Carole Chabries on Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Expectations for Women

On this episode, I welcome Dr. Carole Chabries, former higher education administrator and now entrepreneur. We talk about being a woman and leader in higher education and what that move to entrepreneurship looks like.

Transcript

Rebecca Pope-Ruark (RPR): On this episode, I welcome Dr. Carole Chabries, former higher education administrator and now entrepreneur. We talk about being a woman and leader in higher education and what that move to entrepreneurship looks like.

Welcome to the Agile Academic, a podcast for women in and around higher education. In each episode, we tackle topics from career vitality to burnout and everything in between. Join me as I chat with inspiring women about their experiences, pursuing purpose, making change, and driving culture in the academy and beyond. I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope Ruark. Hi Carole. Welcome to the show. 

Carole Chabries (CC): Hey, Rebecca, nice to see you. 

RPR: Yeah. So let's just start by introducing you to our audience today. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey in and around higher education. 

CC: Such a huge question. Okay. My name is Carole Chabries. I have a cousin who says it rhymes with french fry us. So if you're ever wondering that's how to pronounce it, I left higher ed as a campus employee three years ago, but that was the culmination of nearly 30 years of working on campus, primarily as an administrator. I got my PhD in English at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where I was introduced very early to administrative work and A, I fell in love with it, and b, I felt a little bit like tenure, looked like jail, really didn't want to be in jail for the rest of my life. So instead of pursuing the tenure track, I've literally never once applied for a tenure track job. I went immediately into administration and I started off in writing center and writing program work and then kind of worked my way up the proverbial ladder and ended up as a vice provost here in Wisconsin. But my passion from the very early days in the writing center was working with faculty. And so can I tell you the story as a 

RPR: Please do. 

CC: My little story about why I decided to work in administration, I was working with a master's student in mechanical engineering on his thesis, and so we met every week and we were working on his writing and he came to our session one week and said, my professor wants to know if he can come sit in on the session next week. And that was okay, except I was curious why, what does this guy want from the session? And the student said, he's been really impressed with how my writing's changed and he wants to see what you do. So the professor came to our next session and he stayed after we were done and he and I talked and he told me that it had never occurred to him to give a student the kind of feedback I was giving students. And so we talked about how you give constructive feedback about writing that's not about content. It's about helping the writer clarify their ideas. I was in conversation with this professor and I thought, oh my God, I could spend the rest of my career teaching a couple hundred students a year, or I could teach hundreds of faculty who would then reach tens of thousands of students. Why would I not make that choice? The impact was so attractive to me. So that's what I did. And here I am not doing that anymore, but here I'm 

RPR: So tell us a little bit about that flash of purpose. What kind of attracted you to that work and eventually led you out of that work? 

CC: Yeah, I think everybody who loves teaching I am. So I get chills in that moment when you see a student have a flash of recognition or you see their eyes light up or they pause and they're like, oh, there is nothing like that moment. And I kind of don't care who I'm with when it happens. I don't have an ideal student. I just love being with people when that happens. And I know people who love teaching love that moment too. And so that was part of what prompted me to work with faculty and faculty development. I've done a ton of other things, but faculty development has kind of been a consistent through line in my work. And when I have felt least rewarded at work, I have asked to teach. So I've asked to lead workshops or I've asked to teach the first year experience because I need that in my life. 

And administrative work can be really heavy and really bureaucratic and really compliance driven, and I've just always been, I always find myself returning to that moment of helping people get that flash. That's what I live for. When I left campus work, I knew I wanted to continue that in some way. And I thought at the time that I really wanted to continue it with women leaders because I had been so roundly abused by so many women leaders and as a feminist and a woman, I was just pissed off that women were treating each other that way. But I realized not very far into that journey that my anger at the way I'd been treated by women didn't really directly translate to wanting to work only with women. Men are plenty abuse too. There's just a lot of harm that happens in higher ed. And I really came to realize that what I wanted to do was work with people who are in leadership positions where their impact on their team has a ripple effect across the campus, a ripple effect across the entire institution. And that giving that group of people those aha moments was energizing to me in a way that I didn't really, I mean, I didn't know it was going to be until it was, and then I was like, oh, oh. It's like all my years of leadership combined with my passion for teaching and reaching the people who are suffering the most. It's just kind of a nice little nexus. And so that's what I do. Now, 

RPR:  You and I have talked a lot in other spaces because I've been doing some work with women in higher education leadership roles and aspects of burnout. Can you talk a little bit about what some of the challenges you see are for women leaders? And we can get to men leaders, male leaders in a second, but what are some of the big challenges these days for women leaders? 

