Jorge Burmicky
They also are big believers in the value of listening. But for them, listening isn’t just about the listening, it’s what you do after you have have heard something and so, you know, there is a big piece of this, I think that really comes down to taking that, that notion of listening, and scaling it, and saying, Okay, what does this mean for me as a leader? How do I create systems that allow me to Yes, listen on an interpersonal level, but also, how do I listen across the organization and then act upon that?

Keith Edwards
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW I’m your host. Keith Edwards, today, I’m joined by doctors Kevin McClure and Jorge Burmicky, who conducted the research that led to their report on the seven competencies for the college presidency. I’ve worked with several college presidents, and these connect more than any other piece on senior leadership that I’ve seen. I’m excited to hear from them how this came to be, the seven competencies themselves, and what they have learned since they have been sharing this broadly Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs, we release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com This episode is sponsored by Evolve. Evolve helps senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take action for Transformative Leadership through a personalized cohort based virtual learning experience. Today’s episode is also sponsored by Symplicity, a true partner. Symplicity supports all aspects of student life with technology platforms that empower institutions to make data driven decisions. As I mentioned, I’m your host. Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, gim, his I’m a speaker, author and coach, and I help higher ed leaders and organizations Empower better tomorrows through better leadership, learning and equity. You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com and I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota in the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s get to the conversation. Kevin and Jorge, so glad to have you here. Thank you so much for this research and this report. I find it really empirical and helpful, and those tiny things don’t often go together, but sometimes they do, and I’m glad we’re here to talk about this. Let’s before we dive into the report, let’s learn a little bit about each of you, Jorge, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Jorge Burmicky
Yeah, of course. Thank you, Keith. I really appreciate it. As you mentioned. My name is Jorge ebermiki. My pronouns are he, him, his Ed and I currently serve as an assistant professor of higher education, leadership and policy studies at Howard University in Washington, DC. Particularly excited to be here today, because, as a former student affairs, affairs professional, you know, who the field deeply impacted me, my trajectory, you know, being here as a professor. So this, this particular audience, is one that I’m very excited to be a part of. I worked in Admissions and Enrollment Management, Housing and Residence Life, as many of us student affairs professionals, student involvement and Diversity and Community Engagement. So So yeah, excited to be here. Very broadly, my research for many years has focused around presidential leadership competencies, back when I did my dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin. When I did my PhD in higher education, I focused specifically on Latino women who achieved the college presidency. And part of why I wanted to focus on that particular group is because I often sat in many committees and leadership groups at various universities that I was a part of, and I never saw myself represented in the leadership ranks. So that’s what drove me to studying Latino men who achieved the presidency. What I didn’t realize is that that set me up to study the presidency in various settings, including community colleges, Hispanic serving institutions HBCUs. I’m currently at an HBCU as well as, you know, broad access institutions, which are institutions with a historic and contemporary mission of access. So that’s more or less where my work has taken me in terms of research. Of course, you know, I’m one of those faculty members who always says I ended up here on accident. I wanted to be. You know, when I started my PhD at UT, Austin, I wanted to be a VPSA or to stay in the Student Affairs ranks, but then I realized that I really like research and I really like mentoring students in the classroom and their dissertations and all of that. So had a great experience as a student, and that sort of led me to being a full time researcher and teacher, which is what I do today, but I’ll stop talking, because otherwise I’m telling my whole life story here, and I’ll let Kevin chime in.

Keith Edwards
Well, we’ll get to the rest of the life story in a little bit. Kevin.

Kevin McClure
Yeah, great. Hey everyone. My name is Kevin McClure, and I use he, him his pronouns. And joining you all from Wilmington, North Carolina, where I’m the Murphy distinguished scholar of education and associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and I, interestingly, first started doing research that involves college presidents, not because I was that interested in college presidents themselves. But because I’ve often used people in leadership positions to help me understand other questions at institutions, so my background is actually in studying finance and management questions, usually at broad access institutions like regional public universities and a co director of a research center called the Alliance for research on regional colleges, but a couple of years ago, started kind of stepping into a little bit more directly, studying questions of leadership, including presidential leadership. And had the great fortune of working with Jorge on a chapter that looks at presidential leadership at broad access institutions, and through that, we learned that we’ve got a couple of points of overlap. Included being like the exact same age, having two children that are basically the exact same children’s and so now we get to live the dream of being friends, and also doing a little bit of research on the side. And so now I’m doing a lot more work focused on questions of leadership, but also looking at the higher education workplace and so that has also allowed me to a little bit more directly delve into what good leadership looks like at various levels across the institution, and thrilled to be here a long time listener of the podcast, and really thrilled to just be able to contribute to the conversation.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, I’m glad you’re here, and maybe we’ll give you a chance to talk about caring University here in a little bit, that book project you have coming up, which we’ll do an episode on coming and Kevin was on a finance episode, and Jorge is here for his first time. So really glad to have you here. Kevin, tell us how did this project, uh, come to be you shared a little bit about how the two of you started Get Connected about this. But then this, this project emerged. How did this emerge?

