4.01 What Higher Education Leaders Need with Carole Chabries Artwork

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4.01 What Higher Education Leaders Need with Carole Chabries

January 24, 2025 • Jennifer Drake Askey • Season 4 • Episode 1

In this episode of The Mindful Academy, Carol Chabries and Jennifer discuss academic leadership. Carol is the founder of the Clario Group, which supports leaders in higher education. They talk about originality and the need for leaders to embrace templates and simplicity. They also discuss the post-pandemic world and the need for leaders to interrupt themselves and give themselves space to think. Carol and Jennifer also announce two upcoming events they are doing together: Impact 2025, a half-day online workshop on February 11th, and a workshop in September.

Show Notes:

Clareo Group, Carole Chabries:
https://theclareogroup.com/

From PhD to Life, Jen Polk:
https://fromphdtolife.com/

Create the Future, Jenny Mehmedovic:
https://www.createthefuture.online/

Books by Lisa Feldman Barret:

https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/

https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/seven-and-a-half-lessons-about-the-brain/

Episode Details

So welcome to the first episode of the Mindful Academy in 2025. Thank you for coming back. I just hit 500 downloads on the podcast and I'm incredibly excited about that.

so much for tuning in. And today I'm doing something that I've not done before, which is I'm being joined by a guest. Today Carol Chabries and I are having a conversation about academic leadership. And to start that off, I'm going to ask Carol to introduce herself. And what she does now and how she got there.

Awesome. Jennifer, I can't believe I'm your first guest in 2025. That is like so amazing. Thank you for inviting me. I will also say lovingly that my last name was pronounced Chabries. Mike, I have a cousin who says it rhymes with French fry us. So that's your way to remember it. Now, see, I thought I had listened to you say it once.

Because I wanted it to be Chabries or something, right? And I knew it wasn't that. And yeah, it's not French. It is Americanized Croatian. And don't ask me to say it in its original form. It had J's and Z's and I am close. Okay. Anyway. So even though Carol and I have done a fair amount of work together, we don't have to pronounce one another's last names very often.

So it's Carol Chabries. Who is going to introduce herself after lovingly correcting me, watching her name, but that's fine because we extend grace where we can. We do. Thank you, Jennifer. Okay. So I'm Carol Chabries. Happy to be here. I've already said both those things. I am the founder of a firm called the Clario Group and my vision for the firm is a bunch of really fucking smart women.

Oh, Jennifer, can I swear on your podcast? Absolutely. A bunch of really fucking smart women doing amazing work together to support leaders in higher ed. So that's what I do and that's what I'm building towards. The, my favorite thing that I do in the business is a workshop called 10 and a half lessons for leaders.

It's a two day workshop that really is. 10 totally distilled lessons that you can teach in roughly six minutes each. And we build around that an incredible amount of fun, introspective community building activities. So that by the time the leaders leave, they can say 10 quick phrases and they know what, how to put those lessons into place in their leadership.

That sounds so valuable, like the actionable translation of I've learned a thing and here is how I can use it is, is so often the missing link. And I think, you know, as people whose careers started in higher education. I can hang out in that theory space for a long time, but let's just read about it and learn about it and talk about it.

And the bridge to practice is you know, that's Jennifer 2. 0. But So the fact that you're teaching people the bridge to practice as you're teaching them the concepts. I think it really resonates with me. And it also fits with what you and I wanted to talk about today, which is Because your work doing ten and a half lessons for leaders, doing your work one on one with academic leaders, and my work with academic, with professors and academic teams on aligned decision making and mindful leadership and all of those things, they overlap in a lot of places.

So what do you think academic leaders need? And You know, leadership is, there are shelves of books on leadership, there are academic units and colleges and departments on leadership and what I find is that often when people write about academic leadership, they're also trying to, you know, get, land that with an academic publisher and have an account for tenure, and so, I have read some books, Carol, I've read some books that were not inspiring or actionable, theoretically potentially very interesting, but I did want to throw them against the window.

So I think that being able to distill a few key things that academic leaders need is juicy and exciting. So, Let's dig in. What's something that you think academic leaders need that maybe doesn't show up in one of the books I've thrown against a wall? Can I just like go to that party with you for a moment because someone once told me that maybe my shtick should be anti leadership leadership training because Even though I know some really talented, smart people who lead and teach in leadership departments, and I've read a few books that I like, most of it is just mind numbingly bad.

