The Color of Leadership

The color of leadership…

Have you ever noticed that Barnes and Noble and Borders are just full of books on leadership lately? I mean really… we must have a real need for this stuff… really badly and I guess there is a market or maybe it's just that I started to pay attention.

I’ve been doing a little content analysis of these books and they seem to say a lot of the same things… “stick out, but not too far”… “treat others well but create urgency”… “discomfort is expected”… “lead from the front… and sometimes the back”… “embrace creative destruction” (my favorite) and so on. These books also come in all sizes… the little ones that remind me of kid’s versions of “The One Minute Manager”… remember that one? Or maybe it's just a bit like "Pat the Rabbit." Others are thick tombs with huge prices (these are by the academics who hope to score some bucks and get the book counted toward merit this year… sort of twofers) and then there are the “how to” manuals with the funny names and drawings done by the author’s five-year-old child… at least I hope that’s who did it. If not, someone paid too much for the design.

The prices vary but most are in the $19.95 to $24.95 range… except those that have the academic book look… then they jump to $60 or $80 or even $120 (the later was likely an ordering mistake) and the paper quality is a lot better… also, the jacket cover has a long resume and no picture… well, maybe there is a picture but it looks like the picture you would expect on an $80 book. The guy doesn’t seem to have any obvious tattoos. Colors vary… doesn’t seem to be a “color of leadership”… well, maybe there should be… in fact maybe that’s a great title…“The Color of Leadership.” I better start writing the thing before someone else does… maybe I get can it done before I leave town in three weeks… but I better do a search… hold on...

Well, I’ve been saved some hard work, I just Googled “The Color of Leadership” and now I know… it’s been done. Something called the Media Management Center has a publication with this title… and there is another Google entry on the “colors of leadership” which seems to be claimed by some kind of consulting group that wants you to “explore the leadership spectrum”… I give up… well, maybe I should check to see if they have trademarked the notion… if they have, I can focus on those memos I need to write before the next faculty meeting.

Chasing the money...

A few entries ago I spent some time writing about “metrics”. How do we measure up? In communication and journalism we are fortunate… we don’t have a category in US News and World Report… yet. Why are we fortunate? Well, we do have rating and ranking schemes of all sorts but not a national/international ranking/rating scheme that gets so much public attention (although the NRC rankings are about to be released). I don’t know about my colleagues at other universities but I don’t feel the angst that department heads in psychology, public administration and business endure every time the US News reports come out.

At the same time we are increasingly driven by metrics. One metric that’s getting more and more attention in our field is “external funding”. What kind of money are your colleagues bringing in? “What’s this all about?” you might ask. Communication, journalism and external funding? Isn’t this the domain of the sciences and engineering? Why are we in the money hunt and what could possibly be funded in communication by the likes of the National Science Foundation, NIH, HHS, or corporate interests? Well, the answer is… a lot.

Over the last decade several factors have come into play… funding agencies like the NIH and NSF have come to realize that to tackle many of the really sticky problems we face, we need to consider interdisciplinary approaches… New information and communication technologies (ICTs) have significant social effects… these technologies get used in unexpected ways… or not! Advances in science have unanticipated effects that influence their adoption, their public perception and more importantly their funding.

The other day I talked to one of my engineering colleagues who directs a major energy research center on campus… he told me that 70% of the requests for information they receive are “soft” inquiries… nonscientific questions… policy questions. This surprised him. Another friend who directs our “nano” efforts agreed with him but seemed less surprised and wondered if we had someone in our unit who could work with them on research submissions.

So, there are opportunities… uses of new media are of great interest… public understanding of science is important… and fundable… information campaigns are a critical part of grant proposals… you need to have a dissemination campaign… show impact… publishing a piece in an obscure scientific journal is not enough anymore. But it’s more than that. It’s the recognition that science is an ‘integrated’ enterprise… it’s not isolated, it’s part of our social fabric and affects and is affected by events and people outside the laboratory. Well, others have spoken more eloquently about this so I won’t belabor this point.

The concept of “funded research” in communication and journalism is not new but its importance for our programs is growing and in major doctoral programs it’s become a critical metric. Regardless of whether or not we are hiring a humanist or a social scientist we assess “their potential to bring in funds” during the interview process. We want to hire the very best and we look to hire great scholars who are also great teachers… we are not solely focused on “grant potential” but this aspect of a hire is playing a larger role in our thinking.

Not all my colleagues will agree with me but I personally try to assess a job candidate’s potential to work in interdisciplinary teams, is their work potentially “fundable”… sounds pretty mercenary doesn’t it? Well, it’s not “money for the sake of the money”. Most of my colleagues don’t require huge amounts of expensive equipment, don’t need complex labs (some do) and a number of the best scholars in our unit don’t have major funding, but there are a lot of research questions, national surveys, and projects that involve significant travel that can’t be addressed without funds to support the work.

Funded research is the coin of the realm in R1 universities. Without significant external money we don’t show up on the charts in the VP for Research Office, we don’t sit at the tables we need to be at, we don’t participate in the conversation or influence research directions at our universities. We need to have a voice in these meetings. My colleagues have views that need to be represented and I think their views are important for our engineering, science and medical colleagues to hear… The communication department at Purdue had almost $4 million dollars in new externally funded research last year… our goal is higher this year! What are you doing reading this blog? Finish that grant application this weekend!