Opinion
In mid-2019, nine months before the pandemic, I was approached by my boss to ask if I would act in his role, as he was moving into a more senior position in the organisation. I had been leading a team of around 10 for a few years and while I had no particular ambition to move up, I was flattered to be asked, and said yes.
Like many people working in technical disciplines, I had been promoted based on results and while promotion resulted in increasing management responsibilities, I had received little training in leading people.
A combination of following the example of my line managers and learning through mistakes had seen me through the first part of my career, but suddenly and quite unexpectedly, I was leading a team more than 10 times bigger and mistakes were likely to have a much broader impact.
I had been with the organisation for more than 20 years and had a limited level of interaction and familiarity with most of my new team.
With a small team, you can spend formal and informal time with individuals and small groups. Establishing and maintaining connection takes some time and effort, but it’s achievable.
In addition to being larger, my new team was spread over five different locations, most of them within a few minutes’ walk, but there were five people working 200km away. There were plenty of new challenges, but the one that seemed most fundamental was how to achieve personal connection at scale.
Attempts to build connection
One-on-ones with the team leaders, being present and visible at various formal and informal gatherings, spending time each week across a variety of locations to improve accessibility all helped; but were ultimately insufficient from my perspective.
While this problem was new to me, it has been studied for a long time. Drucker coined the term ‘knowledge workers’ and identified many of their attributes and ways of working more than 60 years ago.
One of the important characteristics was that they needed to be managed like they were volunteers. Their primary loyalty was to their profession or discipline, rather than their employer, which meant it was important for them to feel aligned with organisational values.
While universities and research institutes have some unique attributes, from the perspective of a senior leader, many of the challenges they present are common across large organisations with workers in distributed teams.
Leading academics is often described as being like trying to herd cats. It’s a pretty good analogy; academics like to think and behave independently and are strong-willed, very much like our feline friends. Taking the cat comparison a bit further, while cats can be quite compliant, if and when it suits them, if you try to force a cat to do something it doesn't want to, prepare yourself for a struggle.
Even if what you're doing is for their own good, the cat won't thank you and they won't forget, and if you try the same thing again, they will resist even more than they did the first time.
While it may be mildly amusing to compare the behaviour of university academics to cats, like all analogies it only paints a partial picture.
Employment surveys indicate that many staff express high levels of satisfaction and trust with their direct line managers, but for university senior management, connection and communication are generally much lower.
Building leadership trust
In many cases you have departments where people like and respect their colleagues and work well as a team at that level, but are in competition or conflict with other departments. As a result, institutional-level strategies are treated either with apathy, or sometimes active resistance.
A similar pattern is seen across large organisations in many sectors around the world. Universities tend to exhibit a more extreme version, but it is a leadership issue for both bankers and boffins.
In all these organisations there is a trust gradient that runs from the local level to the top of the organisational structure. In one sense that is disheartening, telling us that no matter what you do, as someone leading a large team you will never achieve the level of connection you can with a small team.
However, the good news is that the steepness of the gradient is highly variable; which immediately tells you that individual leaders can make a difference.
The leaders who have flattened the trust gradient presumably haven’t just been lucky and they can’t simply be spending more time one-on-one. They must be doing something which has an indirect impact.
It’s one thing to have identified the necessary characteristics of the required solution, but it doesn’t mean the mechanism is obvious or easy. However, as Archimedes famously found, inspiration can sometimes arise in unlikely places.
Finding solutions
So where do you find examples of best practice of influence at scale? Physics tells us that extremes often provide illuminating case studies.
As the world’s first billionaire musician, Taylor Swift is a modern cultural phenomenon, setting the benchmark for music and concert tour sales. Her success doesn’t just depend on the music though; she has carefully cultivated a millions of loyal fans, many of whom have been with her for more than a decade and feel like they know her personally, even though they have never met her. How does she do it?
She does many things, but the reason so many people feel a connection with Swift is that she lets fans into aspects of her personal life through social media posts and a constant trickle of limited information about future music, tours and media, littered with her famous "Easter eggs" or clues. Let’s focus on social media.
