Language and Leadership

Administrative Conference - October 10, 2001
Worcester, Massachusetts

Good Afternoon. When I was asked to address this group today, I wondered what I might say that would be of general interest to or a possible commonality among a group such as this consisting of: auditors; budget officers; directors of environmental health and safety, physical plant, facilities planning, employee and labor relations, human resources, purchasing, grants and contracts, campus services, customer service center, auxiliary services and dining services; or, CFO’s; compensation and benefits specialists; financial analysts; capital planners; bursars; controllers; principal planners; payroll managers; project design and construction managers; and administration and finance executives. It did occur to me that given these times of transformation in nearly every dimension, I could as well talk with you about what I call "managing my flamingo"—you know the chapter in Alice in Wonderland of the Queen’s Croquet Game in which nothing is as it really seems—the croquet balls are really hedgehogs and the croquet mallet is a flamingo that keeps rearing its head every time Alice starts to swing the mallet—but I decided that these days you may have had enough in your day-to-day of the Queens Croquet Game. So, I am pleased to say that I decided to take this opportunity to talk with you today on a topic that will prove to be familiar, if not fun, for you, and one I enjoy and to which I continue to give considerable attention: that topic is the role of language in management and leadership. As you might expect, knowing my disciplinary background to be English and Comparative Languages and Literature, I have for some time been interested in language, its predications, and its postulations as instruments of exploration, discovery, and rediscovery. I should, however, like to tell you something of how I brought my interest in language to the issue of management and leadership.

About 15 years ago when I learned I was the recipient of an ACE Fellowship, I was eager to find a way to bring my discipline to bear on the entire experience of the fellowship year as well as on its research component specifically. (Briefly, to explain what the fellowship is: the American Council on Education--ACE--is the umbrella organization for all post-secondary educational organizations in the United States. One of its aspects is the Center for Leadership Development, which has as its primary purpose the identification and development of potential leaders for senior administrative positions in higher education. To that end, the Center for Leadership Development of ACE conducts an annual competition which encourages member institutions to put forward candidates whom they believe will make good prospective leaders. The fellowship consists of five parts--an internship; three national seminars for that year's complement of fellows; regional seminars at a variety of educational sites; college visits; and a research project of publishable quality.) It would seem that, at least on the surface, my disciplines might appear to be somewhat removed from higher education administration. But to the extent that the discipline accommodates my affinity for relational and referential connections and my abiding belief in the coherence of parts and whole--to this extent is there no incongruity of interests. This, you see, was the context for my bringing to bear my discipline on the research project of that fellowship year.

After having spent a few months reading the literature of leadership and listening to formal and informal presentations by a variety of leaders, it became apparent to me that the role of language and its aspects did not take on the proportions that it might in order to serve more effectively the purposes of leadership and of management. This revelation came somewhat as a surprise, for while we often talk about the power of words...of language, in practice we often neglect to reflect in our actions the power of our words...and as often neglect to bring to our words the full predicative courage of the intent of our actions. Leaders must seek and make opportunities to bring to confluence rhetoric as persuasive as the desired reality is vigorous. Rather, I found it was too often the case that we allow our language to undermine our intentions and then wonder helplessly about the pursuant muddle.

During this time, it also became clearer to me--through the discourse on and of its leaders--that there could be the informing coupling of my discipline and higher education research that I believed so firmly to be possible. Thus, I undertook an identification and analysis of the discourse.

While language may be characterized in many ways and for various purposes, it is useful for my purpose here to consider a Firthian (linguist, "Modes of Meaning," in Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951) characterization of language as a "way of behaving and making others behave. It is within this frame that the concept of discourse may be regarded as the "verbal process in the context of situation." While my research does not provide a full discussion of non-verbal communication, it does assume as a corollary the potential for further informing studies of human interaction along the full spectrum of modes of non-verbal communication.

An analysis of any discourse has at least two concerns: a characterization or description of the message (meaning) of the writer or speaker and an explanation of the message in the fuller context of occurrence. Elaborations of the former usually include a detailed exploration of the rules of coherent discourse along with a description of the structure generated by those rules. A focus on the latter, however, that is to say, a focus on an explanation of the message in the fuller context of its occurrence, allows for a consideration of various contextual factors in the process of negotiating meaning.