Kevin McClure
Yeah, so this project is actually the brain child of Sean Hartman at Academic Search, and Sean had the idea of doing a bit of an update on some of the prior research that’s been done on presidential competencies, especially now that we’ve had a really tumultuous five to 10 years, and I think there was real interest in trying to get a handle on What does effective college leadership look like now, now that we have experienced the pandemic, we have certainly seen big questions asked around, who wants to be a college president, and what does good college leadership look like as we kind of deal with any number of different really big challenges in higher education. And so he began by kind of assembling a group that include the American academic leadership institute, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the Council of independent colleges, to kind of explore this idea of, let’s do a big project on presidential competencies. And part of this was, of course, that they have been working on helping to support searches for presidents, but also doing leadership development and coaching amongst college presidents. And really felt that there was need for research like this to provide kind of a baseline and provide a resource that can inform that type of work. And so Sean started by connecting with Jorge, based on the great work that Jorge has done on presidents, and this was looking to be a big project. And so he said, Hey, do you want to jump on board and see if we can tackle this together? And so ultimately, the project ended up involving both a survey, a national survey, and focus groups. The survey was sent to over 3000 presidents at ascu institutions and CIC institutions, as well as some other institutions, and we ended up getting about a 25% response rate, so over 700 responses. From really good among super busy people. It is, it is so okay, we could have a whole podcast episode just how we part of getting survey responses from presidents. And we actually took some inspiration from the American Council on Education, which runs a survey of presidents, because they’ve got some tricks that they have developed. And so anyway, it’s a whole thing. We were helped very much, obviously, by the partners that were involved with this. And so it wasn’t like Jorge and I just like sending an email. There was a lot of thought and prep work that went into that. And then we were able to follow up with focus groups. So we did focus groups at the ask ask you annual meeting and the CIC annual meeting, which was really designed to kind of say, All right, we’ve got this survey data. Can you help us understand this? Help us to get a sense of what do some of these competencies look like in practice? And so that enabled us to kind of. More richly describe the competencies beyond just kind of what the survey data was telling us.

Jorge Burmicky
Yeah, and if I don’t mind adding another two things that I wanted to add about what Kevin just shared once on Rio also was a key author of this of this project. He specializes in survey research. He’s a great researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, where he serves as a research associate. So a major shout out to Juan Sanrio. Definitely check out his work. But also, another impetus for doing this work that was very much also brought up by academic search when we were having our initial initial conversations with Sean is that we really wanted to get data that is relevant to individuals who are running leadership institutes, particularly those leadership institutes that are tailored to individuals who want to achieve the presidency. It’s also since Keith you mentioned this very relevant to individuals who work and coaching, because there’s a lot there that we were able to capture. There’s a whole section of the survey that was really tailored at improving or getting more data that is relevant to improving leadership institutes. We know from research, certainly from my own research, that leadership institutes play a huge role in advancing the careers of aspiring leaders who see themselves in the presidency, whether because they finally see themselves represented, or they acquire the skills, the networking that is necessary to be there. So we know that there’s value, and there’s research that supports this. So there’s a there’s a whole section there that really gets more data at how to improve these institutes. So if you’re either running an institute, or if you’re about to be a part of one, or if you’re coaching, this particular research is going to be of great help to you.

Keith Edwards
Yeah. And as I mentioned earlier, I’ve coached maybe a dozen college presidents, and I see a lot of think pieces about the experience I coach a lot of other senior leaders who are, I like to say, a dozen college presidents, another half dozen future college presidents who I think will be on their way there. And I read a lot of these think pieces about the college presidency, and a lot of them sound interesting, or sound like what it should be, or sound like written for imagination. But when I talk with these folks in the day to day real life challenges that they’re navigating, this really gets to that, and I think it probably speaks to your process of gathering a lot of data by so many different people and then engaging in meaning making. So the mix of quantitative and qualitative, right? This is the data, data from the numbers, but then help us do the meaning making. Help us understand. Help us do that. And I think that provides for a much more interesting report to read. It brings it to life. But I also think it helped make sense of some of the numbers that you were getting, and bring that to life. There’s a lot of humanness in this.

Kevin McClure
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that was big for us, I will say so. Jorge and I have done research with college presidents for a while now. And for us, we aren’t just studying a position. These are people. These are people that we’ve met and people that we respect. We have a really good understanding of the challenges that they face. And so we wanted it meant a lot to us, for this document itself to be able to accurately represent what it means to be in this position, and for people to see that kind of their experiences and voices were recognized, you know, as you were talking Keith. And then I’m going to let Jorge kind of introduce some of the competencies, but I will say that there is kind of this internal debate that we have amongst, not really between Jorge and I, but also amongst some of our team members in Academic Search. And it’s interesting, because obviously one impetus behind this was trying to get a handle on in what ways has what it means to be an effective college president. Changed over the last couple of years. But in talking to, for example, Jay lemons, who’s President of Academic Search, he says there’s a piece of this that is really about identifying core leadership dispositions and skills. These are things that, yes, they are important now, they are maybe even more important now, but there are things that make for good leadership, I think, in lots of different places across an organization, but really make for good leadership across time. And so although it’s the case that we were trying to get a better handle on, okay, even forward thinking, What would good leadership look like? You know, five or 10 years from now? There’s a certain piece of this where there is a through line, I think, of just really solid leadership values and skills, regardless of kind of where you sit in the organization, well.

