Jennifer Askey on Coaching and Leadership in Higher Ed

On this episode, I have a conversation with Dr. Jennifer Askey, former tenured faculty member and now higher education  coach and consultant, about coaching, leadership, and coaching skills for leadership in higher ed.

Transcript

Rebecca Pope-Ruark (RPR): On this episode, I have a conversation with Dr. Jennifer Askey, former tenured faculty member and now higher education coach and consultant, about coaching, leadership, and coaching skills for leadership in higher ed.

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, Jennifer, welcome to the show. 

Jennifer Askey (JA): Hi, Rebecca. Thank you so much for having me here today. I've been looking forward to this. 

RPR: Awesome. So just tell the audience a little bit about you to introduce yourself. 

JA: So my name is Jennifer Askey and I am an executive coach and organizational consultant for higher education leaders. I live in Edmonton, Alberta, the northern most city in North America with a million residents. I feel duty bound to say that. And yeah, I have a small coaching business myself and some partners I work with, and we work with individuals and schools, faculties, teams in higher ed to make the academy a better place to work. I say that tentatively because that sounds a bit grandiose, but that is the goal. 

RPR: Absolutely, and that's a goal that we share. And there's a puppy, y'all can't see the puppy, but there is 

JA: A puppy. There is a puppy who strangely has discovered a taste for coffee and really wants to get in on the coffee story here, which I find both odd and gross. 

RPR: Awesome. Well, she's welcome to join us at any point of the conversation. So I always like to start with the question, what defines your purpose in or around higher education? 

JA: That of course, coming from a coach is a great question and I feel like I should have this really snappy answer, but purpose is kind of a deep thing, and so the answer is a little bit less snappy, but very authentic. I think that what I'm aiming to do as a coach and facilitator and consultant is to help people who are incredibly brilliant and subject matter experts and driven and ambitious people connect with themselves and their values and their humanity so that they can connect with their people, whether their people are students in a classroom or peers at a university or disciplinary scholars. We all need to connect in order to lead and connection is challenging if you are not tapped in to who you are and why you're doing this. And so that's my primary aim in the work that I do. 

RPR: And we've talked before, connection is one of my four pillars of burnout, resilience as well. So I talk a lot in workshops about connecting to other people, but also connecting to yourself and that level of self-awareness, connecting to nature, connecting to your higher power, whatever it is that fills you up and brings you peace and joy. 

JA: I think that, and I think when you and I spoke on my podcast, we went into this a little bit that in order to be on the side for other people, in order to be a coach and a facilitator and all those things, you need to take pretty exquisite care of yourself and keep that connection. And so walks in the ravine with my dog and meditation and little dance breaks and other things that just keep me connected to me and to my place in the world are really important. And if I do those things, then I am better able to be present for others and maybe we create a ripple effect there. 

RPR: Absolutely. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about how you got into coaching in the higher ed space specifically. 

JA: Sure. So in my first career I was a professor of German literature, language, and culture. I had gotten tenure, but my husband and I were part of sort of the classic two body problem in academia where we had spent, oh gosh, a very, very, very long time trying to find a place where we both felt relief fulfilled at work in a place where we wanted to live. And that was just hard and as luck and such would have it being a library administer pays more than being a German professor. And so about 15 years ago, we moved to Canada to follow his career path and he's been successful and happy. And I got a crash course in Canadian higher ed. I worked as special assistant to dean here and visiting professor there. And I did all sorts of things in Southern Ontario and higher ed. And then I realized that I was kind of putting together gigs and I didn't feel like I had a career. And somewhere in the midst of a dark night of the soul, somebody I knew socially who happened to be an executive coach said, you need me. And I said, that's cute, I can't afford you. And she said, no, seriously, you need me. 

So I worked with her for a while and then I worked with another coach at the university I was still employed at. And both of these people at one point in time told me, you might want to look into coaching. It seems to really fit with your skills, it fits with your values, it fits with what you want out of work, you should look into it. And so I dove into coach training and in the very first intensive face-to-face weekend, we did a values exercise with one another. And I probably cried, I don't remember. But what happened was this enormous light went off and I thought, how am I this far along into my adult life and my career and nobody who has mentored me or offered me guidance has ever asked me what I care about. 

And having the space to articulate why I did what I did and what was important to me and what made me feel valued and all of those things. But man, if this had been part of my academic life, how might things have been different? How might my relationship to my writing and my scholarship have been different? How might my relationship to my service obligations at the university been different? And so after that first weekend I came home and I was like, that's it. I'm going to be a coach. I'm going to coach academics because we need it. 

