Dr. Ralph Gigliotti is Director of Leadership Development and Research at the Center for Organizational Leadership at Rutgers. He serves as a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Ph.D. program in Higher Ed at Rutgers. His research and consulting explore the intersection of organizational communication, leadership, and crisis communication. He's also a National Examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence Program and serves on the Board for the Network for Change & Continuous Innovation in Higher Education.
Book and Publications by Dr. Gigliotti
Quotes From This Episode
Resources Mentioned
Dr. Ralph Gigliotti is Director of Leadership Development and Research at the Center for Organizational Leadership at Rutgers. He serves as a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Ph.D. program in Higher Ed at Rutgers. His research and consulting explore the intersection of organizational communication, leadership, and crisis communication. He's also a National Examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence Program and serves on the Board for the Network for Change & Continuous Innovation in Higher Education.
Book and Publications by Dr. Gigliotti
Quotes From This Episode
Resources Mentioned
Note: Voice to text transcriptions are about 90% accurate.
Scott Allen 0:10
Today on the program I have Ralph Gigliotti, and he is the Director at the Rutgers Center for Organizational Leadership we have never met. So you literally are listening in to our first-time conversation. And Ralph, I'm excited you've written a book, Crisis Leadership and Higher Education: Theory and Practice. So we'll get to that I'm sure. But maybe share a little bit about you and a little bit about your path to leadership education and that work.
Ralph Gigliotti 0:42
Sounds great. Well, it's good to be with you, Scott, and nice to meet you officially. I mean, we have I've learned about you for lots of contacts and mutual relationships, and to be able to connect this awesome love, with the podcast, too. Um, so my career actually started at Villanova University. And I was working at Villanova
Ralph Gigliotti 1:09
So my career actually started at Villanova University. I left Duquesne, where I did my undergrad in Pittsburgh. And actually, I grew up in a really big Italian family, and most of them still live in Pittsburgh, and I miss it deeply. And, and I learned a lot about leadership from them. And from the way, I was raised as a first-generation college student and just sort of the importance of family values. When I left to go to Villanova, it was, it was a different experience for me being on the other side of the state. And I learned a lot about independence and was doing a lot of work and undergraduate leadership, education, and co curricular leadership programming. Really, really enjoyed my work at Villanova, and started a Ph. D. program at Rutgers. While I was working full time at Villanova, I, my interests really look at the intersection of leadership and communication and crisis in the context of higher ed. So I knew I wanted to get a PhD in communication, but to explore leadership and higher ed issues. So Rutgers was a great place to be I worked with Brent Rubin, who eventually hired me to work full time in the center for organizational leadership at Rutgers. Yeah, and where I work now is the director. And Scott, it's, it's sort of like a dream job for me because I love my work with undergraduate leadership education, and to be able to elevate some of what I was doing there and translate it in the context of higher ed more broadly, and working with faculty and staff leaders across the university have been amazing, and a great learning experience.
Scott Allen 2:47
Well, even as you're talking, so I'm gonna go to Pittsburgh real quick. So I'm in Cleveland. Yes. And but I grew up in Minneapolis. So I have had just wonderful experiences in Pittsburgh just had a perfect Saturday afternoon at PNC Park off son, and his cousin and just a perfect day, such a beautiful place to be seen some wonderful concerts in Pittsburgh, even within the last year. And we had the most wonderful new year's day at the Carnegie Science Center. So when you speak of Pittsburgh, and then I'm going to get it wrong. Is it from Primanti Brothers or
Ralph Gigliotti 3:25
Yeah!
Scott Allen 3:26
yeah, you got to go and have that sandwich that is, you know, coleslaw, french fries and everything else in the sandwich. Right. So I love Pittsburgh. When I think of Villanova. I think it's the number one undergraduate Business School, isn't it? and fabulous,
Ralph Gigliotti 3:42
they have a terrific Business School. Yeah,
Scott Allen 3:44
a great university. And, and when I think of New Jersey, I think of the Jersey Shore, City, New Jersey, where my wife and I spent a lot of time, kind of at the beginning of our relationship, because their family, they were all from Philly, and they all had their big house at the shore. And we would go there every summer and just have a blast. And so those are a couple of connection points. But I love the fact that that you...I love integration, and I love people who are thinking about concepts through different lenses. So the communications, the leadership, and tell me about the crisis. How did you get out in the crisis piece of it all?
