working with a group of university leaders recently, and we were doing a lot of discussion on, okay, well, what's different now compared to before the pandemic? And one thing that they all talked about was just this sense for all of our learners, a sense of collective, just exhaustion, fragmentation, feeling alienated from society, from the world, the institutions.
(17:28):
And that makes it very hard to get people attached to an institution. But because of that, we also have this opportunity to say, "Okay, in this world, fragmentation and chaos and alienation and just feeling like things are changing, this institution, we can be a place that you can trust. We can be a place that brings safety to you, that brings calm to you." So really just start with, okay, putting ourselves in the shoes of the learner, and what is just distinctly hard for them now that wasn't in the case, and then showing them that they can trust us because we get that
Jason Altmire (17:58):
In higher education, there's a lot more access to data than there was say a decade ago. You can very easily compare outcomes of institutions across pretty much any measure that you look at. If you're a student thinking about where you want to go to school, you have information that wasn't available 10 years ago. And if you're someone who is a critic of a sector or someone who is writing about or thinking about higher education, you now have the ability to look at outcomes in a way that wasn't possible. How has that affected the role that leaders play in higher ed?
Melanie Ho (18:34):
It's a really interesting question because I think everything, there's sort of pros and cons to it, and that on the pro side, it has led us to think more about, well, what are the outcomes of our product. On the con side, besides that sometimes an obsession with data can take away from the human element, but the other con to it is that if we define data too strictly, it doesn't get down to the real life of how learners are and what they're looking for. And that's what really concerns me as I think about how we serve non-traditional learners, that so much of, as you know, data and outcomes are really built around just this perception of the 18-year-old that's going to graduate in four years, and that's just so increasingly not the case.
(19:19):
And especially many of the institutions that you work with, we've got to figure out how to take into account that every learner has their own outcomes that make sense for them, and it might not be tied to specific timeframe or to growing their income a certain amount. And so I find that there's all this data out there and that's great, but the data is not yet customized. The data does not yet take into account the fact that people have customized outcomes. And to me, there's a real problem with that, and I worry about how that will lead institutions to just focusing on the easiest-to-measure outcomes instead of the ones that match the learner's individual pathways.
Jason Altmire (20:03):
Our guest today has been Melanie Ho. She is the founder of Strategic Imagination, which is a leadership consulting firm. She's an award-winning author, renowned public speaker. Melanie, if somebody wanted to get in touch with you, learn more about your work, how would they do so?
Melanie Ho (20:20):
My website's probably the easiest way. It's easy, just my name, www.mealnieho.com. And all my social medias are linked there as well, so people can feel free to connect to me that way too.
Jason Altmire (20:32):
Melanie Ho, thank you for being with us.
Melanie Ho (20:34):
Thanks for having me.
Jason Altmire (20:39):
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Career Education Report. Subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For more information, visit our website at career.org and follow us on Twitter @cecued. That's @C-E-C-U-E-D. Thank you for listening.