As a leader you're told to be "authentic", show people who you really are, but what does that mean? Clearly there are things that are appropriate to share with colleagues and things that are not.
Social media has been part of our lives for a long time and we all know people who post about holidays or celebrations with friends and family, not the mundane or unpleasant; they carefully curate their feed.
We know something about them and their life, but we probably wouldn't call it authentic. If people feel you are trying to manipulate them through what, or how you share aspects of yourself, they are likely to disconnect, rather than connect.
Swift's social media is clearly highly planned and meticulously curated. Her fans know that, so how does she achieve the connection?
She shares a lot, but she doesn't pretend she is sharing everything. Plenty about her cats (Meredith Grey, Olivia Benson and Benjamin Button), and her love of the TV show Grey’s Anatomy, but there are clearly boundaries.
However, she does share some stuff that’s real and that matters to her and talks about those things openly and with vulnerability. That is the challenge for us, what can we share about ourselves that is both genuine and appropriate?
Touchpoints for connection
The shared currency and points of broad connection in our society are sports and the arts. I'm a middle-aged Australian man who likes football and has a favourite team, which makes a great neutral conversation starter within a small group of people that shares a love of AFL. But what about those people in my team who come from different cultural backgrounds, or just aren't interested in football? If I share my bitter-sweet relationship with the highs (and mostly lows) of the North Melbourne Football Club it provides limited connection.
So what can I share that’s genuine, safe and more inclusive? By definition, popular culture provides the widest shared connection. While Taylor Swift is one of the best-known people on the planet, I fall well outside the demographic of what people envisage when they talk about "Swifties".
So when I stand in front of a room of people and use some of the lyrics from a Taylor Swift song to illustrate a point, there is an element of surprise, which helps strengthen the message and engagement with it, but there is now also a point of connection. Whether they like Swift's music or not is irrelevant, they almost certainly know something about her and have an opinion.
Am I trying to be cynical or manipulative? Strictly speaking, any action a leader takes to influence is a form of manipulation. You are deliberately trying to change something, generally in a way that benefits you. But we usually reserve the label for cases where there is an unfair, dishonest or deceptive aspect, an attempt to create an impression which isn't true, often by withholding relevant information, the lies of omission.
What I'm doing is planned and has a purpose, and that's what leadership communication is supposed to look like. But it's genuine, and so not dishonest or deceptive. I haven't just used Google or an AI agent to search for something Swift-related to weave in. I'm a real fan (top 1% of Taylor Swift listeners world-wide according to last year’s Spotify Wrap).
Plunging in – truths beyond Tay Tay
The harder question isn't whether the enthusiasm is real. It's what I'm willing to share beyond it. If all I ever offer is low-stakes information about my personal music preferences, then that is manipulation, not in its most egregious form, but no different from an influencer who posts only the positive stories about their topic of choice.
Nothing in the feed is false, yet the life it projects still isn't the real one. But if I'm also willing, when it's appropriate, to share relevant doubts, failures or shortcomings as well as the successes and the Swift-trivialities, then I'm revealing things about myself that really do matter.
That's where the line actually sits. It's not in how selective you are, but in whether what you're holding back would change how people view you. If you want people to really know you, sometimes you have to reveal things you would rather not because it helps build psychological safety within your team. If you want them to be up front when things aren’t working you need a degree of reciprocity.
Getting the boundary right is the difficult part though; it's subjective and it’s personal. Wherever you choose to draw it, some will say too much information and others, that you're covering up. But having a boundary is required, because you want to connect with your team; not make them feel they are responsible for your wellbeing.
Like every other tool in the leadership kit-bag, curated self-disclosure will not connect you with everyone in a large and/or distributed team: intimacy doesn’t scale. How you deploy it depends on a range of factors and thinking about what you will disclose, both in terms of low-stakes connection fodder and things that do matter need to be carefully considered.
I’d love to hear other’s experiences, both positive and negative. If reading this has made you “Swift-curious”, please be reassured that we Swifties are an inclusive bunch and would love to welcome you on board.
Professor Simon Ellingsen is Executive Director of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) at The University of Western Australia.