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: I've been catching up on @BreneBrown's Daring to Lead podcast and her series on armored vs. daring leadership has been mind-blowing. It reflected my own experiences in academia. The 1st part was about our own armor, which is reminiscent of my @TEDxWVU talk. 1/
: I've been catching up on @BreneBrown's Daring to Lead podcast and her series on armored vs. daring leadership has been mind-blowing. It reflected my own experiences in academia. The 1st part was about our own armor, which is reminiscent of my @TEDxWVU talk. 1/
My own experience of putting on armor to protect myself from the criticism of others shaped my life for way too long. It was only when I started living authentically that I felt free. 2/
"Rather than protecting and hiding our heart ...it’s integrating our thinking, our feeling & our behavior, it’s putting down the armor and bringing forth all of the scraggly, misshapen pieces of our lives, our history, all the different roles we play." 3/ https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-on-armored-versus-daring-leadership-part-1-of-2/
But, whoa, the second part of this: Brene talked about shame in teams, esp at work. It's funny how academic departments don't use the imagery of a team. We've all been hired to be the expert in X, but many of us don't exist in a dept where we are working toward a common goal. 4/
She talks about how shame can take form in orgs. Favoritism, making others "feel smaller, diminished, less than, put down." We see this widely in academia, as well as in journal reviews. Heck, we see it here on the bird site. Favoritism and bullying sucks. 5/
"Any kind of management tool where we're tying people's self-worth to their productivity, you are as good as what you produce." Oh, Brene, you're totally talking to us, right? We bring people down by calling their scholarship "niche" or "not mainstream." There is room for it. 6/
But she also talks about how orgs use a scarcity-driven culture as motivation. How much and what kind of work do you get done when you're stressed out of your mind? Worried about losing your job? This is what we've seen in academia throughout the past 13 months. 7/
"1 of the key indicators we see in scarcity-based cultures is we don't acknowledge good work & small successes bc we fear some people might become complacent & slow down, so never take your foot off the gas... bc if you do, people are going to stop working hard." 8/
"When teams + leaders regularly practice gratitude, celebrate milestones + wins, people normally redouble their efforts... it refuels folks. And when people are afraid to do that, that's bc normally the culture is very scarcity-driven." 9/ https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-on-armored-versus-daring-leadership-part-2-of-2/
We can do so much better than what we're doing right now in academia. Exhaustion is not something to be proud of, and burnout is a reflection of how wrong things are in an org/institution. There are simple things we could do to make folks feel part of a team. 10/
But academia has beaten this out of us. From grad school on, we've adopted the break people down to rebuild them type of motivation, and the research shows this doesn't work even without the context of a global pandemic. 11/
It doesn't work w/ students or in reviewing academics within a university structure or discipline. We can do better. We can learn what leadership inspires rather than hurts people. It wouldn't be hard to make academia inclusive, if we can shift our collective mindset. /end
