How leaders build a collective identity with Vanessa Beasley | ReThinking

1. 0:00 – 0:25

   Listening vs. speaking: what rhetoric misses most

   1. VBVanessa Beasley0:00

      I don't think we have a learning how to speak problem. I think everybody and their brother has a way to speak and a podcast and, [laughs] you know.

   2. AGAdam Grant0:08

      [laughs]

   3. VBVanessa Beasley0:08

      I think we have a learning how to listen problem. [upbeat music]

   4. AGAdam Grant0:16

      Vanessa Beasley, welcome to Re:Thinking.

   5. VBVanessa Beasley0:18

      Happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

   6. AGAdam Grant0:20

      Well, I'm excited to find out what you're gonna ask me to rethink today.

   7. VBVanessa Beasley0:23

      All right. Game on.

2. 0:25 – 1:33

   How presidential rhetoric constructs a “we”: media + constitutive identity

   1. AGAdam Grant0:25

      As a rhetoric expert, what do you look at first when you're analyzing a presidential speech? What are the signals that stand out to you right away?

   2. VBVanessa Beasley0:33

      So I'm super interested in the, uh, two things. One is the intersection between the evolution of the presidency and the evolution of media, because they don't exist without each other.

   3. AGAdam Grant0:43

      Right.

   4. VBVanessa Beasley0:43

      And the strengths and the weaknesses of both systems need each other. And the other thing I'm really interested in is the activation of what we call constitutive rhetoric. If you and I think about giving a speech, the first thing we might think of as leaders is what does it do? You know, what's our message? How do we wanna motivate people? What behavior do we want to result from it? And that's instrumental use of rhetoric, but I'm more interested in the constitutive part. Who does that leader tell you you are in that moment? How does that leader build community through their words? What are they constituting as an audience?

   5. AGAdam Grant1:19

      Well, you wrote a whole book on this.

   6. VBVanessa Beasley1:20

      [laughs]

   7. AGAdam Grant1:20

      So you're the perfect person to ask. Even the idea of the, the American people as a we, as, as an identity that was held collectively, I didn't realize the extent to which presidents actually created that-

   8. VBVanessa Beasley1:33

      Yeah

3. 1:33 – 2:49

   Before national media, there wasn’t really an “American people”

   1. AGAdam Grant1:33

      ... um, and, and shaped the content of it. Talk to me about that. Like, what, what were the American people before presidents started describing them as, as a, a collective or as a community, and, and how did it change?

   2. VBVanessa Beasley1:45

      Before there was a way to, uh, to spread news through telegraph, and before there was an way to get printed newspapers across the country, everything would've been local. So people wouldn't have thought about an American people as much as they would've thought about what was happening in their state, and for politicians it would've been what's, what was happening within the parties, uh, within their state. So my argument is there isn't a conception of actual American people before that time outside of the Constitution and outside of the constitutionally and, uh, ritually mandated practices that presidents had at their disposal, including the inaugural address, which is when you tell the American people ritualistically who they are, and that starts with Washington. He was the first person, obviously, to do that. So I think it's a rhetorical creation over and over and over again, and as media changes we just have more ways to show it or, or feel it perhaps is a better verb.

4. 2:49 – 4:27

   The rise of the “rhetorical president”: speaking directly to citizens

   1. AGAdam Grant2:49

      Who do you think is the greatest American president that people don't respect or fully appreciate?

   2. VBVanessa Beasley2:55

      So I'm not gonna name a president, I'm gonna name a, an, a change, a shift in media history, because I tend to think about the presidency as it changed as the channels of communication did. So on that note, Theodore Roosevelt was one of the first people that we call a rhetorical president, which meant that he had the gall to go speak directly to the American people. And then once, uh, Woodrow Wilson started doing that and radio started, it all, you know, it was all off the chain. Everything before that would've made presidents think it was base or beneath them to speak directly to the American people.

