What is Leadership?

I frequently Zoom with a friend, CJ, on the East Coast. Our conversations are always stimulating, never boring. We both graduated from the same small-town Midwestern high school back in the 60s but, interestingly, it is only in the past couple of years that our relationship has deepened. Last year, during my trip back to rural Northern Wisconsin for our sixtieth-class reunion, she was one of just a couple individuals with whom I was eagerly anticipating some one-on-one time.

We are both academics, but because we spent almost six decades leading quite different lives, with only infrequent contact, we continue to learn more about each other with every interaction. During our last call, I mentioned that throughout most of my professional life I had occupied leadership positions. She hesitated, then interrupted with a simple but provocative question: “What is leadership?”

(For her own reasons, she’d been ruminating on this question for a while, and was interested in my take.)

I do not recall precisely how I answered. That probably means my response was not especially coherent. You might expect someone who spent decades in higher education administration, earned a doctorate in the field, worked as an academic dean, and has written extensively about leadership in these pages to have a polished definition ready for immediate deployment. I did not; I mostly rambled.

Since then, the question has stayed with me. So I’m here to wander around the topic yet again and to report that with more than twenty years of writing here in Musings, all signs seem to point, consistently, toward the same idea: leadership begins with trust.

A title may give someone authority to make decisions, approve budgets, evaluate employees, or call a staff meeting. It does not guarantee, however, that anyone will have trust in the person exercising that authority. Positional power can produce compliance, at least for a while, but compliance and followership are not the same thing.

When I first became an interim academic dean, I had never been a dean, department chair, or even a full-time faculty member. At my first divisional meeting, I told the story of my personal journey and shared the values I was bringing to the position. I believed that people needed to know the person asking for their confidence.

That experience helped convince me that authenticity is central to leadership. By authenticity, I do not mean turning every meeting into a confessional. I mean allowing people to see an alignment among one’s values, words, decisions, and behavior. That alignment is also how I understand integrity. It becomes most visible when remaining true to one’s values is inconvenient or risky. When words and actions match, people do not have to search constantly for hidden motives. A basis for trust has been established.

Leadership also depends upon listening. “Leaders,” so-called, often “listen” just long enough to formulate an answer or defend a decision. Genuine, active listening accepts that someone else may know something important, including something the leader would prefer not to hear. It communicates respect and makes an organization more intelligent. When people expect dismissal or retaliation, they remain silent, and the person naming a problem can become the problem.

Listening cannot necessarily tell a leader exactly what to do, however. My doctoral mentor, Thomas Schwandt, helped me approach the uncertainty that remains. He asked questions that slowed thinking down: What does this mean? Whose voices are absent? Given what we know, what should we do now? His questions taught me to examine both values and assumptions, mine and others, before acting. They also encouraged humility, since a sincere conviction can still be wrong.

Those habits shaped how I understood authority long before I became a college dean. Earlier, while I was working for the Oregon University System, one of our university presidents described my style as that of a “servant leader.” I had not consciously adopted the term, but I recognized myself in it. I had always believed that leadership was less about exercising power over people than using whatever authority I possessed on their behalf. I often told colleagues that whatever power came with my position amounted, in practice, to the power to persuade. The president had given a name to the way I was already trying to lead.

I have also always thought of myself as a consensus builder. That did not mean requiring unanimity or waiting until every objection disappeared. It meant bringing people into the process, finding common ground, and building enough shared ownership to move forward. Consensus was not an escape from leadership. It was one way of exercising it.

Together, these descriptions explain why I regard administration as a calling to service. A college exists to educate students and serve a larger public good. Administrators temporarily hold responsibility for a mission that will continue after they depart.

Service does not mean passivity, though, and listening does not eliminate the obligation to decide. Participation makes decisions more informed and legitimate, but responsibility cannot be distributed so broadly that no one remains accountable. Presidents must lead, boards must govern, and administrators must sometimes choose among competing interests.

A responsible leader invites the knowledge of those affected, communicates the reasons for change, makes the necessary judgment, and accepts accountability for what follows. Collaboration is not unanimous agreement, but neither is it a ceremonial conversation held after the real decision has already been made.

