Barely a week old and 2019 has already been dubbed the “Year of the Woman” with unprecedented numbers of women being sworn into Congress and stepping up to lead influential organizations. But, it is one thing to get the job and quite another to do it well—especially when so many are scrutinizing you from the sidelines, waiting for you to fail. Being in the room where big changes happen is hard, but important.
I recently talked with Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University’s first and only female president, about her improbable pathway to heading up the world’s most prestigious university. By all accounts, Drew’s tenure was a success. She increased revenue, grew Harvard’s international footprint, launched edX in partnership with MIT, drove key decisions to increase the diversity of women and people of color in leadership positions, and more.
She also had to overcome tremendous obstacles. She calmed tumultuous waters after the hasty exit of a well-liked and controversial president. She navigated entrenched gender biases in academia as the first woman in Harvard’s top job. She managed a steep learning curve while taking the helm only months before the national fiscal crisis wreaked havoc on universities across the country.
After stepping down this summer, Drew looks back on more than a decade of leading. As a fellow change agent, her lessons resonated with me and they are a must-read for anyone dedicated to breaking down barriers to effect change in the room.
1) Do It For The Right Reasons.
As a history professor early in her career, Drew never envisioned crossing over to university administration, “what my faculty colleagues call the ‘dark side.’” She would raise her hand for leadership tasks not because she wanted to get noticed, but because she felt it was “good citizenship to serve others.”
But she started to enjoy her increased impact as much, if not more, than her scholarship. “Being a professor is inherently a solo pursuit about your own work,” she explained. “I realized I was energized by working through and with others in pursuit of a common goal.”
Throughout her career, Drew has always remembered that “with large power comes…huge responsibility.” She added, “You have to be clear-eyed about what you want to accomplish and never lose sight of that.”
Drew’s singular vision of service resonated with me, as someone whose passion to reverse the cycles of inequity for all kids led me into leadership roles early in my career. As she told me, “it isn’t about power, it is about purpose.”
2) Don’t Be Afraid To Take The Leap.
If Drew was initially reluctant to transition from professor to administrator, she was downright resistant to becoming the boss of Harvard. The move from associate dean at University of Pennsylvania to president of Harvard was like entering “a whole other ball game,” she says.
“My leap was larger than most. I was managing a $5 billion budget, international politics, real estate, and compliance. Some of these things I had never done before—and certainly not at this scale.”
The opportunity came after a public relations crisis emerged for Harvard in 2007 when then-President Lawrence Summers opined in a public speech that the lack of women in math and science had little to do with discrimination and more to do with genetic advantages in men and the reluctance of women to work long hours. Summers’ remarks caused wide-scale outrage and university officials tapped Drew to lead a process to recommend university-wide changes and “mitigate the uproar.”
Much to her surprise, the incident ended in Summers’ abrupt resignation. “It was improbable to me that it would end this way,” in part because she and other women had frequently had to suffer comments like this, and worse, throughout their higher education careers.
Neil Rudenstein, a former president of Harvard, then gave her a hard sell about throwing her hat in the ring personally, hitting her with a line she says she uses to this day to recruit candidates: “If you have even 1% interest, let’s keep talking.”
3) Define Yourself Publicly, Or Others Will Do It For You.
When Drew took the helm, she initially avoided the spotlight and the press. Like many women I’ve met who find themselves in positions of leadership, Drew spent the first several months trying to, “stay out of the press and do the work.” (I remember thinking the exact same thing when I was first appointed to a public-facing role.)
She quickly realized that wasn’t a winning strategy, and she learned to embrace being the face of an organization. (I wish my epiphany had been as quick as Drew’s.) She decided to get better at telling her own personal story.
She sought help, approaching the task as a technical skill to be learned and honed. A talented public relations professional coached her—sitting in on interviews and speeches and giving her real-time, productive feedback.
“If you don't define yourself publicly, someone else will, and it will likely be according to stereotypes,” she said.
4) Gender Is Always An Issue, But Don’t Let It Derail You.
