A Conversation about Communication, Leadership, and Knowing What We Don’t Know
On May 28, Leading Online talked with Curt Lieneck, Director of Information Technology at the University of Chicago Lab Schools. Though we had seen his name and read his words for many years as members of the Independent School Educators Listserv email distribution group, we only got to meet Curt in person when we were in Memphis for an educational technology conference. Reshan and Curt happened to sit next to one another on one of the shuttles from the hotel to the conference site, and later that day at another session Reshan heard Curt offer some very insightful words about the purpose of schools. We knew we wanted to keep learning from him, and we eventually asked him to contribute to our book.
Leading Online: In [the book] Leading Online, you use rowing as an analogy to explain the key to unlocking the magic of school. Can you explain the analogy again for our newsletter audience, elaborating on it if possible?
Curt Lieneck: What struck me about the conversation I had with the rower was the combination of emotion and joy that he was able to share, in [regards to] everybody working in unison to achieve a shared goal, and the way that made him feel, despite the fact that it really hurts to row competitively at his level. Much of what we do [in IT] is stuff we've never done before, and if we have trust in each other and that level of confidence that we are going to work together, then it makes getting the boat rowing smoothly a lot easier than it would be otherwise. You can't have people who are daunted in any way by pain – and I'm using pain in two different senses here, of doing a lot of things you've never done before versus the physical pain of rowing. If you have people who are uncomfortable with being uncomfortable, it is painful to get things done. In that sense, the rowing metaphor has been a good one for me to keep in mind as we continue to tackle complicated things that we've never really done before, while at the same time delivering a reliable level of service and incident management and so forth as an IT team. Once you're in that situation where everybody is really working optimally together, it's something you don't forget, and you really want to experience that again and again and again. I don't know if it's the same sort of flow experience that Csikszentmihalyi was responsible for articulating, but it is nice to feel like you're on a different level than a lot of other people who go to work every day.
LO: We love that you can pronounce the name Csikszentmihalyi.
CP: I think you can't pick up your University of Chicago paycheck unless you learn how.
LO: Good point. Do you feel that you can create that sense of rowing together using online tools? The things that you are talking about. . . do those have to happen in person?
CL: It's not often physically possible to get a lot of people in the same place at the same time, but, certainly as a consultant, I've had the experience of working on very difficult projects with people I've never met before who weren't anywhere in physical space where I could get in touch with them. And whether it's through the phone, or by sharing documents and so forth, the people who are good at expressing themselves and being able to put their expertise forward in a non-threatening kind of way . . . yeah, we've had that experience of really solid teamwork on a small consulting group of five or six folks. Whether that scales to large numbers of people, I’m not sure. I do know that some of the same principles apply – that you have to be open, you have to be vulnerable, and operations have to be transparent to the extent that you can engender trust. Those are all necessary conditions for the sort of teamwork experiences that I [am describing].
I play online pool and it's interesting because the app picks a random person for you to play against. You can tell by the way people play and the comments that they make that some of them are really nice people. You end up playing a lot longer with the nice people than you normally would otherwise. (I do wonder sometimes if our [students] are developing a sixth sense about such things because they've been more inured to the online environment than certainly I was growing up.) But I guess to the extent that people can be authentic online and have something to contribute online, yeah, I would say those experiences can happen [on or offline]. I know they've certainly happened on those consulting engagements I've been on. Then when you actually get to meet these people in person, it's just hilarious because they really are who they are online, and that fit is just fabulous.
LO: We've been studying Nick Morgan’s work, about when you communicate face-to-face. In order to be authentic in your communication, you have to believe in your message and then also communicate it in a way that people believe that you believe it. Do you think there is a parallel process in the online world where you meet people online and you have a gut reaction that this person is authentic or this person is inauthentic or this person is really nice?
CL: [A question I would ask is,] “does somebody need to be the smartest person in the room?” Even online, you can tell those people a mile away. In my world, if you need to be the smartest person in the room, you aren't. I also think people who are good at expressing themselves come across online as they would in person.
LO: This conversation is making me think about email etiquette. I know I can think of some examples where some of the simple graces, or the absence of them, in an email, especially from a leader to a large group, can change how a message is received. Without naming anybody, or throwing anyone under the bus, can you think of a time where you've been on the receiving end of bad email communication? And also, on the flip side, what do you do with intent when you communicate via email to the people you lead or the community you serve?