   3. AGAdam Grant3:35

      That's so interesting 'cause I, you know, I think about the, the image of Lincoln sitting down for office hours with citizens. That was definitely not beneath him to speak to the people. Did it change between him and Roosevelt, or was he just an outlier?

   4. VBVanessa Beasley3:47

      People hated that Lincoln did that. I mean, even in his-

   5. AGAdam Grant3:50

      What?

   6. VBVanessa Beasley3:50

      ... own time it was very controversial. Yeah, yeah.

   7. AGAdam Grant3:53

      Why?

   8. VBVanessa Beasley3:54

      Uh, because that would've s- been seen as pandering.

   9. AGAdam Grant3:57

      How else, though, I, I g- granted, America was much smaller than it is today, but-

   10. VBVanessa Beasley4:01

       Right

   11. AGAdam Grant4:01

       ... how do you avoid becoming out of touch if-

   12. VBVanessa Beasley4:04

       Yeah

   13. AGAdam Grant4:04

       ... you're not in touch with your constituents?

   14. VBVanessa Beasley4:06

       They were largely out of touch with most of the American people. So when you think about the fact that we didn't have railroads that could deliver newspapers nationally until the middle of the 19th century, there was kinda no such thing as the people. There were only the constituents that you were able to connect with locally, and even then it would've been very rare for a president to do that.

5. 4:27 – 5:42

   Washington’s founding identity: defining America by what it’s not

   1. AGAdam Grant4:27

      So interesting. What do you find most surprising about the, the changes in how presidents have characterized the American people? Who did Washington tell us we were?

   2. VBVanessa Beasley4:37

      Yeah.

   3. AGAdam Grant4:37

      And how did that evolve?

   4. VBVanessa Beasley4:38

      Washington famously told us that we were not to get involved with other countries, avoid foreign entanglements. But Washington had a really interesting task because he was the first president who had to say basically, "We're not them." And all constitutive, or again, identity-building rhetoric, has an us and a them. So Washington had to say, "Look, I know we've been them, but we're not them anymore," and of course referring to the British. And so his idioms had a lot to do with thinking differently, acting differently. Some of the f- presidents that come after him will expand on this, but it's not letting ourselves fall prey to the kinds of divisions that one would've seen in Europe or frankly, uh, some of the, uh, class-based thinking you would've seen in Britain. So the idea of upward mobility, they're not gonna use that language, but that's gonna start to show up. So it's this invention of an American people that's almost necessarily saying, "We're not the Europeans," or, "We're not the British," in the very, very first early years.

6. 5:42 – 6:52

   Beyond “us vs. them”: Reagan, storytelling, and visual identity

   1. AGAdam Grant5:42

      Us versus them is such a uni... It's, I mean, it's, it's probably the most ubiquitous identity-building strategy. It strikes me as not the only one, though, and I'm, I'm wondering about the others that presidents have used. It sounds like actually there's, there's a hint of us versus our past selves in the Washington message.

   2. VBVanessa Beasley5:59

      Lovely. That's really nice.

   3. AGAdam Grant5:59

      Which happens to also be a them. What are the other ways that the presidents have built a sense of collective identity?

   4. VBVanessa Beasley6:06

      So Reagan is one of my favorite answers to this question because Reagan introduces narrative and storytelling, uh, and of course, uh, abetted by the visuals of television that his administration uses so well. But that's another good way of showing who we are without always having to feature a them in the background. And if you think about some of Reagan's best-known visual rhetoric, and I'm thinking about, uh, I'm old enough to remember a video called Morning in America, which is about, you know, people waking up to a new day and they're on a farm. Uh, that kind of visualization of identity with a narrative background. So those entailments that get manifest through the story and the visuals, Reagan really opened up a new chapter in presidential rhetoric, and I would argue very few presidents after him have met it.