Keith Edwards
And I’ll extend that beyond just higher ed too. I mean, I think these would be great things if you’re running a healthcare company, or if you were principal of a middle school or or so on and so forth. Worth you did come up with seven competencies. So thank you for really cooking it down, making it chunkable. That’s really helpful. Jorge, why don’t you kick us off with these competencies and tell us a little bit about these seven competencies?

Jorge Burmicky
Yeah, and I’d say, you know, these seven competencies come with a caveat in that, yes, we did feel like we had to kind of narrow it down to, you know, when you when you creating a report, you want to make sure that there’s some key takeaways right that you share with the audience. But the reality is that it was an impossible task where these quote, unquote, seven competencies come from, is primarily by looking at the data and seeing what our respondents shared. As you know, top very, very important to keep in mind, but then also, when we use the survey data and we went into the focus groups, these competencies kept being brought up, not necessarily in the using the same language that we use to package them, but more or less within the same team. So we really do want to emphasize that by no means. We’re saying that if you don’t have these seven competencies, you’re not equipped to be a president. We’re also mentioning this by keeping in mind that this is what our respondents and focus groups participants told us. It doesn’t mean that they are perfect and that they have all the knowledge. It means that that’s exactly what they share with us at the time in which we collect the data. So if you’re thinking that something’s missing, you’re probably right. If you’re missing, if you feel like these seven don’t really capture the entire college and university ecosystem, you’re also probably right. But these are the ones that were very salient in both the survey and the focus group that being said, I gotta answer your question. So those seven were trust, building resilience, communication savvy, cabinet and team building emotional intelligence, leading with courage and data acumen and resource management. So those are the seven that the report starts with. Again, there’s so much to unpack about each one of these competencies. And very recently, we were just at the CIC President presidents Institute, and something that, as we were unpacking these competencies with with presidents who were there for professional development, we also realized, and this is something that we just kept seeing, that all of these are so interconnected, and it’s almost like they don’t really make sense when you only discuss one alone. In this particular workshop, we were talking about resilience, but by organically within the hub, talking about data acumen, we talked a lot about communications. We talked a lot about trust building and emotional intelligence, and that wasn’t set up. We really didn’t have a bullet point on our slides to say, hi, remember, to talk about emotional intelligence. It was simply organically brought up with the conversations in the Q A that we have with presidents right then. And this was, I don’t know, last week. It feels like more than that, because of the snow and everything that’s happened. But yeah, it was just last week. So you know, of course, Keith, we can talk about them in whatever order, but we do want to highlight that, yes, they’re all interconnected. If you feel like something’s missing, keep reading the report, because there’s so much in there that you’ll realize that it’s impossible against the package at all. And we really wanted to stay away from the checklist language. Oftentimes people want to look at the bottom of report and look at those bullet points. Okay, so what’s my checklist to to make sure that I’m doing everything right to become a president? No, we also try to stay away from that because, again, it really isn’t a one size fit fits all model. We also something that is really important about this report is that we realize that many of these competencies, or even your understanding of them, has to do with who you are as an individual. What are your identities, but also your context? What kinds of universities are you leading? What kinds of universities have you been a part of when you look at your trajectory. So all of those contextuals and individual characteristics are really important to consider. Kevin, what else do you want to add to this?

Kevin McClure
Yes, maybe we could. Maybe you and I could just share some of our favorite kind of from from Summit, because we both have our favorites that we, you know, as researchers, and have our certain inclinations. So when we see something in the data, we would kind of say, Oh, this is it. You know, I love that this got brought up and was such a clear

Keith Edwards
finding. I love that. I love that plan. And I think just unpacking some of your favorites would be awesome. And we won’t be able to get to everything, but I think that would be a great entree and intrigue people. Two things I don’t want to mention before we get into that. I that these are not just like, here’s the skills, and if you have them, you can be a college president. If you don’t, then you can’t, right? These are things we can develop and build and learn about and get feedback on and develop. So there’s a developmental capacity part of this here. And then Jorge, when you’re talking about them being interconnected, I always imagine. The Olympic rings, right? These five rings that are overlapping, we just need to add two more rings and then put those rings in motion, right where they’re overlapping in different moments, right? If there’s a big protest on campus now you’re focused here, and if they’re you know, you’ve lost your provost, now you’re focused on these rings. And so that was sort of the visual I was getting as you were talking about how they’re interconnected going forward. I like, what did you want to focus on?