CL: The most outstanding example was when I was at the wrong end. I learned at one time that a reporting relationship I had enjoyed for close to 10 years had been changed, and I was informed about that [change] in an email as part of a diagram of a new org chart. [This message came] without any kind of in-person preparation at all. For somebody as heavily invested in building strong working relationships as I am, I was so disappointed. It was a real head scratcher. It was like, “Really? Is this the way we're going to do business? I hope not.” It turned out to be the exception rather than the rule from the people involved, but it did happen in a number of other areas of school life involving an administrative team that, I felt, needed some schooling in how to [communicate] properly. Another path, though less efficient, would have been the more effective way.
In my own work, I'm very careful, first of all, to keep things brief. So if there are really heavy nuances in [a message], then email is just not the right medium. I feel like I'm Captain Obvious here. There's the old saying that content is king, and I don't actually believe that; I think context is king. Whatever message I have, I always take a sentence or two to try to put it in some kind of context by saying, “You may recall that this effort was taking place and one of the things that was being investigated was X.” The second paragraph is, “Okay, we've made some decisions about that” – that's the second two-line paragraph. A third two-line paragraph is, “If you want the more detailed explanation on the technical side of this, for those of you who are geekily inclined, then I put the long explanation under my signature and you can go look at that at your leisure, or not.” Then, always at the end, “If you have questions or concerns, feel free to email or stop by my office, etcetera.” I think I've gotten pretty good at those kinds of emails over the years.
When I first got into IT after coming out of the classroom for many years, I had a very bright young man who got stuck with helping me understand technology in ways that I hadn't before. Back then, when I would start writing emails about technology, he would just throw them back at me and say, “What's the fourth grade version?” He said, “You're the best fourth grade teacher I've ever seen. . . . What message would you send to the fourth grade?” And that's been really, really helpful because I'm always looking to prune, to undo, and to keep things as rock-solid clear as possible.
I think leaders need to understand when email's the right medium for getting something done; then, [if they choose to use it,] they always need to provide the context that goes along with the content of the information. Sometimes in our hurry to get stuff done, we forget about that context part.
LO: Are there other things in your past – like the exchange with the colleague who would throw an e-mail back at you – that prepared you to lead well either online or offline?
CL: For a good part of high school and a little bit of college, I got by just by being charming and funny – until I had to start writing a lot of papers. I never had to write a lot of papers in high school. But when I ran into a humanities teacher during my sophomore year at college, he pulled me aside and said, “You're way smarter than this paper tells me. You don't really know how to write these do you?” And I said, “No, I actually don't.” And so he said, “Curt, you're going to come to my office two days a week for the next three months, and by the time you get out, you're going to know how to write.” And it was a really good lesson for me – that being charming and funny is great, but you also have to produce if you want to earn respect. I've hired a number a of people who are very funny and charming and delightful to be around, but I’ve learned that we have to be focused on results in addition to enjoying the work that we do.
In terms of leadership, too, I think you can't be afraid to say that you don't know the answer to something. You have to model that for people and, boy, on my first few years on this job – and still to this day – there's a lot that I just don't know about technology. For example, once a month all of the tech leaders from the different sub-units get together [at the University of Chicago]. And if there's something that I don't understand, I'll just raise a hand and say, “I know most of you all know exactly about all of this, but I don't. Somebody give me a two-minute explanation about this thing that you're talking about and why it's important to know.” For my own staff, I think that's been a very helpful [move] because they don't feel like they have to have all the answers.
The woman who ran the graduate school program that I went to was always diligent about being very, very clear about what was expected from you. [At work, too,] if your staff is not clear about what's expected of them, you're going to be unsatisfied with anything they do. My people know exactly what I expect from them and they also have told me what they expect from me. At the end of any meeting, [in fact,] I will always ask, “Is there something I need to be doing that I am not?” And I don't want to embarrass people either at meetings, but if there's a need to go back one-on-one and say, “Maybe we're not clear on this, but I'm expecting that you're going to do this in this situation, and if I didn't make that clear, that's on me.”
LO: All right, so this will be our closing question. Dream big. What do you think school or schools will look like in 10 years?
CL: Well, I guess I would ask, which schools? The cynical part of me wants to say that a lot of independent schools will look kind of like they look right now, only maybe fancier and better. They've got a good thing going and they know it. Public schools, I have no idea. I just have no idea. I have a feeling if I did have an idea, I could earn a lot of money telling people what it would be.