Oh my god, it's so awful. So I'm glad to not be the only person to ever have said that out loud, so thank you for that. There was one that involved, like, as you make decisions, you need to put on different hats, and I got lost after like the 13th hat. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, nobody, nobody can go through that process.

Nobody can remember all 13 hats and do that diligently. Like it, no. Yeah. It didn't happen. So in the spirit of your question and also distilled ideas, I'm, I'm going to talk about four things. These aren't, these are, these are not four of my 10 lessons, but these are kind of four sort of umbrellas maybe that I think Leaders anywhere, but particularly in higher ed would benefit from an ad.

Two of them come straight out of higher ed culture, and two of them come out of, let's call it for my benefit, post pandemic trauma. Yeah. Yeah. So the, the, if I had to choose two things for folks in higher ed to try and get over, I would say the culture of higher ed teaches us, especially once you've earned and done the years of labor to earn a terminal degree and then to be on the tenure track with that expertise.

We are taught that originality Is the epitome of our intellectual success, right? And I think what leaders need is to kick originality to the curb. We need to be released from the tyranny of originality because it requires leaders to remake things every time, or to ask their teams to remake things. And there is so much value in.

forgive me for saying this word, but templates, there's so much value in the tried and true way. And I don't mean doing things the way everybody's doing it because a lot of ways we do things suck, but you don't have to recreate the wheel in the spirit of adhering to originality. Not everything is going to be a manuscript that gets you, you know, your gold star.

So that's one thing I would say for higher ed leaders. The other is related. And that is, could we please find ways. As leaders in academia to embrace simplicity. We don't embrace simplicity. Look at any faculty manual. Look at any list of policies, academic affairs, right? I would rather not. Right. I have a friend who is building a business as a policy writer and mad props to her because I would rather play in traffic.

Yes. Yes. But it's partly because The art, you know, to use policies for a moment, everything has to be so spider webby to connect and accommodate and make room for all the other little policies and bits and pieces that exist elsewhere. And it is so hard to be, for example, Senate president for two years and go through a learning curve.

The first year to get a handle on that, to try and do anything about it for the second year. And then you step down and you're like, what, what did you, what were you able to accomplish in those two years? Not enough. And it's not because you're not talented and it's not because you don't care enough. It's because we make our world in higher ed so incredibly complex and it's unnecessary.

So if we could. Quit thinking that originality is our ticket to stardom, and if we could make it easier on ourselves by being a little bit simpler, I think those would be amazing gifts for a leader in higher ed to bring to her team. What you said about originality being the pinnacle I reflexively thought like originality for so many people who've gone through, you know, the rigors of a PhD and tenure track job search and the tenure process, and then maybe you wind up as the chair of something or the head of a department or an associate dean.

Originality is like, the low bar. Everything has to be right. Like it isn't even the epitome. It's like, well, you have to at least be that. That's a great point. It's the baseline. It's the baseline against which everything is, is measured. And so if, if you come in and you do what people before you did, but, you know, refine it to better adapt to the current circumstances, does that seem Significant enough if you're not making like it is is making impact equated with being undeniably original, even if that means like yanking the tablecloth off the table and everything goes flying.

Yeah. So, and, and higher. So though that cultural moment that you're talking about the we make it complex. We, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be Original and, and maybe cutting edge or maybe super, super bespoke and specific to your little corner of the world. And, you know, not going to look outside for best practices or other people's standard operating procedures to see what we can glean.

Higher ed is an interesting place to be a leader, though, right? Like, it's not like being a corporate manager. Being a dean is not like being a corporate division head. So I'm guessing not having never been a corporate division. But I will say again, with great love hired is not nearly as special as we think it is.

And the, the, the two things that I think are really worth. learning from leaders, regardless of their sector, that if you, you're leading people and faculty member, despite what you might imagine a dark administrator to be saying, faculty are people and most administrators understand that. And were faculty before they landed that administrative gig.

And They have work to do and work can be managed and guided regardless of the industry. So yes, we're a little bit different, but I can't tell you how many consultants I meet who say to me, Oh yeah, I've worked with faculty. They always think they're really special. I've worked with college presidents who say you go from campus to campus and everybody says they're different and they're different in exactly the same ways.