Kevin McClure
All right, so, and I agree with that 100% by the way, everything that you just said is very true. And in fact, there are certain definitions of competency that that say it isn’t a competency unless it is something that can be taught and learned and developed. And so that was one of the things that I think we kind of tried to keep in the back of our minds. But alright, so one of my favorites is the trust building piece. I’m a big believer in the value of kind of building up trust capital. And this is, you know, incredibly important, I think, these days where, you know, it’s just not possible for an institution to avoid some type of crisis, and those are moments where having that kind of storehouse of trust becomes really, really important. One of the things that that I read in the data is that the trust piece is very much, very closely connected to listening, and I’m actually going to pair this with a little data source that’s not exactly in the report itself, but comes from listening to lots of higher ed employees for the last couple of years, which is to say they also are big believers in the value of listening. But for them, listening isn’t just about the listening, it’s what you do after you have have heard something and so, you know, there is a big piece of this, I think that really comes down to taking that, that notion of listening, and scaling it, and saying, Okay, what does this mean for me as a leader? How do I create systems that allow me to Yes, listen on an interpersonal level, but also, how do I listen across the organization and then act upon that? So that was huge for us, and for me, is thinking about that trust building comes down to people feeling heard and knowing that you’re going to do something with that knowledge that kind of is in their best interest. And so I’m better and able to trust you by virtue of the fact that I think you have my best interests in mind, and I know that because I have brought forward to you a concern that you have listened to and are doing something with.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, I think that’s so important. And I think the one of the things I’m often sharing in my coaching with these senior leaders who are really smart and and often maybe the smartest person in the room or close to it, and they’re very fast at processing. And a lot of times they say, I don’t know why I keep hearing from people that they don’t feel heard. Because I’m I’m hearing them, but there’s a difference between hearing them and them feeling heard, right? That’s where the trust building. And sometimes they are absolutely retaining everything that is being said, and they’re already processing to how am I going to systematize this, and how is this going to change? And I got to schedule a meeting in two weeks, and that leaves the person not feeling heard. So I think there’s a big difference between listening and leaving people feeling heard, which is so critical in this trust building part practice.

Jorge Burmicky
Sorry, Kevin, but I thought of, you know, something that we have in our data is that our presidents were very clear about saying that no matter what, no matter how many times you communicate, no matter how many different forms. So you’re always going to feel like someone is not being heard or someone’s being left out, like it’s it’s essentially impossible to communicate and lead without feeling or knowing that someone didn’t feel included or heard or so, you know, if it helps with even your own practice, feel free to direct them to that, because I think it’s very comforting to know that you’re not alone. We, over and over, we have a lot of evidence that keeps reassuring that or reinforcing that the presidency is very lonely and that it’s a very isolating job, and there’s even pain involved in that isolation, as our participants shared with us, sometimes even physical pain involved, which was very interesting to see in the data, right? Because, like, What do you mean with that? I’m so, I’m so curious. But it was, it was very real that it’s a very difficult job, which, you know, going back to the question about which, which one of the competencies I’m going to go ahead and use the resilience one, because we was very fresh in our minds. We were just doing a workshop on this, but I’ll tell you why. I think it’s very interesting, and one of my favorites, this is one of the competencies that have gotten the most attention, that really resonated deeply with so many people. And I was surprised, because to me, it felt like one of those, like, oh yeah, of course. Resilience. You know why it makes sense? You know, given how difficult the role is, given how difficult the times have gotten, but I didn’t really realize that it was going to connect so deeply with people. And part of it is what we and this is really important when looking to report and understanding what we mean with resilience. With resilience, we did not mean toughness. We do not mean toughen it out, or grit. We don’t mean any of those things. That’s actually not what the data communicated at all. What what really resilience end up being is your ability to develop a support system or community that is going to help you overcome the barriers that are inevitably going to happen during your presidency or any leadership position that you might be. So what we really heard is the types of individuals, oftentimes, spouses, family members, close friends, peers, particularly other presidents. We have a lot on faith communities. We have a lot on organizations, whether professional social or anything outside of our field. And that is something that we would really try to emphasize more, because there’s so much rhetoric around, you know, being tough and just sort of sticking it out and kind of surviving, and we really are trying to shift the narrative a little bit in that no really what our president told us, and what the survey is very clear, is that it’s all about developing that support system so that one has really resonated with so many different people. Because I think we’re providing more nuanced language to what we mean with resilience within the context of the presidency, and the other one very quickly, that I think is really interesting, that I think it intimidates a lot of people, is the data acumen one. But here’s something that I really learned from this whole experience, and I’ve continued to process, is that with data acumen, we don’t really mean being a numbers person, really, what data acumen communicated to us is your ability to understand numbers, yes, but even being able to tell a story about data that actually resonates with your constituents and that is actually useful to people who are not in front of those spreadsheets or not meeting with their CFO daily, but are able to tell a story. So again, this is one of those that are very interconnected with other skills, such as storytelling. Some of our most effective presence that we spoke to that were very comfortable with data were the ones that were such good storytellers that they were able to again communicate with their constituents. There’s the state of affairs of their organization, whether their budgets, their positions, enrollment, and things like that, through storytelling. So to me that this is another one of those competencies where it felt very nuanced to me and your awards, Keith, more human because we were able to understand no like you don’t really have to, again, be a numbers person, and even when you’re a numbers person, you can’t just rely on just simply being a numbers person. You have to understand how to communicate it so it resonates with people, because otherwise they’re not hearing you. And I think that kind of connects with some of the comments that you were saying to earlier about I don’t you know, people don’t feel hurt.

