Developing the Next Generation of Leaders

Cynthia Golden: Hi everybody. Welcome to EDUCAUSE's Integrative CIO Podcast. My name is Cynthia Golden. I'm with Vantage Technology Consulting Group, and I am here with my co-host, Michael Cato of Bowdoin College, and we're happy to welcome you to today's conversation.

Michael Cato: Thanks for that, Cynthia. We're excited to get our conversation going this morning. Today, we're joined by two guests, Dr. Marilu Goodyear, who's had several higher education leadership roles at the University of Kansas over the past 35 years. I always say those numbers slowly because every time I have to do my own math, it always catches me. But Marilu has, including those roles, including in the role she has held, has been Vice Chancellor for Information Services and CIO. We're also joined by Jenny Mehemetovich, who has had 25 years in higher ed from institutional research to IT policy to faculty development, and is now focusing on executive coach ... So coaching, excuse me, supporting leaders in their teams. Together, Marilu and Jenny have partnered to lead and facilitate organizational change efforts at many organizations and supporting their leaders. They've served on a number of EDUCAUSE communities and committees, excuse me, which I means you're probably familiar to many people in the EDUCAUSE community already.

Michael Cato: And you both served as faculty on the EDUCAUSE Institutes, which is one of my favorite ways to contribute to the community. Marilu, Jenny, welcome to the podcast.

Jenny Mehmedovic: Thank you for having us.

Cynthia Golden: It looks like there's another presenter in Jenny's office.

Jenny Mehmedovic: This is Cora, and I really have no control over that.

Michael Cato: Always my favorite parts about pets. They live to make sure you know you have less control than you think.

Michael Cato: You both have had long-serving careers at the University of Kansas. You've grown through different positions. If you were asked to describe what do you think are the secret or secrets to successful long-term success in one place, where would you start? Jenny, maybe we could start with you.

Jenny Mehmedovic: Sure. I'll take that one. I think it's about knowing your strengths and then being open to possibilities that emerge from there. And then there's just a wealth of things that your mentor network can help you do. And Marilu has been a longstanding mentor for me, and that will become clear as we continue to talk. But in my career, I've been able to become known as a person who could handle some difficult conversations. And my skill at ensuring people are heard led to me being tapped to support high-level searches, help recruit distinguished professors, and facilitate university-wide change efforts alongside Marilu. And someone told me once when I was going through a rough patch several, many years ago, maybe decades ago, your reputation precedes you. So engage in ways that feed the reputation you want.

Michael Cato: I really appreciate that, Jenny. Marilu, where would you take that question?

Marilu Goodyear: Well, I think one of the most important things is to understand that if you know how decisions are getting made in your university, then it's easier to move from job to job to job, right? If you kind of have that clue about what's going to happen. When I stepped down from the CIO position, I was asked to give a speech to our campus women administrators group, and the name of the speech was Run By Amateurs, Leadership and Higher Education. So the basic concept there was most of our leaders are not educated in leadership. Most of them have degrees in biology and psychology and other kinds of things. And one of the most valuable things I think I learned was to try to understand how that person's discipline framed how they made decisions

Marilu Goodyear: And try to think, "Oh, okay, this person is from this discipline. That means they're going to care about X, Y, Z." So when I was chief information officer, our chancellor was a literature professor who wrote biographies of literary figures. So he was kind of one of those people that wanted to ... The way he made decisions was go ask a whole gob of people what they thought and kind of synthesize the information into his decision-making process. And so I quickly learned that I was going to convince him of something. I would have to have my, I have asked 30 people across campus about this and here's what they said. I had to reassure him that I'd done that kind of homework. So my provost who I reported to was a labor economist who could find a mistake in a spreadsheet in like 30 seconds.

Marilu Goodyear: So I quickly learned I had to be really, really hard on making sure that my spreadsheets were absolutely correct and I could answer any detail of finance you wanted to know about whatever it was. And our CFO, ironically, was a historian who had been at the institution for a really long time and he really believed in the tradition and history of the University of Kansas. And so I quickly learned to advocate with him. I had to convince him what I'm proposing is within our history and tradition. It continues our tradition of serving students excellent. It continues our tradition in Kansas of, we're going to do a whole lot with a few little resources was kind of one of the values that the state of Kansas has. So just an example of really being much more strategic and thinking carefully about how discipline affects a person's way of thinking about a decision and what's important to them and what's not important to them when they make that decision.