7. 6:52 – 9:35

   Meeting people where they are—then elevating them: the shared-problem gate

   1. AGAdam Grant6:52

      You know, I, I think this is one of the hardest challenges that leaders face, and you obviously know it from studying presidents. You also know it from being a president of a university. And I think that, you know, there's this tension that, that always jumps out at me when I, when I work with leaders, which is I wanna read the room. I wanna know what people's existing values and identities and experiences are so I can speak to them. But I also wanna elevate the room. I wanna create a new identity for people, and that involves some risk because I don't know if they're gonna buy what I'm selling. I don't know if they're gonna get attached to the vision that I'm trying to paint. But it also comes with tremendous opportunity because I can open up new possibilities if they do get excited about this, you know, this vision that I'm, I'm trying to construct. I'd love to hear you talk about the dance between kinda meeting people where they are and bringing them somewhere that you would like them to go.

   2. VBVanessa Beasley7:41

      Yeah. I love this question. I'm gonna rephrase it as, how do you have a healthy version of us without relying on some kind of enemy imagined them? And then as you said, you've gotta get people to try to imagine to collectively that they have the capacity to be greater than what that current state is. And I believe your research, among others, a lot of social psychological research suggests that people have to have a little bit of a shared sense of a problem to change. And I won't go all far the way to say they have to fear something, but it's pretty central to persuasion. You and I have to agree that we share a problem before we're gonna decide that it's worth risking a solution.

   3. AGAdam Grant8:22

      One of the biggest mistakes that I consistently see leaders make, in psychology it's called solution aversion, where I bring you a solution-

   4. VBVanessa Beasley8:28

      Mm

   5. AGAdam Grant8:29

      ... and you don't like it, and your first impulse is to deny the existence of the problem altogether. Whereas if I can align with you on here's what's broken, then we can start to talk about what are the most compelling fixes. And so I think applying that to leadership rhetoric, what I'm learning from your observation here is it's actually helpful for leaders to start by acknowledging a common problem that everybody agrees on. And then once they're on board with that, you have some license to bring some novel solutions to the table.

   6. VBVanessa Beasley8:57

      That's right. And if you can't get them to buy in to the problem, then you might as well, you know, just talk about the weather. I mean, there's, there's-

   7. AGAdam Grant9:04

      [laughs]

   8. VBVanessa Beasley9:05

      ... there's, there's no way to move forward. There's a persuasion model called Monroe's Motivated Sequence, and when we teach public speaking, we tell people this, that the first step is get their attention, and the second step is, is persuade them that there's a shared problem or threat. You can use a fear appeal there. And if you can't get them to that second place, there's no, there's no point in going to number three, which is solution. And then you, then you travel to actualization. What do I need you to do to make this solution a possibility? But you're right. You gotta get there first.

8. 9:35 – 9:49

   Contested facts make common problems harder to build

   1. VBVanessa Beasley9:35

      And I think one of our challenges as leaders today is how many different, uh, sources of evidence and contested facts are out there because it's really hard to build a problem if we, if you and I don't agree on what color the sky is today, you know?

9. 9:49 – 11:49

   Reinventing Trinity University: translating liberal arts into modern value

   1. AGAdam Grant9:49

      So you're finishing your fourth year as Trinity's president. I'm struck by a couple things that are, are really interesting about your role. The first one is you basically reinvented Trinity as an institution. It was known as a, as a highly respected regional university. It's now a major national liberal arts college. How did you think about getting people on board with that vision?

   2. VBVanessa Beasley10:12

      I love the way you phrased that question because it, it speaks to my, uh, rhetorician's heart. So one way of l- approaching that task would be to say the core parts are already here. Amazing faculty, amazing students, beautiful campus, all the right values. And if the core parts are there, all I need to do is be a good communicator and go out in the world and pull back the curtain and say, "Look. Look what you've been missing, world. You know, here we are." Um, and that's one theory of the case. Another theory of the case is to say, uh, that at a national level, what does the world need at this moment when we start to think about the things that higher education has gotten right and the things that we've maybe not gotten so right? And I saw in Trinity the potential to have that conversation and to build on the strengths, of course, but also frankly and a little weedy, because we have an undergraduate business degree, because we have an undergraduate engineering degree, both of which lean heavily on the liberal arts tradition, I saw the opportunity to say, "This is kinda what the world's been missing," [laughs] right? That, uh, I'm gonna use the classical term, like that focus on, you know, the method of learning that you get through liberal arts and the humility that the liberal arts teaches you because your perspective does not define the world. And boy, you get that in liberal arts. Along with, you know, some of the practical skills that sometimes liberal arts colleges hold their noses up to, and we need to stop doing that.

