Tag: Cornell

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Seek Out a Faculty Mentor

We spend an inordinate amount of time assisting young people to get into college. We spend a fortune on prep courses, we travel across the country going on college tours, we calculate the right advanced placement courses, we try to figure out whether early admission is the right move, we sit with their counselors, and then, finally, when they make it across the finishing line—when they arrive on campus in their freshman year—we drop them, like the Stork dropping a package down the chimney and disappearing. Sure, we ask them to call, we support them emotionally, but what are the tools we left them with that will allow them to achieve, as young adults, in the university?

Indeed, we’ve left them with one misnomer: that college is a continuation of school. Maybe—but it’s a lot more than that.

College is the beginning of the work world. It’s a student’s bridge to the practical world they’d like to live in. It’s the gateway between school and making a living. That is the reality. And it’s in college that they’ll have to develop the very proactive leadership skills that will enhance their success in the future. College is self-discovery and the beginning of a student’s capacity to move his or her own agenda.

They’re many keys to this, but one of the most important keys to a student is to connect with faculty members. A college student needs to connect with one or two professors who will not simply educate them in engineering, art history, or Victorian novels, but will mentor them and challenge the way they think.

To a large degree, this occurs in the classroom—but mentoring relationships that are truly successful occur outside the classroom. They start when the student shows interest. It starts when the student displays curiosity.

Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to work with many great undergraduate students. Those with whom I maintain a relationship to this day and whom I remember most are those who were clever enough and assertive enough to reach out to me.

They were the ones I involved in research projects, they were the ones who discussed their career with me, they were the ones who shared their fears and worries over a cup of coffee. They weren’t necessarily the most brilliant—but they were the ones who understood that education was a process of focusing and that faculty could help them in this process.

These are the students for whom one can write robust letters of recommendations. Today there is a lot of talk about ‘authenticity’–these are the students that you can write authentic letters  for. Letters not just strewn with glorified adjectives–but detailed shared experience. These are the students that, in the best sense of it, never go away and come back every so often just to check in. These are the students who are smart, competent, and I have enjoyed working with.

So lesson number one for college students: In your search for discovery, in your search for a career and direction, partner with a number of faculty members. Find out about their research projects, don’t hesitate to share with them your struggles—don’t be afraid to open up and engage them. In higher education as in life–things happen because you make them happen. Relationships emerge because you invest in a relationship–so seek out a faculty mentor.

Remember, most will be receptive, many will be flattered, and you’ll be surprised as to the generosity of their spirit.

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You Don’t Speak The Way You Should

When I was an undergraduate at NYU, commuting by subway to the Washington Square campus, the path was laid out for me:  economics or medical school.  In my last year I stumbled into a passion for art history when I completed a course on the French impressionists.  The course made me entertain the possibility of diverting from my path and getting a Ph.D. in art history.  I approached my instructor with this somewhat fleeting thought and he reacted as blunt could be when he said, “You don’t speak like an art historian should.”  I sheepishly crawled back on the subway back to Brooklyn and proceeded to the University of Wisconsin and became a Cornell professor of management.  Several years later I had occasion to speak about a book of mine at another well-established university when a faculty member came up to me and intended to flatter me about my relatively casual speaking style.  Unfortunately for him, he used the same language the art historian did eight years before: “You don’t speak the way I thought you would.” While he meant well, I had a flashback to the art historian and in an extremely exaggerated New York accent said, “But I write real good, don’t I?”

The years have evolved, but I remain cognizant of the fact that language and style become a subtle mode of discrimination.  Recently I’ve been working with some colleagues in Baton Rouge.  And they related to me how often that they, as smart, articulate women, are often dismissed by their Louisiana accent, which lead others to stereotype them in unflattering ways and certainly label them as being incapable of being art historians.

Language and style often trump content.  These two things often exclude many from leadership positions.  I’m struck more and more when selecting leaders we become obsessed with their presentation of self, and we are overly concerned with how they say something rather than what they say.  Do they speak in a thoughtful, reflective manner? Do they use the right language? These are important, but in the final analysis, these are issues of style, and not much more than tassels on a pair of shoes or the shade of  Brooks Brothers tie.  Not irrelevant, but not grounds for dismissal.

Over the last number of years, my time has been spent in the world of leadership training.  In this context, I’ve had to hire trainers and deal with leaders.  The challenge has been to match the trainer to the leader.  But I found out that consistently that people are concerned with the content much more than with style.  In this culture, surrounded by style, people are listening much closer to what you say than your accent.  Globalization is going to demand from each of us to ask a simple question: Does he or she know what they are talking about–and should I pay attention?  Soon there will be more and more art historians who don’t speak the King’s English, and that world, one in which style and language are secondary is one we should welcome.

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BLG Leadership Insights Features Proactive Leaders Proactive Stories

Leaders & The Thanksgiving Contradiction

This Thanksgiving there’s some bad news and good news when it comes to leadership.