CC: Yeah, I can, although I also want to lead with a caveat that I have blinders on and I have limited experiences. I'm a certain age, I'm white, I'm married to a man. I have lots of markers that make other experiences unavailable and invisible to me except as an observer. So I do want to acknowledge that and not overgeneralize, even though I'm about to overgeneralize. One of the things that I think is hardest for women is I know how I'm going to try and say this without resorting to cliches, but we're punished for being ourselves, whatever that means. Whether it's wearing colorful, loud clothing or having a strong voice or needing to get home to take care of ailing parents or sick kids, whatever it is that makes us the human being, we are typically punished for being that person when we show up in a campus leadership role where there are kind of strictures set in place. 

And so from things like don't cry or don't raise your voice or be the first to a meeting, be extra hospitable, be welcoming, don't be domineering. There are just all these ways that we are signaled. However you were planning on showing up, don't and show up this other way. And so I think the experience for a lot of women in leadership roles is internal dissonance. You walk into work and there's a part of you, you have to shut down and sometimes that's actually the best part of you. So I don't know. That's kind of a big general question. 

RPR: Yeah, I read a book while I was doing the research for my own book, and I'll add it, the title's not in my head right now, but I'll add it to the show notes. And this researcher talked about doing lots of work with women leaders and finding them in different categories. And some, one category was she called them the passers. They were the women who were often the first in their generation to be in those leadership roles and never had their gender mentioned is a goal for them so that they fill in those male spaces as much as they can, 

But to build space for other women to come after them. So they kind of take it on to act one of the boys to make that happen. And then there are other groups that she interviewed who had very different experiences, who did show up in the ways that people around them might not have been comfortable with, like you said, wearing loud clothes or being loud and aggressive in spaces where that often is frowned upon if you're a woman. So I think it's really interesting to think about how we do show up in those spaces and what masks we're wearing. Sometimes 

CC: Yes, 

RPR: When we show up there, 

CC: And I don't know, I'd be curious to know what you've learned in your research, but I can tell you there was a point in my career when I was very happy to be in a room and not have my gender mentioned when I genuinely felt like the badge of of being the woman at a table. I remember sitting in a meeting with state and regional CEOs and a few college presidents and a few other, a vp, but from an R one. And I was the only woman and someone joked I was the only one not in a gray suit who didn't give the girl the memo. And I also felt in that moment, but here I am with all of you. All right. So that was fine. And I'll tell you now that I would just feel really differently about that. I think I've gone through some of those phases. It was great for me at one point to pass, and now it's not. But I don't know that 25-year-old me would've been served by the same things that serve 56-year-old me. 

RPR: And I think there's so much to be said about embracing the seasons of your life and the seasons of your leadership in different ways that sometimes certain things are going to be more important to you than other things at different phases, and that's okay. And you do show up differently as you get those experiences and you move through that space and you are a part of that space in different ways and being okay with that. 

CC: Yeah, I will say there was a period of my professional life that shaped me profoundly. And so I was running a consortium of private colleges and my kids were little, I think they were two and four when I started that job. And those kids went with me everywhere that they recognized college presidents by their first names. They sat with me in board meetings. I could tell you a number of funny stories about having this was pre pandemic. When your kid is sick, you don't know to stay home or you think it's okay. But I would drag my sick three-year-old around with me, and one day he was wearing his pajamas and he put on his robe and he had slippers on. He kind of looked like a 19th century gentleman at leisure except that his nose was running and his eyes were gross. He was sick. But he tod around town with me, and I never thought of it as work-life balance. What I recognized and was really unique is that I had work life integration, 