10. 11:49 – 13:28

    The cultural danger of the “hero leader” story

    1. AGAdam Grant11:49

       Agreed. As you look at all kinds of leaders, in politics, in business, in education, what do you see are the most consistent mistakes that leaders make from a rhetoric standpoint?

    2. VBVanessa Beasley11:59

       A, a red flag for me is when we talk about past leaders, and cultures do this all the time, as if they alone were responsible for the success of the organization. And this happens a lot to presidents, happens a lot to college presidents, uh, and that's an organizational red flag for me, right? Because no one person alone is very likely to be responsible for the success of an organization.

    3. AGAdam Grant12:24

       Oh, that's such a good point. The leader attribution error. It's, it's well documented, but I've never thought about it as a symbol of a cultural problem, that our sense making is flawed, that we're, we're basically placing too much responsibility in the hands of the person at the top, which means we might be overlooking the importance of building the structures and norms that allow us to be successful together.

    4. VBVanessa Beasley12:47

       Yes. I mean, we do this with the US presidency. One of my former colleagues, a professor named Dana Nelson, has written about presidentialism, and she's argued that sometimes when we tell stories about US presidents, it's almost like they're superheroes who just went in and fixed things and, you know, sometimes with a speech, but sometimes, uh, with a, a policy they got enacted. And one of her arguments is that diminishes the responsibility you might feel as a citizen. It diminishes your agency and, and maybe even worse than that, your desire to have agency, your desire to think that you matter. So I think that, that it is a, it is a big red flag, yeah.

11. 13:28 – 15:03

    Hard power and fear: how scary “them” can make people cede authority

    1. AGAdam Grant13:28

       I think the, the thing a lot of people are struggling with right now is if you look around the world, it seems like [chuckles] Leaders are reasserting their authority in some ways. Like, I've, I've always pushed back against this leader attribution error to say, "Look, you know, yeah, leaders have influence, but ultimately everything that a leader does, um, in order to be effective has to be supported by, endorsed by, and implemented by a group of people who choose to follow them." And I think we're seeing more pushback against that, that thesis, um, as leaders, I guess, rely on more traditional forms of like what's been called hard power, um, or, you know, coercive authority. How do you think about reconciling those two views?

    2. VBVanessa Beasley14:07

       Yeah, I mean, I think that the opportunity from a rhetorical lens to say, "Okay, how do you get... How, how have they gained that power, or how have they gained access to hard power without depending on the culture or, or the society you're talking about?" And my hypothesis would be that it's about the construction of a more or less urgent threat so scary that people, uh, in those communities might say, "Okay, that sounds so bad that I'll just cede it all to you," right? "You just, just make sure I'm safe." I, when I teach rhetoric, especially when I teach political rhetoric, I always say the most, the two most dangerous words are us and them, not necessarily for the obvious reasons, but because we can't live without them. And so it really does become important to think about where the balance is and if there is balance and the harm that gets done when them, the them gets really scary and operationalized.

12. 15:03 – 18:54

    Values talk is slippery: ideographs like ‘liberty’ need precision

    1. AGAdam Grant15:03

       Yeah. I, I think so too. And, you know, I think in some ways the, what a lot of leaders are doing, and we see this again across sectors, is they're basically trying to paint a common enemy as not representing our values or our ideals. My, my instinctive response to that is to say, "You know what? Yes, you can define who you are by what you're not, but I would rather think about who we aspire to be and define our principles around that." And I think you have a slightly different take on this. Um, you've, you've at least made the case that we should be a little bit less concerned about what our ideals are and more about how they're put into practice. And I, I'm curious to hear more about that 'cause it's a challenge for me.