Ralph Gigliotti 4:24
Well, to go back to this theme of integration, I was raised in a value-centered house and I went to primarily Catholic University, I went through Catholic school my entire life, and then Catholic universities from undergrad and masters. And you hear a lot about values, right? That's something we talk a whole lot about and that system and that sector. And when I left to work at Rutgers, a public large state institution values take on a prominent role here as well, right. They might look a little bit different and sound a little bit different, but I learned a lot that values matter, right? Understanding sort of what those principles are that guide you as a leader is super critical. When I was an undergrad at Duquesne, there was a campus shooting, which was really unprecedented for the university. And as the student body president, I saw a university come together in a crisis that really fueled for me an interest in university life and university dynamics, and really placed a spotlight for me intellectually, on how leaders in higher education can rally others around a shared vision, how those values take on an elevated level of importance when the stakes are so high during times of crisis. And this was all pre COVID Scott. So now to be thinking about these issues at a time where we're dealing across our society with a convergence of so many different crises. It raises a lot of questions, but I continue to take seriously the importance of being value-centered and responding to these really challenging circumstances.
Scott Allen 6:05
Yeah. So let's dive into how you're thinking about this topic. And I guess we could enter wherever you feel comfortable entering, I mean, we could go into kind of COVID, we could go into maybe some of the, you know, the realities that you were thinking about pre-COVID. But how are you thinking about this topic? Now, given what you've written?
Ralph Gigliotti 6:27
Yeah. Um, so I guess I could start first with the origin of the book and sort of what I was studying in the book because it was written and published right before the pandemic, I had an interest in crisis leadership in higher ed. And it's very clear in my work in the center and working with leaders across the university, that crisis management and crisis leadership are often placed on the back-burner for leaders in higher education. We are often thrown into these roles with limited preparation and limited training, yet are expected to manage and lead in high stakes situations. Yeah, particularly crises. So I for the book, I did a content analysis of articles from inside higher ed in the chronicle of higher ed, just to see on the horizon, what are the kinds of issues that are being elevated to the level of crisis in the trade publications, okay, so I came up with this scheme of crises that were most relevant for colleges and universities because there wasn't one in the literature that I found to be as relevant. Yeah. And then I spoke with leaders across higher ed, what I love about the podcast, Scott, is that each conversation you're having important themes of leadership is coming out. And there's like, the synthesis across the different conversations is fascinating. And as a qualitative researcher, when I was doing this for my dissertation, and then for the book, you just hear some of these reoccurring themes. And these patterns of thought that were emerging from the dialogue was fascinating. And there were a couple of themes that were really important. Okay, one, crises are super complicated. But they're often perceived in different ways by different stakeholders. Yeah. So part of what makes the work of leadership and higher education so tricky is trying to deal with the competing interests and the competing priorities and to really disentangle the crisis from the non-crisis. But there's subjectivity involved in that. Right. So how do you know what's going to bubble up to something at the level of crisis? Another interesting theme was the challenging role of social media. Yes, it allows leaders to get messages out there in a quicker and more agile way. But so many of the leaders with whom I spoke discussed the challenges of trying to get their hands around issues that were bubbling up, in through social media. Yeah. And I think the third theme that really emerged as being especially relevant from the book was the distinction between crisis management, and crisis leadership. So much of the crisis management, writing, and scholarship focus on how you can use communication as a tool to try to get yourself out of the crisis, how to preserve the reputation of the institution, all super important and very critical. Yeah. But values-centered organizations and in higher education in particular, when crises strike, there is a need and an urgency to let those values guide how you respond to the crisis. And communication is not just a tool to get you out of the crisis, but it actually becomes a way of being through how you engage with others, how you take care of the people with whom you work, how you show compassion, how you demonstrate clarity, and how you respond in an agile way to the challenges at hand.
Scott Allen 9:52
So is it almost like the values are floatation devices you know, they're there to kind of hold on to as the North Star, or you know, that that that will help guide some of our decision making and all of the noise I imagine that's going on. Is is that a way of describing it?
Ralph Gigliotti 10:14
I love it. Yeah, I often use the word anchor for decision making, right? So the life preservations, the anchors, something to lean on, when the waves are so Rocky, and look at where we are right now. Those waves are so Rocky. Yeah, and how do we know what to grasp onto? How do we know how to make sense of not just a pandemic, but the whole other host of situations that our country is wrestling with right now. And it's easy to respond to these things in ways that are not completely connected to the values that we hold in common and to those that we cherish. But if we can take pride in those and place a spotlight on those and use as an anchor for how we respond. I think not only will it serve the short term interests well but most certainly the long term interests.