I don't want to undermine the ways that we are distinct, but I do want to emphasize we are not nearly as distinct as we go around saying we are. Yeah, no, no argument there. And, and that applies to other, that applies to small corners of higher education too. There's I've done some learning and some What's it called?

A circle of interest, an interest group within coaching that looks at higher education, and most of the people in there specifically look at medical school academics, and that is a group that thinks that not only is it unique, As it is with, it's a unique group within the unique group of higher right?

And so they outline the issues that they face. I'm like, nope, nope. We change a couple nouns and we're talking about the same stuff. What I see as 1 thing is probably also the case in the corporate world. But 1 thing that. That strikes me when I work with teams and groups and units in higher ed is that in, in the corporate world, in most instances, and we watch this happen if an employee does not fit.

if an employee does not perform if there's a change in leadership and a change in priority and your portfolio doesn't match anymore, you can be let go. The interesting thing about leading people in higher ed is that a big chunk of those people won't ever leave. And so I see like the, the timeline for, and you've This is neither of our first rodeos.

How many times do you get involved in a conversation where somebody wants to offer you context, and they start talking about something that happened 15 years ago, right? So this incredibly long memory is I tell myself it might be unique or emphasized in higher ed and the thing that maybe isn't so unique that I think about a lot is you get promoted to chair or promoted to dean or hired for dean, Whatever, usually based on a stellar research record, which might not have any anything to do with your ability to connect with people, inspire people, lead people tap into your emotional intelligence, seek feedback in a way that brings people on board, right?

You get promoted to a job that you oftentimes have no preparation or training for. And that is one way that I think we are, we are unique. I don't want to say that doesn't happen in other industries, but it is the path to administration in higher ed is a path that does not prepare you for administration.

And that's like stupid, but I think also like not super typical. Yeah. I did also want to say I have a lot of feelings about tenure that I won't go into here that are, that come from my academic training as a graduate student, but I also want to say, look around and tenure is not what it was. You know this.

I have, I can count, I cannot count on two hands, the number of people I know who are tenured and who have been fired or who've been let go or whose programs have been closed. So tenure is not the protection it once was, which For the purposes of this conversation, I will say is all the more reason for leaders to be really skilled at people management.

And I, so when you asked me the question originally, what do leaders need? I talked about two umbrellas. And so this other umbrella might sound a little bit more industry specific, a little bit more private sector specific, but it actually is really relevant to higher ed leaders too. So maybe it's a little way to.

To think about one of the ways we might feel different, but we're not different. Two things I would say there that leaders in higher ed would benefit from one, having a sense of agency. Which I can tell you as a, so what have I been? I've been a department chair. I've been an executive director. I've been a Dean twice.

I've been an AVP. I've been a vice provost. I rarely felt that I had agency, but almost everybody who reported to me assumed I had agency. And so I think there's a lot of work to do around understanding where you actually do have agency and exercising it. Because I I've been reading this book that Your podcast person can just edit this out because I don't know how to finish that sentence.

But I've been reading about how agency and stress are related. And there's a sentence I read that really stuck with me. I can't quote it, but the concept is when we don't have agency over our work, we feel more stressed than we do when our workload is impossible. It's not the amount of work that stresses us.

It's whether we think we have any control over it. And so thinking about how to exercise agency for yourself as a leader, and also how to grant agency to the people who work for you, this will go a long way towards smoothing your stress levels and easing the stress levels of the folks who work for you or report to you.

And the other thing I would say that we don't really talk about enough or do enough we don't really make space for this in higher ed, but I think it's been really endemic since the pandemic, you know, I think back to March 2020 when suddenly we were doing everything that we'd always done. But it was slower because it was on zoom and none of us knew how to work zoom.

And it was also slower for roughly 53 percent of us whose children were in the next room trying to go to school or were who were crying or needed lunch. Right? Like it was fucking chaos. When at least the campus I was at, when we returned to campus, the pace did not ease. And I think for many people that pace didn't ease.

And so the thing I want to point to is not the pace, not time management, not any of that, but one of the things we lost in all of that busy ness was the ability to pause. And say, I can't give you an answer on that right now. I don't know what I think about that right now. I don't know whether I can tell you yes right now.

