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Calling on Women to Lead with Courage, Persistence

Dr. Lynn Gangone

Women leaders who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s saw positional leadership as an obligation. They sought visibility and chances to mentor, to open doors for the women who followed.

At the first Midwest Women’s Leadership Institute held at Minnesota State University Mankato in June, Dr. Lynn Gangone called on a younger generation to heed the same responsibility. Dean of the Women’s College of the University of Denver, she has devoted her career to developing women’s leadership in higher education and beyond.

Women are more than half the population but fill only one-fifth of leadership positions across sectors. Women lead just over 15% of Fortune 500 companies and only one of the top 10 U.S. medical schools.

Gangone doesn’t see how we can move forward on the big issues until women are half the conversation. Her college’s tagline: “Advancing the world. One woman at a time.”

Lead where you are, then move up

Her message sounds like a paradox: Leadership doesn’t depend on position, but it’s important to hold leadership positions. Those two points are tied together. Awareness of leading in place can spring one to positional leadership.

Students at the Women’s College take evening and weekend classes while juggling jobs and families. Their response to the notion of taking leadership is “I can’t.” Leaders compound the problem when they talk chiefly about how hard the work is. Leadership does involve a lot of hard work but so do a lot of other things.

“Your life is already complicated. Look at all you’re doing. You can do this,” Gangone tells her students. Women leaders need to tell women in more junior positions about the rewards of working where you can make a visible difference. “You’re already doing all these things. Do them with power and influence,” she said.

Whatever your spot on the organizational chart, you’re already in a position to exercise leadership in higher education, she told the women in Mankato. You’re also a member of a community, perhaps a volunteer, perhaps a mother or aunt. Every woman has a capacity to lead in the places she lives from day to day. It’s a matter of intention.

Stepping up to higher positional leadership enables one to open the door for others and influence a larger world for the good. That doesn’t mean every woman need aspire to be a university president.

“The workplace isn’t fitted yet for people with multiple responsibilities,” Gangone said. It still runs on an obsolete model from the 19th and early 20th centuries. While some serve in positional leadership to retrofit the workplace, others may choose to balance their multiple responsibilities by leading from lower rungs on the ladder. The point is to be thoughtful about where and how you lead.

Courageous responsibility

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face,” she quoted from Eleanor Roosevelt. “You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” Each such experience is preparation for the next step forward.

Deciding to play it safe is a decision not to stretch. It isn’t even safe; look at all the people losing the jobs they thought were steady and secure. “I don’t think in this environment that anyone is going to be successful if they just hunker down,” Gangone told WIHE.

As a long-time tennis player, she’s drawn to Lois Frankel’s analogy between leadership and tennis in Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office (2004). You can’t win at tennis by just hitting the ball to the middle of the court. It’s the shots to the edges that win the game, the same shots at greatest risk of landing outside the line.

You need to be willing to fail in order to succeed. “There is a lot of calculated risk involved in leadership,” she said. It doesn’t mean being blind or reckless.

A strong leader:

• collects and examines the data
• assembles a team with diverse views
• makes wise use of resources

Being cautious doesn’t mean taking no risks. Schools are financially conservative just now with good reason. Leaders who take courageous responsibility keep moving toward their goals while shifting course as necessary to get there.

She’s been working to reposition the Women’s College, where she sees the economic downturn as opportunity. She hosts gatherings with civic leaders to make sure they’re aware of the college. Training women for entrepreneurship, leadership and political office fits the needs and the constraints of difficult times.

Understanding the organization

To be an effective leader you need to understand yourself, your role and the place you lead. She finds it helpful to view dynamics in terms of four frames that Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal describe in their book Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership (2003).

• Human resource frame.

“People are rightly feeling vulnerable and scared,” she said. Knowing this, a leader can create ways to engage people in making decisions and fi nding opportunities for growth. At the Women’s College she’s made strategic planning a very collaborative process. Many faculty and staff have gained new expertise in areas like finance and budget.

• Structural frame.

In times of change an organization loses clarity and stability, increasing the sense of vulnerability. Last fall her chancellor announced a hiring freeze and a voluntary severance package. Staffing was already short. “I had to try to figure out ways to instill structure when it seemed like the world was falling apart,” she said. Worry eased when she involved the survivors in figuring out the new allocation of responsibilities.