My recent writing about Lane Community College has tested these convictions from a different vantage point. As a retired administrator and community member, I have sometimes called for decisive action, including the resignation of a trustee and the nonrenewal of a presidential contract. That might appear inconsistent with my emphasis on collaboration, but listening is not leadership’s final act. A process that produces no accountability can become another form of avoidance.

All of this brings me back to CJ’s initial question. What is leadership, anyway? For me, leadership begins with trust, which grows when people experience a leader as authentic and know they are being heard. It means seeking consensus, encouraging collaboration, and bringing people together around a purpose they share. It also means acting when necessary and remaining accountable for the result.

Perhaps that university president had already supplied the shortest answer. Leadership is service. A title may identify who occupies the office, but it tells us little about whether leadership is occurring there. What matters is what a person does with the trust.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

He roller-coaster, he got early warning
He got muddy water, he one mojo filter
He say, “One and one and one is three”
Got to be good-looking, ‘cause he’s so hard to see

Come together
Right now
Over me

(“Come Together” — Beatles)

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My Own Clock

For most of my adult life, I believed I was a morning person. Whether I was working as a chemist in my twenties, attending graduate school in counseling in my thirties, teaching while completing my Ph.D. at Indiana University in my forties, or later serving as a college administrator, I was typically up and at ’em by 5:30 a.m. I assumed that was simply who I was: an early riser, a morning person. It has taken retirement to make me question whether the clock I lived by for so long was ever really my own.

As I look back, I recognize that my sleep pattern was among many rituals which remained remarkably consistent throughout my professional life. For example, I often stopped for breakfast on the way to work before arriving at an office that was mostly empty. How I valued that quiet first hour. The phone wasn’t ringing. Meetings hadn’t begun. No one was standing in the doorway with an urgent question. It gave me time to get oriented before the demands of the day took over.

I recall that during my years at IU, associate instructors could request the sections we wanted to teach. I always chose the 8:00 a.m. classes. Most of my graduate-student peers preferred something later, and undergraduates weren’t especially enthusiastic about early mornings either (an obvious understatement). That suited me just fine. I loved beginning the day before campus had fully awakened.

Then there was another idiosyncratic practice of mine. For years, on the left side of my desk, I kept a stack of papers. The issues demanding the most immediate attention were always on top. I continually shuffled them, working my way down as the day allowed. Those near the bottom sometimes waited for days or even weeks. More than once, a problem resolved itself before I ever reached it. (That strategy, in itself, continues to serve as a valuable personal and professional axiom: not every problem requires immediate action, and some require no action at all.) Like my early mornings, that stack became part of the architecture of my days.

Of course, there were occasional outside interruptions to my rhythms. Beginning in the late 1990s, an enlarged prostate led to increasingly problematic sleep. Four or five trips to the bathroom each night became routine. A TURP (the “roto-rooter” prostate surgery) procedure in 2011 helped enormously, but years of interrupted sleep had trained my body to wake repeatedly. Even after this medical issue improved, the habit of frequent awakenings lingered. But throughout it all, I remained an early riser.

Ultimately, retirement had its impact on my lifestyle. While there was no conscious decision to sleep in later, there simply was no longer a reason to get up before dawn. Without really intending it, I began getting up a little later. And then later.

Today I’m usually asleep by 10:00 and awake around 7:30, about two hours more sleep than during most of my working life. At age seventy-nine, I now sleep considerably more than I once did. That surprised me because I’d always heard that older adults need less sleep. Curious, I did a little reading and discovered the research isn’t nearly as settled as the popular wisdom suggests.

While I was at IU, one of my closest friends seemed to function quite well on four or five hours of sleep each night, but I always needed much more. We were both a little skeptical of the other’s sleeping habits. I couldn’t imagine getting by on so little sleep, and he probably thought I was a slacker. Looking back, I guess each of us believed our own rhythms to be the “normal” ones.