That my kids were part of my work life. People were not surprised when my kids showed up. Nobody blinked an eye when I stayed to work from home because occasionally I recognized that my child was too sick for me to drag them around in public. But I also know that was incredibly unique. And one of the reasons I could do that is because I was running the association, but then I was also modeling that for the people who worked for me and the people who worked with me. But that gave me a taste of what it was like to truly be myself at work pretty hard not to be yourself. When your sick kid is hanging on you, you're spit up all over your nice gray suit or whatever. But that was a season of life and I had no idea that I would want that, and then I didn't have it anymore. When I went to work at an institution that did not treat me that way, I was angry because I had seen what my life could be, and I was furious that especially where I was, which was a women's college, they were telling me that was inappropriate and wrong. 

RPR: Yeah, that's hard. Some of the women I talked to in my leadership interviews talked about that competitive space with other women where multiple women that I spoke with in dean roles especially would say that they would see the men deans asked to lead these important committees or to go to these events with the board while the women were kind of given cleanup duty and then kind of fighting for scraps among each other. So they weren't able to form those relationships to really support each other because they were competing for attention and they were competing for really space in that leadership team. 

CC: And then some of the women. I mean, that feels to me also generational. I could be wrong, but I feel like that might less than it used to. But I do know that, well, I don't know this. I believe there's a generational thing too, where women who came into leadership at a certain historical time really did feel like they had to claw their way to the top, or they had to fight in some way. And so their response to other women was, well, I had to fight for it. You do too. And what I see more and more, and I hear people talk about all the time, is how we can lift each other and open those doors instead, reach back and help someone through the door instead of slamming it in their face. 

RPR: Yes. 

CC: But that's not to say it's easy. I think sometimes it's easier. 

RPR: Some of the younger administrators that I spoke with I think were the mentees of that generation of women, and were feeling like in some ways they were getting messages from those mentors that there are some things you just have to suck up and do whether you want to or not, but also you should also be blazing your path. And it's hard and it's going to be hard, unfortunately. But how do you show up the way, show up as you, is that authentic you in those spaces and make that okay for yourself and for the next person who's coming behind you in leadership? 

CC: Yeah, I do think we're humans, and so there's always going to be stuff we have to suck up. I think the shift that I've seen is that increasingly women feel, the women I talk to at least feel like they can choose what they're going to accept and what they're not. They have a little more autonomy in how they suffer laugh, that's a terrible way to say it, but we don't all get what we want all the time anyway. But at least women leaders are, I think starting to feel like the range of possibilities is broader and they can make intentional invisible choices from within a wider range. 

RPR: And it is so important to feel that level of agency in your own path to feel like you have some power over what's happening and how you want to be and when you want to step in and when you want to step out. And that stepping out is okay if that's not where you need to be at that time. 

Several of the women that I spoke with talked about, and in some of the literature that I looked at too, talked about this idea that stepping away isn't always stepping out, but you can step away and do what you need to do and then potentially go back in if that's what's interesting to you, depending on that season of your career, a season of your life, or go into a different area of higher ed or move into entrepreneurship you have. So let's talk a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey as well. So you've mentioned that you left campus work about three years ago. Tell us a little bit about the road to entrepreneurship. 

CC: So the road is actually much longer than that. I took on my first kind of contract project work, I think in December of 2015. And it was for a university, it was for a president I had a great relationship with. And he basically said, Hey, I need this thing done. I think you could do it. And I was like, sure, what the hell? Yes. And it was fun. And then when it was over, he was like, well, how about this other project? And I was like, great. So I kind of snowballed into ad hoc project work and I loved it. I loved the freedom, I loved the autonomy. I loved being in control of my own time. I loved my hourly rate, I loved everything about it, and I had no idea how to keep the requests coming in. And I was really panicked. And I started, I mean, this was after six months or so, I started talking to people. 

I can't just hang out a shingle and say, call me when you have an interesting project. I mean, I could, but who's going to find that shingle? And so I stayed an employee because I was scared, but it was more than scared. I was scared and I had no resources. I had no knowledge. I didn't have the financial cushion to take a year and sort this out and learn what to do. So I stayed employed and backed away. I still took occasional projects, backed away from that. When I decided, I actually decided to get serious about this again, from taking someone else's really bad workshop. I will try not to give too many details so that I don't totally out this person, but there's a person who has a national reputation in his field and he leads workshops on this topic all the time. And I had a group of people on campus who reported to me who would benefit from his work. 