• Political frame.

Parts within universities regularly compete for resources and that increases when resources shrink. Win/win can seem elusive but leaders must try.

Her school’s planning and budget officer asked her to share the next year’s projected budget with the whole staff, including the potential effects if enrollment dropped. Staff appreciated the rare transparency and recognized their shared need to keep up recruitment and retention. New teams formed as a result.

• Symbolic frame.

Economic crises shake people’s sense of purpose. Many respond by wanting to retreat to a mythical past when everything was supposedly better.

Wise leaders create transitional rituals that honor the past as a foundation for advancement, not a haven for retreat. The Women’s College centennial celebration provided an opportunity to make the links between past and future.

All four frames are important for leaders to keep in mind. The human resource and structural frames get the most attention because people and charts are right before our eyes. Less common but equally important challenges are political and symbolic: to create the arenas for working out conflict and to sustain the community’s sense of meaning.

Preparing to lead

Susan Madsen’s On Becoming a Woman Leader (2008) explores the experiences of ten women who are college and university presidents. How did they develop their knowledge and skills? What did the presidents feel helped them? How did they learn to lead?

Gangone said the presidents started with deep selfknowledge and were intentional about continuing to learn. She discussed four of Madsen’s themes, plus one of her own.

1. Persistence.

Lack of certain skills intimidates many people. The women presidents assumed that if they kept at it they could master the skills they needed. If someone said no, they went back and asked again.

She recalled feeling burnt out after five years as a senior student affairs officer. She didn’t want to leave but had to get out of student affairs. She told her boss, who put her on a committee to broaden her skills and then transferred her to an area where she could apply them. “If I hadn’t persisted, and asked for a much needed professional change, I might have just picked up and left,” she said.

2. Openness.

“The capacity to be open, and to learn through experience, takes time and doesn’t just come through mastering a competency. You have to be able to build experience to go along with the competency,” she said. That means being open to assignments in which you’ll learn and stretch—or fail.

3. Failure.

Madsen quotes a 1990 study that found women got 43% of their learning and development from assignments, 28% from other people and 22% from hardships. We rarely seek out hardship or failure but we’re likely to encounter them. How will we respond? Do we deny or blame others, or do we embrace the chance to grow?

When she became executive director of the National Association for Women in Education (NAWE) in 1995, she was determined to turn the declining organization around. Five years later it was clear the challenges were too great and NAWE had to close. Today she uses the lessons learned there to help her guide her college.

4. Reflection.

The presidents watched themselves and others and reflected on what they saw. As with the other themes Madsen identified, they were quite intentional about choosing to be participant observers.

Gangone loves to watch and learn. She calls herself a higher education geek and encourages others to follow suit. “If you haven’t caught the wave on this one, start surfi ng the waters of engaging and observing. You will be a better leader as a result,” she said.

5. Networking.

This was her addition to Madsen’s list. Networking means forming intentional connections for the benefit of both parties. Use conferences and development programs to connect and keep up the contacts.

For all five aspects of learning to lead, the key is intentionality. The intentional woman keeps trying and stays open. She says, “I need to learn budget so I’m going to put myself on that committee.” She accepts the risk of failure and when it happens, uses it to grow. And she shares with others, for her sake and theirs.

Numbers matter

With women being almost 60% of today’s college students, is there still a need for women’s colleges or centers? With a growing number of women on faculty, do women’s leadership development programs still have a role? With women presiding over several top research universities, is there any reason to press for more women in positional leadership?

Yes, yes and yes. “We have to not let those achievements slow us down,” she said. Women still need womanfriendly spaces to find their voice and the world needs women’s voices at the table.

“In mixed settings, it is difficult for women to bring the whole of who they are,” she said. Conversations among women can address the interplay among professional, personal, family and relationship issues. They make room for authentic self and not just professional persona.

Women’s colleges and women’s centers give students a place to practice how to be, so they can move on to have an impact in a world largely shaped by men. Leadership development for women faculty and staff prepares them for positional leadership, where they’re sorely needed.

She’d like to see a 50/50 ratio. Women might start being able to bring the whole of who they are. The debate about how women and men are different could give way to a valuing of individual qualities. And solving the problems of higher education and the world may depend on having that rich mix of voices at the highest levels.

Contact her at
lynn.gangone@du.edu