    2. VBVanessa Beasley15:46

       So I would go back to the way you've phrased my take. I would never say that ideals don't matter. I would say that we need to never assume they're, uh, obvious to people, never assume that once they're articulated, that articulation stays the same, and always look for the places where people wanna offer different definitions that might, that we might imagine get us further away from any kind of, uh, shared commitment to them. So it's to be careful about value rhetoric, ideal rhetoric that asserts something as just a known and de facto common good without saying, "Well, wait a minute, you know, how are you using that term?" To ask for, uh, more precision because there's this notion in my discipline of, um, ideographs, like a word like liberty, right? You and I might a- agree that across our circumstances that we both value liberty, but when we really start talking about what that means, you and I might have radically different views of what that word means. So m- the research in my field suggests be really careful when it's just those o- one or two powerful loaded phrases, and be aware that people are gonna bring different meanings to those, um, and that we ought to own for ourselves the meanings we take in that.

    3. AGAdam Grant17:11

       I think that's such an important point, and, uh, we've seen a lot of leaders get trapped in the sort of the, the assumption that their terminology is gonna be interpreted the way that they read it and only speak abstractly about what they stand for and then find that actually [chuckles] the, my followers are not, they're not on the same page with me at all. I think a lot of the leaders who advised move fast and break things kinds of ideologies were not really realizing that people might truly break things. I'm thinking about all the leaders who, you know, who have basically said like, "Yeah, what we need is, is rapid execution," and forgot to emphasize quality, care, reliability, and then all of a sudden have found that they had these like haphazard decision-making processes, and they had organizations making tons of errors. And sometimes the stakes of that can be quite high.

    4. VBVanessa Beasley18:04

       That's beautifully said. One of the challenges and, uh, opportunities in higher ed right now is to take some of those prescriptive ideals that were, for many of us, were the reason we got into the job in the first place and realize that not only is the ground shifting under our feet, but also that the way we've talked about those ideals turned a lot of people off, you know, seemed elitist to a lot of people, seemed out of touch to other people. So I think it's up to me as a leader to be careful. I wanna connect to values and ideals, but I don't want that commitment to be so strong that I keep using a rhetoric that's, that's in, you know, counterproductive in the most obvious sense but also, um, can ultimately get turned around and maybe, uh, uh, get used against, you know, the mission, get used against the institution.

13. 18:54 – 20:35

    Universities as practice fields for truth: translating ideals into norms

    1. AGAdam Grant18:54

       Okay, so this is interesting because when I think about the traditional mission of a university, I think about it standing for the pursuit of truth and learning above all else. And like that seems self-evident to me then that we're gonna create an environment where people constructively debate and challenge each other's ideas. Obviously, some of that has been co-opted in the last decade or so. I'm curious about how you're thinking about building an environment where like those practices follow from the pursuit of, of truth and learning and how you translate those ideas into classroom dynamics and cultures that support truth and learning.

    2. VBVanessa Beasley19:29

       So the translation is the point. So I, I've spent my entire career at research universities, and I'm so grateful for that because I've been challenged at every opportunity to get super sharp on the question I was asking. Am I using the right method? Is my evidence gonna stand up? You know, all the things good researchers do regardless of their discipline. And so the choice for me to come to Trinity University, which is a national liberal arts university, and start to think about, "Oh, if research isn't the mission, what is the mission?" [laughs] In both cases, uh, truth is being pursued, arguments are happening, evidence is being weighed, but at Trinity University, I wanna say, "Undergraduates, you sit at that seat because I want you to learn for yourself how truth is discovered or, or, um, rebutted." You know? And sometimes, again, that's through the scientific method, sometimes that's through creative expression, but I think it really matters how we translate the road to both of those things. The mission is the same, but the points of emphasis and who gets to be active in the pursuit of truth is different.