RPR: Yeah. We're often not given that space to think about ourselves. It's a weird catch 22, isn't it? Because we're always thinking about ourselves. We're always thinking about our research and getting the funding and our classes, but we don't think about ourselves very often. 

JA: There's a lot of checking whether you're pre-tenure and trying to check all the boxes and jump through all the hoops to get tenure or, and then you're juggling a bunch of different things that are internal and external commitments and the research continues and maybe you have to sort of retool because you want something new. And so there's a lot of performing and performing the role of experts and not ever being vulnerable, not ever saying, I don't know. All of these things are very much part of the, or at least we're very much part of my mental space as a faculty member. And so having an opportunity to sit down with a trusted person or in the case of coach training with a group of people who were all going through this same process and saying, oh wow, I really value autonomy. I also value these other things, and how do I get to live those in my current role? I'm thinking back to how was I living those as faculty? It took a while for the penny to drop and maybe other people get better mentorship early on in their career than I did. My sense is maybe not, but I mean, I was surrounded by lovely people, but I don't know, maybe we all just looked like little ducks on the pond floating along and underneath were scrambling like crazy, surely how I felt. 

RPR: Yeah, and we don't ever talk. I mean, we have certain people that we will maybe share that we're not feeling great or that something's kind of off, but we don't really get into the depth of that. There's a shame attached to not being able to hack it 

JA: And being vulnerable is the hugest possible emotional risk. If you expose, I am not fully in command all the time, then have you scuttled your chances at X, Y, Z? Have you exposed yourself to people who maybe don't have your best interests at heart? So it feels like there are a lot of risks associated with being vulnerable in any way, and that's just being vulnerable with your colleagues. We haven't even gotten to reaching out and asking for help. That's a whole other level of vulnerability. 

RPR: Absolutely. And I think there are a lot more coaches, well, there's a lot more coaches in the world in general right now. So there's a boom in training and people calling themselves coaches and there are certification programs and there are, we're both ICF certified. So we have that ethical framework that even though it's not regulated yet, there's a framework for what we do and a pathway. 

JA: And we opted into pretty rigorous training. And 

RPR: I think that academics like that, I think they like to know that you've been well-trained and you're not just hanging out a shingle thing, calling yourself a coach. 

JA: And my first coach training, it just called it itself coaching. It didn't say life coaching. It didn't say health coaching, it didn't say executive coaching, it just said coaching. And I was like, well, but it's all the same thing. And that remains my conviction, your health, your life, your career, your presence. They're all very much interconnected and you can't just carve out this one little thing and we're going to coach your book, you and your book, we're going to coach that and it's going to be awesome, or you and your role as dean. We're going to coach that and it's going to be awesome to imply that we could just carve out that little bit of a person and that's the only thing we're going to pay attention to. But yeah, when you're talking about it, it's like because I was a faculty member, because I worked in university administration because I worked at seven institutions in two countries. I get it at a really profound level. I get it. 

RPR: What are you seeing as some of the big issues that faculty and leaders are bringing to the coaching table these days? 

JA: Speed. I feel, so I live in Canada and some of my clients are in Canada. Some of my clients are in the United States, both when it comes to individuals and institutions. And so the Canadian context is a little bit different. I live in Alberta, which is trying, its hardest to be the Texas of Canada. Thank you very much. So the speed at which changes are happening is a speed at which I don't think humans are meant to function. So whether it's policy changes, budget changes, technological changes with ai, climate changes, all of these things are happening really fast and clustered and coming right at you. And when I talk to people, it's like, well, where can I make a difference? Where should my attention be? If I'm an individual faculty member and I'm just focused on my own stuff, my grants and my writing, is that enough? 

Am I doing enough? Does it matter? And if I'm a leader, how do I keep my people together and functioning and teaching students and producing research against the backdrop of what might be collapse? And so I would love to have a magic wand. I would love to be able to pass them out to other people as well. And we don't have those. And so there's a lot of emotional regulation, prioritization, focusing and sort of getting in a line in alignment with yourself so that the decisions you are making are decisions that you feel good with and decisions that you can follow through on and support and not making your activity feel like it is happening at that same frenetic pace that the general change around you is taking place. 

RPR: Tell us a little bit about the leadership aspects or the aspects of coaching leaders and how that's maybe different than working just specifically with faculty. 