Michael Cato: I really appreciate that, Marilu. And it's interesting because both of you in your responses, you're suggesting something that maybe I just ask as a follow-up, that those approaches are dynamic and that as the organization changes, as the people that you're working with or reporting to change, you have to be able to have flexibility to change to match the circumstances. Is that correct?

Jenny Mehmedovic: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we call it tap dancing, Marilu, when we've worked together on different things, being able to pivot. So you know what your primary orientation is to the work and what you want to be trying to getting accomplished, but you got to also figure out where to meet your leaders in the middle and figure out how to adapt to what it is that they're looking for and what they are needing in order to be making decisions to get things done.

Cynthia Golden: Related to that, one of the pieces of advice I got from a mentor when I was really young early on in my career was to make sure that you're reading and paying attention to the things your provost is reading and worried about and the things your chancellor's reading and worried about. And I know we did a lot of that in the EDUCAUSE Institutes to talk about that, but that's something that stayed with me and helped with that perspective shaping that you both are talking about. So we just heard how you both started out in IT and you moved into these other roles in the academy. And Jenny, I know you did a lot of faculty development and now you're in leadership development and coaching. And Marilu, you moved from the CIO to new academic program development, and you have twice led the School of Public Affairs and Public Administration.

Cynthia Golden: And when you think about those changes, how did leading IT prepare you to contribute in other ways to your institution?

Jenny Mehmedovic: Yeah. When I worked in IT, I often joked that I had technology in my title, but I was so far from being a technologist, I just really wasn't. So just a quick conceptual map of what I did. I was originally working for IT policy and also as Marilu's chief of staff at the time. Then I started to work in the provost office on university policy and then slowly transitioned to university leadership development. And over the years, through all of those changes and working with faculty, I really developed a skillset at being able to listen to faculty and move past the status that kind of exists between faculty and staff because I don't have a PhD and I've never been a faculty member. And at first I was quite intimidated about what it was like to work with faculty since I'd never walked in that walk before.

Jenny Mehmedovic: But what I became able to understand was I also brought quite a bit of value to each of those engagements in ways that had some broader institutional knowledge than the faculty member that I was working with had from their deep disciplinary knowledge. And being able to kind of weave that together really was beneficial to me and helped focus on shared mission of what we were trying to accomplish for the university as a whole. And doing so, working with faculty over all these years helped me develop an extensive network and understanding of how different each of the faculty and departmental cultures are in each academic discipline and each school. And so the skill then that I brought was being able to bridge the gap between understanding what it is that kind of clients, stakeholders, faculty need, administrative leaders need, and then trying to provide that rather than trying to teach the whole thing at one time.

Jenny Mehmedovic: I remember one time I went to an Excel training and the training was all about, here's everything that Excel can do. And it was a two-hour training and it was everything. And I was like, "That is not what I need to know. I need you to ask me, what do you want to use Excel for? And then teach me how to do that. " And so that's kind of an analogy for what it is that I was trying to bring to bear in my different work with folks across the university. And that also kind of ties into something I said before about knowing your strengths. The Clifton Strengths is one of my favorite tools, and I have strengths in individualization and relator, which means that I like to really deeply meet people where they're at and find out what they need specifically as an individual and relate to them in ways that help to create something bigger than what we had before.

Jenny Mehmedovic: And being able to meet people where they're at, you have to understand them first and understanding that everybody wants to be seen as competent, everybody wants to be able to be valued for their contribution. And when you start to help people feel like you see them and understand them, they start to trust you. And that really helps when you're trying to continue relationship-based work over time for the good of the mission as a whole. Yeah,

Cynthia Golden: I agree. I agree. Marilu, what do you think you brought ... What from your IT experience carried over into your subsequent work?

