Leadership and Integrity: What Colleges and Universities Need to Know

December 16, 2016

America’s top colleges and universities have a lot to say about their role in creating the nation’s future leaders.  But ask them how they do it, and most won’t have a ready answer.

I created and ran an innovative leadership program for women at Barnard College for six years, in partnership with the great Judith Shapiro, former Barnard President, which succeeded by challenging students to lead by being themselves first.    

Leadership takes many, sometimes contradictory, forms.  Leadership can be about standing out in public, creating a vision and motivating others to act.  But it’s also about toiling quietly in private, working tenaciously on scientific research, for example, that results in a breakthrough discovery.  In other words, not every kid with leadership potential is going to run for office. Some of them will change the world in less conspicuous ways.  And that’s what makes it hard to teach leadership in a systematic way, and why colleges and universities can get it so wrong.

College-based “leadership programs” tend to take the form of shadowing programs, which don’t require the student to actually do anything, or of achievement programs, where students are given a project to undertake.  Achievement programs can strengthen team-building and critical thinking skills, but there’s no guarantee that they will help young people develop the true foundational competencies of a leader.  

Those competencies live in the realm of integrity.  At the simplest level, integrity is about doing what you say you will do by when you say you will do it — honoring your word.  But at a more essential level, integrity is about honoring yourself — fulfilling your unique capacity to make a contribution to the world by being who you are and who you are meant to be.  

And that requires you to speak up and stand by your beliefs and ideas and work.  You don’t have to be a rhetorical genius to be a leader, but you do have to be willing to say what you think, and not be cowed.

To lead, one has to have the tenacity to articulate one’s vision over and over, reframing it for each new audience.  One has to have the emotional strength to resist the demoralizing effects of criticism and cynicism (and the bigger your vision, the louder those voices will be).   A leader must have real confidence — not just good speaking skills, but an actual belief in the rightness of her ideas and the plausibility of her theories that enables her to inspire confidence in those around her.

How does one teach this?  When I work with students, I start by building their integrity muscles first.  I demand impeccability, unwavering dedication, and a sense of responsibility to others, even in what seems like the small things: being on time for meetings, participating fully, keeping commitments.  

And I focus on letting students — particularly female students — know that they matter, that my demand that they be on time and speak their mind aren’t trivial requests, but rather an acknowledgement that their presence really does make a difference.

Only when students are practiced at expecting the most from themselves can they take on the challenge of leading others — because it’s through their own example that real leaders help others to see, and activate, the best in themselves.