“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
In their 1997 book The Power of Alignment George Labovitz and Victor Rosansky attribute this quote to Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape, (although it may come originally from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, 1989). For my three decades of medicine in the uniformed services, the main thing was pretty straight forward: caring for Service Members and their families. I remember considering a transition to civilian-life at about twenty years into my career. While paging through the directory of a local hospital I found myself looking at the physicians’ pictures and musing, “I wonder what their ‘main thing’ is?” I stayed in the military until they told me it was time to go home. I think that the clear sense of the main thing was a big part of the reason.
Now I have worked in academia for nearly a year. Part of the adjustment has been trying to answer the same question: “What is academia’s main thing?” To a newcomer, the university seemed at times to be a random collection of instructors, researchers and research assistants, statisticians, administrators, teachers, clinicians (in medical academia) all circling in parallel orbits. I could argue that the medical or graduate students were the central focus, but some staff members rarely interacted with the students. The search for a unifying “main thing” proved elusive.
A possible answer to the question occurred to me recently while I was listening to a post-doc researcher present her work. She described how each experiment had led to the need for further experiments. One question answered led to fresh questions unanswered. It struck me while she was speaking that when academia functions as it should, its “main thing” is inquiry.
Inquiry is the act of asking from the verb “inquire,” to ask for information, or to investigate. Both come from the Latin “inquīrere” to seek for. Academia at its best teaches students to seek.
It is as true for preschool children in their first brush with the classroom as it is for medical students and PhD candidates late in their third decade of life. If the academic setting doesn’t rest on inquiry we are selling students short.
“School should be a place where kids can discover what they love,” according to blogger Shelly Wright. “They should be able to ask the questions that matter to them and pursue the answers…” Medical students fired by a passion for inquiry learn that the diagnosis is made three quarters of the time by asking the right questions and listening to the answers as they take the patient’s history (Peterson et al. West J Med. 1992;156:163-165). Researchers base their work on inquiry by interrogating hypotheses. If “academics are professional thinkers” (Alex Hope) then perhaps inquiry is the currency of the professional academic.
But the significance of inquiry may be even greater for leaders.
In his 2013 book Humble Inquiry, Organizational Development Practitioner Edgar Schein argues that Americans are much better at telling than asking. By learning to ask, and listening to the answer with an attitude of “interest and curiosity” in an effort to draw someone out, we have the opportunity to build a positive relationship characterized by open communication.
Eisenhower circulated among his soldiers and asked not just about their weapons and training but about “where they were from, what they hoped to do when they got home, and what life was like for them back in their home states.” Inquiry is the cornerstone of approachable leadership.
Humble inquiry is also foundational to the four cardinal principles of leadership: honor, humility, integrity and faith. In the context of inquiry, humility is the willingness to be taught and to learn. Honor is the respect shown to those who would teach us. Integrity is consistency in our attitude towards subordinates, superiors and peers. Faith is believing something you cannot see; in this case that someone can provide insight that if I listen will make me a better person, and a better leader.
Inquiry may well be the “main thing” for academia. But in discovering inquiry in my consideration of academia, I may well have stumbled on to a leadership “main thing” that is more than academic.
Inquiry points to a leadership journey characterized by humble interest and curiosity about the people we lead and their stories.
So inspired, we resolve with Tennyson’s Ulysses,
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Chuck Callahan Henry V 4.3 – Lead from the Front https://henryv43.wordpress.com/
Henry V 4.3 