Marilu Goodyear: Well, when young professionals asked me about their career path, I told them, "Don't look at my resume because it blasts out into the air. This woman cannot keep a job." But actually, I think what it was is that I was proving in my job that I had a campus-wide view of the organization and then figured out how to move whatever unit I was in charge of at the moment toward that campus-wide view. I think it really helped that I started out my career as an academic librarian. And so library people have to have a campus-wide view to serve in the campus, but they do a lot of interaction with specific disciplines. And I think the combination of that really helped me when I was IT director and CIO. And then when I was CIO, boy, I learned a lot about developing relationships and that was with the big 12 CIOs at the time who I could call up on the phone and get advice from to all kinds of people across campus.

Marilu Goodyear: One of the things that I think was the most significant for me is understanding that relationships and strategy going together is such an important aspect of things.

Marilu Goodyear: And so I made sure I had good relationships with every staff person who worked in the provost office and the chancellor's office. I knew them by name. I knew who their kids were. I could stand by their desks and have a conversation while I was waiting for a meeting to start center. And that paid off time and time and time again. And then I think just strategy is so important, just being able to spend the time. We all have hugely high pressure jobs. I remember going home and crying myself to sleep the first week I was CIO because I kept thinking, "There's no way I can take this stress and work this hard from 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." We have really stressful jobs, but I think what really helped me do a good job of CIO and then translate it into the rest of the positions was the feeling that I have to carve out just a little bit of time for me to think carefully about what my strategy needs to be and to plan and to execute it.

Marilu Goodyear: And in particular, to figure out how to get past the barriers that appear to be in the way. I have a colleague, Misty L. Heggeness, in our School of Public Affairs who's going to publish a book called SWIFTYNOMICS. It's out in the spring, and she takes the Taylor Swift story and then translates that into how do you really think creatively about what barriers are in front of you and how you can find a strategy around them? And I think it's just an amazing tale that she tells with that popular figure with something that's really pretty simple, which is don't give up when a barrier is in your way, pull your team together and think creatively about the way you're going to get over it under whatever.

Cynthia Golden: Perseverance.

Marilu Goodyear: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Michael Cato: Yeah. It sounds like it's that combination of perseverance and creativity, trying to find new solutions to the challenges ahead. So Marilu, I note in your background that you've been really extensive and active in topics around women's leadership that you created the women's mentoring group at KU when you were CIO, continued it for years. You've authored articles and work with the EDUCAUSE Review and other places on these topics. Would you mind talking a little bit about why that's so important to you?

Marilu Goodyear: Sure. Well, my mother was an educator, so I think I naturally came about a part of my role as a leader is to try to educate everyone around me and help them promote their careers, et cetera. So it was kind of an innate thing for me. I also became CIO in 1999 when there were not very many women in the CIO role. I was very lucky to have a number of supporting men in CIO roles that helped me out. And also very lucky that for a brief shining moment, it was about nine months. We had a state of Kansas woman CIO and K State, which was the other research university in Kansas, also had a woman's CIO. So there were three of us all at once, and it was just amazing and fun. But one of the reasons why I was so dedicated to it, I think was just more practical, which is when I took over CIO, we had to fill a number of positions and we did searches.

Marilu Goodyear: And I think Jenny was the first person we hired in that process, but many of our other women candidates didn't hold up against the candidates from external as we were hiring. And I sat and thought to myself, "Hey, Marilu, this is on you. You were doing something wrong if the people who are working in your organization are not interviewing well or for these middle management positions." And that's when I said, "Okay, enough of that. I'm going to invite every woman in this organization that I think has potential for a larger role to come forward and put a women's mentoring group together." I was CIO. I didn't have a whole lot of time to do this, so I just made this deal with them. It's going to be on my calendar and it's going to stay on my calendar, but you guys have to determine what you want to talk about.

Marilu Goodyear: You have to arrange it, you have to figure out where we're going. All I can do is show up. And it ended up being just this amazing experience of those women empowering themselves. It got to the point where second or third meeting, I wasn't even contributing that much. They were mentoring each other and solving each other's problems, and it just really worked amazingly well. And that was a real lesson to me that you can take very, very small steps to correct a problem that you see in mentoring others or coaching others. And if you value their contribution and you just put a little bit of priority into it, it can turn out amazing things. Most of the women in that group are major IT leaders now. So I mean, it really worked.