14. 20:35 – 23:01

    Why students boo speakers: social-media performance and the lost pause

    1. AGAdam Grant20:35

       I was very surprised this spring when I saw videos of multiple commencement speakers getting booed by the students in their audience, and in some cases not making what I perceive as very controversial arguments. In at least one of those cases, a very balanced argument. To me, students booing a speaker is fundamentally at odds with hearing ideas that challenge your thinking and being open to rethinking. And to do that at commencement when you're at the culmination of four years of learning and the pursuit of having an open mind, it sort of boggled my mind a little bit, and I, I'm curious about your reaction and what, if anything, we should do about that dynamic.

    2. VBVanessa Beasley21:16

       Yeah. I've been thinking about that too, and I actually think it may be less of a barometer of a lost skill and maybe more of a barometer of how we think argument is performed. A- and so what I mean by that is going back to the study of rhetoric, you could imagine a time when we had a story that a commencement speaker shared ideas and people, "Hmm," you know, [laughs] "I like that point. I don't like that point."

    3. AGAdam Grant21:42

       [laughs]

    4. VBVanessa Beasley21:42

       "But I'm an educated person, so I'll just take it in and process it," right? And maybe that's how it was. But we have a story about speech in that case, and leadership, and the way it's performed and received, and I think we're in an era right now where we have a story about, and I am gonna blame social media a little bit, thumbs up, thumbs down, immediate reaction. I don't like, uh, what's on the stage. I'm gonna start to think about, a little bit about whether or not I'm open to the message, right? Like, the interchange that's, that's idealized when we imagine the perfect speech audience is, is really, uh, troubled right now because I don't know if, if we ... Maybe, maybe you know. There's research on this. I almost feel like students might feel some peer pressure if they're not responding like that right now. Do you know what I mean?

    5. AGAdam Grant22:32

       Wow. I, I have not seen any data on this, but it, it makes a lot of sense. So yeah, I mean, students are entrained to have an immediate reaction. I have to like or dislike.

    6. VBVanessa Beasley22:42

       Yeah.

    7. AGAdam Grant22:42

       And actually part of the value of a commencement speech is don't react. Process. Reflect.

    8. VBVanessa Beasley22:48

       Right.

    9. AGAdam Grant22:48

       Challenge. And so maybe, maybe your job is to not react yet and to say, "Okay. Did this stretch my thinking at all? Which ideas challenged me? Why? And what does that tell me about me?"

15. 23:01 – 36:49

    Teaching listening: non-reactive presence, psychological safety, and ‘monk mode’ learning

    1. VBVanessa Beasley23:01

       I think those questions and that level of self-reflection is exactly what higher ed should be teaching. We should be teaching the ability to listen. I'm gonna use this as an opportunity to say one of the great joys in my life for the last two years is teaching a class here called Listening, and the reason I wanted to offer it in the first place is, uh, related to this conversation. How are we teaching people that they have the option to not react? How are we teaching people that, yeah, you may hear something you don't like and your bo- and we know this, right? Your heart rate may goes up. Your body may tell you, "I don't like what I'm about to hear." But guess what? You can control those reactions. So one of the things we talked about in that class, and I just mentioned in my commencement speech, is listening doesn't mean agreeing. Listening doesn't mean that your ideas have to be threatened. In an interpersonal sense, listening might just mean I care enough about you and our relationship that even though I've never in a million years at this moment think I'm gonna agree with you, but I care enough and know about you to know why you think the way you think. And so I, when, when we, when I talk to students in that class about, like, what if that's what it's about or could be about?

    2. AGAdam Grant24:14

       You know, I'm so glad you've brought this up, Vanessa, because I love the irony of a rhetoric expert teaching a class on listening when what you study is speaking. I would love to know, like, for, for those who don't have the benefit of sitting in your class, what is the, the most non-obvious or surprising listening skill that you teach?