Scott Allen 11:08
Well, I love that I love just even a leader with that as you know, step one. In their mindset, and in their way of being that, okay, our values are front and center in this decision-making process? And how do those help guide? how we live our values, how we move forward, how we chart a path? What other things like that? kind of did you come across that? What's step two? What's step three? In this management and leadership? What other things did you come across?
Ralph Gigliotti 11:45
Yeah, um, so I think a couple of important ideas, Scott, one, and this is really a management principle, but having response teams in place, who can respond to any kinds of crises that your institution might deal with, and to make collectively
Scott Allen 12:03
we've done the prep work, we've thought this through, and there's a team ready. I mean, it's almost like I spoke with Craig Johnson, he's like, know, your values and have done some of that work before you get to the ethical challenge.
Ralph Gigliotti 12:18
You know, this is the pre-crisis phase, right, we need to be mindful that this is going to happen, it's inevitable, right? Um, and sadly, that's the case. But yeah, to have a team in place that's well prepared, that's representative of different units. And that knows their role and their responsibility. One of the things that came out in the research was this idea of a counter-cultural need for agility, that in higher education, we sometimes are a little bit slow-moving. And change takes a lot of time. But when crises strike, we're held to the same standards for speed and accountability as any large organization, any large corporation. And so we need to have a mechanism in place to respond swiftly, but also to respond again, in a way that's consistent and congruent with those values. Yeah. And we call it countercultural in the book. And I think there's a lot to be proud of in terms of how higher head our higher ed has responded to this crisis of, you know, in March shifting into remote settings so quickly, so with such agility, and yeah, there were a lot of kinks and lots of issues to be worked out. But a lot to be proud of in that response. Yeah. And I think the other piece of this, Scott, as we think about leadership, there's when we look at leadership, communication, and we look at crisis leadership, it's easy to sort of hone in on the messages that leaders, particularly formal leaders are communicating during times of disruption. And that's an important dimension of leadership. But I like to think about leadership. And some of the writing that I've done with Brent, around leadership is a process and a process of social influence, which has been written by so many different scholars. And when we look at leadership through a broader lens, and it's not just the messages, but it's the strategies and its structures, and it's the processes that make social influence possible. Yeah. And what does that mean for the crisis, that we don't just focus on the messages that are sent during the time of crisis? But the history and the precedent that precedes any leadership communication endeavor? That's part of this leadership transaction? Would you say more about that?
Scott Allen 14:32
even provide an example? What
Ralph Gigliotti 14:33
do you think? Yeah. So I think, in the work that we're doing in the center, we're doing a lot of coaching and consultation with leaders across the university. And oftentimes, the focus for leaders is on how to respond to X, Y, or Z situation. And those are really important to understand when a crisis strikes, how might you respond in ways that can help the department or the school But crisis leadership begins before the moment of crisis itself. So the ways in which you build trust with your team ahead of time, that shapes the perception through which you'll be analyzed and evaluated when crises strike, there's a history that precedes you, and to build a reservoir of goodwill that you're able to draw on, especially when times are tough. It is not just a soft skill of leadership, it's an enduring skill, a leader,
Scott Allen 15:33
I have to imagine that as the social capital, the investment you've made in relationships within the team or within the larger community, right, that builds trust, and that and if those relationships don't exist for a leader, you're kind of hanging out there. Am I correct?
Ralph Gigliotti 15:53
I think it's really hard. And we have at Rutgers right now, an amazing new president who started July 1. And it's been just from a leadership analysis point of view, fascinating to see the ways in which he and other leaders who just started in recent months, for relationships in the immediate environment, often the case, and begin to cultivate some of that, because if it doesn't exist, and makes those harder decisions, even harder,
Scott Allen 16:26
yeah, yeah. You see, you see it quite a bit that that, again, an event an individual gets so locked into the work and the tasks. And I think at times, they don't remember that building those relationships and building that social capital, it's a glue, it's a net. And if the time isn't invested there, it's going to be very, very difficult to rally a community and different factions of the community. If you only know your executive leadership team, and those are kind of the extent of your relationships, that's just not solid footing, in my opinion,
Ralph Gigliotti 17:08
no, and surrounding yourself with people who will be honest with you. Yes. Lee in crises when that honesty can be hard to hear.