Keith Edwards
Well, that just reminds me of Brian Rosenberg, who was the president of Macalester College when I was there, and he was very good at taking very complex things behind the scenes, understanding them, and to be able to communicate them. And I remember at a convocation and explaining to the students that their tuition and fees and all the money that they were paying paid for about two thirds of the year, and the other third was paid for by the endowment and alumni and donations and things like that. And just so you know where this goes, that he lasts us until and he had the date. It was something like March 3, or something like that. And it was just a great, simple way to tell that story of a very complex, 100 million dollar budget. A week later, we had a major speaker on campus. I don’t remember what it was. We had a couple of rows blocked off for trustees and big donors and things like that. And a student was sitting there, and I said, you’re gonna have to move back a row, and we’ve held these for people, and the student goes, Oh, these are for the people who pay the other third. And I was like, yeah, no problem. Great. And it was just a great example about you can talk about numbers and tuition and revenue and endowment percentages and things like that, it’s not going to connect. But that two thirds, 1/3 was a great storytelling to you. Perfect example. And I love this talking about the support network. Resilience is really about cultivating a support network. And I think that’s that’s true for all of us, but I think it’s so hard when you’re the leader, yeah, when you’re the CEO of a healthcare company, whether you’re the president or chancellor or you’re the governor of the state, it’s really who can you trust? Who’s not going to who’s going to tell you the truth, who’s going to leverage what you said for their own gains? You don’t know. People might have great intentions, but you don’t know because so many people are gaming. And so I just remember so many times walking around. On, at faculty, staff cocktail parties and the president alone, right? Yeah, literally, by themselves.

Kevin McClure
For sure. And we heard that too, right? We heard that as well about this. Is, this is it can be a very isolating job. You know, you are occasionally at institutions, in a brand new place, in a small town, in some cases where you know there is very little ability to separate yourself from the position. You know people look at you and that’s immediately what they associate you with. I do, though, think as we have interacted with presidents over time, the message that is coming through to us, especially around those that have been in this role for a long time, is that is true. All of this is true. You are in an executive leadership position, but if you enable that to kind of create these walls between yourself and other people, it makes the job harder, and you have to kind of open yourself up to connection. I think this is true, not just for a president, but it’s true for a dean and a provost, and probably a VPSA as well, where it’s easy for folks to kind of put you on a pedestal, or for you by virtue of your daily schedule, to just be removed from from the people that you are leading or or you know, even to be far removed from students in some cases. And so what we heard from from presidents was just this idea of kind of getting out there, need a moment go talk to students, create those connections with people. Occasionally, it means like I need to go out of my way to demonstrate to these folks that I am not a superhero. I’m not superhuman, like I’m a person. I have a cat, I have kids, or I have grandkids, I, you know, and to talk about themselves as real people, as a way of, kind of breaking down those, those types of barriers. We also heard, you know, the emotional intelligence piece was one that that I found to be really, really important. And it kind of goes back to something that you had mentioned Keith around. You know, some of the folks that you talk to very likely could be the, the smartest people in the room, but I think for some of the most effective college presidents, they have figured out a way to say, You know what, I’m going to try my very hardest to for that not to be the case. I’m going to try to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am, and for me to be comfortable with that, that’s the most important piece for them. You know, leadership is less of an exercise in power, in individual power, and a little bit more in terms of, do I know myself well enough to be able to say, like I surely cannot be an expert in all of these things. I cannot be the finance expert and the enrollment expert and the marketing expert and the comms expert and the, you know, academic transformation expert. This is why I have hired this team of people. And really my job as as a leader, is to bring these really smart people together and figure out, how do we, you know, figure out what our path forward is going to look like. And so one of the interestingly, one of the comments that was most frequently used in the open ended comments part of the survey, was humility. And it’s interesting because, you know, I’m sure there are folks that would say, Well, I worked with so and so at my institution, and humble is the last word that I would have used to describe them. So this could still be aspirational more than than reality. But I think it’s telling that a lot of the folks that we were speaking with pointed to this notion of humility as being really key for them to be effective, and allowing some of those other really talented people to come forward and to bring their talent to problems that otherwise may not be feel comfortable if they feel like they have to diminish themselves so that the President feels like they can be the smartest person in the room.