Let’s start with the bad news…

The Bad News

When you look around the world today–you realize, from place to place, that leadership, in terms of really moving agendas, in terms of tenacity, persistence, and leader’s capacity to take teams all the way, has become, at least in the public arena, a rare phenomena.

Everything seems to be frozen and no one seems to know where they should take the next step. It is, to a degree, a failure of courage. Decision makers are endlessly debating what micro-steps  need to taken so that no one will be offended, constituents won’t be lost and moderates and fringe groups won’t be alienated.

Leaders throughout the world seem to be accountable to surveys, standings in the polls–they seem content to shift deck chairs on the titanic.

No matter how stuffed the closet is we still keep packing things in just  as long as we can get one more problem out of site. Consensus and the search for consensus has become an excuse for processing things to death.

That’s true in the Middle East, that’s true in Washington, and that’s true in almost any other place. And the dialogue is simple: one party says you’re moving too slow, one party says you’re moving too fast and nothing ever gets done.

There is a certain incapacity to climb up the crow’s nest and see that there is a damn iceberg coming. It reminds me of the scene in Dr. Strangelove when, on the brink of doom, world leaders are sidetracked debating the minutia of survival–instead of fixing the larger problems. It seems, in many ways, that this is a period in which we are nickel and dimming each other too death.

That’s the bad news.

But there’s always another side.

The Good News

The good news comes can be found in my wonderful students from the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) that I teach at Cornell thanks to the ILR’ International Programs Office.

They are a delightful group of young people from India and, admittedly, we have very little in common. I’m certainly much older than they are and they are fresh-faced and on the eve of their first career. I grew up Brooklyn and they grew up in a part of the world I know very little about.

Before teaching I was told and had others warn me about how I must be a bit guarded with my New York style and humor. I was told my sort of folksy approach wouldn’t translate and wouldn’t be corporate enough–a warning I have heard for years. So when I first started teaching my young colleagues from India I took a distance, hid beneath my Ferragamo tie and blue Oxford shirt, and reached deep for that nonchalant, low-key, self-assured approach which is corporate enough to be boringly universal.

After a while After an hour I loosened my tie and a few jokes about my childhood in Coney Island came out. I told them how little I knew about their culture and they told me how little they knew about Brooklyn culture and together we got down to the wonderful experience of learning from each other.

What we both learned was that race, religion, culture, and all the divides of globalization, can be quickly overcome with quality of content, sincerity, and a style that allows you to be authentic.

Now, I even notice that they visit this blog from time to time.

It’s Not All So Bad…

So here’s the great contradiction for Thanksgiving. In a world where leaders are too scared, too cautious, to reach out beyond their chairs of power, in a world where we all sometimes have a sense that we’re just tinkering around, in a world where everyone tells us that globalization is tearing us apart, there are still wonderful opportunities to be authentic, sincere, and supportive of each other.

Photo Credit: Arimoore

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Get to Know Your Work Neighbor

I have been in the same office on 34th street for many years and, like all of us, I’m caught in the patterns of routine. But every so often I’m reminded that we are enriched by getting to know the people we work with.

We’re enriched by the side conversations, the extra cups of coffee, and  the extra discussions that allow us to build intimacy with those we work with.

A younger colleague of mine began working in a research & administrative capacity at our Cornell office about a year ago. Essentially we had no real work interface with the exception of him doing me a favor every once and a while. Our quick chats grew over time and soon they developed into genuine discussions. Soon I found myself dropping by his desk asking him for his feedback on some ideas that had just caught me. A mutual exploration began to occur as we both found common interests about what makes people proactive.

I began to marvel at his world outside of work. Little to my knowledge, he had been actively involved with a group of community friends and colleagues who were developing a new charter high school in Plainfield, New Jersey called the Barack Obama Green Charter High School. It’s set to open this fall and it will give many young people in Plainfield a different type of education.

Outside of his work at Cornell my friend has been involved in the grass roots movement to help his community create an innovative charter school. With my interest in leadership, I became more and more enthralled about how my ideas on the subject could be integrated with his efforts.

Last week, I was in Plainfield for a fundraiser for the new school. We heard Professor Cornel West speak about issues of leadership, race, and class. He delivered an impassioned and an intellectually artful presentation, linking the efforts encapsulated in the charters school to the wider issues of poverty, opportunity, and local control in the 21st century. Professor West delivered a presentation grounded in the American ethic of mobility, enriched by cultural history, but at the same time pragmatic in its implication, well worth the traffic jam on the Pulaski Skyway.

I was enriched by the evenings experience and I have already began to explore what implications it has for my own thinking. Had I not reached across the cubicle, made a friend down the hall, I would have just gone to the gym that evening, watched a little PBS, read a book, and would not have learned as much I did in Plainfield.

Today, I’ll head into the office, my friend, the social entrepreneur, will be back in his desk and I’ll be meeting with my students, but we both will have shared an outside work experience that has enriched our lives and our work.

The next time you walk down the hall thinking you don’t have time to get know the people around you, think again.

Picture Credit: Somedesignerguy