Scott Allen 17:16
Yeah, yeah. What else do you thinking about right now? I mean, that's probably consuming. Probably all-consuming. You know, what, what has what has been your experience with the book out there in the world right now, during this time? Would you talk a little bit about that? I mean, I'm sure you've heard from some interesting corners of, of higher ed,
Ralph Gigliotti 17:42
I've had so many fascinating conversations. Yeah. And I wrote the book in a way that it would be applied, but that it also has some theoretical principles to help inform how he makes sense of this. And so I think what's been really interesting and challenging and hard over these last few months. One, I've had so many conversations, Scott, with folks who are losing steam, and losing motivation, and losing the joy in the work that they do. Because so much of the work that we're focused on right now is fundamentally different than what brought us into these roles in the first place. Yeah. Um, and with little end in sight, it's hard to sustain that motivation. So I've had lots of conversations just in terms of leadership development with folks around how you sustain your own energy and resilience as leaders, and how you can cultivate that in the teams that you work with as well. Yeah. The second thing that's been on my mind so much over the last couple of months, is we talk a lot and hear a lot about reinvention. And I'm sure you're having conversations about that at john Carroll and elsewhere. You know, what does the future of our institutions look like? Yeah, on the other side of this, and reinvention to me is exciting because it's a reset. And sometimes crises can reveal what was broken. Yeah. And crises can expedite decision making, in ways that might not be customary. And that's sort of exciting, right to think about what the future might have in store for our institutions. But it's scary. And there's a lot of fear, and we can't ignore the impact that this has having on people's lives and on people's jobs and just the financial uncertainty around reinvention. So one of the studies I just worked on was a survey of department chairs across the big 10 just to get a sense from them, leaders who are on the front lines of their academic departments, who are in these liminal leadership roles, right, like you have some influence. Yeah, but often you're responding to and taking on responsibilities that are handed on to you from your faculty and from senior administration. So it's a really interesting and complex leadership role. But what does reinvention mean? To them, and nearly in half, half are excited about the possibilities. And half have fundamentally negative views of what reinvention might mean, because of the financial challenges, because of the uncertainty associated with it, and because of the fear of change, and what that might mean to these traditions that we've developed.
Scott Allen 20:27
Yeah. Well, I have to imagine, mindset is such a fundamental piece of this whole conversation. Imagine now, okay. The situation that those department chairs in is incredibly challenging, it's just difficult. But if the mindset is that the other 50%, think of the damage that can do, right? Think of how that could hurt that department to that institution in the long run. Because I think you're exactly right. If you're viewing this as not an opportunity to thrive, shift, adjust, reimagine. It's almost accelerating some of the challenges. And does that make sense?
Ralph Gigliotti 21:21
It makes so much sense. And I think your conversation with Tony Middlebrooks a few weeks back, or whenever you recorded, was so instructive for me, because it really centered on mindset, but design principles and taking a user-centered view of this. Right. So for department chairs, I think there are so many important principles from that conversation, you had that translate beautifully to this situation for department chairs, who, yes, are in leaders across higher ed, who are situated at the nexus of lots of different stakeholders. Yeah, you know, trying to triage short term issues, but also strategically explore future possibilities, that mindset and being able to place yourself in the shoes of the prospective students in the UAE, and the senior leaders, you and your faculty and staff, who each have different competing perceptions of what the department does, or what the department focuses on. Um, that's a challenging intellectual exercise. Oh, yeah. On top of your teaching and research. All right. But, um, if you have this growth, orientation, and you sort of are entrepreneurial, and can think creatively around what that future might hold, what an exciting time. And when you look at the ways in which disciplines are structured right now, what an exciting time to be paving the way for what a changed world might look like, on the other side of this?