Keith Edwards
There’s something about this that feels very macro, and maybe feels like maybe an umbrella to the seven, because, as you’re talking about this, whether we call it humility, which I think is so important, but it ties so many of them together, emotional intelligence, the trust building. I mean, I think that every leader wants to be trusted, and the way our culture teaches us to do that is know everything, have the right answers, never make a mistake, get everything right. And so we perform this thing to gain the trust of people. And we nobody trusts that person but someone who says, I’m really having a hard time with my teenager. Or, geez, I have no idea what chi squared regression analysis is. Could you really help walk us through that? Because that’s that’s new for me, when we’re vulnerable, whether that’s personally vulnerable about our knowledge or the humility or trusting other people or I disagree, but I think you know better about this, so we’re going to go with you on this one. One that actually gains trust. And so for me that this humility is sort of convergence around a lot of these emotional intelligence, the trust building, the resilience, just willingness to ask for help, to reach out and make a phone call to your peer who’s on the other side of the country and say, I’m really struggling. Have you ever been through anything like this? Any thoughts for me? So I think that whether we call it humility or letting go of the ego or vulnerability, this thing seems to be something that connects with so many of these intersecting competencies.

Jorge Burmicky
And Keith something that is really interesting about the asking for help component that he just shared is that we also saw differences across race and gender, and something that we learned from our data is that presidents of color are more likely to develop help seeking behaviors or just simply ask for help. You know, to put it more simply, and I think part of it, and again, we haven’t really done, like, a deep analysis of this, but we’ve had so many opportunities to talk about it, because it comes up in conversation, just like you did right now. And I think part of it, and this very ties a lot to my research, particularly with with Latinx presidents, is that when you’re more self aware of the structural and historical barriers that are involved in positions like the college presidency, which remains overwhelmingly white and male according to the latest ace ACPs study and so many different studies you know, not just them. I want to point that out is that you’re more self aware again, part of the emotional intelligence piece that you have to ask for help, and you have developed that skill because it’s been required for you to get to that point. So it’s really interesting to see some very notable differences, particularly when it comes to race and gender, that are very interested in the in our study that really played a role in how we ended up packaging those competencies that are really critical as you look at it again, keep in mind who you are, keep in mind of your surrounding environments, because all of that is also going to help you interpret the findings also differently, which is what’s really hard to package these competence competencies in this one report, right?

Keith Edwards
Well, and I think the flip side, I think that’s that’s brilliant, and I’ve seen that too. And I think the flip side is also true. If you’re someone who identifies with a lot of privilege identities, and you have an awareness of social dynamics, you might have the feeling like, oh, the whole world works for me. This should be easy. I should need help. I should be able to go it alone, right? And so it’s sort of those power dynamics I think work, and making help seeking a little bit more normalized, right? If the world’s stacked against you, yeah, ask for some help like that makes total sense. But geez, if you have every advantage of the world, why would you need help? And so I think that help seeking for all of us is so good, not just for the individual, but these are people who deeply care about the success and the vitality of their institution. So if you’re not, you’re not going to ask for help for you maybe ask for help for the betterment and the well being of your institution or organization.

Kevin McClure
I’ll share one quick story from one of our focus groups, and it’s one that’s kind of stayed with me. There was a gentleman, that older gentleman, white guy, been a president at his at his institution forever and ever. He was a first generation college student, and his parents were immigrants and worked in, you know, worked hard jobs. And so when we asked him this question about resilience, and how do you practice resilience in the presidency, part of his explanation was, I don’t expect things to be easy. And so that that piece has stayed with me, because, you know, at various points in time since that interview, I’ve had hard moments, and I’ve had to pause and say, You know what? This is hard work. It is meaningful work, and maybe it’s not supposed to be easy, and and I walked into this with maybe the wrong set of assumptions, but that’s been really helpful for me.

Jorge Burmicky
Well, we’ve also had a lot of President participants that share because I have privileged identities, I’m also aware of the responsibility that I have to pave the way for others that don’t have or or share the same identities that I do. So I think that again, that that that self awareness, that emotional intelligence, was there no matter what, it’s just you have to be really self aware of who you are, but also your role as a leader, you know, in terms of paving the way for the next generation of leaders, because that’s really important.

Keith Edwards
Well, we have been trying to have this conversation for months, trying to get this scheduled, trying to get the two of you and us together. And I’m so glad we’re able to do that. I’m so sorry it took so long. One of the upsides to it taking a while to pull this conversation together is it’s given you both time, as you’ve mentioned, to be out on tour, to be at conferences, to do other podcasts, to have different conversations. Conversations, and one of the things we often hear from guests on this podcast is, well, we wrote this book, but we submitted the manuscript a year and a half ago, and now that we’re talking about it, we have new insights. Now in this conversation, I’m imagining that both of you have learned significant, important things since the report was published, and all of these conversations you’ve been having about it at conferences with presidents in professional development, you’re leading on other podcasts with media. I’d love to hear from you both, and I think you’ve spoken to some of them already. But what are you learning as you’re sharing this, as you’re talking about this, as you’re doing what we’re doing today, talking about the numbers from the survey and also the data from the stories and the focus groups. What are you learning as you’re moving this forward?