What has stayed with me, though, isn’t the research itself or the sleeping habits of others. Rather, different questions altogether poke through. If my body now prefers a schedule so unlike the one I had followed through most of my adult life, what’s changed? Has retirement simply given me permission to sleep more? Or had I spent decades assuming that my work schedule reflected my natural rhythm when, in fact, I had gradually adapted myself to the rhythms of the institutions where I worked?

For more than half a century, my life was organized around the schedules of schools, colleges, and universities. Over time, those rhythms became so familiar that I stopped noticing they belonged to the institutions where I worked. I experienced them as my own. I believed I was someone who naturally woke at 5:30 every morning. Maybe I was. Or maybe I had simply spent decades living by rhythms that were never entirely mine?

Interestingly, although I sleep longer now, I still keep a pile of papers on the left side of my desk. Today’s stack has little to do with budgets, personnel issues, or committee meetings, though. Instead, it contains notes for upcoming doctor appointments, insurance forms, and, at the moment, a draft of my will waiting to be finalized and signed.

I suppose that’s what retirement has given me. Not simply more time, but a different relationship to time. For most of my adult life, my days began because they had to. Today they begin when I’m ready. Whether that means I truly need more sleep or have finally been allowed to get the sleep I’ve always needed, I don’t know. But after all these years, I’m no longer quite so certain that I ever really understood my own clock.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

Time is on my side, yes it is
Time is on my side, yes it is

Now you all were saying that you want to be free
But you’ll come runnin’ back (I said you would baby)
You’ll come runnin’ back (like I told you so many times before)
You’ll come runnin’ back to me, yeah

Time is on my side, yes it is
Time is on my side, yes it is

(“Time Is On My Side” — Rolling Stones)

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The Observer is Always in the Story

On Memoir, Memory, and the Limits of Objectivity

Not long ago, I reviewed Lauren Kessler’s Everything Changes Everything, her memoir of walking the Camino Francés, the ancient 500-mile pilgrimage that begins in the south of France, crosses northern Spain, and concludes at Santiago de Compostela. Kessler undertook the journey after losing both her husband and her daughter within the span of eight months. My review was later published in the Eugene Weekly (still in existence after 44 years as an actual print newspaper!).

Now, about four months after the book’s publication, Kessler has posted an essay on her Substack titled “The Facts of Memory.” In it, she reflects on the challenges of writing a memoir, a genre that differs from the nonfiction books that established her reputation. As a journalist and nonfiction writer, she has spent her career pursuing facts, verifying accounts, and trying to get the story right. Memoir, however, asks something different of a writer.

The essay explores the uneasy relationship between memory and accuracy. Kessler describes the steps she took to check her recollections against documents, conversations, and other sources, while also acknowledging the unavoidable role of memory in shaping any personal narrative. Reading it, I was struck by her wrestling with questions that have occupied researchers, historians, and writers for a very long time. She invited readers to respond, and I found myself wanting to join the conversation. Here is what I wrote…

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Hi Lauren,

This essay resonated with me, though perhaps not in exactly the way you intended.

My academic training was in qualitative and interpretive research. For my doctoral dissertation, I spent several years studying the social world of a college fraternity, conducting interviews, reviewing documents, attending events, and attempting to understand how members made meaning of their experiences. Early in that work, I abandoned the idea that I could somehow stand outside the story as a detached observer. I brought my own history, assumptions, and experiences to the project, and the best I could do was acknowledge them and make them visible to readers.

Because of that background, I really loved reading this discussion of memoir and nonfiction. We both seem to agree that all accounts of human experience are filtered through the observer. Where you see a tension between memoir and nonfiction, though, I tend to see a continuum. Even the most conscientious reporter or researcher makes choices about what to notice, what to include, what to emphasize, and what meaning to draw from the material. Those choices are never entirely objective.

In fact, one of the things I noted in my review of Everything Changes Everything was that I experienced it not only as a memoir but almost as a form of ethnography. You were documenting a journey, certainly, but you were also observing and interpreting a social and emotional world. The subject happened to be grief rather than a culture or community, but the process, and result, felt surprisingly familiar.