Scott Allen 22:53
Yeah, yeah, I had a student, a former student of mine, works and it was in our MBA program. And right at the beginning of this of the shift, to kind of stay at home and all of that this was in March, I was doing a session for an organization on virtual leadership. So you can take some of the classic Blake and Mouton and you know, tasks and relationships. And I was going to some of my students who had worked as virtual leaders for a period of time, just getting some of their thoughts and their advice. And this one student said, Look, it's the same what it's just a different how it's the same, it's the same back to the values. Here's what we do. This is who we are, this is what we value. This is what we're trying to accomplish as an institution, whether it's Duquesne or Villanova, Rutgers or John Carroll, or any institution, how we're achieving that now is shifting. It's different. But it's a beautiful question. How do we maintain that what, how do we do this with excellence? How do we create, I said to a group of students this summer, I taught my first fully online class and I said, I want this to be the best class you ever take. That's my goal. Now, I know, I won't hit that with all of you. But I want you to know, that's my objective. And because that's where my thinking had to be to try and provide a learning experience that was different and new. And I experimented. And I learned and they provided me with feedback. And I got a lot of really, really good feedback from the students about what energizes them What didn't energize them. But
Ralph Gigliotti 24:39
what was your approach to that Scott different than how you would teach it in past semesters?
Scott Allen 24:45
It was very different. It was very different. It was a different orientation to time. How, you know, I'm not know necessarily if it's an evening course, it's not two and a half hours of me, of me, talking, or it never really was that But even if it is me talking, it might not it might be in face to face me talking a little bit, they go into discussion, we talk a little bit, we watch a video me talking a little bit, we do an activity. So there was always this kind of, from a design perspective, again, yes, time moved by quickly for the learner. But we also got to some cool content. I haven't totally figured out that recipe online yet. So what I've done is I might add in a podcast, I might add in a smaller group meeting that's a little bit shorter, but very, very focused of 45 minutes, at least, that's what I'm experimenting with. And then again, the students are giving feedback, and they are letting me know. So each week, they can have a module that you know, stuff to read stuff to watch, maybe listen to discuss, reflect on, then we do some one on one meetings with them, where I'm getting to know the students better than I ever knew many of my students face to face. Fascinating. So even if you treat the classroom as sort of a laboratory for leadership learning, you guys, you and the students are co-constructing this learning experience together. And I think that translates so nicely to just leadership across sectors, right?
Ralph Gigliotti 26:12
What are the ways in which leaders and followers more broadly conceived? Are co-constructing these situations to create meaningful opportunities for engagement, such as a classroom setting?
Scott Allen 26:23
Yeah. And then I'm asking for feedback left and right now, am I always getting that feedback? No, not necessarily. But you know, I have a midterm questionnaire that's like, Hey, how are things gone? What do you think? What do you like? What do you dislike? And of course, I say, I might not be able to make all the changes you hope to see. But I'm looking for the themes. And I want this to be an incredible experience for you. So help me, you're exactly right, co-create what this looks like, I want it to be challenging. It's going to be work. But I want you to finish this and say that was hard work. But I learned a ton in the process. And that's the goal. Right? So Scott,
Ralph Gigliotti 27:02
that well, let so let me try to translate some of what you just shared there to what we're doing in our center right now. Because we're having conversations in our Center for organizational leadership, with academic units across Rutgers, who are facing similar questions. We know what our y is, we know why our in our organization exists. But our How is going to need to be transformed, given this moment that we find ourselves in. Yeah. So what are some of the new strategic priorities that we need to focus on? And what are the action plans that we need to develop that can help us to get there? Right? So we're facilitating conversations across the university that are very purposeful, but so much of what you just said, is so appropriate to what we're dealing with one having a learning orientation through all of this. Yeah, figure out what's working and what's not working.
Scott Allen 27:56
Yeah. To write quickly. Yeah, quickly as possible. So yeah, I felt like the recipe was somewhat in, in place, face to face. And I kind of view the curriculum as a recipe in some ways. And some semesters, it has, it's been some White Castle, semesters, it's, you know, been a four star experience. But, you know, face to face, I thought I kind of had the recipe in place. And so now I'm trying to relearn that recipe, online and in the digital space, and what's too much, what's not enough, what's enough face to face time, what's not enough face to face time, especially when the students are used to and value at least at our institution, you know, we rarely have a class larger than 30. So you, you do get to know the students build relationships? So, yeah, it's, it's, it's a fascinating time for all of that. It really is, what are you hearing? What are you hearing from some of the conversations that you're having?