But, I do think that some of us – some aspect of what we do – will become less and less relevant unless we can really focus on that value proposition of, “We do things here that you can't do any place else.” If an old guy like me can learn to play punk rock without ever having an in-person guitar teacher, just by going on Coursera, you know that things are different. Though I’m not the biggest Dan Pink fan, I think he was right when he said that, more and more, the world is going to reward those people who do things only they can do.
Leading Online: In [the book] Leading Online, you use rowing as an analogy to explain the key to unlocking the magic of school. Can you explain the analogy again for our newsletter audience, elaborating on it if possible?
Curt Lieneck: What struck me about the conversation I had with the rower was the combination of emotion and joy that he was able to share, in [regards to] everybody working in unison to achieve a shared goal, and the way that made him feel, despite the fact that it really hurts to row competitively at his level. Much of what we do [in IT] is stuff we've never done before, and if we have trust in each other and that level of confidence that we are going to work together, then it makes getting the boat rowing smoothly a lot easier than it would be otherwise. You can't have people who are daunted in any way by pain – and I'm using pain in two different senses here, of doing a lot of things you've never done before versus the physical pain of rowing. If you have people who are uncomfortable with being uncomfortable, it is painful to get things done. In that sense, the rowing metaphor has been a good one for me to keep in mind as we continue to tackle complicated things that we've never really done before, while at the same time delivering a reliable level of service and incident management and so forth as an IT team. Once you're in that situation where everybody is really working optimally together, it's something you don't forget, and you really want to experience that again and again and again. I don't know if it's the same sort of flow experience that Csikszentmihalyi was responsible for articulating, but it is nice to feel like you're on a different level than a lot of other people who go to work every day.
LO: We love that you can pronounce the name Csikszentmihalyi.
CP: I think you can't pick up your University of Chicago paycheck unless you learn how.
LO: Good point. Do you feel that you can create that sense of rowing together using online tools? The things that you are talking about. . . do those have to happen in person?
CL: It's not often physically possible to get a lot of people in the same place at the same time, but, certainly as a consultant, I've had the experience of working on very difficult projects with people I've never met before who weren't anywhere in physical space where I could get in touch with them. And whether it's through the phone, or by sharing documents and so forth, the people who are good at expressing themselves and being able to put their expertise forward in a non-threatening kind of way . . . yeah, we've had that experience of really solid teamwork on a small consulting group of five or six folks. Whether that scales to large numbers of people, I’m not sure. I do know that some of the same principles apply – that you have to be open, you have to be vulnerable, and operations have to be transparent to the extent that you can engender trust. Those are all necessary conditions for the sort of teamwork experiences that I [am describing].
I play online pool and it's interesting because the app picks a random person for you to play against. You can tell by the way people play and the comments that they make that some of them are really nice people. You end up playing a lot longer with the nice people than you normally would otherwise. (I do wonder sometimes if our [students] are developing a sixth sense about such things because they've been more inured to the online environment than certainly I was growing up.) But I guess to the extent that people can be authentic online and have something to contribute online, yeah, I would say those experiences can happen [on or offline]. I know they've certainly happened on those consulting engagements I've been on. Then when you actually get to meet these people in person, it's just hilarious because they really are who they are online, and that fit is just fabulous.
LO: We've been studying Nick Morgan’s work, about when you communicate face-to-face. In order to be authentic in your communication, you have to believe in your message and then also communicate it in a way that people believe that you believe it. Do you think there is a parallel process in the online world where you meet people online and you have a gut reaction that this person is authentic or this person is inauthentic or this person is really nice?
CL: [A question I would ask is,] “does somebody need to be the smartest person in the room?” Even online, you can tell those people a mile away. In my world, if you need to be the smartest person in the room, you aren't. I also think people who are good at expressing themselves come across online as they would in person.
LO: This conversation is making me think about email etiquette. I know I can think of some examples where some of the simple graces, or the absence of them, in an email, especially from a leader to a large group, can change how a message is received. Without naming anybody, or throwing anyone under the bus, can you think of a time where you've been on the receiving end of bad email communication? And also, on the flip side, what do you do with intent when you communicate via email to the people you lead or the community you serve?
CL: The most outstanding example was when I was at the wrong end. I learned at one time that a reporting relationship I had enjoyed for close to 10 years had been changed, and I was informed about that [change] in an email as part of a diagram of a new org chart. [This message came] without any kind of in-person preparation at all. For somebody as heavily invested in building strong working relationships as I am, I was so disappointed. It was a real head scratcher. It was like, “Really? Is this the way we're going to do business? I hope not.” It turned out to be the exception rather than the rule from the people involved, but it did happen in a number of other areas of school life involving an administrative team that, I felt, needed some schooling in how to [communicate] properly. Another path, though less efficient, would have been the more effective way.
