6 Powers Administrators Should Cultivate

The most valuable skill for an administrator working at a university is the ability to identify and solve problems quickly and effectively. Honing your problem-solving skills takes practice, but approaching problems with the right attitude and mind-set will make that practice far more rewarding. After 20 years of working at a public research university, I have found that the most successful and effective university administrators cultivate six powers, which I want to share with you to help you maximize your effectiveness and success.

1. The Power of Curiosity

Curiosity is at the heart of the mission of higher education. The learning and discovery that colleges and universities exist to promote are only possible when we are willing to ask questions, challenge authority, rethink received wisdom and be open to new experiences, ideas and ways of thinking and acting. Yet in our business and professional lives, curiosity is often lacking.

As university administrators, we are hired for our knowledge, expertise and abilities, and we are rightly proud of the skills that we have developed over a lifetime of work and study. We are good at what we do because we’ve seen and done it before and therefore, we are familiar with the well-worn paths that lead to success. But the strength that comes from experience can become a weakness. When answers to questions come too easily, it can seem that every question has an easy answer, or, more dangerously, that we have the answer to every question—and that’s not always the case.

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No one knows everything about everything. Everyone knows something about something. Together, these two facts of life mean that everyone has something to teach us—if we’re curious about what other people have to offer.

Curiosity provides an immense boost to a successful career. When you are genuinely interested in what people have to say, people will say more to you. You will learn things you would never have known otherwise.

Practicing curiosity with everyone you meet helps you make connections and build relationships. People enjoy few things more than talking about their ideas, opinions and experiences. Stay curious and you will be surprised by how much you will learn and how much better you will understand those around you.

2. The Power of Empathy

Most of the time when we think about other people’s opinions and beliefs, we position ourselves as judges. We assess whether their views are correct or incorrect. We evaluate whether they are reasonable or unreasonable. These kinds of judgments, however, come from our perspective. They don’t reflect what the other person is thinking and feeling.

Whenever someone does something that strikes you as unreasonable or even outlandish or irrational, consider this: everything anyone ever says or does, no matter how bizarre or inexplicable, seems reasonable to the person who says or does it at the time they say or do it. In other words, there’s always a reason for why people do what they do. True empathy demands that you understand and appreciate those reasons. If you can’t think of any logical reason for a person’s actions, you are not seeing the world from their perspective and you should think harder.

To sharpen your power of empathy, when you encounter someone who disagrees with you or who acts in a way that you disapprove of, try to pass what George Mason University professor Bryan Caplan calls an “ideological Turing test.” To pass Caplan’s test, you must be able “to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents.” In other words, if you support abortion rights, the test would challenge you to explain the position of those who oppose abortion rights in a way that people who hold that belief would recognize and accept as correctly describing their position.

Universities are complex places that bring together many different people with many different backgrounds and from many different walks of life, which is one of their greatest strengths as places for exploration, discovery and learning. It is inevitable that in this wild and diverse milieu, you will encounter people who hold radically different points of view. You will have the most success in interacting with all of these different people and worldviews if you can find a way to understand their reasons, motivations and perspectives. Empathy can build bridges in a way that no amount of argumentation or assertions of authority ever can.

3. The Power of Assuming Good Intentions

Just as you are trying to do your best, try to assume that the people you meet are also acting in good faith and with good intentions. You may encounter someone who comes off as belligerent, angry or aggressive—and sometimes even all three at once. But before responding in kind, consider that if you were standing in their shoes and had lived the experiences they have lived, you might very well see the world as they see it.

You never know what is going on in other people’s lives. Every person you meet is facing some struggle that you know nothing about. When other people rub you the wrong way, give them the benefit of the doubt. And if these antagonists are mistaken in how they see the world, have compassion. No one passes through life so perfectly that they never make mistakes.

If you can curb the impulse to pass judgment on other people’s behavior and approach them with the assumption that their intentions are good, you will maximize your chance to influence their thoughts and behavior. As a university administrator, the prime directive is to educate, but true education doesn’t come from the sting of a stick. It comes from changing hearts and minds, and that is only possible when you approach people as people who are doing their best to do the right thing, just like you.

None of this is to say that there are no bad people in the world. There are far too many. And none of this is to say that when people do bad things, they should not be held responsible for their actions. Consequences for bad acts are natural and necessary.

But if circumstances allow, you are more likely to form a connection with another person and have a greater influence on their thoughts and behavior if you approach them as well-intentioned human beings doing their imperfect best to do the right thing. Those are the kinds of conversations that have the power to change lives.

4. The Power of Teamwork

We must also accept that no one person can do it all, and that includes us. The modern university is an inherently collaborative enterprise where nothing gets done without teamwork.

Because of their complexity, university administrations are necessarily divided into departments, each with their own area of expertise, responsibility and authority. To accomplish anything of significance inevitably requires many different departments to work together. Success comes, when it comes at all, from working together in partnership and collaboration with our colleagues. We can’t know or do everything ourselves, but we don’t have to. We are not alone.