Ralph Gigliotti 28:59
Um, but they're similar to some of the thoughts that you were sharing their engagement is, is challenging, but critical. Yeah. Um, and, and engagement will look different depending on the scope of the class, or the scope of the leadership endeavor that people find themselves in, um, lots of questions around sort of culture and the spirit of the department. So for individuals who have been leading teams across the university or teaching classes, there's a spirit that we intend to cultivate, right. And we've been for some of us working on this for years. And we're proud of that. How do you sustain that? When the circumstances are so challenging, such as which we're dealing with now? Another theme is alignment. How do we move forward in new interesting directions with our curriculum, with our programs, with our services, with our work that we do at our institution? ways that align with some bigger strategic vision. Yep. And trying to make that alignment clear, especially when that future is so uncertain. Yeah, that's a challenging endeavor for so many. Yep. And I guess the last one I'd share is great appreciation for the work that we do in leadership, education, and leadership development. We run a lot of different programs, I have an amazing team that I work within the center. And we're working on programs for mid-career faculty and staff, doctoral students who are looking to enhance their leadership development, medical students with similar goals, and faculty administrators from across our health system. Those are just some of the audiences that we engage with. And we were really worried about what in March and April and over the summer like we are going to have to have these programs online, will they still be meaningful? Yeah, will there still be an interest? I mean, these are really busy people in normal circumstances. And the response has been incredible, perfect attendance, outstanding engagement, lots of enthusiasm to build networks across the university, and build communities of practice that are engaged in similar sorts of questions and areas of exploration, and just appreciation, Scott, to take their minds off of the challenges of their normal nine to five or nine to nine or nine to 12 kinds of roles, right. But like to take time to focus on their own development is, it's an unusual time to be doing that when we're in such disarray, but also such a beautiful time to be asking questions.
Scott Allen 31:41
Yeah. Well, my mind keeps going to because my mind doesn't always go here. My mind can go to the struggle, the challenge that we've lost. And, but I'm continually kind of going to Well, what's the opportunity in all of this? What, what is the, what's the upside. So for instance, tonight, we have the Global Head of innovation from KPMG, speaking at John Carroll, and this is a gentleman, he's in Texas, a year ago, I never would have even thought it wouldn't even have occurred in my head that we would, you know, fly him up for an evening to talk for an hour to our students. And it wouldn't have occurred to me to do that by zoom. But in the space where And now, we have, we have him for an hour this evening. And this is a person in a very, very important role. There's a totally new opportunity there that's been opened for our students to hear from someone. The Global Head of innovation for KPMG, one of the big four incredible learning opportunities, it's tremendous. So I think I think part of this is us. There's a concept called conceptual blocks, they're rules that we have in our head about how things are, and their cognitive biases and challenges that we have to overcome. But moving past those conceptual blocks, letting go of how things were, and reimagining to your to, I think some of the words you're using, reimagining what the future can look like. Because there are some upsides to some of this. There really are, right? I,
Ralph Gigliotti 33:20
I am good. I completely agree, Scott, I am typically a really positive person. So when I was writing on the crisis, people would sometimes look at me funny, like, why are you positive guys studying crisis? And I ended the crisis leadership book with a word, of optimism that yes, it seems like higher ed is under siege. And there are lots of challenges that are threatening our very existence. But look at all the good, we're still held as sort of standards for global higher education, right, there's so much to be proud of. Um, and that was before the pandemic, right. And I think even now, there's a great deal to be proud of. And this is a moment of awakening to really explore what matters to us to create opportunities for learning, such as the one you're creating for your students that may not have been possible in years past. Well, thought of it right. I
Scott Allen 34:17
wouldn't, I wouldn't even have thought of it.
Ralph Gigliotti 34:19
Yeah. And I think and also, I've worked with a lot of different associations who are translating their conferences, to virtual opportunities, and huge financial challenges, of course, but enrollment at some of these virtual conferences is skyrocketing, because it just becomes a lot easier to engage with then traveling across the country or globe to be there. Yeah, um, it's not to diminish the material and the emotional and the human impact that these crises have had. Right. Those are real and important to acknowledge. And there are lots of issues regarding sort of access to higher education and the disproportionate impact this is having across our society and it's important to honor That. But I do think if we are mindful of that disproportionate impact, and if we are thinking creatively and going back to the mindset, Scott, you know, with an eye towards innovation, and an eye towards learning, and an eye towards transformation, we can all learn together through this, we can heal together through this, and we can come out of this stronger than we may have been and more unified than we may have been going into this.