    3. VBVanessa Beasley24:30

       Uh, non-reactive, non-anxious presence. Listening in a way that it's almost a form of meditation sometimes. Like, you can imagine being in a situation where someone says something that you immediately have, you know, like, a blood vessel level reaction to, right? And that sometimes happens because we feel threatened or sometimes it happens because they're attacking a value or something that's really important to us. I would never ask anybody to stop having that reaction because that's how we know we care. I would ask people to be aware enough of their own reaction to determine whether, you know, A, am I in a position where my physical safety is threatened right now? Because if you are, that's a different answer, right? B, am I in a position where my psychological safety is threatened right now? And if you are, you have some different choices. But if you feel like you're in a space, and universities are good for this, where you can actually, everybody take a breath, take a beat and calm down and say, "Okay. How did you get there?" Then that's a conversation worth having, man. I mean, that's good stuff. So back to the contrast between speaking and listening, I think the, the non-intuitive thing is to both hang on to whatever reaction you had, but also don't let that reaction drive your next choices. You know? Like, like imagine that you have a range of choices there.

    4. AGAdam Grant26:00

       Even just having multiple reactions would be better than one.

    5. VBVanessa Beasley26:04

       I'm gonna disclose that, that, I mean, this is not a secret, I have a, a child with chronic illness and intellectual disability, and when people I love use slurs for, uh, that, a, a community of people with intellectual disabilities, I mean, I feel hot inside. I feel red, you know? And I do, uh, I understand that urge because in a way what I'm hearing, regardless of what the person's saying, is that my child's not human or my child's necessarily less than. I've really had to th- to check myself and think, "Okay, if I want to change this person's mind or even give them a reason to think about changing their minds, then I need to figure out a way to talk to them about it and not just storm out of the room and say, you know, 'I don't ever wanna talk to you again because you used a word I didn't like.'" I've gotta really, uh, think about the kinda community I wanna be responsible for building or being part of.

    6. AGAdam Grant27:02

       Okay. You ready for a lightning round?

    7. VBVanessa Beasley27:03

       Yes.

    8. AGAdam Grant27:04

       All right. First question is what is the worst leadership rhetoric advice you see given?

    9. VBVanessa Beasley27:11

       Be yourself.

    10. AGAdam Grant27:11

        Why is that bad advice?

    11. VBVanessa Beasley27:13

        You need filters [laughs] to be a leader. You need filters, and you need to think about the audience first.

    12. AGAdam Grant27:20

        So true. Okay. What is something you've re-thought lately?

    13. VBVanessa Beasley27:23

        Whether or not speeches matter.

    14. AGAdam Grant27:25

        And do they?

    15. VBVanessa Beasley27:27

        I, I don't know that they do. I think we need them. I don't want them to go away. I want oratory and eloquence in this world, and even when we have it, it gets taken out of context, it gets sliced and diced, it gets deep-faked. You know? There's something romanticized about the exchange of really, of... You know when you've left hearing a great spake- speaker and you feel elevated and edified and ready to do new things? We need that so much, and there's so many traps and forces countervailing against us having those kinds of listener and speaker experiences that I don't know. I don't know. What do you think?

    16. AGAdam Grant28:08

        I mean, that makes me wanna reframe a little bit and say the question is not whether they matter, it's how we can make sure that they matter.

    17. VBVanessa Beasley28:14

        Mm.

    18. AGAdam Grant28:15

        To your point, the words alone often don't do enough. I found in, in some experiments with Dave Hoffman that when leaders articulated the vision, it was, it was great for them to exude charisma, but people didn't really buy it unless they also brought in the customer, the client, the end user who had benefited from the mission who could attest to it firsthand and say, "Here is how the work of this organization really changed my life."

    19. VBVanessa Beasley28:39

        That's fascinating, and again, gets to what are we really studying, right? Is it persuasion? Is it, um, behavior change in the workplace? Is it consumer behavior? And yeah, wh- whose, whose arguments matter more, the, the proof point or the person trying to sell?

