Encouraging Words
While preparing for a workshop I’m facilitating this week, I pulled an oldie but a goodie from my bookshelf. In 1987 James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner published The Leadership Challenge in which they named the five practices of exemplary leadership. In 1999, they published a book focusing on one of those five practices, Encouraging the Heart:…
Read MoreCulture, Strategy, and Breakfast
Unsure what to write about, I decided to play Newsletter Tarot this week. I have a deck of notecards and on each one is a lesson learned, an idea, or a story. Someday I might figure out a way to string them together into a book, but for now they sit in my desk drawer. Twice…
Read MoreBalance and Buckets
This week I went to a family reunion. At least that’s what it feels like to me. Officially, the event was a professional conference for TACUSPA (Texas Association of College and University Student Personnel Administrators). There are many reasons it feels like a reunion to me. There’s longevity – I first attended this conference thirty-nine years…
Read MoreWhat is Fair?
Many summers ago, I was working in the only real legal job I ever had. I was serving as a law clerk with a small outpost of a large legal firm. The lawyers were part of the labor and employment law of this firm. I hadn’t yet taken those courses though they proved to be…
Read MoreChange, Creativity, and Curiosity
Last week I wrote about change, asking ‘what can you change?’ Tuesday morning I did a keynote for the Division of Student Affairs at Texas State University. Their Vice President, Cynthia Hernandez, gave me the title, “Embracing Change and Enhancing Creativity” which she apparently got from my website. I decided I’d share a bit of that…
Read MoreOne Small Change
I was wondering about the topic or this newsletter and found this week’s quote in Seth Godin’s daily, yes daily newsletter. (And I’m a faithful reader. It doesn’t hurt that he mostly writes short essays, but I also find tidbits regularly.) And then I found out I’m currently hanging out in one of the many resting…
Read MoreWhat Can You Let Go?
I’ve had a couple of conversations about burnout this week. On the one hand it’s much too early in a normal academic year for so many people on campus to be so worn out. But of course, this is anything but a normal year. What’s a leader to do? I’ve heard of several situations where…
Read MoreDegrees of Freedom
I’ve been thinking about the concept of ‘degrees of freedom’ recently. It’s a term I’ve used without thinking about it to mean the level of choice we have in our decision-making, usually in the context of leadership and organizational life. It turns out that there’s no real definition for that usage – that I can…
Read MoreBeing Whimsical (Seriously)
“Okay, so it’s summer time again, and while not as hot as last summer, when the drought was so heavy that UTSA lay under the horrendous heat like coal that has been buried for millions of years, under thousands of pounds of pressure creating diamonds that glisten like ice in the glass of sweet tea…
Read MoreStorytelling as a Leadership Skill
What stories are you telling these days? What stories are your campus leaders telling? When I entered the phrase “storytelling as leadership” into the Google search bar, it told me there were more than 71 million pages to review. In other words, the idea that leaders need to be able to tell a compelling story is…
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