The Dean's List #40: More from the Hartley File

Hi everyone, Just as I thought, Gary has been an amazing resource, and we actually talked a couple of times for the Dean’s List, so this won’t be the last you hear of him. Gary has thought so much about what these jobs require, and he’s actually put that thinking into a document called The Roadmap, which he’s been adding to and evolving for more than a decade. At a deans meeting later in the month, Gary is going to talk about The Roadmap, so I won’t steal that thunder here. For this week, I’ve stuck to the Dean’s List questions, and we’ll pick up our conversation about The Roadmap after we hear directly from the source about it.

What did you think the job and the role of the dean were before you got the job and what do you think they are now?

What hit me right off the bat is that it's more task oriented than people oriented and I felt like I wanted to change that. I didn't want to leave or sabotage it or be mad at the people I worked for or any of that. I've always felt like I could suggest or demonstrate some changes that would make it a better job – more effective, more fun, more accessible. If the person who was in charge was somebody that was open to conversation about that, I loved having that conversation. The thing that hit me right off the bat here at Los Rios was that Sue Lorimer [former Deputy Chancellor of Los Rios] seemed to have really good ideas about that and was very people oriented. There was another person I worked with that was just the opposite. That person was very command and control oriented — You know, ‘You need to be doing this, this and this. I was thinking, ‘This is my first time as a dean, I don't even know what this is, let alone how to do it.’ I could see the two things very closely paralleled each other: what it could be and what it was.

What is your approach to difficult conversations? How do you prepare?

So this might be a radical answer: Go in without memory, desire, or understanding. Let's say you're a therapist, right? You're fully trained, ready, armored even. You pretty much know if they say this, you're going to say that. And as long as you remember all that stuff, you're good. The problem is that all that preparation is kind of like a lawyer going into a courtroom with a briefcase full of documents. ‘I’ve got my whole case right here. It's 260 pages.’ The problem is you tend to focus your energy on taking what the other person says and fitting it to what you're prepared to talk about, to the case you brought. You twist it, turn it, squish it, massage it, whatever you have to do to fit it into that case, which represents what you're prepared to deal with. What that does is completely negate everything that they say because you're not listening. You're thinking of how to plug it into your defense. The truth is that as soon as you get defensive, you make the other person the judge. You're building a defense against their side of things, and you're trying to convince them that you're right just like you would a judge. Being defensive is automatically counterproductive because you're taking something that you believe — or think you do — and you're presenting it to that other person, who then is going to tell you whether you're right or wrong, which is exactly what you don't want. The flip side of that is not to accuse anybody of anything, because if you accuse them of anything, they're going to be on the defensive. Now you're the judge, and they're going to be mad at you because you've debunked everything that they said. And maybe you're smarter than them and maybe you aren't. Maybe you're more articulate, maybe you aren't. Who wants to take that chance, right? I put my money on going in there to listen, to hear what's going on. When it's a difficult conversation, I completely stay away from accusation. After a long period of time doing this with different people and at different places, my perception was that it seemed to me like the people who are good with people are much more effective in the job than people who are good with spreadsheets and policies and those kinds of things. I think the advantage we have as people oriented folks is that we're kind of ready for anything. If you're all about the rules, regulations, the customs and the procedures, you're trying to fit people into those, which doesn't work very well because people are all different. When it comes right down to it, the policies are a collection of statements that were put together because people couldn't follow the previous policies and procedures.

What seemed important in the beginning that doesn’t now? And vice-versa?

Curriculum. That was a thing that I didn't really have that much interest in because I've never been a dean over anything I was a certified expert in. So I was never Dean of Sociology or Psychology or any of those. I had chops in all those areas, but that isn't what I did. You realize that curriculum is faculty purview and that you need to stay the heck out of it. So that kind of resolved itself over that first year. But not being involved in the curriculum doesn't mean you have to fall back on just the tasks either. Because no matter what you're deaning, you've got people. I try to understand the people and I don't try to understand their discipline. I don't ask them many questions about their discipline. I like to understand their excitement. I like to understand what I call The Three E's: energy, excitement and enthusiasm. And that's what I look for when I'm on a hiring committee, too. Because you can't import that. That's got to come as part of the package.

Are there any book, podcast or website recommendations that help with work life?

There are a couple of great Ted Talks with a guy named Daniel Pink. One is about motivation and one is about regret.

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Something to think about:

I'm not a big guy for the poster that says, ‘Remember to respect people’ and all of that kind of stuff. I'm more the guy that makes sure that comes out of my mouth three or four times a day.

— Gary Hartley

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