My interest in analyzing verbal interactions manifests itself not only in my choice of disciplines (comparative language and literature) but also in my propensity for assessing what is called in the literature the perlocutionary force of an interaction--the producing of an effect on a listener or a reader with its attendant causal behavior. I do this by attending to the degree of complement (or "fit") between the surface (apparent) message of the discourse and its metaphorical assertions. I have been somewhat abstruse, and with an after lunch audience one runs a serious risk of having the somnolence of satiation turn quickly to the surliness of a restive silence. Let me give you an example. During the course of the fellowship year I had occasion to read the inaugural address of a new president at one of the southern universities. He had come from a "system" state—as we are a system state-- (where the public higher education institutions comprise a system and are regarded by the legislature as a single entity) and was being inaugurated at a university that is also part of a system. As you might imagine, there can sometimes be a great deal of dissention among the various institutions within a system--each one arguing interminably the validity of its own requests for money. In his efforts to garner the support of the university community, the new president described the enhanced cooperation among institutions in his former state saying that they, too, in his new state could enjoy similar benefits providing they all worked together. That way, he continued, they could all get a" bigger bang for the buck". Well, I thought, what an unfortunate misspeak. On the one hand (the surface message) the president was enlisting the cooperation and collaboration of his audience, but on the other (with his choice of metaphorical assertion) he was diminishing the likelihood of a ready compliance by causing such a disjuncture between a hoped for outcome and the language used to characterize the outcome--an unfortunate metaphorical reference to prostitution or to war.

But, you say, that is just an expression. I say to you, so are they all, all just expressions. To paraphrase Marc Antony, "I speak not to disprove what you speak, but here I am to speak what I do know."

The power of metaphor to obstruct our thinking is readily observable. What for example, was the relationship between the metaphor of the iron curtain and the actuality of the Berlin Wall? (Although I do not yet speak Russian, I cannot help but wonder what metaphorical significance the words Perestroika and Glasnost might have had on the removal of that barrier.) Or, from a more recent war, to what extent did the constant repetition of the powerful metaphor of the domino theory become easy substitutes for the more troublesome task of examining the basic issues of that war? When we talk about students-as-consumers we certainly obfuscate the underlying premise of education as we value it. Or what about this one: the metaphor of the USA as the melting pot of the world--a phrase that we used for years to describe the dream that was America only to discover now the extent to which we had, by the use of this thoughtless metaphor, nearly obscured the cultural pluralism we so highly value. If we must be metaphoric in this context, perhaps the metaphor of the USA as a salad allows us better to envision the presence of many parts to comprise the whole. (I am aware of the potential of culinary metaphors; if you prefer, a musical composition will serve as an appropriate metaphor as well.) In any case, you see, careless, reckless, or obstructive metaphors should have no place in the language of leaders who seek the cooperation of their constituents.

Do you remember learning in your elementary years that a metaphor was a figure of speech by which ordinary descriptive language was made more interesting, and so you set about using them to enhance a descriptive statement or to make a prescription more persuasive? (Metaphors of Education, William Taylor, editor, p.4) The simplicity of this proposition soon gave way to your wider understandings of the relationship between language and the shaping of our experience of the nature of phenomena. Metaphor assumes a rather central position in this context. It is no longer a linguistic decoration but a ubiquitous feature of our thinking and our discourse, the "basis of the conceptual systems by means of which we understand and act within our worlds." (P.5)

T. Cohen (in "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy," in S. Sacks On Metaphor) argues that metaphor is one way of achieving a kind of intimacy, by drawing together the maker and the "appreciator" of a metaphor. In the process of recognizing that something has a metaphorical meaning, and in trying to make out what that meaning is, "...the hearer typically employs a number of assumptions about the speaker: what the speaker believes, what the speaker believes about what the hearer believes (which includes beliefs about what the speaker thinks the hearer can be expected to believe about the speaker)". Metaphors have performed a variety of functions over time. For leaders, metaphors can function in a central way, contributing to the life, credibility, sustainability, and implementation of visions proffered.

As I listened and read during that fellowship year, I began to gather clusters of metaphors into certain categories such as WAR, the JOURNEY, a GAME, a BODY (or an organism, or a society). Each major category has several subcategories, which may be found in more than one major category. There is frequently overlap which adds to the richness and the potential of the metaphor. One such metaphor I have heard used in a variety of ways is the metaphor of the wave. A speaker can intend the wave as a threat to an ordered "shore"; or the wave can carry with it a sense of anticipation and anxiety; the wave has been used to describe that which brings to the coast flotsam and jetsam; and the wave can be that which re-shapes, refines, reconfigures, renews the shoreline. There is an interesting remark about another kind of "wave" attributed to First Baron Ernest Rutherford, British physicist and the 1908 recipient of the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Rutherford's work and reputation made the Cavendish Laboratory the Mecca for experimental physicists from all over the world. As success followed success, someone observed to Rutherford that he was always at the crest of the wave. "Well, after all, I made the wave, didn't I?" said Rutherford. (reported in The Little Brown Book of Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman, General Editor).

