Note: This interview in the Weekly Wisdom Series originally aired on April 17, 2023 as part of the University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast, appearing live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The transcript of this podcast episode is intended to serve as a guide to the entire conversation, and we encourage you to listen to this podcast episode. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Michael Sorrell:
Can you be a great manager while also being a great husband and father? And I don't know if you can, and I say that because what makes great managers is time. It takes time to manage people, you need to be present, you need to be engaged. To be a great father, it takes time, you must be present, you must be engaged. To be a great husband, takes time, you must be present, and you must be engaged. So now, there are three separate units that need your time: your job, your children, your wife. How do you resolve that tension?
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to Innovating Together, a podcast produced by the University Innovation Alliance. This is a podcast for busy people in higher education who are looking for the best ideas, inspiration, and leaders that will help you improve student success. I'm your host, Bridget Burns. Each week, I partner with a journalist to have a conversation with a sitting college president, chancellor, system leader, or someone in the broader ecosystem who's really an inspiring leader, and the goal is to have a conversation to distill their perspective and their insights gathered from their leadership journey. Our hope is that this is inspiring and gives you something to look forward to each week. This episode, my co-host is Inside Higher Ed Co-Founder and CEO Doug Lederman.
Doug Lederman:
We're joined today by somebody who's been on this show before. Our guest is Michael Sorrell, who's president of Paul Quinn College. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Sorrell:
It is great to be here. It's always good to see you, Bridget and Doug. This is a coming home moment. I'm just thrilled to hang out with you guys.
Bridget Burns:
We just can't wait for you to start acting like the third host, man. We just expect you to start showing up each week and be like, "Ask them different questions." Also, we're excited for you to test out your pipes later on when you do the main stage jingle because you're on the board, I can't wait to see what it is.
Michael Sorrell:
It's important for everyone to understand that we all have gifts. Part of life is understanding what gifts you don't have. Don't have the jingle gift. Okay?
Bridget Burns:
Well, I guess we'll have to find out what wisdom you have regardless, even though this was entirely supposed to be just a vocal audition for the commercial. We've had you on a couple of times, you're fan favorite, we always get a lot of great feedback from the audience about the wisdom that you share. And I was describing earlier, I think of you as kind of like the executive coach for leaders in higher ed, while you're also doing the actual job of leading. And part of that is from you're informed by your background, where you actually were a crisis manager, and you've done a variety of things, you worked in the private sector and otherwise. So I'm hoping today we can go a little bit deeper.
One of the new questions that we're asking -- it turns out to be kind of a treasure trove depending on the person, so I'm hoping it is with you. This new question is, we all learn a lot about leadership from examples in addition to many other things. But I'm just curious if you have learned more from watching good examples that you want to emulate or bad examples that you want to avoid when it comes to leadership.
Michael Sorrell:
No, I think that's a great question. So, "it depends" is the most honest answer. I have learned a ton from bad leaders. I would tell you, for a significant part of my career, I was exposed in one context to people who taught me a lot simply by the things not to do. I'm trying to be delicate, because you never know who sees these things, and you don't want people to be like, "He's talking about me." But in politics, I was exposed to some amazing leaders and amazing in ways that I thought were really, really important, the human level, people who actually cared about the people they worked with, who were funny, who were relatable, who actually cared about the issues that they were advocating for.
Those people like Ron Kirk, when I met him, was running for mayor of Dallas, who wound up being one of the cabinet secretaries, the trade ambassador under President Obama, who has become such a friend and mentor to me. He and his wife Matrice introduced me to my wife. I learned a lot just watching his interpersonal skills, watching the way he engaged people, watching the way he spoke up and spoke truth to power. Then in my own career, I was exposed to two extraordinary other leaders, Tom Luz and Del Williams, who really taught me about power, who taught me how power thinks, how decisions are really made, the power in sincerity and in maintaining relationships. And also I learned a lot from them about how to deliver news that people won't like. I mean, they were adept at telling you things that were absolutely contrary to what you hoped for, and doing it in a way where, when you got done hearing the news, you were sort of like, "I think I lost, but I don't feel like I lost."
But then I had some people who managed me that were really, really wonderful examples of just what not to do. I've tried to be cognizant of those things, and I think if we're honest with ourselves, all of us have learned a lot from people who have been good and people who have been bad. And the people who have been bad, the trick is not to stay so long around them that you become better, that you take them for what they can provide, learn the lesson, learn the exposure, and use that as you move forward. And I think that's good for others, because the one other thing, too, that I'll add to this, sometimes you can learn the good and the bad lessons from the same people. It depends upon the season in which you're exposed to them.
