Navigating leadership with kindness: Choosing generosity over scarcity

Author: Stephanie Spong

Importance

The poet Naomi Shihab has a prose poem called “Gate A-4″ that documents a small act of kindness at the Albuquerque airport that blooms into a tableau of joy. In the poem, the narrator provides translation assistance to an older woman in distress who doesn’t speak the local language. This one act of kindness begets another and another, until the scene unfolds into a bounty of connection and community. By the end of the poem, the woman once in need is doling out sweets and the airline agents are sharing juice boxes. In the final stanza Shihab writes, “This / is the world I want to live in. The shared world”. If you are someone who believes that our actions affect those around us, then I can only imagine that your world-making, like my own, includes a desire to see kindness and generosity amplified. We want it for ourselves, for our children, for our friends and loved ones. We want to move in a space that is not just safe for us but also for the extensions of ourselves that feel the most vulnerable. We want the world to extend them the same tenderness we would by their side.

And, like many, I did not make it to my middle years without seeing terrible things happen to wonderful people, or wonderful luck befall people who did terrible things. In many ways this makes it even easier to lean into generosity, which if nothing else is unearned kindness. This principle then is the way for me to create the culture I want to be a part of in the academy, the culture into which I want to welcome students. The ivory tower has a narrow entryway, and to be generous with others is to “shoulder” open the door and make room for greater possibilities.

Scenario

In 2019, I returned to my graduate alma mater to take a role as the Associate Director for Digital Learning. It was the job I had been dreaming of in the city where I wanted to live and start a family. There were some caveats, however. There had been some tension with the outgoing Associate Director and partnering units and, understandably, some lingering frustrations among the staff. Two members of the team had unsuccessfully applied for the job I had accepted, the team itself was under its third (or fourth) umbrella unit, and there was a sense of distrust among team members. In short, the team I walked into had been living with scarcity for long enough that they had begun to see one another as competition either for resources or privileges.

So, we started from the beginning. We held a retreat and several retreat-like meetings to establish some fundamental understandings across the team. First among these was “We are accountable to one another”. This applied to everything from flexible work hours to how we assigned facilitators for workshops or drop-in lab hours. It also allowed me to start modelling generosity in the face of challenges. If an employee had a mishap or something didn’t go according to plan, I responded with support: “What do you need for next time? How can we work together to achieve a different outcome in the future?” I told each employee something my previous supervisor had assured me: “Listen, I’m your flak jacket. For all your work, I’m your coverage and I won’t leave you out on a limb if something goes array. If we mess up, even a big one, it’s my job as your supervisor to take the heat.” This may seem extreme, but I wanted them to understand that I could see the difference between a mistake and a performance issue. I needed to assure the team that I would not leave them stranded if they trusted in my generosity.

I also encouraged them to be generous with one another when colleagues encountered someone else on the team having a challenge. When missteps were reported to me about a colleague, I asked the reporter “Ok, what did you do to support them?” or “How were you able to help them change the outcome?” to emphasise that my role wasn’t to seek out and punish anyone for perceived low performance, but to uplift the entire team to do great work collectively. When interpersonal conflicts arose, I asked them to try to imagine the most generous interpretation of someone else’s behaviour and start there in untangling the issue (Grenny, et al., 2021).

The consistent practice of offering and modelling generosity created a noticeable shift in the team; not only did morale improve, but the actual work the team became capable of expanded dramatically. The team collaborated to revise key programming and a quality course review rubric, they rebuilt relationships with partner units, and when the global pandemic struck in the Spring of 2020, the team responded generously to one another and to the instructors they supported. Weekly, I received emails and phone calls from faculty telling me how grateful they were for the kindness they received from our team. I’m not sure the team would have had the kind of emotional energy stores they needed had they been preoccupied with the competition, distrust, and surveillance I encountered at the outset.

It was in this first year of growth and change that a seemingly insignificant change happened in our office space that, to me, illustrates the changes the team was willing to make within this culture of generosity. A large white board in the centre of the office space had once held the name of each employee and a grid for them to indicate whether they were at their desk, at lunch, taking a short break, in a meeting, etc. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with communicating clearly to colleagues about our whereabouts, the board had come to be used as a kind of surveillance tool. Was someone where they said they were, did the board match the blocks on everyone’s calendars, did someone update the board appropriately when they stepped out of the space even for short bathroom break? I would start a meeting with an employee only to hear “Oh no, I forgot to update the board.” It also came up again and again as a point of contention when I met individually with employees about their work and progress. “If we are accountable to one another,” I asked the team, “can we not simply share our calendars and use this board for something other purpose?” Now, opening up your calendar can feel vulnerable for some, and I encouraged them to continue to use Outlook’s “Private” feature for any personal events or meetings. It was a tribute to the trust we had built that the team universally agreed—and perhaps a clear signal that the board wasn’t benefiting anyone.

