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Silver Medal Universities and Unhappy Faculty

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Medalists: Gold, Bronze & Silver

As the memory of the London Olympics fades into the rearview mirror, an interesting piece of psychological research gives us a clue to the origins of a certain kind of dysfunction in a number of universities.  Researchers have noticed that among medalists in the Olympics, gold medalists and bronze medalists tend to be happy campers, living happy post-Olympic lives, and that silver medalists tend to be dissatisfied wondering what might have been.

The problem according to one research study (here) is “what if” or counterfactual thinking and the idea is straightforward.  When gold medalists consider what might have been, the counterfactual thoughts that run through their minds are all negative (“I might not have won the gold medal!!”) and they are justifiably grateful for the result they achieved.  Similarly, bronze medalists when they consider what might have been, concentrate on the negative possibility of getting no medal at all, and they too are happy with their result.

Silver medalists, on the other hand, are different.  When considering what might have been, silver medalists consider the counterfactual possibility that if they had only tried a little harder that they would have won the gold medal.  This counterfactual opportunity causes them dissatisfaction at the time of the event and for periods of time thereafter.

Universities: Gold, Bronze & Silver

Similar reasoning applies to faculty happiness at what we might call gold, bronze & silver universities.  At the top of the heap, the very best universities have faculty who feel blessed to be where they are because counterfactually they would be at a less prestigious place.  At lesser institutions faculty are happy because counterfactually they might not have an academic position at all.

At silver medal universities, faculty members, like silver medal athletes, reason counterfactually how if only things had been a little different that MIT, Harvard, or Stanford would have hired them instead of the very good but not great institution that actually did.  At one university in my experience a commonplace would be to meet faculty members who would say the following:

When I first came here, I expected only to be here a few years, and I blinked and I’ve been here 25 years.  Of course, it’s a great place to raise kids.

The expectation to be in a silver medal university only a few years suggests that a gold medal university will come to its senses (and to the rescue) and hire the silver medalist faculty member away.  That this doesn’t happen is a source of deep career disappointment that often never heals.

Silver Medal Administrators

The dysfunction of a silver medal institution can be pervasive.  Faculty members have a heightened need to seek recognition in an environment unable to dole it out.  Silver medal administrators–due to their own counterfactual thinking–tend to act as if they were gold medalists, and doing so requires them to withhold honors from all but the very best faculty members.  Kudos are reserved for the Nobel Prize winners and National Medalists, and excellent faculty member has trouble getting a mention in a press release.  This cycle of seeking, not giving, and not getting recognition exacerbates individual silver medal feelings, creating a situation that sustains unhappiness and dissatisfaction among a substantial proportion of the faculty.

First Step: Awareness

Matters of status and recognition are difficult ones, but the start of a way out of the cycle of dissatisfaction is for faculty and leaders to become aware of this mechanism and to reflect on the validity of the underlying counterfactual thinking.

Need a Strategic Plan? Consider SOAR in Place of SWOT

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In strategic thinking circles, the SWOT model is a commonly used framework for strategic planning and stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  The model is generative and has been helpful to many strategic planners over many years.

Having said this, there’s an alternative that is getting increasing attention called SOAR or strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results.  SOAR grows out of the movement toward appreciative inquiry in which emphasis is placed on considering positive opportunities and possibilities as opposed to problems.  While SWOT spends half of its distinctions on the what might go wrong, SOAR spends 100% of its categories on creating intention for future positive outcomes.

The shift from problem solving to opportunity finding is a subtle one, but results from positive psychology and innovation studies support the approach.   For more on SOAR consider the Thin Book of SOAR and for more on appreciative inquiry consider the Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry. 

A Letter to Mr. Churchill: “You Are Not So Kind as You Used to Be”

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Garza Baldwin

Guest post by Garza Baldwin,  www.baldwindavis.com

Below is a nugget that may interest students of leadership. It comes in the form of a letter to Winston Churchill written by his wife Clementine in June 1940, just after her husband became Prime Minister. Speaking truth to power, she makes some observations that we all might wish to preserve in our Emotional Intelligence files. I have excerpted portions of the original post and Mrs. Churchill’s letter, and those interested in the original post can read the full Churchill article here and other letters on the delightful blog called lettersofnote.com.