I need space to think and I need space to process whatever, you know, flash of emotion I just had in my body, whatever physiological response I just had, because the thing you asked me to do has stressed me out. So creating space to interrupt our thinking and bodily responses just to really understand what we're experiencing instead of madly rushing and pushing everything through.

And as we do that, to both give ourselves and give our teams a better sense of agency. I think those two things would be amazing for leaders. I, I love what I'm hearing you say about, well, first of all, the recognition of the acceleration of pace and how most, most people that I, and I started working for myself as a coach and facilitator during the pandemic.

So I was working as a leadership development educator in a university. From my basement in my pajamas, unhappy with a high school student upstairs who said, mom, I got it. I'm on it. Dear reader, she was, but I, it was clear to me that I was going to be happier and more fulfilled if I could steer my own ship.

Right, have agency in what I was developing and who I was developing it for and working with people who want to adopt in and all of that, but from the get go in doing this full time, the breakneck speed of the decisions we need to make, the output we're expected to produce the stakeholders we're supposed to engage, like whatever aspect of your work we're addressing, that rush And, you know, I'm not sure if we have decelerated or if people are just numb at this point, because I don't, I have not heard anybody say, well, thank goodness it's, it's slowed down.

No, I don't know anybody for who it is. I think, so that rush is, is there. And what you were saying about, you know, checking in with yourself. taking a pause. You know, from our conversations and our collaboration, that one of the things that I'm really passionate about and the name of this podcast has to do with mindfulness and meditation.

But so the story of, of getting your butterflies flying information comes from when her daughter was 12 and her daughter is now an adult. So this is an ancient story, but her daughter was, taking martial arts and she was testing for her black belt and she's this tiny little 12 year old and she's going to enter hand to hand combat with, you know, 16 year old boys.

And the kids are lined up and they're getting ready for their, their tests. And the girl looks, however, she looks agitated, nervous, scared, I don't know. And the sensei walks over to her and says, Get your butterflies flying information, take all those feelings you have and channel them towards the outcome.

And so when Lisa Feldman Barrett talks about this, she also gives the example of standing on the stage, giving a TED talk and she says, you know, I can feel my blood pounding in my fingertips. Now, a very natural conclusion to draw from that is I'm nervous. And the minute you think you're nervous, your brain says, Oh no, when I'm nervous, I do all these things, right?

You have help here, right? Whatever narrative that my brain needs to replace, itchy, itchy, run, with is, is more helpful. Yeah. And to circle back where we started, that's not a special experience for leaders in higher ed. It doesn't mean you're not qualified. It doesn't mean you're underprepared. It's not a reason to think that you're suffering from imposter syndrome.

It's a universal human experience. Absolutely. Yeah. And I love the word human there because When I first started doing this work, shortly after I trained as a coach, I worked with some universities in my area to do short workshops for people who were relatively new supervisors of graduate students.

And so I did some facilitating. I had some guidelines, some, some skills we talked about, and always in these, Small workshops, very experienced supervisors would show up too. And, you know, these are people who are showing up along the lines of they didn't need it, but they loved it so much. They wanted to be there.

Right. And so maybe there were people who needed more supervision. Training that didn't show up, but we had newbies. And then we had people who'd been there for a while and just loved supervising graduate students. And I would always start with sort of a discussion question around how were you mentored?

And what do you notice about how you were mentored as a graduate student or postdoc? What do you notice about that filtering into how you mentor today? For the, for the good, for the bad, consciously, unconsciously, that was sort of our opening question and so many of these experienced supervisors and people who maybe had, well, regardless of whether their experience as a supervisee was good or bad, so many people would say these exact words, I just want to be human, I just want to be human, and it strikes me that what an interesting thing.

thing to aspire to when, of course, we are all human, but it acknowledges that a lot of people feel like working in higher education is working in an environment that makes the full expression of our humanity somewhat challenging. Hear, hear. And so, right, recognizing your own emotional complexity. As a human, but yes, we have to do that at work.

That's a thing that we all have to do. Yeah. Yeah. So so let's just recap your because I've I've intruded and we've gone places let's let's read your two umbrellas and the little lessons in there. Give us a quick summary. I mean, I took notes. I could do that too, but I'm going to hand it back to you.