Slowly, something else started to happen on the board. People began to share the joyful and creative pieces of themselves through doodles, song lyrics, and jokes. It became a colourful thing and a shared thing the team took pride in together. A team member that retired even used the board to sign her parting farewell, “Always a Lobo!” There are bigger projects and greater institutional contributions that these folks made together, but this small piece of shared space was a clear visual indication of the shift they were willing to make as a team toward a culture of generosity.

Reflection

It’s hard to come into a team you didn’t hire amidst change and uncertainty. I experienced several moments in the first few months when I struggled to stay the course and avoid tightening my supervision around a set of rules or policies. I had to keep reminding myself that if we didn’t reset the culture first, then we’d inadvertently slow down any of our efforts at big-picture collaborative work. If we couldn’t first be generous with one another, it would be much more difficult to be vulnerable enough for meaningful cooperation and the model we’d be setting for instructors would not be beneficial to students. I didn’t realize how necessary that was going to be before the pandemic, but I was grateful that the team had willingly adopted the new approaches we built together.

Purposefully supervising with generosity in mind allowed me to better support employees who had been pigeonholed as difficult or whose talents had been overlooked. It meant taking time to actively listen to employees when they asked questions or expressed concerns, engaging with them to understand and improve our approaches, and showing them gratitude for being generous with their thoughts. As the restorative justice researcher, Mikhail Lyubansky reminded my colleagues and I at a recent workshop, you can choose to hear the “please” or “thank you” underlying all communication. If someone was worried about a big change or new process (like a new Learning Management System), I chose to hear that as “please help me have more agency” and made sure they were on a steering committee, led a core working group, or looked for other ways to provide them with greater input in decision-making processes.

If someone was feeling undervalued, I chose to hear “please see my unique contributions” and worked with them to identify key projects that they found inspiring or motivating. In many ways, being generous as a leader is similar to practicing equity-minded or asset-based teaching approaches: I worked to understand the individuals on our team and their unique contexts, tease out the individual strengths and talents of each team member, sought appropriate and respectful ways to recognize them for these talents by matching them with projects where they could demonstrate the fullest potential of their work. Sometimes this meant inviting someone to join an existing project, and sometimes it meant figuring out how to see the ways someone’s ideas for their work could fit into our broader goals. Like asset-based teaching, it meant allowing folks with the same job title to take different approaches to their jobs while still meeting the same expected outcomes.

A clear test to my approach came with an employee who was thriving interpersonally on the team, but whose work didn’t seem to match the advanced expectations of their job title. Their role had not been clear when I began my work with the team, and because they were the only individual with their job title, I struggled to get clear on what their expected outcomes were. When the pandemic struck, the culture of generosity that helped others on the team thrive actually seemed to leave this person behind. When personal issues arose for this employee, their work suffered even more. The more generous thing for me to have done would have been to spend more focused time trying to identify their strengths, keeping my expectations clear and transparent, and working together with them on a path forward. This is clarity that I have in hindsight but struggled with at the time. Luckily, my own supervisor also modelled generosity in their approach to leading our centre. In collaboration with them and others from our team, eventually we were able to relocate this team member to a team that better matched the employee’s strengths. It was a challenging process, and wasn’t without its bumps, but the team member is thriving and meeting expectations. Rather than feeling uncertain about their place or disappointed in their work, they find their contributions to the larger team meaningful and rewarding once more.

My own stalling made this challenge harder than necessary, as did navigating human resource policy and application that weren’t in keeping with our team’s culture or my approach as a leader. Having a clear understanding of your institution’s supervisory policies and performance improvement policies can be helpful. Having a close relationship with your HR leaders and understanding their perspectives is even more beneficial. Further, it may still be challenging to reconcile a culture of generosity with an institutional stance focused on defensiveness and liability. Despite this known risk, my own experience has shown that it’s still work worth doing.

Advice

My advice to others seeking to adopt this principle is to start with Principle 6 and cultivate generosity for yourself. These two are in a productive reciprocal relationship with one another. The kinder and more supportive you can be for yourself (even if you aren’t sure you have “earned” it), the easier it is to offer that kindness to others. This is how we make the teams, institutions, and worlds that we’d like to live in.

References

Abu Toha, M. (2022). A rose shoulders up. In Things you may find hidden in my ear: Poems from Gaza. City Lights Books.

Grenny, J. (2022). Crucial conversations. McGraw Hill.

Lyubansky, M. (2024, March 29). Talking across differences: Creating conditions for productive dialogue [Workshop presentation]. ADVANCE at UNM Workshop, University of New Mexico.

Shihab Nye, N. (2008). Gate A-4. In Honeybee. Greenwillow.