JA: Yeah. So when our second move within Canada, we moved out here to Edmonton and I took a role in the local huge university, top three in Canada, developing leadership development programs in-house for chairs, deans, vice provosts, things like that. And so it was an interesting role because I worked in the office of the deputy provost and then I worked in HR and I worked with all of these faculty leaders. And so I got to see like, oh, this is how HR talks about leadership and this is what the provost office wants, and this is what faculty are asking for or what faculty don't understand. And one of the reasons I really enjoy working for myself independently is that I can take what I have learned and offer something that says, okay, yeah, you need to know how to use banner or Tableau or PeopleSoft or whatever the thing is that you might get training on when you become a chair. That is not leadership. Allow me to repeat that really loudly. And with pompoms, that's not leadership. 

That is management, scheduling, classes, management, A lot of things that might be offered internally have to do with managing the systems that keep the university running. And my bigger question in working with deans and vice provosts and chairs is how do you become the person who can do those things? Yes. But also in the job description of chair at the university I worked at, it said something about creating a positive environment for teaching and research to flourish. So if that's your job, whether you're a chair or a dean or a provost, creating a positive environment for teaching and research to flourish, how do you become that person? It's not through navigating technical systems 

Or being really up on the data. Those things are supports, and you might really need them from time to time, but it's the human and the values thing and the managing your own energy and your own worries, not picking up everybody else's, not radiating your bad juju out to everybody else. There's a lot of self-management and other management and emotional intelligence involved in leadership that universities really shy away from offering, especially on the academic side of the house. I've seen some pretty great HR staff side of house leadership training, and then you come over to the academic side and it's like, poof, you're all smart. You'll figure it out. And I just don't think that's the case. 

RPR: Well, there's also that thing that faculty often don't think of themselves as employees, so they wouldn't seek out the training in HR, right? Precisely. They see it as separate from 

JA: Staff. And I had interesting conversations with the leadership in OD and in learning and development in HR when they were like, why aren't the faculty here? I'm like, well, they don't see you as an authority, which sounds rude, but when it comes to things like job description and performance, recognition of performance and promotion and annual review and all of that, HR has nothing to do with faculty. So it kind of makes sense that they don't think you know what they do, and often you don't know what they do because you don't understand that they have entirely different reward structures, entirely different promotion structures, staff person. 

RPR: Yeah, it's an easy distinction to make. Unfortunate though it is. We are missing out on a lot of great stuff that's happening in HR areas and leadership. 

JA: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

RPR: Yeah. So picking up the thread on leaders and coaching, you and I talked a little bit before we got on here and that you've been working with some institutions to help develop coaching skills for academic leaders. Talk to us a little bit about that. 

JA: Yeah, this is work. I enjoy a great deal because it's kind of a format that both I and the faculty members in the room, it's like this little active workshop seminar thing. They get to learn something and practice something. And I get the energy of being in a room with people that I miss from the classroom. So with at least two institutions that I've worked with recently, they are developing peer coaching programs for faculty. And so peer coaching is different than what you and I do as credentialed ICF coaches. But it takes sort of the basic principles of we ask and don't tell. We don't offer unsolicited advice. We try to listen really closely and curiously, in order to ask a question or three that might provoke insight for the other person. And we're there to be the sounding board around what does your inner wisdom know if you can slow down enough to access that. 

So those principles inform peer coaching. And so working with groups of faculty who are signing on to be peer coaches, I've done a couple kickoffs, a couple trainings, sort of depends on what the university needs of me, but it's giving them practice in not blurting out the first thing that comes to mind. And it's so hard. You are the answer person. That is why you have the job you have because you know the things and so practicing when somebody comes to you via email in your office door randomly on the quad and says, Hey, what do you think about X? Or, Hey, I ran into this thing. What do you know people offer us problems to solve all the time you inbox is probably 80% other people's problems that you have been offered to solve. Like, oh, look, maybe Rebecca can fix this for me. 

And the more we do that as individuals take on those things that come to us via doorways and emails and say, oh, sure, I'll fix that because I'm the one who knows, or, oh, they're relying on me. Or if I don't do it, nobody will. Where does that lead us? This is your area of specialty. This leads us burnout to total burnout. Let me fix, fix, fix, fix, fix, fix, fix, fix, fix. And so coaching skills is one way to get a door open and their toe into what if You don't have to know the answer. And what if it is even more valuable to your colleagues if you don't? 