When we open ourselves up to other people, other ideas, other ways of doing things—when we let people help us when we need help, which is almost all the time—we develop a stronger sense of agency, purpose and direction. We are each part of a greater whole, each with a role and a valuable and distinct contribution to make.

Cooperation, however, is only possible if we approach our colleagues with respect and appreciation for their specific abilities. Offer help when it is needed. Accept help when it is offered. Share credit generously. Be the colleague you want your colleagues to be. The university as an institution succeeds best when the people who make up its community work together. The power of teamwork makes great things possible.

5. The Power of Humility

One of the best lessons I ever learned in college was from my economics professor, and it had nothing to do with economics. Whenever a student offered an incorrect answer to a question, the professor wouldn’t criticize the answer. Instead, he would invite the student to go to the blackboard to explain their thinking. “After all,” Professor Saffran would say, “I could be wrong.”

While Professor Saffran was rarely wrong, the “I could be wrong” mind-set is extremely powerful. That attitude means that, with the right evidence, you could and would change your mind. But many people forget that they could be wrong, which is the path to folly and, sometimes, even ruin.

Ironically, a dogged determination to be right all the time is likely to result in being wrong more often than the humble modesty of accepting that our beliefs might be the mistaken ones. The antidote to closed-mindedness and the errors that come from it is embracing the power of humility.

As an administrator, you will make decisions that can have a profound and lasting impact on the lives of other people. You hope that impact will be positive, but there are no guarantees. You must make the most important and difficult decisions under conditions of deep and disturbing uncertainty. Are we doing the right thing? Only time will tell, and sometimes even then, you’ll never really know. The person who doesn’t react to this profound uncertainty with humility simply isn’t paying enough attention.

Humility teaches that you should be open to receiving the help of other people. You should seek out and welcome diverse viewpoints, opinions, thoughts and ideas, even those that disagree with you—maybe especially those that disagree with you.

Humility helps you become a better leader, a better manager, a better colleague and a better role model. Humility will strengthen your connection to other people, who will come to see you as a constructive, valuable and valued partner. The humble administrator generously gives credit to others, and they are unstinting in their praise and lavish in their thanks. They are appreciative of the work others do and understanding when people sometimes fall short, as all of us sometimes fall short.

Most of all, humility teaches that you are doing well when you are doing the best you can. You are not perfect and never can be, so perfection is a false measure of success. There is always more to learn and room for improvement. Imperfection, however, is not a cause for despair but rather a call to action—a demand that we strive at every turn to find ways to make the university a better place.

6. The Power of Apology

Mistakes are inevitable. And when you or your university make one, you may be tempted to cover it up or to blame other people or to pretend that it’s not a mistake at all. I’m not going to say that those strategies never work, because sometimes they do. But I want to offer another possible response to consider: sincerely apologize, make amends and promise never to repeat the error again.

A sincere apology can go a long way to mending a damaged relationship. Once you apologize, it’s hard for people to stay mad for long. They don’t need to teach you a lesson because you have already learned it. Apologizing signals that a fight is not necessary. The aggrieved person has already won. Moreover, a sincere apology conveys that you can be trusted to do the right thing in the future.

To be effective, an apology must usually be followed by action to make amends. If someone was injured, their injury must be redressed. You should also take concrete steps to prevent the mistake from being repeated. A sincere apology accompanied by robust corrective action is a powerful tool that you should be ready to use whenever you find that you or your university are in the wrong.

If you are unjustly accused, it is right and proper that you defend yourself and your honor. If you are justly accused, however, fighting the accusation only prolongs the confrontation and increases the severity of the consequences when they eventually come. When you find yourself in error, a sincere apology frees you to focus on correcting the mistake and when things are eventually put right, or as right as they can be, you can move on and get back to trying to do your best, which is all any of us can really do.

Staying Positive

Here is a corny math joke. Why is absolute value everyone’s favorite math function? Because it is always positive! I like the joke not because it is particularly funny, but because it helps me remember two things. First, people like positive people. If you are cheerful, enthusiastic and energetic, other people will like working with you, and you can’t succeed as a university administrator without the help of other people.

Second, you should always be looking for ways to turn negatives into positives. Every job comes with frustrations. Every career has setbacks. A positive outlook makes those challenges easier to handle. Positivity keeps you engaged and pushing forward when other people just give up.

The days of the university administrator are filled with challenges and conflicts. In a sense, the university administrator exists, much like emergency-room physicians, to respond to the incidents and accidents of the moment. On our best days and in our best moments, our decisions, words and actions will preserve and protect our precious institutions so that they can carry out their vital missions of educating the next generation of scholars, leaders, inventors and—not to be discounted—ordinary citizens who will contribute to their communities, raise their families and make the world a little more livable.

Steve Jobs famously said that his goal was “to make a dent in the universe.” As administrators, we have the opportunity and the power to make a difference, a dent, if you will, and if that dent makes our universities a little better, well, then we have done a good day’s work.