Kevin McClure
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a one dimension of this that has been really enlightening, as we’ve already mentioned, is that there is something that is humanizing about taking a job that is pretty often vilified, or, if not vilified, then met with a certain level of confusion, or, you know, complexity, which is is the case, but to be able to kind of drill this down and to say, Okay, here’s, Here’s what real people are saying about this job. And you know, Jorge, you can, you might have been able to have some conversations with folks where this is true or not, but I do know that a big piece of this for us was trying to demystify some of this, a little bit, to demystify what it means to be a president, and in that way to make it so that someone can look at these competencies and not necessarily see, oh my gosh, here are all these things that I don’t have, but rather to look at the set of competencies and to say, I think I’m doing some of these things. I think I have cultivated some of these skills already, and or I have a sense of the ones that I need to develop a little bit further. But maybe, you know, even if I hadn’t seen myself as presidential material, quote, unquote, in the past, through this, I do see a pathway where what I do, well could could really serve an institution or allow me to be successful in this position. And so, you know, we’ve had some conversations. I think that that hint towards that. I don’t know if you had any of that more directly get at that or other things that folks have come forward say.

Jorge Burmicky
You know, the biggest surprise, and I would say this has been a huge lesson for me as a researcher in terms of gaining additional self awareness, is, Kevin, earlier, you talked about the humanness of this research, and what I didn’t realize is that I think both Kevin and I as researchers really do prioritize the human component of research, and it’s kind of hard for us to imagine this research without the focus group part, because we knew that the survey was was required, and We knew that as we were looking at other instruments and everything, we definitely saw the over reliance of surveys, which is, it’s great to really understand the college presence, but but really to get that texture, to get that depth, that we know that we need to really operationalize as competencies. We knew that we had to the focus groups. What I didn’t realize is that that’s very unique to our work as researchers, particularly as researchers that are very committed to leadership and, you know, all the different things that we study, but it came very natural to us. But I didn’t realize that this part of the research was going to allow us to connect with so many people in such a deep, intimate level, and it kind of made me sad for other research that hasn’t been able to communicate the human part of the presidency, because what is research if you’re not able to connect with it, right? Like, what is what does this work for if people are not seeing themselves represented? I love that we have those notable differences when you disagree about race and gender, I think that’s so important. And part of me is, wow, why did we wait so long to do this? Obviously, thankfully, we had leaders like Sean Hartman who were able to find the resources and do this. But I so wish we would have been able to do this before, because oftentimes we talk about diversifying the college presidency. But then No wonder, if we don’t really have data that is speaking to people, or people are able to, like Kevin is saying, realize that I’m doing a lot of these things. I just never really heard it that way, or I heard a package that way. So I think as we continue, as you said, Keith, going on tour with this project, what I’m really learning more is that, man, I didn’t realize that I do research through very human lens. I didn’t realize that when you’re managing you know lots of data, that if you don’t again, communicate in a way that resonates with people, it pretty much doesn’t get read, which is really, really tragic. So I think that what I’m. Learning is the importance of really having these platforms right here, Keith, to keep disseminating the work that we do in more consumable and accessible ways, particularly to audiences like in student affairs, where we’re seeing more and more numbers who are climbing up to the presidency. And we’ve heard this from research that we’ve done with search consultants, that oftentimes in the academy, we look at the quote, unquote, traditional pathways to for the presidency, you know, like Provost and things like, you know, traditional academics. But the reality is that those professionals like student affairs, development, Chief Diversity Officer, etc, etc, are often the ones that are developing these competencies very naturally because of the role. So there’s just so much, and I think that, again, there’s no way to package it, but that’s been a really huge lesson as we continue to talk about this work.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, I think it’s it makes total sense to me, because I think you’ve both talked about this a lot about helpful for people who are in the role to understand how normal some of the challenges are and some of the skills they might want to develop, and where they might see themselves and lean into those strengths or lean into these challenges and learn more. And I’m thinking about it a lot in terms of people who might see themselves on the pathway to the presidency, and what do I want to develop, and what do I want to articulate, and how do I see myself or not see myself? It makes a lot of sense, and I continue to see that maybe it’s my skewed lens paying attention to every student affairs person who gets a presidency role. But I think it’s not just the preparation that fits, which is what you were just speaking to. But I also think the challenges of today’s presidency really aligns with the Student Affairs background, well being, connection, community, protest, disruption, crisis management, the things that tend to get presidents fired tend to be the things that student affairs professionals have been developing a career of skill coming through. Well. Thank you both so much. We are coming close on our time, so I want to move us to our final question here. The podcast is called Student Affairs NOW, and we always like to end with asking, what is it that you’re thinking about, troubling or pondering now? It might be related to today’s conversation, or might be something that’s just really present with you. And then also, if folks want to connect with you, where would you Where would you like to direct them? And Jorge, we’re going to start with you. What are you troubling now?