And so I teach a couple principles of what we call ontological coaching. So are you paying attention to the words, the emotions, the body language of the other person? It's their whole way of being. How are you listening? Are you listening for the content? Are you listening for the mood? Are you listening for the things that are unsaid? How do you establish safety in conversations? Because we're talking about conversations that rely upon and also continue to build trust. And so all of those things come up. And I find uniformly that people are very energized by a training like that because they're like, oh, first of all, this is hard. I recognize this is a skill I could polish. And second of all, maybe it's a bit of a relief to say, oh, the next time somebody just knocks on my door and says, Hey, I have a thing I need you to fix. You can approach it in a more creative and collaborative way rather than internally groaning and saying, okay, fine. We'll do this too. 

RPR: Yeah. How powerful is that to be able to separate that a little bit for yourself and to not always have to be the answer person, but still, and it's not in a shirking way by any of the imagination. You're developing people and you're developing a relationship with the people. 

JA: And the second time I went to the University of Oregon to do this, they expanded the people who were entering the peer coaching program. So they'd been doing it with faculty, and then they were bringing on a whole bunch of staff in finance and HR to also learn basic peer coaching principles. And so there we really talked about leading teams and how coaching can help, whether you're doing a standup meeting or a performance review meeting, all of these things, just shifting your mindset a little bit as the coach, as the peer coach helps take a little bit of that weight off your shoulders 

RPR: And just that little bit of extra weight off your shoulders. And that kind of role can be really important, especially at a chair level. It really is kind of the hardest job because you're so stuck in the middle with some power, but not a lot of power, but some influence, but not a lot of influence, 

JA: A lot of responsibility, not a great deal of authority and people squishing you. I also tell people that I think it's the hardest job in academia, so I'm glad. It's interesting to see that you agree from your position too. It's like, oh yeah, this is a hard gig. 

RPR: Yeah, the listeners know, and I just did a big project on women leaders and burnout in higher ed, and a lot of the chairs I talked to, you get it from all sides. So how do you take care of yourself in those spaces and be able to be responsive to the things that you do need to solve, but also to be able to say, that is not part of what I need to do. Let's talk about how you can do that and you can take ownership of 

JA: That. And the desire is just to say, not my circus, not my monkeys, but which might be a great first step, but is there also a way with some peer coaching help people see, I'm on your side, I'm on your team. What are your internal resources to solve this? Or maybe even simply, I have some ideas about that, but before I list them for you, I'd love to hear what you're thinking. 

RPR: And 

JA: Maybe they have solved the problem on their own and they need somebody to listen to them and say, that was actually a great idea, carry on. And that your energy gets managed radically differently in that conversation than, oh, you have that problem. Let me go back to the last time I encountered this. And so how to fix it. 

RPR: And it is hard because in some ways there, there's a little bit of energy in being the answer person. There's some identity issues with being the answer person as well. Absolutely. So thinking about that role differently in a way that also protects you as a person and as a whole person, I think is game changer. Yeah. 

JA: Yeah. And the identity around being the answer person or the subject matter expert. I was writing up sort of a one pager for somebody today, and I was trying to find really good language to talk about leadership beyond management and beyond subject matter expertise because so many, especially dean, vice provost, provost, those roles, you might wind up there because an amazing researcher chair too, right? Like, oh, this person is a full professor, amazing researcher, and then your identity is amazing researcher. How does that map onto, I lead a portfolio of people who have students and research agendas and service obligations, and I'm not the boss boss. This is academia, and nobody thinks they have one of those if they're a faculty member, but I am in a leadership role. I have some accountabilities, I have some management duties and promotion and tenure, and all of those things land on your desk. And so that transition from being the answer person and the subject matter expert who is in control of your research portfolio that isn't going to necessarily serve you when you're in control of department or a school or a college, 

RPR: And we certainly don't give them any training to think about how do you take the skills that you've learned as an effective teacher and researcher to move into a leadership role. We just kind of throw people over a Wall

JA: You're smart. You'll figure it out, right? Yeah, you'll figure it out. You're smart. People like you, you'll figure it Out. That's not a recipe for leadership. It's just not. 