Scott Allen 35:27
Yeah. And that's such an incredible phrasing you just used to learn together through this. I love that. I love that. Because, you know, in many ways, that's what we need to do. Another quote from Tony's podcast that has resonated with my students, because they listen to some of the podcasts is, I don't know better, I know different. Yes. And so if that if you kind of buy into that, then learning together through this process is probably the best path, right? Because they have incredible perspective value. And they're an important part of this equation, their experience if we go back to that user-centered design kind of notion, but learning together through this, I love that I love.
Ralph Gigliotti 36:19
And you would think that in institutions of higher education, that we would all share this commitment to learning together. And I think it will be in this is a challenge and a reality, to try to build support and rapport across our institutions. And to learn together, hopefully, will be a shared value. Yeah. So we get through this. And enough, you know, that saying, I gotta tell you, Scott, one of the things that have been really interesting for me and listening to the conversations you've had, I have a son, and two daughters, two daughters, and you have two daughters, right? Yeah. And my youngest was born. So first off, the conversations you've had with folks around gender and sort of leadership have been fascinating. And I have so much like you to learn on this topic. Oh, yeah. Especially in raising two young girls. Um, but what's been really interesting is my daughter, my youngest was born on March 19. Okay, so it's been a crazy six months, right? Yeah. And to think about what a moment for her to be born into this sort of chaos. But to go back to the upside of it all, to be home with her and to grow every day, in ways that I may have missed if I was driving, you know, an hour each way on a regular basis. So I Oh, when you said born March Norgay, like literally newborn hearing in the hospital as they were setting up the COVID test, drive-thru test site outside of the hospital, watching the news of that was the day that the stock market just completely collapsed. When I think the reality of this was, was becoming more clear, and it was scary, and it continues to be scary. But lots of blessings in the midst of this. Yep,
Scott Allen 38:11
yep. No, you're exactly right. You're exactly right. It's, it's we're making where it's, it's a very complex time. It's a very complex time. And I've been learning a lot as I've been having these conversations, because, as you mentioned, there's a lot of different areas in this topic to have the leadership to kind of be aware of, or have a command of, but I have so much respect for what you're doing. Because that's another super important piece of this whole conversation. I love the notion of, are we prepared? Does it make all the sense in the world? It's something I'd never thought of. Do we have the team in place that people know their roles? And what are we going to do when it happens? Right? When it happens, not if but when? And hopefully, it doesn't, but there's a possibility. And then when it happens? Are we really clear on what we value who we are, what we stand for? And, and are we behaving in a way that's consistent with that?
Ralph Gigliotti 39:17
And then on the post on the post-crisis side, and I don't we're not quite there yet. What did we learn from this? And how will it inform how we approach future challenges? I mean, maybe not, hopefully, another pandemic, but another set of challenges that our institutions will have to wrestle with?
Scott Allen 39:34
Yep. Yep. I love it. I love it. Okay. Hey, real quick. lightning round. lightning round. I'm right. Yes. Yeah. It's an important part of the podcast. What do you watching? What are you streaming? What are you listening to what's standing out for you right now that's keeping you going. It could just be something for fun. It could be something where you're doing some great learning in the process, or it could be both Yeah.
Ralph Gigliotti 40:00
So of course Phronesis and the Leadership Educator Podcast are two highlights of my morning runs. But I think I am trying to watch more television and trying to get away from some of the news for a moment. So lots of Netflix, my wife and I just finished The Politician, which was an amazing series with Ben Platt. (Scott, I haven't heard of it). It's good. It was really good. I really enjoyed it. Um, and, and some reading on the side. I just finished Contrarian Leadership, which was published in 2000. And it was fascinating, really interesting.
Scott Allen 40:38
Really, okay, contrarian leadership. I haven't heard of it
Ralph Gigliotti 40:40
.A Steven Sample he was though, yes.
Scott Allen 40:44
The president at USC. Okay, interesting. Very cool. Yeah. He was there with Warren Bennis, probably yes. Probably mentioned Warren Bennis in the book I met. Yes, yes. Oh, that's great. Cool. Hey, I am so excited to have future conversations with you. And like last year when we are at IRA together, now we will know to bump into each other. And I just appreciate the work that you're doing. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks. So
Ralph Gigliotti 41:09
looking forward to it. Yeah. Thank you, Scott. And good luck to all the listeners out there because this work was important before all these challenges. And my goodness, it this punctuates it and it's going to be even more important moving forward.
Scott Allen 41:22
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Ralph Gigliotti 41:23
Thank you, Scott. Great, great connecting with you.
Scott Allen 41:26
Yep. Take care.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai