As instructors and professors finalize their syllabi for the upcoming semester, we had an opportunity to speak with one whose expertise reaches into organizational management and transformation about the College of Veterinary Medicine.
It took a bit of negotiation before our interviewee agreed to speak with us, as they had concerns about being fully open with their views on a topic within academia, where they also work. In the interest of transparency, these are the agreed-to ground rules: 1. The conversation must be printed in its entirety, no amendments or editorializing; 2. We cannot use the person’s name or title, and so we will refer to them as “Dr. Smith.”
Here is the conversation in its entirety, transcribed using software, with all names, titles and personally identifying information removed.
CVM Independent: Thanks for sitting down with me. All it took was some good coffee to get you away from the computer!
Dr. Smith: Coffee by the gallon, yeah. Count me in every time. Just, yeah, if there’s ever no coffee, not worth it, right?
CVM Independent: Keep the coffee coming, got it.
Dr. Smith: Cool. You’ve got me till the coffee runs out.
CVM Independent: Well let’s dive right in. I guess first thing, how did you become aware of what OSU’s veterinary college is going through? That’s not exactly in your wheelhouse, right?
Dr. Smith: I mean, I live and breathe the study of organizations. Why are some successful, and others just disasters? Why do good organizations end up failing? How do failing organizations end up succeeding? So I wouldn’t say that the vet school is not in my wheelhouse, I mean look at the place.
CVM Independent: Ouch, ok that’s harsh. Well ok. Ok, so where do we begin? I guess, I’m curious, can you tell me what you have heard? Are you studying CVM for a paper or something? How far down that rabbit hole have you already gone?
Dr. Smith: No, no, no. I guess we should be really clear on this, no I am not studying their vet college, not in any formal way. That’s not the kind of thing we do in quote-unquote academia, don’t do that kind of thing to each other. Which I get it, but I also hate it because we are so bad, by we I mean academia, we are so bad at managing things. All the case studies and papers always focus on the for-profits and nonprofits, government agencies and that kind of thing. It’s always ironic to me and not in a good way that I exist on a campus, walking to work every day across places that are terribly inefficient and reactionary, but the fastest way to get booted from the quote-unquote club is to research it. Nobody talks about Fight Club, right? So I am…
CVM Independent: But you obviously know some things about VetMed, just sounds like not a 100 footnote paper’s worth. I mean, what interested you in talking to us?
Dr. Smith: Coffee. No, no in all seriousness, back on my campus there is for some reason a contingent of OSU vet college grads and former faculty. We met through, I guess it was from some campus event, and we got to talking about what I do and, man, it was like opening the floodgates. These guys were going on and on, they’re doctors, right? So they have such a detailed memory, and story after story, all of them described dysfunction. Multiple chains of command, nothing gets done, people quitting left and right. I forget the number of people they said left last year but it was insane. And the weird part is they said nobody is doing anything about it. And that’s what interests me, just purely in an academic sense, of ‘what is this organization’s strategy?’ So for, I guess, about a year, maybe less, I’ve been talking to them about OSU and have become more and more curious about what’s happening there. The vet college sounds like you could teach an entire syllabus on how NOT to run an organization, so naturally, you know, I want to dive in and write a case study. But that’s not really possible so I just sort of admire the volcano from afar. Maybe after they fix it all, maybe it’ll be ok to research it a little more, who knows.
CVM Independent: Well, ok let’s start there. A bunch of former CVM what, faculty and staff, you said? What are they saying that got you interested? Oh, I guess first, why did they all leave OSU in the first place?
Dr. Smith: They were miserable there. Which usually is, like, roll your eyes, right? We’re all unhappy at work sometimes. But when a few people leave, you get concerned. When a couple dozen leave, ok, big problem, right? When what did they say, like 60 people leave in 2 or 3 years, it gets someone like me really curious about what is breaking down inside the organization. So you start asking questions: Is the problem isolated to one part of the organization? Is it everywhere? Does leadership know about it? Are they creating it? Are they totally removed and just separated from it? But really even those answers aren’t totally interesting to people like me who study this, it’s who’s at the top of things? Who’s actually running the show? Are they all hamstrung by bad policies and structures? Did they create those structures in the first place? Do they have the self awareness and institutional awareness to even see the huge blinking red light or are they too close to it? See what I mean? Or, or other things, for example what are the politics? Is money in the mix? Are incentives misaligned maybe, maybe leadership wants to go in one direction for their own reasons, but the institution should be going another, and you just get an incompatible situation.
CVM Independent: Yeah, great questions, how many coffees can you drink because I don’t think we can get to them all today.
Dr. Smith: Yeah, no.
CVM Independent: So why did these people leave CVM? Are you able to talk about that?
Dr. Smith: We can talk about it. Just not, well, we just can’t get really specific about things, private conversations. But some left because they felt the work environment, the academic environment, it was very negative. All of them described dysfunction in how the college is run. Some of them had personal issues, like problems that kept occurring that they would complain about and nothing would happen. A lot of them felt like sticking around there would basically waste years away for them. It’s like if the organization is always moving in reverse, your career will never progress forward, or it's just way harder to push ahead.
CVM Independent: So basically some made career decisions that they just, I guess, they couldn’t take it anymore. Needed to be somewhere that wouldn’t hold them back.
Dr. Smith: Wouldn’t hold them back, right. But mostly it was the culture there. I remember one of them said they wanted to stay, you know, hero syndrome, fight the power and fix things. But year after year they felt ignored and finally they just left. That's basically the common thing with all of them. Really they all felt it was just not a good place to work if you really want to be an academic in the true sense of the word.
CVM Independent: Let’s, let’s focus, let’s go into that. That academic idea. Talk about that a bit.
Dr. Smith: Think about academia having a few products to sell. Education. Research. With the vet college, medicine, right, the hospital. We have to compete in those areas, meaning the quality needs to be good or else students don’t come. Talented people don’t come work here. Things get stale. Patient care goes down. Students doesn’t, that’s not a problem in veterinary medicine because there aren’t enough schools, so there’s a favorable distortion in that market. But that will not always be the case. But when I said, what did I say? Oh, academic environment. Academics want to be around other academics. They want to work in places that help their research, or whatever they’re known for. Nobody wants to be the only goose in the flock, or the top goose in a really messed up flock. So the top experts, the best people in really any industry, they want to be somewhere that elevates them and what they do. That’s pretty common in just about any organizational space. It’s why bad companies go out of business. That vet school, I just saw the rankings, it was, you had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to find them. How much talent can you attract to a place that people see falling down that page every time the rankings come out? You can do better work, better teaching, better research, at a better place. We see that constantly in studying organizations. Top cultures attract top people. Bottom cultures attract, well, nobody really.
CVM Independent: Right, makes sense. I’m a thought leader or an expert in some field, I've got choices, not going with a place that can’t meet my excellence, or my expectations of excellence?
Dr. Smith: Exactly.
CVM Independent: You mentioned culture, this idea of culture at work. What’s that mean and is that something you’ve heard regarding CVM? Why does that matter?
Dr. Smith: It’s a buzzword for sure, but in the past two-ish decades the amount of research put into studying work culture has exploded. Really big area of interest for me. Not that long ago we only thought of workplace culture as how good are the conditions we work in? Before that, we really didn’t pay attention even to working conditions. Entire movements started, riots and strikes, protests, federal legislation, state legislation, unions. Every presidential candidate talks about the middle class, what do you think they’re talking about? But culture, this idea of culture in the workplace, there is really compelling research looking at the connections between excelling and being fulfilled in our work, versus just doing the work on demand. Are we respected at the office? Are we accepted? Bullying, talking about people behind their backs at the water cooler, is that ok? How we feel, how our work makes us feel, how our colleagues make us feel, do we see our own future in the thing we’re doing? Good leadership and healthy structures will elevate all those things.
CVM Independent: Treat each other like we want to be treated.
Dr. Smith: Sort of. The standard definition is basically culture, workplace culture, is this idea of values and behaviors that shape the feeling of a place. The atmosphere, or the environment of the workplace, all the same thing. How employees interact with each other, how they interact with their work. Do people connect with the mission? Mission is just what is the purpose of this thing, right? Workplace culture is the overall work atmosphere, employee morale. The organization's ability to attract and retain talent. All of it.
CVM Independent: Let’s say there's a medium sized organization, couple hundred people, different departments, some departments work together and some never see each other. Lot of mission critical lines of authority, they don’t intersect much, maybe by design. So a lot of siloing and a lot of movement, lot of little teams that have trouble forming, really, a full team, the whole team. Is that type of atmosphere more or less prone to culture problems?
Dr. Smith: Very common problem. Every case study from Harvard to here has examples of this kind of thing. It always seems obvious to us, even to students. Like ‘wow, that’s so obvious! Get everybody together, build a better team, right?’ It’s like every leader of these types of failing organizations is too close to the sun to see the light even while it's burning them somehow. But what you just described is, yeah, that’s common. And yes, culture problems are, they seem to incubate and explode more in organizations that don’t have that kind of self awareness, an institutional self awareness.
CVM Independent: Talk a little bit more about that, institutional self awareness. How do organizations like that get it together? They don’t all fail, right? So the ones that get things fixed, what are they doing right?
Dr. Smith: Yeah, when we read about a business that fails, we all just go, “Damn that was so obvious. Nobody with a brain would ever make those mistakes!” That’s not really that fair. But that’s what I mean by self awareness. Leaders who lack self awareness will fail eventually, whether today or next month or two years from now. Times change, technology changes, people change, now we don’t go into offices we Zoom, right? Good leaders have to have an extra sense that ‘am I looking at this right? Do I even know enough to look at this right?’ And institutional self awareness is sort of the same thing but instead of about yourself, it’s a sense of the organization that you lead. It’s a level of curiosity that good leaders have to go seek critical inputs, new ideas, even ‘out there’ ideas from that guy who always has the wacky idea at the weekly meeting, because you know he will be right that one time in a critical situation but you only hear it if you are open to hearing it. Self aware leaders are emotionally intelligent leaders, they’re curious, they don’t take things personally or at least never show that they do, and they don’t let ego or ‘i know everything’ type of thoughts close doors to information. Right?
CVM Independent: Yeah, makes sense, thank you. I want to get to that phrase you used, emotional intelligence, but can we go back to something real quick?
Dr. Smith: Sure, yeah.
CVM Independent: What happens in an organization that has the challenges I mentioned earlier, if leaders aren’t self aware in the way you’ve described? What impact does that have on their ability to right the ship? Is it possible to fix organizations without that?
Dr. Smith: Sure, yes, because every situation is different. A leader who is not emotionally intelligent - the loner guy, or the guy who always gets mad when problems arise, or that guy who is brilliant and everyone knows it but they are horrible bosses - yeah they can be successful. Go study Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. But self awareness, again, emotional intelligence, they do matter. Steve Jobs was fired by Apple and everyone forgets that. Elon is having a heck of a time with Twitter. But most leaders are not Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. And the failure rate is much, much higher for leaders who don’t exhibit these traits. Especially the bigger the challenge, right? The bigger the problems, study after study shows that self awareness and emotional intelligence are critical for a leader to exhibit and bake into new strategy.
CVM Independent: Interesting, and…
Dr. Smith: Ok yes and, yes hang on, one more thing. This isn’t all that tough to sort of derive for yourself. Think about it. Huge challenges, everyone’s miserable. Lots of people quitting. Things in the organization aren’t working. Everyone’s talking about quitting, right? Heard that a million times. What kind of person will, leader, what kind of leader is most likely going to be successful?
CVM Independent: The one who relates to everyone. Self awareness, right?
Dr. Smith: Yep, 9 times out of 10. You have to be able to understand your own limitations, your organizations limitations. Accept them. Go search for resources to fill those limitations. No ego. Create new strategy and be ok with testing things and failing at things in smart ways, the old scientific method but for organizations and challenges. And all the time you’re doing all that, that self awareness and emotional intelligence will allow successful leaders to see all those changes and problems and things through the eyes of the people who work there. You can solve the problems in your head but you can’t really solve anything until you have the workforce on board with you.
CVM Independent: This stuff is so interesting. I bet you could talk about it for hours.
Dr. Smith: I literally get paid to talk about it for hours. I have to get going, but I can say this I guess, without, not creating, you know, I don’t think it is very dramatic to say this since it’s just obvious that anyone can see with the vet college. You could teach an entire syllabus on how not to run an organization based on that. I’m not saying that toward any individual or, like, a particular person there, I don’t even know anyone there. But that many people leaving? Organizational controls don’t seem to be working. The core function, you could almost call it the product that the organization quote-unquote sells, education and hospital services, obviously research. The products do not seem to be very appealing to the market these days, so something’s broken there. Just make sure you write that I am very clear with you, for real, I am not commenting on any people over there. Just organization stuff.
CVM Independent: Yeah no problem. I think instead of writing an article how about we just transcribe the talk and post the whole thing? Is that better?
Dr. Smith: Yeah, ok yeah sure. Let me know if it causes problems I don’t, that’s, that’s not what I want to get involved with, you know? But talking about good organizations is what I do, so that’s fine. Ok, cool man this was fun!
CVM Independent: Yep! Really I am, uh, wow. My brain hurts. I think I just got an MBA over coffee.