And so I decided to take his workshop and bring my knowledge back to my team. So I did that, and at the end of the workshop they were like, what can you tell us? And I said, nothing. This was a waste of time. I'm so mad. Why is he considered an expert? He was teaching us a pedagogy that he wasn't even modeling. I was just beside myself and my team, bless their hearts, said, Carole, is there a chance? The problem is you and I said, you know what? It's like post pandemic. I'm exhausted. We're all stressed out. Yes, it is entirely likely. The problem is me. So take the workshop with me. So I actually paid for it a second time, and this time a couple people who worked with me came along and a couple weeks in, it was a month long workshop and a couple weeks in, they're like, this is the worst thing ever. 

And I was like, it is. It's so bad. It's embarrassingly bad. And so I priced it out. I do this in meetings when I used to sit in cabinet meetings and they were a total waste of time. I would price them out and just like, oh, so this meeting is costing institution $2,500. Do we think that's a good use of right? Anyway, so I did the same thing and I realized that if I took the registration numbers that were visible to me, I don't know how many people registered, but I think the day I decided to do this, there was something like 60 some odd people in the zoom room and I knew what I paid and I could estimate the amount of time he was spending. And so based on that, I thought, well, I think he's spending four hours a week. If I were to lead four workshops, that would still only be a part-time job. 

And if I could get the same number of registrations he got at the same registration rate, what would that be? What would that be? How much money would you make in that scenario? How much money you would make would $1.2 million? And I was like, $1.2 million. Are you kidding me? What am I doing wasting my time on a campus when I could actually do really good work much better than this? And that sort of impact for others. I mean the number of people you would reach if you had his registration numbers and the things that the good you could do in the world with that kind of money. I was like, why am I not pursuing that? So I did I for the record, do not make 1.2 million a year or do I teach for workshops a month that have 66 people registered? And I was like, none of that math was real, but I mean the math was real, but none of it is the reality I'm living. 

But I became really kind of terrier on the combination of impact, I guess financial impact and pedagogical impact and leadership impact is, again, there's a little trifecta there for me, but I will also say that the entrepreneurial journey out of higher ed is, it's kind of like I'm just totally flashed on Pilgrim's progress. It's fraught. There is a slew of despond. There is a lot that is difficult. There is a lot of BS in the online entrepreneur world. There is a lot of versions of snake oil pedaling of how fast you can succeed, how fast you can become rich, how quickly you can shift your hours to only work four hours a week. There's a lot of stuff that's just nuts and it's misogynist and it's patriarchal and it's gaslighting, and it's all the things that we hate about other places too. So it's not a simple path. 

It's not, I think a linear solution. I think it might be for some people, but in general I think it's not. And also it's just so rewarding. And I feel like I am in a position now where the work I do and the people I do it with I know matters. I know because of the feedback I get. I know because people return to me, it's way more, I was about to say it's way more affirming than what I did on campus, but that's not true. It's as affirming as those moments I talked about at the beginning where people are sparking with energy and excitement. It is that affirming. It's just it's that more often, that's not the outlier moment. That's the heart and soul of what I do. So in that way, it's 

RPR: Fantastic. I do works a lot of workshops on burnout as well, and you can reach so many more people in those spaces than you can just on your campus. And it's empowering, but it's also, it just makes you feel like you're making the world a better place. 

CC: Yeah, 

RPR: One workshop, 

CC: Which is why we all went into higher ed in the first place anyway. So the whole idea that you have to suffer to support the mission, you get to live that differently when you're building a business of your own. 

RPR: What advice do you have for someone who's considering maybe hanging up a shingle or whether that's leaving higher ed completely or just kind of starting a side gig? What advice would you offer them? 

