The Gritty Leader

The higher education IT landscape is always changing. This green pasture is filled with many exciting opportunities and inevitable, lurking setbacks. To successfully navigate your teams, services, and institutions through the upcoming challenges you are facing, higher education IT leaders must demonstrate gritty leadership now more than ever.¹

What exactly is gritty leadership, and how will it help you achieve success?

Gritty leadership is a mindset that you can cultivate and should practice daily. To help you build a foundation, let's first explore the concept of grit.

In her book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth explains that effort is a more reliable and robust predictor of success than talent is. Duckworth summarizes her theory with the following two equations:

Talent x effort = skill

Skill x effort = achievement

Duckworth's theory states that talent (defined as how quickly a person improves in skill) matters for reaching achievement, but that effort counts twice.²

Effort is an essential ingredient for building grit. The danger in equating talent and achievement is that doing so removes effort from the equation. You deny yourself the opportunity to build grit and instead allow yourself to relax into the status quo.

As an IT leader, you will inevitably face setbacks in your career. As you're reading this, you might be thinking of a setback that you have experienced—maybe even one that you faced today. If you're like me, when you experience setbacks, you might immediately question what you did wrong, wonder if you're capable enough to handle it, or even feel paralyzed about how to respond. Going down the rabbit hole of doubt, fear, and shame can feel inevitable, but it is not.

You have the power of choice. Choosing fear, doubt, or shame is just as easy as choosing their opposites. You have the power to reframe the experience.

Gritty leadership is a mindset rooted in two principles:

1. Being persistent (effort)
2. Reframing negative experiences (skill)

As Charles Duhigg describes in his book, The Power of Habit, habits are malleable and controllable. Recognize that your response to a negative stimulus is a learned habit and that habits can be changed. Pro Football Hall of Famer and former National Football League head coach Tony Dungy said that changing a habit begins with an understanding of the basic components of a habit: a cue, a routine, and a reward. Once we understand the basic components of a habit, we can then attack the routine while keeping the cue and the reward the same.³

I invite you to practice building a gritty leadership mindset. Table 1 outlines the process.

Table 1. An experiment in building a gritty leadership mindset

Day	Instructions	Theme
Pre-work	Consider Angela Duckworth's grit equations. Recognize that effort is a critical success factor.	Identify (cue)
Day 1	Identify a setback you have recently experienced (at work or outside of work) and write it down in three to five sentences.	Identify (cue)
	Identify the emotions you're feeling about this experience and write down three to five of them. Allow yourself to reflect on these emotions for a while. Resist the urge to ignore or block them out (this step is painful, yet critical to reframing). Ask yourself, "Can this, too, be explored?"	Reflect (routine)
Day 2	Schedule thirty minutes to one hour with yourself, and ask yourself the following questions: What doors might open for me (or others) in this scenario? What information might I be missing? What can I learn from this experience? What can I teach others about this experience?	Reflect (routine)
Day 3	Schedule thirty minutes to one hour with yourself, and ask yourself the following questions: What am I grateful for from this experience? What will I choose to feel about this experience?	Reframe (reward)

For those who like extra credit, I challenge you to practice this routine each time you experience a setback (real or perceived) for one month. Then challenge yourself to see how long you can keep it up.

For the 2019–2020 academic year, I was nominated and selected to participate in the MOR Leaders Program with colleagues from the Big Ten Academic Alliance. As a part of the program, we are required to share events and experiences in our lives that have taught us lessons in leadership. When I shared my leadership journey with the cohort, I was incredibly nervous. I hadn't previously told colleagues about some of my failures, such as getting fired from a job in college. It felt like the shame might crush me if I spoke it into being.

Reflecting on that setback, I realized that if I had not been fired from that job, I might never have found my calling in information technology. After I shared my professional setback with my colleagues, I felt a rush of gratitude that filled the entire space of my body. I survived that setback. I even thrived as a result of it. Why? Because I never gave up. I found purpose in desolation, and I found gratitude in defeat. I had been given an opportunity to reflect, reframe, and learn from my mistake—and I got back up again.

The future of higher education IT is in our hands. All of us will face adversity along our journeys. Whether our work involves improving the student experience, simplifying infrastructure and/or administrative systems, implementing information security and privacy strategies, developing policy, managing a help desk, or streamlining funding models, we all have crucial roles to play in shaping our institutions. I'm excited about the plethora of gritty leadership opportunities that are on the horizon for all of us, and how each one of us chooses to experience them.

Notes

1. Susan Grajek, Top 10 IT Issues, 2020: The Drive to Digital Transformation Begins, special report, EDUCAUSE Review, January 27, 2020. ↩
2. Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016). ↩
3. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012). ↩

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Sarah J. Buszka is the Critical Infrastructure Service Lead at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.