Great leaders coming out of traumatic situations who haven't processed their own trauma can traumatize others. Now, if you caught them maybe prior to that trauma, they may have been spectacular, but it really does depend where you are in your life, how are you managing what you're going through. I would imagine someone who's gone through a divorce is going to be at a different place than someone who just had their first child in a happy marriage. Leadership isn't just your own individualized experiences, it's what else is going on in your world?
Doug Lederman:
Are there commonalities in the traits that you've learned from the bad examples? In other words, are there certain things that were the biggest mistakes or things you learned not to do?
Michael Sorrell:
Yeah, selfishness. Selfishness by far was the singular connecting trait for bad leadership. I often tell people, "One of my leadership lessons is you cannot lead people you do not love, and you should never lead people you do not know." Because the sacrifices required to truly lead people, to truly manage someone effectively, require selfless behavior. You have to be at a space where you can put others' needs before your own. And if we are honest with ourselves, we can't always do that. You have to be in a certain frame of mind, a certain emotional stature or emotional state to allow you to move beyond your own personal agendas to adequately care for others.
One of the things that I try and do is, I try to be honest with my staff about where I am emotionally. I've gone through periods where I was like, "Look, you all, just tired. I'm tired. I need a moment." And I've got to have the ability to find a way to rejuvenate myself while still doing my job. Depending upon your leadership model, that may or may not be possible, I think, for a lot of people who have built up these personas where they're always right or they're never people that can be questioned.
Doug Lederman:
Or invulnerable.
Michael Sorrell:
Right.
Doug Lederman:
A little bit of what I'm hearing from you is, being able to show vulnerability, I think, is really an important trait.
Michael Sorrell:
I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I had something happen to me here once where one of my really good friends died of cancer, and he left a wife and two young sons. His wife is a wonderful woman, we're friends, like adore her, but you take that father out of the equation, now those boys are going to have a very different life. No matter what the rest of us do, no matter how we try and stand in the gap, no matter what it is, that's their dad. As someone who is a father of young children, and I think at the time he died, we hadn't yet had my daughter, so it was just my son, I was in my staff meeting with the entire staff of the college, and I'm telling them, "Look, I really need you to pray for my friend. He's sick, he's dying, blah, blah, blah." And I just broke down in tears, just put my head down and broke down in tears.
Now, some of that is because of having survived my own brush with death, but the rest of it is because I know what it's like to lose your dad. I lost my dad in college. I lost my mom when I was a young professional. Those moments change you, and they're scary, and cancer is terrifying, and all of these things, and he was a good man. And to see what he went through, my staff was so amazing in that moment. People came up, they put their arms on me, they hugged me, they prayed over me. Listen, that's a gift. My staff gave me a gift. What they said to me in that moment is, "We authentically love you, and we care for you."
And to your point about vulnerability, I try to honor that by always just being authentically vulnerable in myself. One piece of advice I would give to more leaders out there is people actually want to know you, like your staff, the people following you, your students. They want to know you, not the trumped-up version of you, not the version of you that is impenetrable. No. The version of you that might not have it all together, because none of us have it all together. Listen, I am grateful every day when my clothes match. I mean, I wear lots of solids, it's hard to mess those up, but it's really important that we just be human.
Ray Magliozzi:
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Bridget Burns:
I love it. I think that's excellent time-tested advice. I do want to go in on one part of what you just said, though, because I can tell people are going to have questions about it, because this idea of being able to deliver hard news in a soft way -- boy, talk about a topic that everybody's like, "Oh, what did you learn?" Can you share your advice for doing that that you gleaned from this other leader?
Michael Sorrell:
Sure. Well, the first thing is tell people the truth as soon as you can tell them. You do no one any favors dragging out the truth. And then also understand the temporal nature of delivering bad news. You're not always going to have to deliver tough news. There is a moment in time where you have to deliver that, and then you move on, you don't have to wallow in that place. So for me, when I was younger, I would deliver the bad news and I would be smiling. And I learned that that didn't really work, because then people weren't hearing what I was saying or the severity of what I was saying, because they were kind of like, "Well, if it was that bad, you wouldn't be pleasant."
So, what I've learned to do is just to sit people down and say, "Listen, this is what it is. Now, you don't have to love it, you don't even have to like it, but this is the reality of this moment in time. Now, I'm happy to answer any questions, happy to help you work through whatever else you have to work through, but this won't change. Let's talk about what we need to talk about. I'll help you in any way I can, but that does not negate the fact that a change needs to be made, or we have not performed where we are, or you haven't been who you need to be."
I think you tell people directly, and then you let them know this isn't for the rest of their life, this is a chapter, this is a page. Whether or not it becomes the rest of your life is entirely dependent upon them. How do you process this? How do you accept this? How do you move forward with it? This part, I think, doesn't get talked about enough: don't be afraid of the silence. We have a tendency to -- when you deliver difficult news, and then there's that silence, people get nervous and want to fill the silence. And typically, what they fill the silence with doesn't help them in the long run. Say it. Let people sit with it. Don't feel pressure to fill the silence, and then move on.
Bridget Burns:
To build on that, I had an executive coach who once told me, like, "Hey, Bridget, when your team offers something or people give you especially hard stuff, when they share it with you, you don't have to respond, you just have to listen. You can just shut up and just be there." And it was, like, such a gift, because now I don't feel like I have to always know all the answers. And in fact, my role, my leadership in that moment is really listening. I'm not going to react to that, I'm going to listen. That's been quite freeing. And I've given it to many other people who are like, "Oh my God, you don't have to say anything?" No. I mean, eventually you can, but in the moment, you do not have to actually have, like, a canned response or anticipate everything. Your job is to listen.
Michael Sorrell:
You know who taught me that? My wife.
Bridget Burns:
I believe that.
Michael Sorrell:
My wife told me, she's like, "I don't need you to solve every problem, I just need you to listen." It was oddly freeing, because you put a lot of pressure on yourself to kind of be the guy, and sometimes being the guy is being the guy with the small G, not the big G.
Doug Lederman:
I think that tends to be a guy thing to some extent. It's a hard lesson to learn, but it works in the workplace, too.
Bridget Burns:
Yeah. Back to the workplace. So, we had talked about this a little bit earlier, that one of the things that we consistently hear that is the hardest thing, but is the thing that higher ed needs to be able to master, we expect people to know how to do it, but nobody enjoys it -- well, that I know -- and that's managing people. We seem to assume that by being managed, you have learned how to do it through osmosis, even though most of us have been poorly managed, and the examples we have are great. As the president of a college, your job is not necessarily doing day-to-day people management, but in order to get here, you probably had to master it so that you could actually delegate it. And I'm just wondering if there were any particular moments in your career or experiences that you learned how to manage people from the most?
Michael Sorrell:
I want to throw a curve into what you asked, and I want to turn it around as a question a bit. Can you be a great manager while also being a great husband and father? And I don't know if you can, and I say that because what makes great managers is time. It takes time to manage people, you need to be present, you need to be engaged. To be a great father, it takes time, you must be present, you must be engaged. To be a great husband, takes time, you must be present, and you must be engaged. So now, there are three separate units that need your time, your job, your children, your wife. How do you resolve that tension?
Bridget Burns:
Be just a mediocre manager, or just be okay with being an okay manager.
Michael Sorrell:
Well, but for lots of people, the people who pay the price are their fam -- it's the family, the wife, the kids, because there will be a moment in your marriage where your wife needs your attention or your husband needs your attention more. Far too many of us miss those moments. And the price of missing those moments sometimes is divorce, or the inability to ever return to the happiest state of your marriage. The price of missing the time that your child needs, because children don't need you when you want them to need you, they need you when they need you. And so I think about this, and I'm just being very transparent, I spend a lot of time with my son. And when I'm with my son, a lot of times we're in the car, I work very hard not to be on the phone when my son is in the car, because sometimes he's doing his homework and that would be disruptive, but sometimes it's just he needs his dad.
That means that I have to condense the time that I have to manage. So here's how I've solved that. In my presidency, I was here all the time. The students, they knew they could come to my office, sometimes 8:00, 9:00 at night. I'd be here, we'd sit, we'd talk. Same thing with staff. I got married. Well, you can't stay at work all night long and hope that the marriage works well. We got pregnant on our honeymoon. Well, now nine months later, we've got a baby. I remember being here, because we were in crisis mode when my child -- mad, angry because I've got a baby at home that I can't go be with. So as we grew as an institution and my management responsibility started to grow, I realized the only shot that I had at being able to be the father that I wanted to be, the husband that I wanted to be, and the college president I wanted to be was that I was going to have to reduce the number of people that I was managing. I was going to have to find people who could be managed in my preferred style.