And that would be a test and that wouldn't be fair. So the two umbrellas were being a leader in higher ed and being a leader post pandemic and for thinking about your context in higher ed, I would love for leaders to feel released from the tyranny of originality, also love for them to believe in the possibility of simplification and the beauty of simplification.

And then post, in the post pandemic world, I would love for leaders to feel like they have strategies for interrupting themselves before they rush into a response, an answer, a commitment, whatever it is. And I would also love for leaders in higher ed to feel like they have a sense of agency over their own work and that they have the ability to give agency to the folks whose work they are supervising or overseeing.

Here, here. I love that. So and we mentioned the psychologist turned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett. And her two books are How Emotions Are Made, The Secret Life of the Brain. It's a big fatty. It's really good. I listened to it on audiobook. Which was great, except for the opening chapter, which is all about a picture.

So, if you are a fan of audiobooks great, I would just see if you could actually find a picture of, it's, it involves, I believe, bumblebees and spots, I, I got it, I got what she was talking about, but the picture would have helped. Her other book that is shorter and just so juicy is Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

And I recommend both of them highly the how emotions are made really gets into what Carol was talking about in terms of how our mind interprets our body and creates meaning around physical sensations that we call emotion. It is, it's actually super empowering to realize that, Oh, I don't, when I feel that way, I don't have to assume that these things are going to happen or that it means this.

I could actually work with those feelings. And change what they mean for me. So, I love that, Jennifer, because that brings the two things that I said together. So, if you have strategies for interrupting yourself, you're also granting yourself agency to change your outcome. Oh my goodness. Absolutely. Yeah.

So, I want, before we, before we close, and I thank you so much for taking time to do this. I want us to talk a little bit about some of the things that you and I are doing this year because we're doing something really soon in February and then we're planting seeds for something later. All of it in the spirit of I believe, fucking smart women doing amazing work together.

I wrote that down. So, in that spirit I'm going to talk a little bit about our two things and I'll do I'll talk a little bit about February and you can talk about September, just if people are hearing and saying, Oh, wow, like how do I get through this. Some of these lessons and a space where being human is fully accepted.

The first thing we're doing is an online thing. A short little half a day on February 11th, it's called impact 2025 with a focus on faculty, which is a really nice title because the Jen show wouldn't have told people what they were getting, but as it turns out, Jennifer was the most popular name in North America for I don't know, a thousand years as far as I am concerned, but really I think it was like 20.

And we know a lot of Jennifers, and so I, and Jen Polk, who's from PhD to life, and Jenny Mohebdovich, who's We'll link her here because I believe her website is also her name and we're not going to trust that we can spell either a Croatian or a Bosnian last name accurately in this particular episode.

We are each offering an hour long workshop on like an essential nugget of things that support faculty professional development. So I'm going to be talking about the power of cultivating a network, a network of support professionally and personally and what that looks like. Jen Polk is going to be talking about you are more than your CV, which is obviously pretty awesome.

And Jenny is going to talk about, oh no, oh no, have I forgotten what that is? Do you know what off the top of your head? I'm pulling it up. You'll get to it before I will, I think. Okay, all right. I will get to it because it's right here.

Oh, that's right. It's probably the thing that most people are most excited about. It's how to take control of your time. All right, speaking to what Carol said about rush, rush, rush, do, do, do, product, product, product. That's the verb form of being productive, right? It's not produce, it's product, product, product.

Yeah, so Jenny's going to talk about time, Jen is going to talk about career path and CV, and you are more than your CV, and I'm going to talk about the community you build around you that supports you. So we're super excited about that. And if you miss it. That's okay. Because we can do it again, each one of us individually and all together, it'll be recorded, and you have the logistics for that Carol, so I'm going to pass the mic back to you to wrap up Impact and move into our September fun time.

Fantastic. So Jenny. I'll butcher her name, Mehmedovic. Her business is called create the future. So you can look online at create the future. So tickets for impact 2025 are 49. And because we wanted it to be accessible and you, if you can't, even if you can come live, if you can't come live replays will be available to you.

So there will be a little library that has all of the videos, all three videos and any of the resources and workbooks that the presenters put together. So I have a worksheet. I love worksheets. Yeah. So all the material and the learning is available to you, whether you're available on. February 11th from 12 to three central or not brilliant.