Where I think your essay raises an important point is in distinguishing between subjectivity and memory. Subjectivity does not trouble me very much. Memory, well, is an entirely more complicated matter. Human beings reconstruct the past rather than retrieve it intact, and I understand why that creates discomfort for anyone whose professional life has been grounded in nonfiction reporting.

Still, as a reader, what I ultimately trusted in your book was not the impossibility of perfect recall but the honesty and integrity of the effort. Without even much caring, I imagined that you were doing exactly what you describe in your author’s note: consulting documents, checking memories, talking with others, and rendering events as faithfully as possible.

Perhaps that is why I was struck by this essay as sounding almost apologetic. To me, the power of your memoir lies not in overcoming subjectivity but in embracing it. The book succeeds because it offers a deeply observed and thoughtfully interpreted account of lived experience. I don’t see that as a weakness of memoir. I see it as one of its greatest strengths.

Thanks for giving us all something to think about!

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The Observer Effect

Can You Hear Me Now?

Here’s a rather timeless question: If a tree falls in a lonely forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? This issue has engaged philosophers for centuries and has given rise to considerable scholarly debate.

Lately I have begun to wonder whether the internet has produced a modern version of a similar philosophical problem, specifically with regard to blogging. If a person writes essays that remain virtually unread, does the blog really exist?

One might imagine that such a question could be addressed, at least somewhat marginally, with data. We live in the age of analytics, after all. Somewhere inside the mysterious machinery of the internet, numbers are quietly crunched: page views, visitor counts, geographic locations, and other tidy bits of data gradually accumulate in the background. Naturally, I occasionally check the available statistics here on Musings.

What I find here can best be described as modest evidence of human life. Sometimes one of my posts appears to have attracted three visitors. Two of those visits are almost certainly me, returning to see whether a typo escaped my notice before I published. The third might represent an actual reader. Or possibly a search engine robot conducting routine surveillance of the digital landscape.

But every now and then the analytics reveal something more mysterious. A recent visitor with an IP address from the Seychelles, for example. I try to imagine this person: someone on a small island in the Indian Ocean who has paused long enough to read a reflective essay about time, memory, or late-life philosophy written by a retired higher-ed guy in Oregon. It is a pleasant thought. Unfortunately, of course, it is most likely a bot.

These observations suggest that the deeper philosophical issue may lie elsewhere. René Descartes famously attempted to anchor human existence in a single undeniable truth: Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. The act of thinking itself confirmed the existence of the thinker.

Modern physics introduces yet another wrinkle. In quantum mechanics, the Uncertainty Principle suggests that the act of observation influences what is being observed. At the smallest scales of reality, the observer and the observed become entangled in curious ways. The observer becomes part of the phenomenon.

All of this raises an unsettling possibility for bloggers: perhaps a post does not fully exist until someone reads it.

For the modern blogger, then, a similar formulation might present itself: Scribo, ergo sum. I write, therefore I am.

But writing on the internet introduces a complication Descartes never had to consider. Descartes lived in an era when publishing assumed an audience. In our era, it is entirely possible to write something, place it carefully on a beautifully designed website — yes, I am talking about TechnoMonk’s Musings here — and discover that the universe has responded with a deafening silence.

This raises a subtle question. If writing is placed before the world but no one encounters it, what exactly has occurred? Is the blog an act of communication, or merely a private journal that just happens to possess a URL?

Perhaps the older philosophical puzzle offers a clue. A tree falling in the forest still disturbs the air, shakes the ground, and settles into the soil whether anyone happens to be standing nearby to hear the sound. The event takes place regardless of observation.

So let’s consider this: Writing may work much the same way. Thoughts take shape. Words accumulate. A small archive of a life gradually forms, essay by essay. Whether the audience is large, small, or occasionally located in the Seychelles may be only an incidental matter.

Descartes had certainty: Cogito, ergo sum.

I think, therefore I am.

Physicists have uncertainty; and so do I. Scribo, ergo sum.

I write, therefore I might be?

Whether anyone can hear me now is another question entirely.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-shiny day
It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-shiny day

I think I can make it now, the pain is gone
All of the bad feelings have disappeared
Here is the rainbow I've been prayin' for

It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-shiny day

(“I Can See Clearly Now” — Johnny Nash)

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Meditations on Time

Here I am, at age 78, seemingly surrounded by stories about time. These stories naturally have a way of turning my thoughts toward how short my own time may be.