As the first female chair of her department at the University of Pennsylvania in 1981, Drew’s pregnancy made front-page news in the school’s newspaper. There was at that time no maternity leave, so she had to film her lectures in order to keep her job. These experiences early in her leadership career attuned her to the role gender plays in leading. She practiced ways to move forward despite these obstacles—and vowed to change conditions for others.
“Nobody thought the ‘Girl President,’ a former humanities professor no less, was going to be able to steer Harvard through the financial crisis.” Similar to many women in positions of power, Drew felt the criticisms and assumptions about her style and her aptitude were “extremely gendered” and would not have been leveled against a man with her same approach and profile.
She describes her initial approach at Harvard as “doing my homework” and “listening for an opportunity to add value.” But from day one, stakeholders told her she was, “too nice…as if you cannot be strong and decisive as well as kind.”
5) Understand That True Leadership Happens In The “Grey Space.”
If leadership “was easy,” says Drew, “everyone would do it.” Leaders are often faced with what she calls “grey issues.”
Being the head of an organization often involves picking between the best of two imperfect choices, forging a path without having all of the facts, or breaking a tie between two competing factions. “I am not sure I always landed in the right place,” she admits, and this resonated with me. Similar to Drew’s experience, research shows that being an effective leader means making a decision, however imperfect, and executing against it.
Leading a university is all about “the power to persuade—which means retail politics—not absolute power.” Balancing a need to drive results and listen to differing viewpoints can be a challenge. “You certainly can't run a meeting the way you run a graduate seminar,” she joked.
This is a familiar refrain I hear from other female CEOs: If you are too decisive, you are accused of being aggressive and top-down. If you aren’t decisive enough, you are criticized for being too nice and not leading. As Drew’s example shows, the key is leading and knowing there isn't necessarily a “just right” solution in our gendered way of thinking about leadership.
6) Spend Political Capital To Plow The Path For Authentic Diversity And Inclusion.
Drew has always felt that part of her life’s work is not just to succeed as a leader but to open doors for more leaders from underrepresented groups. She wrote in the Harvard Crimson that her goal has been to help all people “emerge from a room of their own to be part—to borrow the words of the current Broadway blockbuster ‘Hamilton’—of the ‘room where it happens.’ Opening such rooms to all has been a goal not just for my presidency but for my life.”
She advocated for and implemented paid family leave at Harvard. She helped ensure that research assistants could get paid more so they could afford childcare (an impediment to many women advancing in higher education). She gave critical feedback even to friends and mentors who used language that, intended or unintended, excluded or stereotyped women and people of color.
Later in her tenure—after Drew felt she had “legitimacy, a record, and credibility” to avoid being dismissed, she took on even more deeply entrenched patriarchal structures. She built political capital to spend it, not to be popular.
One of Drew’s most notable and politically unpopular causes was to take on Harvard’s “finals clubs.” These longstanding, all-male clubs do not admit women, and many felt their alcohol-fueled parties created the conditions for sexual assaults.
She was buoyed by constituents, both students and faculty, who had been pushing for change for years, but often didn’t have as big of a microphone as alumni of the clubs. And despite the fact that the majority of students and faculty supported her position, opposition from a few powerful and vocal leaders was blistering and personal. Recently, a powerful alumni group even hired a lobbyist to approach the federal government to prevent institutions from leveling any policy restrictions against such clubs.
Taking on powerful and entrenched interests, especially those related to patriarchy, is always hard. In my own efforts to be an agent of change, I have had to embrace the fact that those who have benefited from an uneven power dynamic rarely give it up without a fight. Similarly, while Drew found the pushback “tiring and stressful…and at times out of bounds,” she kept pushing, believing that it was the “right thing to do.” Indeed.
In The Room is a series that aims to demystify how leaders are picked, big decisions are made and social change happens. I write using knowledge from my two decades as a CEO in diverse contexts — and from interviewing change agents about how they think about getting into and influencing rooms.