Jenny Mehmedovic: Yeah. And I'll just add on there. So let's take that point in time, 1999. I had just gotten my MBA and I had landed a job at a large telecommunications company in Kansas City, which is about 30, 45 minutes away from here. And I'd been commuting back and forth during the winter and had narrowly avoided a tricky accident and ended up spinning my car and ended up in the media and facing the other way. And that was the moment I was like, "You know what? I think I need to see if there's anything at KU," because I didn't want to continue the commute anymore. So talk about the power of mentors and networking. I reached back out to the woman who had been my boss and encouraged me even to get my MBA, who had been the director of institutional research. And I said, "Deb, I need some assistance.

Jenny Mehmedovic: Do you know anybody who's looking for a position?" And she said, "You need to meet Marilu." And so we met, I went through the application process, the review process interview, and it turned out to be a great fit. What I didn't know until just a couple years ago, it never occurred to me that at the time Marilu hired me to be her chief of staff. She had only been in the CIO role for about six months. So I didn't really realize that because when you work with Marilu, she just feels like she's kind of got it all together and she does. But also there were some things that she shared with me, stressors behind the scenes that she was navigating and managed to not show at work. And so that was really interesting to have the opportunity to be able to have the power of mentor connections to get started.

Jenny Mehmedovic: And just to kind of talk a little bit about my journey and my journey with Marilu together, I'd only been working as her chief of staff for a few months when I discovered that I was pregnant with our first child, and that had happened way quicker than I had expected. He's 23 now. He recently graduated from KU, but I was terrified to tell her because I was going to be a rising star. I was ambitious. I wanted to do great work, all these things. And when I told Marilu, she was thrilled for me and for her. She wanted to be Grammy Lou for my kid. And it was really neat to see that. In our early years together, I had a difficult time figuring out how to achieve work-life balance as a young mom and a young professional, and I had a strong drive to always do a great job.

Jenny Mehmedovic: And there were times when I would ask Marilu for help deciding whether I should attend to this one personal thing that I really wanted to do or that professional thing. And I think I was really hoping for her permission to do the personal thing, but Marilu didn't give me that. What instead she said was, "I trust you will make the right decision." And I used to really hate that response, but it actually had the effect of making me reflect and fully consider what the right thing was for me. And I'm quite sure that there are times that I chose an option that Marilu would not have chosen for herself, but she fully supported me and stepped back to provide me the space to do what was right for me. And I think that's really kind of the essence of mentorship and one of the impacts that Marilu's had on me.

Jenny Mehmedovic: And I just want to add one more thing I'll say about mentors and sponsors is that in my career, they've really helped open doors for me and helped me see strengths that I didn't really know I had and build the confidence to even look through some doorways to future opportunities that I might not have imagined myself. And now that I'm 54, I'm like, "Oh shoot, this is my opportunity now," and responsibility to help others around me. And that's why it's been so powerful to get to be an executive coach and work with folks who are navigating their own leadership journeys and help connect them in ways that they can be successful in their careers.

Michael Cato: Thank you both. Both of those stories and those experiences are really powerful to hear. And you've emphasized a couple pieces that I just want to reflect back. Jenny, one, the fact that you get to do this as your role, I can only imagine how fulfilling that is to be able to pour into the success of others as your professional role and that distinction and relationship between mentors and sponsors. I've been surprised, that's not the right word. I've been intrigued in the conversations I've had over the last five years of trying to help more of the broader higher ed community appreciate that those two things are not necessarily the same. My shorthand for it is mentors will give you time and they will share insights and perhaps advice, but sponsors are the people who will advocate for you when you're not in the room. And sometimes mentors can be sponsors, but I've watched a lot of people who are happy to mentor and are not necessarily the ones who are behind the scenes advocating for the people that they're mentoring because they haven't necessarily seen that connection between the two opportunities to serve in those roles.

Michael Cato: I'm curious if that resonates with you both. I see you nodding, Marilu.

Marilu Goodyear: Absolutely. I think you were really on to something there in the sense of there is a huge difference between that. And I think it's, I don't know, for me, I think I was pretty able to tell the difference through the relationships with people and the conversations and that kind of thing. And I was very fortunate at KU to work for a chancellor and a provost who were raised by very feminist women, and that turned them automatically into sponsorships, sponsored kind of people. I remember the provost saying to me once, "Well, my mother would kill me if I don't make sure that you have the career you need to have and I can do everything I can to do that. " So I think people's values really play into which one of those things they choose and how much time they spend to doing it. Yeah, really

Jenny Mehmedovic: Appreciate that.