I have had first hand experience in various meetings over the last several years to observe the expansion of war metaphors (perhaps I should say, the "proliferation" or the "escalation" of war metaphors.) It was common to hear people talking about "protecting flanks", "coming under fire", "having sufficient/insufficient ammunition", "fighting in the trenches", "torpedoing issues", "zeroing in on targets", "missing marks", "preparing bullets" (when they were referring to the preparation of salient points for presentation), "marshalling forces", "being armed to the teeth", "using guerrilla tactics", "going-to-hand", "getting blown out of the water", "constituents as foot-soldiers", and so forth. The examples I have cited here were actually all used in one three-hour meeting. Over time I had observed the augmentation of such metaphors without comment; however, the accumulation for that one meeting precipitated my bringing to the attention of the group the extent to which the war metaphors were being used and at a time when efforts were being made to enjoin the university community in collaborative energies and common agenda. After that observation, members of the group seemed to make conscious efforts to observe the appropriateness of language to the specifics of the context.

Metaphorical usage is both a reflection and a prime determinant of the intellectual framework of leaders and, hence, their actions. Observe your own use of metaphor. While I am certain you will find the presence of a wide assortment of them, you will also discern coherence among them based on the shared aspects of the different metaphors. You will also recognize immediately that metaphors have both strengths and weaknesses. The metaphors of war, for example, may sometimes more readily encourage competition of a destructive sort than cooperative efforts. On the other hand, a particular war metaphor may serve to focus on a needed aspect of leadership for a given situation. The key determinant in all of this, of course, is the basic assumption that one makes about the nature of metaphor to shape reality for us and to be a fundamental property of thought and expression. Successful metaphors not only merge seemingly incompatible terms; they demonstrate that the maker of the metaphor has developed both a keen sensitivity to language and a strong awareness of the unity of things. We all recognize, of course, that most leaders have speech writers and rarely have sole responsibility for the writing of their major speeches. However, we may also assume that to the extent a leader chooses to deliver the prepared speeches does that leader also subscribe to the metaphorical assertions therein. If such is not the case, then have we also been told a great deal about the qualities of that particular leader. In his On Poetics Aristotle says: "But the greatest thing by far is to be master of metaphor. It is the only thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars."

I have enjoyed this opportunity to tell you something about my ongoing research, through which I suspect you have gotten another insight into who I am and at least how one aspect of my discipline has become a part of my daily responsibilities. I also suspect that sometime during the rest of this conference, one or more of you will "hear" or "use" a metaphor more consciously than you might otherwise have done. More importantly, I hope you will get a sense of how a program designed to develop possible leaders for higher education administrative positions recognizes the value in acknowledging and encouraging a variety of perspectives as a way of putting into practice the strength that such variety can bring to solutions—or even to make the questions better.

Vice President Lenhardt also suggested that a comment or so about directions I see for higher education at the moment. I certainly think it is accurate to describe the environment in education generally, but higher education in particular as one more in flux and "chaotic" than usually feels comfortable. In an article titled "Planning and Chaos Theory," T.J. Cartright notes that what we call chaotic in our environments is simply order without predictability. Some of the recent literature notes that the unpredictable and chaotic is what is probably required for the scope of transformations that must occur. Katherine Hayles refers to chaos as the "…opaque turbulence that challenges and complements the transparency of order." So, directions in institutional planning will themselves need to reflect the flux of the environment (if that makes sense—it seems rather oxymoronic to think of planning templates as much in flux as the times they are anticipating). This will be a huge challenge—it has already proven to be. Higher education is complex as it is, with its concerns about access, declining resources, issues of accountability, technological growth, changing demographics, globalization, new revenue streams, university outreach, institutional autonomy, governing boards, economic development, government policies (local, state, federal), as well as the change issues pertaining to our faculty, staff, and students. Add to this mix an order no longer predictable…no longer as safe as we once thought it was, and the challenge becomes more apparent. Certainly institutions will need to focus more on their own distinct missions, as none of us will be able to be everything to everybody as we either once were…thought we were…or believed we should be. MISSION will be even more critical in all that we undertake, as we more consciously raise the question of how our resources will support our newly defined distinct missions. Regardless of our missions as public universities, it will be incumbent on us to be clearer about our relationship to the public trust as we engage in research and create new knowledge…clearer about our understanding of teaching as moral vocation, and more definitive about our relationship beyond the walls of the campus as one of societal obligation. These are some of the thoughts I have about the directions of higher education. And through all of our efforts, I believe we have to have the courage to bring to bear all parts of ourselves—our professional training and our disciplinary backgrounds, knowledge and information; our insights and intuitions; our common sense; our processes of collaboration and the outcomes of those efforts. I might add, too, an unwavering sense of humor and a resistance to taking one’s self too seriously. Thank you.