CC: That is such a great question. Probably competing pieces of advice. And the first thing I would say is you're going to be scared at points and don't let that get in your way. Accept the scary part and just keep going. Do the thing that scares you. And also sometimes it's scary and it's real because you're wondering how you're going to pay for groceries for the month, right? Or whatever. So I feel like there's this importance to balance what you put at risk at the beginning and facing the risk and still running toward it. And there's not a silver bullet answer for that. I think that answer is different for everybody. And some people have a partner who can support them, and some people are single parents supporting multiple people in the household. And so you have to sort that out for yourself, but you should sort it out. But maybe another piece of advice is you're only going to sort it out by doing it where especially for your listeners who are trained as academics, we are such great thinkers and you can spend all your time thinking about this and planning and writing and researching, but I can promise you, you won't really start learning until you start doing, and then you learn faster than you do when you're just doing research and the learning. 

It's more relevant to you. It is you learning in context, which is not always true when you're reading a book, et cetera. So do the thing that scares you. Don't be stupid about it and take action. And I guess the other thing I would say is find community. This has been in some ways the most isolating work I've ever done. And because it's so isolating, I have gone out of my way to build community among people. And that community has also really shifted over time. So typically when I find myself feeling like there's a thing I don't understand about business or there's a thing that I'm trying to solve, it's not a problem I need to understand, but it's a way of thinking or something, I go out and I look for people who can help me with that. For example, I was struggling a couple of months ago wondering how to sell to institutions instead of to people. 

I mean, obviously you're always selling to people, but how do you make an institutional pitch versus a person to person pitch? And it occurred to me after a few weeks that I used to be the person on campus people sold to. I know a bunch of those people, but it had not occurred to me to reach out to them and say, talk to me about how you decided to sell to our institution, and what sort of research did you do and how did you decide who to contact? Those questions had not occurred to me in prior iterations of my business. So the questions kind of come up as you need them, and that's a great time to build community and to keep broadening the circle of people who are supporting you and helping you in this. 

RPR: I think there's a lot of imposter syndrome that comes out of that too. And having a community saying to help you kind of validate your pricing or things like that can be really helpful. Or just, can I just run my webpage past you to get another set of eyes on it before I launch it? Having another voice of someone who is maybe in business and then someone who's also on the other side of it, having that community of support can be really 

CC: Valuable. What I would also say though about that is if your experiences like mine, you're going to get a lot of feedback from people who aren't running businesses and will never be your clients, and their feedback is not useful to you. And that sounds harsh, but when I run something past my husband and he looks at me a scan, I'm like, okay, but I'm not selling to you, so it doesn't matter to me that you think this about it. So yes, it's a yes and answer. 

RPR: I think one piece of advice that I would give too is to be aware that your services or your products are going to evolve as you learn more, as you work more, as you see what people are interested in and what people are not interested in. I do a lot of workshops and I've tried to launch one-on-one coaching on multiple occasions, and it just never seems to pan out, so maybe that's okay. I do that in my day job, but this other thing is really working for people and they're finding it really valuable. So how do you lean into the things that people are most interested in? 

CC: Yeah, and that's a bit of what I meant when I said take action. My services also have changed really significantly even in three years, but that's because I kept trying things and I learned the market tells you what it wants. So you're learning people really love getting support for burnout, and you wouldn't know that if you weren't out testing it. Yeah. 

RPR: So I always ask one question as we wrap up a conversation, and that question is, what's one thing that you wish all women associated with higher ed knew or practiced 

CC: Today? My answer, ask me in a year. I might have a different answer. I think today my answer is to trust your inner wisdom. I can think of so many times when I walked into a room and I could feel the energy in my body, or I was in a conversation and reading the room and I had a sense and thought, that's not a rational response. That's not what I'm trained to think or that's not what my boss wants me to do. And one of the things I've done over the last three years is try to unlearn the ways I stop myself from trusting what I feel to be true in my bones. And so I would say do more of that. 

RPR: Love it. Thank you so much for being here today, Carole. It's good. 

CC: It was my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me, Rebecca.

RPR: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Agile Academic Podcast for women in higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. To make sure you don't miss an episode, follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps and bookmark the show. You'll find each episode a transcript and show notes theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care and stay well.