Jenny Mehmedovic: And I would just add one more thing. I agree with the way you describe mentors and mentors as being ones who can advise and they've walked the walk and can share insights with you in that way, sponsors as ones who can open the door. And then I would just add in coaches. A coach helps you arrive at your own insights and figure out what is it that you might be asking a mentor for, or what is it that you might want sponsorship for? And so that's also kind of an interesting ... Sometimes people wonder what's the difference? Am I looking for a mentor? Am I looking for a coach? What do I want? So just add that clarification.

Cynthia Golden: Yeah. It's interesting that we're going down this path because Marilu, you and I did some work. I don't know if you remember, but we worked on mentorship a long time ago and developing some stuff for EDUCAUSE. And at the time we weren't making those distinctions, I don't think, between mentors and sponsors. But one of the things I do remember, it occurred to me while you were talking, is that there was an old ECAR study that surveyed CIOs and reported that almost all of them who have been in successful positions reported having a mentor. And so just the fact that that is so key to people's development and to their success and their jobs, I thought was ... And that was a long time ago, but really made a difference for people. So you both have talked a little bit about your own transitions, and I think leadership transitions are certainly a common occurrence in higher education, and I think they bring a lot of opportunities and a lot of challenges with them.

Cynthia Golden: And Marilu, you and I wrote an article about transitions in 2008. I've actually referred back to that a few times over the years, but what do you think has changed since then and what's remained the same in terms of the kinds of things we need to think about during those processes?

Marilu Goodyear: Yeah. Harking back to the conversation we just had, I want to add the word role models in there. And I want to credit Cynthia Golden for being a role model for me because she was high in the EDUCAUSE hierarchy at the time when I became CIO. And the fact that she was there made a real difference to me. And it was so great when I stepped down from the CIO role, I got to work with her for a year. So I think leadership transitions are still similar in the sense that most of the time when we're hiring a leader, we tend to emphasize hiring someone that has a strength where the previous leader had a weakness. We kind of tend to hire on the penulum going back and forth. I still think that's kind of true. And that causes problems when the new leader walks in the door and the staff and everyone working around them is kind of used to something different.

Marilu Goodyear: And so I think that transition period can be really dicey. And I work now in research and organizational change. And I will tell you, even though they know a different person is there, there's this tendency to continue to work like they worked for the farmer leader. And so figuring out how to make that a purposeful transition I think is important. And that was one of the themes of our article. And I've actually had the privilege of being a consultant and helping a few leaders in their first few months kind of make that transition. So I think that's the same. I think what's different is the speed. You accept a new role and man, this whole concept of honeymoon periods is gone.

Marilu Goodyear: Things are breaking, the very hour you accept the position. I am good friends with our current provost. She arrived on campus one week before we shut down for COVID, zero hunting moon period for her transition. So I think that means we have to do things faster and quicker. And for me, what I think that means is that I think there's a tendency for leaders to sometimes feel like they need to let the employees who work with them earn their trust. And I think probably nowadays we can't even afford to do that. We have to automatically trust until the person has proven differently to us. And that's more risky, but I think good leaders are able to take that risk and move through that. So the other thing that I found when we were working on the leadership transition thing was this book called The Courageous Follower, which I kind of fell in love with, because I think we have a ... Leadership is still the thing.

Marilu Goodyear: That's the word. Everybody wants to be a leader. We want to train all of our students in leadership. That's kind of our thing, but boy, have I appreciated the courageous followers? And that doesn't mean they're not leaders. They are leaders, but they are leaders who can understand what the person above them in the hierarchy or the task force leader, what that person needs and how to support them in a way that is helpful to them. And I think Jenny is an excellent example. She has been a courageous follower for me multiple times. I can't tell you how many times during stressful days when I was CIO, she would shut the door and do, "Stop. Let's talk about this one for 30 seconds before you make a decision." You need to hear these three things about that. So I want to bounce it to Jenny and see what she thinks about courageous follower.