In my own work, I'm very careful, first of all, to keep things brief. So if there are really heavy nuances in [a message], then email is just not the right medium. I feel like I'm Captain Obvious here. There's the old saying that content is king, and I don't actually believe that; I think context is king. Whatever message I have, I always take a sentence or two to try to put it in some kind of context by saying, “You may recall that this effort was taking place and one of the things that was being investigated was X.” The second paragraph is, “Okay, we've made some decisions about that” – that's the second two-line paragraph. A third two-line paragraph is, “If you want the more detailed explanation on the technical side of this, for those of you who are geekily inclined, then I put the long explanation under my signature and you can go look at that at your leisure, or not.” Then, always at the end, “If you have questions or concerns, feel free to email or stop by my office, etcetera.” I think I've gotten pretty good at those kinds of emails over the years.
When I first got into IT after coming out of the classroom for many years, I had a very bright young man who got stuck with helping me understand technology in ways that I hadn't before. Back then, when I would start writing emails about technology, he would just throw them back at me and say, “What's the fourth grade version?” He said, “You're the best fourth grade teacher I've ever seen. . . . What message would you send to the fourth grade?” And that's been really, really helpful because I'm always looking to prune, to undo, and to keep things as rock-solid clear as possible.
I think leaders need to understand when email's the right medium for getting something done; then, [if they choose to use it,] they always need to provide the context that goes along with the content of the information. Sometimes in our hurry to get stuff done, we forget about that context part.
LO: Are there other things in your past – like the exchange with the colleague who would throw an e-mail back at you – that prepared you to lead well either online or offline?
CL: For a good part of high school and a little bit of college, I got by just by being charming and funny – until I had to start writing a lot of papers. I never had to write a lot of papers in high school. But when I ran into a humanities teacher during my sophomore year at college, he pulled me aside and said, “You're way smarter than this paper tells me. You don't really know how to write these do you?” And I said, “No, I actually don't.” And so he said, “Curt, you're going to come to my office two days a week for the next three months, and by the time you get out, you're going to know how to write.” And it was a really good lesson for me – that being charming and funny is great, but you also have to produce if you want to earn respect. I've hired a number a of people who are very funny and charming and delightful to be around, but I’ve learned that we have to be focused on results in addition to enjoying the work that we do.
In terms of leadership, too, I think you can't be afraid to say that you don't know the answer to something. You have to model that for people and, boy, on my first few years on this job – and still to this day – there's a lot that I just don't know about technology. For example, once a month all of the tech leaders from the different sub-units get together [at the University of Chicago]. And if there's something that I don't understand, I'll just raise a hand and say, “I know most of you all know exactly about all of this, but I don't. Somebody give me a two-minute explanation about this thing that you're talking about and why it's important to know.” For my own staff, I think that's been a very helpful [move] because they don't feel like they have to have all the answers.
The woman who ran the graduate school program that I went to was always diligent about being very, very clear about what was expected from you. [At work, too,] if your staff is not clear about what's expected of them, you're going to be unsatisfied with anything they do. My people know exactly what I expect from them and they also have told me what they expect from me. At the end of any meeting, [in fact,] I will always ask, “Is there something I need to be doing that I am not?” And I don't want to embarrass people either at meetings, but if there's a need to go back one-on-one and say, “Maybe we're not clear on this, but I'm expecting that you're going to do this in this situation, and if I didn't make that clear, that's on me.”
LO: All right, so this will be our closing question. Dream big. What do you think school or schools will look like in 10 years?
CL: Well, I guess I would ask, which schools? The cynical part of me wants to say that a lot of independent schools will look kind of like they look right now, only maybe fancier and better. They've got a good thing going and they know it. Public schools, I have no idea. I just have no idea. I have a feeling if I did have an idea, I could earn a lot of money telling people what it would be.
But, I do think that some of us – some aspect of what we do – will become less and less relevant unless we can really focus on that value proposition of, “We do things here that you can't do any place else.” If an old guy like me can learn to play punk rock without ever having an in-person guitar teacher, just by going on Coursera, you know that things are different. Though I’m not the biggest Dan Pink fan, I think he was right when he said that, more and more, the world is going to reward those people who do things only they can do.
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