And that is critically important. So part of being an effective manager is understanding your management love language, understanding the kinds of people that you manage best. As a president, I don't need to manage 85 separate people, I need to be an effective manager of my core group and empower them to manage effectively their direct reports, thereby giving me the best chance of being a great manager and college president and still having the ability to be a great father and husband. But it took me a minute to figure that out.
Bridget Burns:
Are there any experiences that you had, or professional development, or -- I don't know -- coaching or whatever, that actually helped you figure that language out? We can open beyond management, because you've probably been recruited into everything under the sun at some point in your career, especially as a president. Are there any things that you think were actually really worth it?
Michael Sorrell:
So, I've never really had an executive coach. I'm a little envious of people who have. I understand the argument for why you use institutional resources to do it. I just can always justify the institutional resources being used on behalf of other people than myself. That requires me to be far more self-critical, to be far more reflective, and to really work at being humble and having the humility to ask people to help provide critical feedback of my performance in what I do. So I try really hard just to listen, to create opportunities for people to give me critical feedback. And then I'm very fortunate, I have friends like you, Bridget, where you and I talk about stuff. I've got a handful of close friends in higher education -- literally, the closest ones could fit on one hand -- that I can just be human with. They provide professional development.
Also, early on in my presidency, I just would go visit other schools and other presidents and I listened. I don't get to do that as much anymore, because that was time that now I have to spend with the kids. If I could offer this piece of advice to people, find your version of an executive coach, and if it's not a singular, traditional executive coach, then find your own personal cabinet, find people who you can call up and they will talk to you. Never get so caught up in your own self-importance that you forget that, at the end of the day, all of us need people around us who will speak truth to us, and it's really hard for the people who speak true to you to be people that you pay. On your staff, I don't think that works.
Bridget Burns:
100%. I love this advice, the personal cabinet, you're in my cabinet, too. You both. I talk to you all the time about this kind of stuff, about how to actually navigate messy things. I wanted to share that I didn't have resources. I did get resources early, I think, from a Gates grant when we were first starting. I tried the traditional kind, but I ended up finding that what was most useful for me was finding someone who I really respected who had done a similar job that retired. And so, I actually sought out the former head of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. She was the person who I had called when building the alliance to figure out, "How do I come up with bylaws? How do I build all these things?" And when she retired, I was like, "I have a job for you." And I said, "You're the person I call that I can talk about all the stuff that I can't talk about with my team, and you're going to help me process and figure it out."
And that was one, but the other is there's so much of a wealth of podcasts out there if you find that you can construct your own virtual cabinet. I mean Oprah doesn't know she's in my ear, Brené Brown doesn't know she's in my ear. Coaching for Leaders is a podcast that I highly recommend that has an episode about everything you could possibly experience in leadership or management, and really high quality. So I'm always sharing those in our newsletter, but I have my free zero-cost executive coaches that when I walk to work, I try and listen to a podcast that helps me think about something different -- or call you and vent.
Michael Sorrell:
That makes such a difference. It's so important to have people who will talk to you, and that's different than mentors. Mentors advise you, but you need people that you can have an exchange with in a more interpersonal level. There are some really good mentors, I do, but I'm very fortunate with the meet people. And I view mentoring differently, I'm sort of like, "Listen, if you answer my email, if you answer my phone call, you are mentoring me." I mean, you don't have to have any -- If I'm just like, "Hey, how would you... Got it. Thank you." I don't think it's a one-size-fits-all. I think that people really have to figure out, "Well, this is what works for me."
Bridget Burns:
I think that's the perfect way for us to end things today. I think this is a great show where we got to go a little bit deeper and elevate your perspective and leadership. And I hope that this has been helpful for the audience. Doug, I can see you taking notes, and I can see your ideas popping around. So, good stuff.
Doug Lederman:
Yeah, I was just thinking that I'm like, I'm too old to learn new tricks. I'm like, I'm past it, am what I am, but we can always get better, I think.
Bridget Burns:
Well, I guess one of the things I would say about executive coaching is it's far more frequently venting, it's about helping you process so you don't process on your team. And also, because your spouse or partner or someone in your personal life, they're free labor, they don't want to be a free therapist.
Michael Sorrell:
Let me add this, this is a really unusual one. I actually had a student who was incredibly helpful to me on this front. She was a bit older. We had this really interesting dynamic. She interned for me, and she was the worst intern I ever had. I'll never forget, she and I had a conversation. I was sitting in the airport in Norfolk, I had a six-hour gap. And so I was like, "Listen, you're one of my favorite people, but you are absolutely by far the worst intern I've ever had." It turned out that she was incredibly coachable.
