As I’ve been reflecting on life and on learning, I’ve been thinking about how much of our working lives we spend trying to make things work.
We build things eg structures, brainstorm strategies, write policies, resolve problems, navigate competing priorities and try to create the environments and spaces where people can do their best work. In universities, especially, there are always things that need our attention, things that can be improved, things that need resolving or the things that we haven’t quite got around to doing (here’s looking at you: to do list!)
Sometimes, in the busyness of making things work, we forget the people for whom the work matters.
Universities are complicated spaces. They are communities of people with multiple histories, convictions, ambitions, experiences and understandings of what is important or the priority. We bring our own stories, hopes, frustrations and expectations into the spaces we encounter. Inevitably, there will be disagreement, doubt, and times when we don’t quite get it right.
And maybe one of the most essential things we can cultivate in our shared spaces is a little more generosity. I don’t mean an absence of accountability, or an expectation that we all agree. This isn’t an invitation to sidestep difficult conversations or declare that everything is fine when it isn’t. Instead, a willingness to extend each other the grace to be human.
Disagreement: a form of generosity
I’ve alway believed that one of the great privileges of working in higher education is the opportunity to meet ideas and perspectives different from our own. Universities should be the places where we can disagree, question assumptions, challenge patterns of thinking and even occasionally have our minds transformed. Indeed, if we depart every conversation with exactly the same ideas we brought into it, we might ponder what we’ve learned.
But there is a difference between challenging an idea and putting down the person who holds it. We can disagree without becoming disagreeable. We can query decisions without questioning someone’s value. We can hold one another accountable while still acknowledging the experiences, knowledges, and intentions that people contribute in their work.
Intellectual curiosity needs a degree of generosity and I think collegiality does too. This means giving people room to explain themselves, being ready to listen before responding and seeing that our own ideas about a situation might not be the only one open to us. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is pause long enough to think about whether we have understood one another. I’m not an expert in this – far from it but as I get older I’m trying more.
Grace doesn’t mean no accountability
I do want to be clear that generosity doesn’t mean lowering expectations or avoiding accountability. I think we can have extraordinarily high expectations of one another and still remain kind. We can seek excellence, take responsibility for our decisions, tackle the difficult issues and keep professional standards without making the experience unnecessarily fraught for the people around us.
There is a special kind of strength in being able to have a difficult conversations without making it personal. There is also strength in seeing when we’ve got something wrong, changing our minds when presented with better information and seeing the contributions of others. Maybe we underestimate how much these small acts matter to people around us.
Little acts such as a thank you, an acknowledgement; a willingness to share credit; some patience when someone is learning something new. Perhaps an understanding that the person sitting across the table might be carrying responsibilities and challenges we know nothing about.
Thankfully, these things don’t need a new policy or a strategic initiative to be written. They just need us to remember our shared humanity.
We create the culture
In higher ed, we speak a lot an about organisational culture, and so we should. We workshop values statements, strategic plans and frameworks that seek to articulate the types of communities we aspire to become. But culture is also developed in much smaller ways. It is created in how we welcome new colleagues, how we react when someone makes a mistake, how we treat people whose roles are less visible, how we react when we disagree and whether we make space for people to share without having to fight to just be in the space. It is formed by what we celebrate, what we put up with, and what we choose to make important.
I often think about the people who quietly make institutions work. These are the people who remember to check in, who help someone find their feet, who fix problems without needing recognition, who stay a little longer to help a student or who notice when someone else is having a difficult day. The people who quietly see the dishwasher in the staff room needs emptying and just get on and do it; the person who puts on the coffee. Much of this work never appears in a performance report. It doesn’t always or easily convert into measurable outcomes or get listed in reports of strategic achievement.
But it matters.
These small acts of care are a necessary part of the life of a healthy community. They create the conditions in which people feel they can contribute, launch intellectual kites, learn from silly and serious mistakes and do meaningful work together.
Creating space for each other
I suspect most of us arrive at work wanting to do something worthy and to do it well. We want our contributions to matter, to be seen, and to make some sort of difference. We won’t always agree about how that looks, or even how to achieve that. We will have different priorities, different approaches and different ideas about what needs to happen next. But maybe we could spend less time thinking the worst of each other and more time seeking the possibility of a shared purpose. We can be ambitious without being competitive about every thing we do. We can still be discerning without being dismissive, and we can be honest without being unkind.
And we can remember that people are rarely at their best when they feel like they have to fight to be there, or feel they need to defend their right to heard.
If we are in leadership, I think this really important: the way we respond to people, especially in difficult times, communicates far more about our values than anything a policy document or leadership statement ever could. People remember how they were treated. They remember when someone took the time to listen, when their contributions were acknowledged and whether they were given space to be, to listen, to speak, and space to grow. We have a responsibility to create spaces where people can do good work and where they can be human while doing it.
A little more grace
I don’t imagine any of us gets this right all the time – I don’t. I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately after meetings, when thinking about policies, and in reflecting on recents deaths in my family particularly how would those people give grace, create space, and importantly, what ways they’d approach difficult topics and new ideas.
We all have difficult days, competing priorities, moments of exasperation, times when we could have responded differently. Sometimes we need to take a deep breath, rethink our approach and start a conversation again. Perhaps that is part of the point: grace gives us room to start again. It’s permission for imperfection without abandoning responsibility. It sees that growth, personal or institutional, is not often a neat or linear process.
Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations:
“Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them”
I’ve always liked the simplicity of this, and maybe it’s a reminder that our lives are fundamentally relational, and that patience, understanding and generosity are not just things we hope to receive from others, but things we must actively give from ourselves. I know I have much more to learn. I want to be better at extending grace, particularly when I’m tired, frustrated or maybe convinced I already know the answer. I want to listen a little longer & more carefully, assume less and remember that I am also a work in progress.
Maybe we should measure some of our success not only by what we achieve, but by how people experience being part of the work:
Have they felt heard?
Do they feel valued?
Do they have space to grow?
Can they disagree without losing their sense of belonging?
We won’t always get it right but we can keep choosing generosity. We can keep creating space for each other and we can remember that the work of building good institutions should never come at the cost of being good to the people within them. A little more grace then, please. I think we could all use some.
Naomi Wolfe
Dean of Learning and Teaching
Naomi Wolfe is the Dean of Learning and Teaching at the University of Divinity. She is trawlwoolway Aboriginal woman of Jewish German and Irish heritage who lives and works on Wurundjeri Country (Melbourne, Australia).
University of Divinity
Pilgrim Theological College
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