Jenny Mehmedovic: Yeah. So about a year into working with Marilu, one day she comes into my office and gives me this book and it was the courageous follower. And so at that time I was kind of trying to read between the lines. I'm like, "What does this mean? Does this mean she thinks I am one? Does this mean I'm missing a whole bunch of stuff and I need to ... " But as soon as I could turn off my brain about overanalyzing it and actually got to the point where I looked at the table of contents, I was really kind of captivated. First of all, the book, it's The Courageous Follower by Ira Chalef. And it hasn't been ... The latest edition was actually 16 years ago in 2009. I think Marilu gave me the second edition when I was kind of doing the math of how old my kid was and all that.

Jenny Mehmedovic: So Ira Chalef is the author, but the first thing I noticed about the book was it had a great provocative subtitle, which was The Courageous Follower Standing Up to and for Our Leaders. And then when I flipped to the table of contents, I started to skim the chapter headings and I was like, okay, the courage to serve, the courage to assume responsibility, the courage to challenge. Oh, that seems interesting because that means maybe my voice matters. The courage to participate in transformation, the courage to take moral action. And I was just really drawn in by that. And what I took away from the book is that it's all about when do you take risks based on your values and desire for the greater good. And it's really been foundational for me and my orientation to the world, to navigating work environments, and just working with different leaders.

Jenny Mehmedovic: And so it's really changed how I showed up and how I participated in seeking and advocating for the change that I wish to see. And it helped me own and find my own voice and use it for good for the organization as a whole.

Michael Cato: Really appreciate that. That's a powerful ... I'm adding that to my list of books I need to go look up. The section headings or just the titles themselves sound really powerful and I'm looking forward to digging into that more. Maybe one of the places I would take our conversation next is thinking about succession planning, right? Because as we think about transitions, as you work through multiple roles, you both had, I would imagine, had to navigate the reality of, as I move into that next role, who's going to succeed me? And I'm curious, how have you approached it over the years? What have you learned? And maybe how has your approach has changed over time? And Marilu, maybe we could start with you this time.

Marilu Goodyear: Yeah. I have not taken any job in the past 20 years without day one, a goal of my role is to work myself out of the job in the sense that this unit should be able to function without this role being here every day. My job is to build capacity and talent and strength in this organization to allow it to function well. And it's a different way of thinking about succession planning. Usually, right? We think about the person who's going to be in that role next. But I've tried really hard to work myself out of a job in most of the jobs I've had. And that's by thinking about across the organization, what talent is there, what strengths are there, how can we do a better job of utilizing that, playing on those strengths?

Marilu Goodyear: I would have to tell you that the leaders of human resources at KU have not always been very excited about Marilu and leadership roles because I love to reorganize around people. I love to give people a chance to show what they can do. And if the org chart doesn't accommodate it now, why not just change it? Is Marilu's vision of the future here. And that's kind of antithetical to normal HR practice, but I found it really works is to build that capacity in the organization. And then hopefully you're also thinking who might be in that next role and planning for it, but it's in a more, how many different ways can this work in this organization? And because the environment's not standing still, right? It's changing too. So if you take a job and start thinking about the duplicate of yourself, it's going to be a very different thing three years later, five years later or whatever.

Marilu Goodyear: So one of the things I'm doing right now is I'm working on a new master's program called Human Organizational Performance Effectiveness as the advantage of being the acronym HOPE, HOPE, which I love. So it's a new degree at KU. But I've gotten to interview community business leaders in the Kansas City area for the last six months. And one of those HR leaders, chief people officer leaders of a major company said to me something that I thought was really brilliant, which is she said, "I have division directors in my organization that are unconsciously competent." And what she meant was that they were talented leaders and they were really good at managing the stuff that they know, right? They're really good division directors, but when they would put them in charge of a company-wide task force or something like that, they weren't as good because they were competent, but they didn't really know consciously know how to translate that competence to a new environment.

Marilu Goodyear: And to me, that's what education does for us. My response back to that is, "Oh, it's because they didn't understand the theory and the research behind that thing they were trying." And if they did, they would know what environments it's going to work in and how to adjust that environment or how to approach it differently in order to make it fit there. And I think that's a really important key for succession planning is we've got to find ways to give people that opportunity to become consciously competent through education and experience, right? Give them those opportunities to step forward, to try that campus-wide task force, to get that kind of experience. And then there's a number of roles that they can fulfill, not just the one that you're in.