Full Post Source: lettersofnote.com

It’s difficult to imagine the stress experienced by Winston Churchill in June of 1940, as WWII gathered pace just a couple of months after he first became Prime Minister. Behind the scenes, however, the weight on his shoulders was noticed and felt by all those around him , so much so that on the 27th of the month, his wife, Clementine, wrote him the following superb letter and essentially advised him to calm down and be kind to his staff.

(Source: Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills, via Mark Anderson)

One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me & told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner ˜ It seems your Private Secretaries have agreed to behave like school boys & ‘take what’s coming to them’ & then escape out of your presence shrugging their shoulders ˜ Higher up, if an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming. I was astonished & upset because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you ˜ I said this & I was told ‘No doubt it’s the strain’ ˜

My Darling Winston ˜ I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.

The letter goes on to remind Mr. Churchill of the need for what we now recognize as emotional intelligence, even in times of great organizational stress, and it is comforting to know that  a leader of Winston Churchill’s caliber needed the occasional reminder from loved ones to be mindful of such matters. Read the full post and letter here.

Enjoy, Garza Baldwin

Garza Baldwin is a principal of Baldwin Davis Group (http://www.baldwindavis.com), a coaching and leadership development firm in Charlotte, NC.  Garza specializes in providing such services to law firms and lawyers, other service professionals, and C-suite, senior management and middle management executives.

Calm and the 2nd Agreement

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An earlier post (here) talked about understanding the nature of complaints and one royal road to feeling calmer through the speech act of making clearer requests.  This post discusses an important point made by Don Migel Ruiz in his bestseller, The Four Agreements, in particular, a point made in his 2nd agreement, “Don’t take anything personally,” but before getting to that point let me recount a short story of my introduction to the text.

I was introduced to this text by my coach Bev Jones (here), but I must confess that I was a reluctant reader of the book, resisting her suggestion for the better part of 9 or 10 months. When I originally looked at the book in early 2010, it seemed like a lot of soft-side hooey, and as an engineer, my strong left brain resisted the idea that it might contain anything useful for me.  Later, when I was taking training as a coach myself, I had been softened up sufficiently to open and read the book, and I must confess that the four agreements almost immediately blew my mind and changed my life.

The poster to the left reproduces the agreements with some elaboration.  The agreements are easy to state, and not so easy to apply, but if you do apply them, they can result in a calmer, easier existence.  Here they are:

    1. Be impeccable with your word.
    2. Don’t take anything personally.
    3. Don’t make assumptions.
    4. Always do your best.

This post is not the place to go into each of them, and for a fuller treatment, just read the book (here and don’t wait 9 or 10 months to overcome your hooey filter), but I do want to spend a bit of time on the 2nd agreement: “Don’t Take Anything Personally.”

A major source of lack of peace in our lives is the words that people say about us or the actions that they take with respect to us, and our interpretation of those words or actions and our resulting feelings. When someone says something that offends us, for example, there are three distinct parts to the chain of events:  (1) The thing said, (2) our interpretation of it, and (3) our emotional reaction to our interpretation.  Two of the three things are occurring in our minds, but oftentimes we experience the three collapsed into one.

This unity of experience is revealed in the way we talk about such events, words such as “He made me feel bad,” “She snubbed me at the party.” and the like, but the simple decomposition of the discrete events (speech or act by another, interpretation, and feeling) shows that there is a way to nip the bad feeling in the bud by refusing to interpret the words or deeds personally.  In other words, when you are about to feel bad as a result of something someone says or does (or doesn’t say or doesn’t do) with respect to you, invoke the 2nd agreement.