RPR: Yeah. I mean, if people who, I think one of the misconceptions that a lot of faculty have is that suddenly someone goes into, suddenly someone goes into a leadership role that they have completely changed. They are now the enemy that they don't care anymore, or they care about only bottom line things. And I think that it's not true that transition different things in those roles when you're a leader, so you have a different picture than the faculty do. But so here you are an excellent researcher who is now a department chair who has had no training and things that you didn't know before. And of course it's going to shift a little bit of your perspective and how you approach some of the problems that the faculty would like you to approach. It's just this big misconception that suddenly that person doesn't care or they only care about the institution's bottom line as opposed to the students and the staff and the faculty, the way they used to care. 

JA: And that role of chair, if we're going to stay there for a second, not only is it super challenging, it's super important because this year I've done a lot of survey analysis work with modern Think they do, the Great Colleges to Workforce survey and insert that comes out, I think in the fall issue of the Chronicle 

And their survey instrument is, I think it's Likert scale or bubbles or whatever, but there are usually open comments. And so I've been doing a bunch of data analysis in these open comments. And so across half a dozen institutions, it's really interesting to see how people, faculty, and staff relate to and talk about their department chair or their immediate supervisor versus dean, vice provost, vice president, and on up. And the tenor in a department, whether it's a staff department or an academic department, kind of makes or breaks people's enthusiasm around work and around coming to work. And so when the chair moves from being a professor to being a chair gets brought into different meetings, gets to see different things, has to manage their own awareness and other people's awareness around all this stuff, the stakes are kind of high. You and I both know what happens when departments go toxic. It hurts the students, it hurts the faculty members, it hurts the staff. And so a really good chair can do amazing things for engagement and morale and productivity. 

RPR: And we know from research that your direct supervisor, so for most academics, that's going to be your chair, makes a massive difference in retention and intention to stay and feeling like you belong at a place as well. 

JA: And I mean, we know the research, and now I've just seen thousands and thousands and thousands of comments that map onto it perfectly. Here's the tone, here are the words. Here's the sentiment around direct supervisor and department chair, and here's all of that around people further up the org chart. And it shifts dramatically. And if it starts out bad, it only gets worse. And if it starts out good, then if they don't feel quite as connected to senior leadership, that might not be as big of a problem as if faculty and staff see that disconnection at multiple levels. And then they're like, well, I'm just collecting a paycheck. 

RPR: Yeah. Yeah. What's one coaching skill that you would recommend Department chairs who might be listening to the show? What's one skill you would like to see them pick up that might help with some of this challenge? 

JA: Ask. Don't tell a question. For example, what does it mean for you to get that result? Or why is this important to you or what's really at stake for you here? Right? Not, yes, no questions, but ask questions. Don't assume because you have worked alongside this person for the last decade, what's going on? 

RPR: Yeah. Think that the framing of those questions is so important too, right? The tone matters. You can ask a perfectly benign question in a tone that doesn't help the situation at all. Right? Why would you think that? Yeah. Yeah. So staying in that framework of what questions and the use space, talking about the who instead of the what, and really kind getting to understand what's at stake here for you can be really important information for a chair to take 

JA: In the coaching skills for leaders. When we talk about powerful questions and then they go do some practice, I'm like, you have a couple rules. You can't ask yes, no questions, and you can't start with why. And after 10 minutes, they're like, but those are the only questions I know. I'm like, no, lots of questions. It's just the first ones that come out of our mouths are closed questions that just want to yes or no, or why questions that even if unintentionally put people on the defensive. 

RPR: Yeah. So starting to wrap up our conversation a little bit, what about working in the higher ed space brings you the most joy? 

JA: I think that at most institutions I've either worked at or come into contact with, whether it's the executive assistant or the student, the grad student, the faculty member, the administrator, they're all, for some reason or another, opting into working in that environment. Most people choose like, oh, I want to work at a university. I want to work at a college. And that means there's so much potential for goodwill and good work. And I mean, I think universities and colleges should be the single best places to work on the planet. And I think the potential is there, the research about what makes good workplaces, is there people who have opted in? Are there systems that generally provide a decent wage and benefits are there, we have all the ingredients, and so let's just massage a little bit how we interact with those ingredients to create workplaces where we all feel really good showing up. 

RPR: And then the last question that I always wrap up with is, what's one thing you wish all women associated with higher education knew or practiced? 

JA: It isn't your job to fix it. Yeah. You might see all the problems and it's not your job to fix 'em. Maybe you get to fix one. Maybe you get to collaborate on fixing one or two, not your job to fix it. 

RPR: On that note, thank you so much for chatting with me today, Jennifer. It's always good to talk to you. 

JA: My absolute pleasure, Rebecca. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and weekend. 

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 at theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care and stay well.