Jenny Mehmedovic: Yeah. Marilu, I love what you're ... I'm sorry, Michael.

Michael Cato: That's all right. Turning right to you, Jenny.

Jenny Mehmedovic: Well, I love what you're saying about you're describing the epitome of a strengths-based leader and operating or creating a strengths-based organizational environment, which I think is really powerful because for me, working with you over these years in different capacities, it's been about reinventing where I'm going to point my strengths into what is needed at a particular point in time. So for me, succession planning is only partly about seeing that somebody in a critical mole, critical role might be leaving one day, but it's also about looking around and figuring out how are you going to develop and build on the strengths of the people that you have and doing that sponsorship, opening doors for them or bringing the education to them, helping them develop this conscious confidence that Marilu's talking about. And I think it really makes a big difference. Yeah,

Michael Cato: Really appreciate that. I can see the real power there with the perspective being broader than a traditional succession planning framework. Marilu, could I ask you to tie this back to something you said earlier in our conversation about leaders, amateur leaders, and that so much of our institution is led by people who ... How do you tie that to the concept of raising their consciousness when so many of the senior leadership across our institutions haven't had that explicit professional development around leadership and you are rarely in a position to provide that for them or encourage it to even happen?

Marilu Goodyear: Oh, interesting. I think one of the things that it's happened as I've had various administrative positions at KU is a set of courageous followers coming together and going to a leader as a group and saying, "Hey, we understand you're thinking about this issue from this criteria set." We have a different perspective and wondering if you could listen to a little bit different criteria set for what it is you're moving through here. And I guess I found increasingly leaders are busy and they're stressed, but if you volunteer to help them solve a problem that's their largest problem at the moment, you can become valuable to them, they will listen to you, they might not always do exactly what you want, but you have influenced their perception about what's going on.

Marilu Goodyear: And I think there are ways to do that that can really help a leader that doesn't necessarily understand all the great theories of strength-based leadership or anything else. It definitely worked. There are certainly some leaders who just naturally function that way, and so they're more likely to listen. I remember a great tone when myself and three other women leaders were standing in the hallway between the provost office and the men's restroom, and the provost walked by us and kind of looked around. He could tell we were talking. And I just turned around and I said, "Dave, we're plotting for you, not against you. " He said, "Okay, that's all right." But getting together with your peers and helping that leader find that solution that they need and that broadening perspective that they need, I think can be very powerful.

Michael Cato: Really appreciate that. Thank you.

Cynthia Golden: So, as we think about pulling all of this together a little bit, in higher education, we are experiencing a lot of disruption right now. And when you think about that, and it's political, it's cultural, it's technology, I mean, we haven't even talked about AI and the impact that that's going to bring, but briefly, what do you think will be important for IT in the future that none of us really have a crystal ball to use, but what are your quick thoughts on that?

Jenny Mehmedovic: Well, I'm going to go back to meeting people where they're at. So IT is just such a fundamental part of higher ed when you look at all the systems and functions it supports for me and for many of my coaching clients that I work with, it's essential to navigate those conversations about technology with stakeholders so that it supports the work of faculty, staff, and students, provides security of data and research and eases transactional processing. But it's also developing and understanding that not all stakeholders are the same like we've talked about before come from different disciplinary backgrounds, have different things that they're focusing on, but really developing the skill to have those conversations and meet people where they're at is a critical tension point and area of growth that I often focus on when I'm working as a coach with people in IT and higher ed.

Jenny Mehmedovic: And I think that's a skill that can be further developed as we face all of these different disruptors.

Cynthia Golden: Thanks. Marilu.

Marilu Goodyear: So I think we face two pretty difficult environmental actions here. One is the financial, the federal government's role in funding research. Are organizations going to value the credentials that we award our students? Can we be very relevant to the formations of societies in the environments we're responsible for? Can I make Kansas a better place? Those are pretty big questions. I think for us, and I'm particularly worried about the financial one as is everyone else, from what I can tell. I think there are a couple of things to just watch for and obviously it's rock and sockem and we're going to have to figure out how to deal with it, right? But a couple of things I watch for the organizational change literature and innovation literature points out a problem where if an organization has developed a particularly strong ability to serve the organization therein as it exists well, if they're very successful at that, they may be more likely to miss significant signs of change because they're doing it really well and when it's not going well, we're more desperate to look for solutions and look for out there looking for what's next.