When I first discuss this with clients, they tend to resist, and say that it is impossible.  After all, how could you interpret the act any other way? It was intended, wasn’t it?  But even when harm or insult is intended, we have a choice, and recognizing that we are always in choice about our interpretations (and thus our feelings) is liberating in a way that is hard to fathom at first.  The trick to this is catching the reaction before it happens, and neuroscientist Dan Siegel says that we have a magic quarter of a second to invoke our awareness before a reaction takes place. If we use this quarter of a second, and invoke the 2nd agreement, we can have greater and longer lasting calm, even in the face of controversy or other external turmoil.

To get on the road to greater calm, read The Four Agreeements here or visit Don Migel Ruiz’s website here.

 

An Engineering Education Tops Disciplinary ROI

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CNNMoney reports that of the 15 top college majors, ten are in disciplines of engineering or engineering technology.  Here’s the list and the associated salaries:

  1. Pre-med $100,000
  2. Computer systems engineering $85,000
  3. Pharmacy $84,000
  4. Chemical engineering $80,000
  5. Electrical and electronics engineering $75,000
  6. Mechanical engineering $75,000
  7. Aerospace and aeronautical engineering $74,000
  8. Computer science $73,000
  9. Industrial engineering $73,000
  10. Physics and astronomy $72,200
  11. Civil engineering $70,000
  12. Electrical and electronics engineering technology $65,000
  13. Economics $63,300
  14. Financial management $63,000
  15. Mechanical engineering technology $63,000

Even the non-engineering disciplines in the top 15 are quantitative in nature.  Read the full article here.

Learning from Student Leaders and Junior Enterprise in Brazil

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I was an academic for 27.5 years before I left to start ThreeJoy and the Big Beacon, and I’ve been to scores of conferences in a score of countries, but perhaps the coolest conference I ever attended was run by students last week (6-10 August 2012) for students, students who are immersed in giving themselves the educations their formal schooling refuses to provide.

Called JEWC or the Junior Enterprise World Congress (here), 2100 students from around the globe gathered at Paraty, Brazil in the State of Rio De Janeiro south of the city of the same name to celebrate their movement of students creating enterprises or consultorias to provide business services in their disciplines to local business as the royal road to giving themselves the practical education today’s theoretically dominated educational system refuses to provide.

I previously wrote about my interaction with Junior Enterprise at UFMG or Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (post here), and I was prepared to see very cool kids in action, but I wasn’t prepared for the size or scope of the event, the sheer organizational skill required to put on the event, or the professionalism of the student chapters that had gathered from around the world to learn, to be inspired, and to bathe in the collective enthusiasm of their movement.

Two  highlight of the visit for me were the opportunity to meet with student leaders of the movement (picture above) and share the Big Beacon with the students and point out how the Big Beacon is aligned with Junior Enterprise.  The presentation below suggests how Junior Enterprise has its campuses surrounded and now the time has come to move (a) around, (b) inward, and (c) inside to help transform higher education to be aligned with an era that values initiative and courageous action, not passivity and timid acquiescence to the status quo.

[slideshare id=13957903&doc=three-steps-8-2012-pptx-120813084339-phpapp02]

Junior Enterprise started in France in 1967 (see here) and it still has a big footprint in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, but Brasil Junior (here) is the largest Junior Enterprise presence on the planet, and I hope to go back and learn more about this important movement.  Those interested in a model for student-centered and student-run education could do worse than to go to Europe or Brazil and check out Junior Enterprise, today.

Higher Education Bubble

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Parents pay more and more for their children to learn less and less from faculty members who are increasingly less engaged in education and learning.  Can this go on?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAwBN2Q8L14

“No,” says Glenn Reynolds, who thinks it’s a bubble.  Watch the RSA-style animation in the video above or read the book here. What do you think?

Urgency-Importance Revisited or the Covey-Rotter Quad

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I was going through some old posts on my blog for my book the Entrepreneurial Engineer and found this (here) somewhat different take on Stephen Covey’s famous urgency-importance distinction.