I just reread a novel in which every adult on the planet receives a box containing a string that reveals exactly how long they will live. And I’m recalling the television comedy about a moral accounting system that tracks a person’s life here on Earth. Finally, there’s the recent film that imagines we get to choose the precise form our eternity will take.

I did not set out to braid these snippets of our popular culture together. They braided themselves. At this age, time insists on being the subject.

The reminders are constant. Obituary columns, for one. My personal calendar, for another, which now includes far more medical appointments than it once did. Routine blood work. MRI, CT and DEXA scans. Follow-ups, with each visit carrying the distinct possibility that this will be the one where the doctor pauses too long before speaking. Most of the time the news is ordinary. “See you in six months.” But the suspense never quite disappears.

In Nikki Erlick’s 2022 novel The Measure, a mid-life character suggests that a string long enough to reach age eighty would count as good news. When I read that passage, I felt a small jolt. Eighty no longer feels like a distant horizon. It is a number that is uncomfortably close.

If I opened my box today, I would automatically have a long string. The real question would be: how much longer? A year? Five years? Ten? More? Though If I died today, surely no one would lament that I was gone before my time.

All of which leads to other concerns. How many more years would I want if they are shadowed by increasing pain — or other physical or mental decline? Longevity, at this stage, is not automatically the goal. There are conditions.

The Good Place, the four-season television series originally airing on NBC (and now available on Peacock), begins with a moral scoring system; every human action or interaction earns positive or negative points. An endless array of cosmic accountants supposedly keeps track of these tallies someplace up there in the sky, and when you die your final count decides your destiny. It is morality, and judgment day, rendered as a dispassionate spreadsheet.

At 78, that premise feels less like satire and more like a quiet audit. I find myself reviewing my own ledger. Have I been good? Not necessarily accomplished. Nor productive. But good?

My entries must be mixed. I have lived and loved imperfectly. I have hurt people I did not intend to hurt. There are relationships that did not endure. Some ended gently. Others did not. Even now there is sadness attached to those chapters, a sense that certain conversations might have gone differently if I had been wiser, braver or simply more skilled.

I sometimes wonder whether those endings count against me, or whether they merely show that I kept trying to connect and sometimes failed.

The show ultimately dismantles its point system, though. Life, it suggests, is far too entangled for simple math. Growth matters more than totals; it matters more than being flawless.

What lingers for me now is the series’ ending. Even paradise becomes hollow if it stretches on forever. In the final season, the characters are offered an exit. They step through one last door when they feel complete. Eternity with no ending, the show suggests, flattens meaning.

So, I wonder: How, ultimately, will I measure my existence? Will there ever be a time when will I feel complete?

Those questions followed me into the 2025 film Eternity, now on Apple TV, where humanity is invited to choose the form one’s forever will take. The idea sounds appealing at first. Pick your paradise. A tropical beach, for example. Perfect weather. Endless calm.

But what would that mean after a thousand years? Ten thousand? How could any single scene, no matter how beautiful, sustain significance without limit? Without scarcity?

Part of what makes a late-life conversation more vivid is precisely that it may not be repeated endlessly. Scarcity is what gives weight to life’s ordinary moments.

If I knew the precise length of my string, maybe I would live differently. I might rush to repair what remains frayed. Or I might grow cautious, conserving energy. Uncertainty leaves me in between. Aware of the limit, but not of its measure. Isn’t it that uncertainty that keeps life from becoming either frantic or complacent?

If there is a ledger somewhere, I hope it records effort. That it shows I kept revising myself. That I tried to mend what I could. That I did not stop growing simply because the horizon drew closer.

I am not eager to open the box. And I am not certain I want a tropical eternity with no horizon. I only know that the ticking is audible now. Doctor visits. Quiet evenings. Old relationships to ponder. Meditations on time.

Age 78. Still adding to the ledger.

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Poetry Selection: The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

-Mary Oliver

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