Marilu Goodyear: And so I personally am so grateful for organizations like EDUCAUSE because one of the things that EDUCAUSE does for us is keep us moving, keep us hooking, keep us refreshed on what might be coming next and how it might look and what implications it might have for us. And I think that's become increasingly important because we have a lot of legacy technology infrastructure that is designed for a certain way of college and universities running, and that could change fundamentally.

Marilu Goodyear: Right now, I'm involved in creating competency-based education at the University of Kansas and trying to get our finance and student information system architecture to support that is not an easy proposition money-wise or technical-wise, right? So we have some pretty significant challenges. And so I guess my advice to folks is to really try to stay relevant, think carefully, as Jenny said, depend on that network and the developed relationships, right? But more and more, I think it's important for us to continue to talk inside and outside, make sure everybody in the organization can do the elevator speech on why we're important to society, why to be as a democratic society have been built on research and education and how critical and fundamental that is for everyone's future. And I look at the way my parents viewed that and the way my great-grandnieces now view that and it worries me a little bit because I don't think we articulate that often enough.

Michael Cato: Really appreciate that, Marilu. And maybe as you touched on the word advice, as you think about the next generation of leaders in higher education, especially those stepping into new roles now, what suggestions would both of you offer them to be thinking about?

Jenny Mehmedovic: Yeah. So I have run several years worth of leadership development cohorts for academic leaders that are trying to figure out whether they want to move on into different roles at different levels within academia. And one of the things that is just so important as a foundational building block is developing the ability to see yourself, which involves a certain matter of being able to self-reflect and be able to think about how you show up, being able to identify and know your strengths and where you can use them well. And the flip side, knowing where you may not be as strong and need to kind of augment yourself with someone else on your team. And I just want to say for like right now, this point in time, especially, I think it's important to figure out how to cultivate your own wellbeing and then also be able to cultivate the wellbeing of those around you and create an environment where that's what is expected and appropriate for being able to move forward together.

Jenny Mehmedovic: It makes such a difference when you know that your team has your back when you're going through a difficult time as a member of the sandwich generation with two kids about to launch into a society that's different than anyone we've ever known before. And with parents who are aging, it's just like tricky and being able to know that folks have your back when you need it and you've got their back when they need it and that that's okay. It makes it so much easier to tap out and tap back in with renewed energy when you need to.

Cynthia Golden: Great advice.

Michael Cato: Very much so. Would you add anything to that, Marilu?

Marilu Goodyear: I'm retiring. Good luck. No, I'm just teasing.

Marilu Goodyear: I really have to. I think just kind of riffing off of what Jenny said, not only really understanding yourself and your wellbeing and taking care of it, but being really intentional about where you spend your time and how you spend your time. And I've grown more and more appreciative of the power of reflection. I have a friend who has this tradition of every January, instead of doing a New Year's resolution, she creates a question for the year for herself to reflect on through the year. And I thought, wow, that is brilliant. And we had this amazing conversation about Deepak Tropper's little rule, the law of least effort, which is something that I have needed to say to myself over and over and over again. And basically the law of least effort is if you're trying to get something done and you have way too many barriers, maybe you need to step back and reflect about whether the universe really wants you to do that or not, whether it needs to be adjusted in some kind of way, right?

Marilu Goodyear: There should be least effort in order to accomplish something. So I think reflection questions are really, really powerful. And I think the way we choose to spend our time really, really makes a difference. You will have a undone task list when you die, right?

Marilu Goodyear: So being very conscious about which ones of those tasks you decide to do is a real important key for both your professional and personal life.

Cynthia Golden: Well, there have been so many great takeaways from this conversation today. I think we can probably end our discussion here. I know I took notes, campus-wide view, mentorship and sponsorship, the importance of your elevator speech. I will take these with me.

Michael Cato: Absolutely. I want to thank you both, Jenny, Marilu. Thank you so much for spending time with us today, and thank you to our audience for joining us, and we look forward to our next conversation on the Integrated CIO Podcast.

Jenny Mehmedovic: Thank you. Thank you.