In The Entrepreneurial Engineer I talk about Julian Rotter’s work on the distinction between those with internal versus external motivation. In Stephen Covey’s famous book, he talks about the distinction between matters that are urgent versus those that are important.  The connection between these two authors is this. Matters that are urgent are important to someone other than you (externally motivated) and matters that are important get their importance because they are consistent with your internal motivation and goals. Saying this out loud helps highlight the point Covey was making and helps us name the quadrants of his famous urgency-importance square. Here in deference to Rotter’s earlier work, we call the diagram the Rotter-Covey Square and name the four quadrants something other than I, II, II, and IV.

Read the whole post (here) & take a look at the The Entrepreneurial Engineer on Google Books or Amazon (here).

HuffPo Piece–Below the Waterline: A Deep Dive to Rethink Engineering Education

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There’s a new piece up on Huffington Post here called Below the Waterline: A Deep Dive to Rethink Engineering Education.  This pieces discusses the ways that education concentrates on particular facts and figures and processes (above the waterline), but neglects deeper issues of reflection and learning (below the waterline):

Focusing above the waterline and filling young minds with known facts and knowledge used to be sufficient for engineering education. In the past, engineers were category enhancers, making existing products and technologies faster, better, and more efficient, so mastery of the known used to be enough. Today, however, engineers do so much more. They are no longer category enhancers; they are category creators, bringing to fruition things that don’t yet exist. As such, because we don’t know what future solutions will be needed, we can’t merely pour existing knowledge into students’ heads, hoping that this will be enough; rather, we need to educate deep, lifelong learners so they can adapt, create, innovate, and lead the world to a better future.

Read the whole article here or other articles by Mark Somerville and myself here.

Are You in Judger Mode or Learner Mode?

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There are many things to like about Marilee Adams book Change Your Questions, Change Your Life (here).  Written as a business parable, this book explores the role of asking questions and curiosity in effectiveness at work and in life.  Routinely in my coaching and training practice, I use many of her particular questions as well as her idea of Q-storming (brainstorming with questions) to help clients become more creative and less stuck.

One of the most useful distinctions in the book is the distinction Adams makes between judging and learning.  Oftentimes, someone behaves in a manner we are unaccustomed to or tells us something unfamiliar, and we immediately judge it, oftentimes as something bad.  This is entirely natural, as human beings we are “living-breathing assessment machines,” and the making of assessments and judgments is part of our evolutionary apparatus that once protected us from harm on the savanna.

Of course, what is good for survival in a hostile and dangerous environment  may not be as appropriate in modern civilization, and nowadays we find ourselves in a stream of unconscious judgment during much of our waking hours, a stream of judgment that is misaligned with the relative peace and tranquility of our everyday lives, a stream of judgement that serves us poorly, especially when we need to be innovative, creative, or collaborative.

Adams suggests that being in judgment this way prevents us from learning very much.  By rejecting something as bad, we don’t reflect on it sufficiently long to learn whatever lessons might be embedded in the thing that we are judging.  This is such an important lesson she depicts it graphically in the choice map shown below. When we judge, our judgment locks us into a particular point of view leading to the judger pit, a self-induced morass from which reflection and learning are nearlyimpossible.  When we switch from the judger path to the learner path (through the asking of “switching questions”) our ability to be curious and reflect and learn returns.

A useful exercise is to self-observe your own thoughts and feelings during the course of 2-3 days, and notice what portion of the time you are in judgment of what is happening or being said (or not).   Are you in judgment, 10% 50%, 90%, or exactly what percentage of the day?  In the exercise, you should simply be aware or notice your degree of judgmentalism, but try to not judge yourself (about the degree of judgment) regardless of the outcome.  Awareness is the first step to change, and once we are aware, we can do something different, but especially in this exercise, moving to harsh critical self-judgment misses the opportunity to learn from the observation.

What we do with the results of self-observation is up to us, but a good follow-on question is this.  In what ways does the degree of judgment observed serve me and what ways does it not?  Knowing the percentage of time you are in judger versus learner and then reflecting on whether that serves the life you want to live is a good starting point for effective personal growth and change.