Jorge Burmicky
You know there’s so many things, but one that keeps lingering on my mind is a conversation that Kevin and I were having last week, and we were having a conversation about, who are those individuals that are currently pursuing the presidency. Are we seeing more interest? Are we seeing less interest? And if we are seeing more interest? Because it’s really hard to know, right? Like, no one’s really collecting this data. A lot of that information is very anecdotal. Like, are we having more interest in the presidency, or is it lesser because of the circumstances? I don’t really know, but what I really want to know is, of those who are seeking the presidency, what is their driving motivation? Um, what is making them put their name on the hat like, you know, what? What is? What is it that that is driving, that that drive that motivation? I think that’s really important, particularly right now, because we know that there’s so many transitions, and, you know, not to even mention our current administration, we’re transitioning as we speak, you know, right? So, like, there’s so many different transitions, but there’s also this climate, right? That that is, that is making people ask so many questions. I’m really interested in that, but I’m also trouble, because ultimately, of those names that we’re seeing that are that are pursuing the presidency. I also want to make sure that is representative of the students that we serve. I think for so long, you know, we’ve seen interest, but I want to make sure that it’s not the same recycle interest of the same individuals who have either had leadership positions before or the same populations. I really want to make sure that that we’re doing the best we can, to make sure that students feel like their universities are being led by people who understand them, that they can see themselves represented at the highest levels. Because, again, that’s what got me to do this research. I wanted to make sure that I’m doing work so that I’m not sitting on a committee and I’m the only one who looks like me, like I really want to make sure that it’s a university for all of us, and that’s representative of the students that we serve. And you know, right now, I’m mostly back to the question of, like, where to reach me. I’m really mostly on LinkedIn when I have time. And I guess I’m trying to lose kind of because it’s like, okay, I’m not doing Twitter anymore. I gotta branch out. And I guess I’m just trying it out, but I’m not really active right now. I’m just trying to to see what was, you know, what’s going on over there, but, yeah, primarily LinkedIn right now. And of course, you can always just reach out to me via email or but yeah, the you know, thank you for this opportunity. And that’s right now what’s on my mind? Kevin, yeah, awesome.

Keith Edwards
Yeah. How about you, Kevin, what’s what are you troubling now?

Kevin McClure
ironically, a little bit less squarely on the college presidency. Not not because, you know, my brain is entirely moved on, but more because I tend to be kind of an intellectual nomad. But yeah, so I I’m really interested in trying to still get a handle on kind of where student affairs as a workplace is now. There was this interesting moment throughout the pandemic where we were actually in different ways, or at least I was hearing from the voices of folks in student affairs about their experiences. And that has petered off a bit, and some of that could just be with kind of the normalization. Of of things in in this new moment that we’re in. But part of me also suspects that it’s not the case that we’ve kind of magically arrived at a set of solutions for things, and so people are all happy, and therefore we don’t have anything to work on. So I suppose that’s an invitation to folks in student affairs, if you would like to comment. Like to contact me about what your experience is like. I love hearing about that sort of thing, and then Jorge knows this a little bit, but I’ve also just been kind of poking around supervision as a concept, and really interested in in trying to learn more about that and think about that as a space where we ought to be dedicating a lot more of our attention, both as scholars, but also as as scholar practitioners. And so folks can find me on LinkedIn. I do have a newsletter connected to my work around the higher education workplace called the caring University on LinkedIn. And you can also look me up on my website, which is drkevinrmcclure.com

Keith Edwards
Yeah, and you want to mention the Chronicle and an upcoming book.

Kevin McClure
Oh, right. Okay. So I also write the working better column at the Chronicle of Higher Education, which is trying to provide advice on how we can improve the higher education workplace. In my book, The Caring University will be out with Johns Hopkins University Press this summer, and hopefully there’ll be pre orders for that available in the next couple of months.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, great. We’ll have you back to talk more about that. Specifically, a lot of overlap here, obviously. Thank you both. This has been really terrific. I really appreciate your research and your sharing it and you’re and also your wisdom and your insight and your meaning making as well. And so thanks for your leadership in this space. We also want to thank our sponsors of today’s episode Evolve and Symplicity. Evolve helps senior leaders who value aspire to lead on and want to unleash their potential for belonging and transformational leadership. This is a program I’m proud to co facilitate, along with doctors Brian Rao and Don Lee, we offer a personalized experience with high impact value the asynchronous content and six individual and six group coaching sessions maximize your learning and growth with a focused time investment, greatly enhancing your ability to lead powerfully for social change and Symplicity is the global leader in student services technology platforms with state of the art technology that empowers institutions to make data driven decisions specific to their goals, a true partner to the institution,Symplicity supports all aspects of student life, including, but not limited to Career Services and Development, Student Conduct and well being, student success and accessibility services to learn more, visit symplicity.com or connect with them on social media. As always, a huge shout out to our producer, Nat Ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes work to make us look and sound good. And we love the support of these important conversations from you our community, you can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube and to our weekly newsletter, where we announce each new episode every Wednesday morning. While you’re there, you can leave us a five star review. It really helps great conversations like this reach more folks. I’m Keith Edwards, thanks again to our fabulous guests today and to everyone who’s watching and listening. Make it a great week. Thanks all you.

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