And so then there was a point where I was struggling with some things on campus. She pulled me, she said, "Listen, you are incredibly gifted, the problem is you can't be every place. And because you can't be, the places where you aren't focused on suffer, and the people in those places suffer because you haven't figured out how to manage through those scenarios." And she's like, "And we're not going to be who we can be as a college until you figure that out." And we were joking and I was like, "Thank you. Now I'm going to take all your financial aid away." And we laughed about it because she knew I was joking, but it was fantastic coaching advice, absolutely fantastic coaching advice.
I know we're running along, but I just have to add, as a president, you better figure out how to listen to your students. You better figure out how not to have their real opinions be filtered. The students have to be comfortable enough to tell you what they really think and how they really feel. Your staff will interpret what the students tell them, and they will give you what they tell them in a way that may not necessarily intentionally, but may cover up some of their own failings. That's human nature. I'm not saying they're bad people. In any business, you and your customers, your clients, whoever it is, you better figure out how to create an avenue for real dialogue, and then you've got to sit back on your ego and be humble enough to hear it and to be appreciative of it, and to listen to it in a way that encourages people to keep sharing with you. And I'm not telling you that that's easy, but I'm telling you that that's incredibly necessary. And that's all I got.
Bridget Burns:
That is it. I think you mic drop at that moment. That's the perfect ending for the day. Between now and then, this episode is going to air at first day of ASU+GSV, which the three of us will be at. So we'll be kicking it. So I'll see you all there. And otherwise, for folks at home, we will see you next week.
Bios of Guest and Co-Hosts
Guest: Michael Sorrell, President, Paul Quinn College
Dr. Michael J. Sorrell is the longest-serving President in the 151-year history of Paul Quinn College. During his 16 years of leadership, Paul Quinn has become a national movement for its efforts to remake higher education in order to serve the needs of under-resourced students and communities. In that time, Paul Quinn won HBCU of the Year among other awards, created the New Urban College Model, and achieved full accreditation from the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS). As one of the most decorated college presidents in America, President Sorrell was named Higher Education’s President of the Year by Education Dive, one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune Magazine, and one of the “31 People Changing the South” by Time Magazine. President Sorrell B.A. in Government from Oberlin College, his J.D. and M.A. in Public Policy from Duke University, and his Ed.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. While in law school, he was a founding member of the Journal of Gender Law & Policy and served as the Vice President of the Duke Bar Association. A Sloan Foundation Graduate Fellowship funded his studies at both Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and Duke University. President Sorrell serves as a trustee or director for Duke University’s School of Law, the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, JP Morgan Chase’s Advancing Black Pathways, Amegy Bank, the Hockaday School, the Dallas Advisory Board of Teach for America, the Dallas Foundation, and EarthX, among others.
Co-Host: Bridget Burns, Executive Director, University Innovation Alliance
Dr. Bridget Burns is the founding Executive Director of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA). For the past decade, she has advised university presidents, system chancellors, and state and federal policy leaders on strategies to expand access to higher education, address costs, and promote completion for students of all backgrounds. The UIA was developed during Bridget’s tenure as an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellowship at Arizona State University. She held multiple roles within the Oregon University System, including serving as Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Advisor, where she won the national award for innovation in higher education government relations. She was a National Associate for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and has served on several statewide governing boards including ones governing higher education institutions, financial aid policy, and policy areas impacting children and families.
Co-Host: Doug Lederman, Editor and Co-Founder, Inside Higher Ed
Doug Lederman is editor and co-founder of Inside Higher Ed. With Scott Jaschik, he leads the site's editorial operations, overseeing news content, opinion pieces, career advice, blogs and other features. Doug speaks widely about higher education, including on C-Span and National Public Radio and at meetings and on campuses around the country. His work has appeared in The New York Times and USA Today, among other publications. Doug was managing editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education from 1999 to 2003, after working at The Chronicle since 1986 in a variety of roles. He has won three National Awards for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association, including one for a 2009 series of Inside Higher Ed articles on college rankings. He began his career as a news clerk at The New York Times. He grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and graduated in 1984 from Princeton University. Doug and his wife, Kate Scharff, live in Bethesda, MD.
About Weekly Wisdom
Weekly Wisdom is an event series that happens live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also becomes a podcast episode. Every week, we join forces with Inside Higher Ed and talk with a sitting college president or chancellor about how they're specifically navigating the challenges of this moment. These conversations will be filled with practicable things you can do right now by unpacking how and why college leaders are making decisions within higher education. Hopefully, these episodes will also leave you with a sense of optimism and a bit of inspiration.
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