    20. AGAdam Grant28:56

        Okay. So we have a quick office hours window. Do you have a dilemma, a puzzle, or a question for me?

    21. VBVanessa Beasley29:04

        I do. So I really struggle with the pace and push question. When's the optimal time to ask people or invite people to rest versus when is the optimal time to say, "No, no, no, no, we gotta rally, we gotta surge," versus the third category, which is, "You know what you need to do." Like, figure out when you need to rest. And I know I need to have all three of those messages, but I struggle with when to highlight one over the other.

    22. AGAdam Grant29:30

        Me too. Yes. It makes perfect sense. I think as a leader of a university, you're, you're actually in an fortunate position compared to most leaders. I think, I think this is actually harder for leaders outside of education who don't have summer, right? [laughs]

    23. VBVanessa Beasley29:43

        Yeah, yeah.

    24. AGAdam Grant29:43

        You, you have a certain seasonality built into your schedule, and I think, you know, to me, I think if, you know, if I were ever crazy enough to think that I could run a university, which I will never be, don't worry, the first thing I would think about is, okay, we're gonna see... If we're not careful, we're gonna see faculty basically disappear for the summer the way students do, and staff end up having to work that much harder to keep basically everything running, um, and to prepare for the new year. And so I think with, with that seasonality in mind, knowing that you're gonna lose, you know, a lot of the students and also a lot of the faculty over the summer, I actually wonder if building in a little bit of early rest for staff would be helpful. If, if I were running this experiment, I would say, "Let's take Fridays off for staff April and May. Like, let's see what happens," or, "Let's do half-day Fridays April and May." And I think there are a lot of shortsighted leaders who would look at that and say, "I'm gonna lose people's effort, their productivity, their focus. I can't afford it." And I wanna take the long view on that and say, "That's how you keep your best people, and that's how you get your best creative thinking and also your highest care and service quality," and those things really matter in a university. What do you think of that kind of experiment?

    25. VBVanessa Beasley30:52

        I love that experiment, and one of the things I love about it the most is that you recognize that faculty have choices that staff don't, because it's not always seasonal for them. What you've taught us all to think again through experimenting, um, because some of us search for truth and have discovery in other ways, and it's... I, I love, even in my day job, I love testing and looking at data to see how well we know things are going or not.

    26. AGAdam Grant31:17

        I mean, [scoffs] it's just, to me it's, it's so simple that if you wanna build a learning organization, you have to run lots of pilots, otherwise how do you learn?

    27. VBVanessa Beasley31:26

        Yeah.

    28. AGAdam Grant31:26

        [laughs] You don't learn by talking about ideas-

    29. VBVanessa Beasley31:29

        Yeah

    30. AGAdam Grant31:29

        ... ad nauseam. You learn by testing and iterating and finding out what works for who, when, and where. And you know, I, I guess, the, Vanessa, the one other, the one other thing that jumped to mind as you asked the question is as a professor, the single greatest source of rejuvenation in my job is when I can teach in short bursts and then rest and recover. Um, I get to teach one MBA class that's a semester of contact hours in about a week, and there's a lot of prep that goes into the, [laughs] the lead-up to it, and yeah, there's a lot of work on the back end. But I think I have more meaningful interactions with students in that one week than I typically do in a quarter or semester-long course because of the intensity of it. Students aren't taking any other classes during that time. They're all in on this class. They do a leadership simulation. Uh, I show them their data, along with the other faculty who teach it. We debrief. And the immersive nature of it, I think, leads to, to much deeper learning. Now, there are open questions about how to make that stick, but, you know, as a, as a faculty member, what that means concretely is, like, more than half of my teaching load is not happening during the majority of the school year, and that frees up tremendous amounts of time and energy for research, for writing, for podcasting, for speaking, for, for all the other things that I love to do that are about discovering and disseminating knowledge outside of the university. And it's crazy to me that we don't have more of these short, intensive class opportunities. What do you make of that wild idea?

Episode duration: 36:50