The fourth of seven short pieces drawn from conversations on the IngenioUs podcast. I’ve talked with more than thirty women presidents and senior leaders in higher education, and a few ideas kept surfacing no matter who was in the conversation. This series is where I gather them.

When Stephanie Herseth Sandlin became president of Augustana University, people wanted to know her plan. What was her vision? What was she going to accomplish? It’s the question every new president gets, and the pressure is to have an answer ready, to walk in and prove you belong. She resisted it. “I want to take the time to hear from my new colleagues,” she told me, “to build more context, both internally and externally, before I would articulate what that vision might be.”

She had learned that somewhere unexpected. Years earlier, after she lost her seat in Congress, she was hired as general counsel at an engineering firm, and nobody there was quite sure what to make of her. It was an engineering firm and she was a lawyer. Some suspected the CEO had created the job for her. More than one person assumed she was just biding time until her next campaign. She could feel the skepticism when she walked in, and instead of trying to argue it away, she did something slower. “I sought people out deliberately,” she said, “and shared about myself and why I was in a role. But I then spent more time asking questions and listening, and didn’t succumb to the pressure of being in a meeting and feeling like I had to show my value right out of the gate.” She made a point of following up with the vice president who seemed most threatened by her presence, and those efforts, she said, tend to become “true friendships that are trusting and respectful.”

When I asked what it takes to reach the top of an organization and stay there, she didn’t reach for strategy or credentials. “The common thread for me,” she said, “has always been building context and building relationships.”

That was the quieter conversation running underneath so much of what I heard. If the first of these pieces was about why these women lead, and the second about who they are, this one is about how they actually work: alongside people, not above them. In one form or another, the leaders I talked with kept describing leadership as something that happens in the space between people rather than in the corner office, and the work of building that space as slow, deliberate, and easy to underrate.

The Work Is Listening

Carol Christ, who led the University of California, Berkeley, traces her whole understanding of that back to one small moment early in her career. She was chair of the English department, meeting with a student who was angry that he hadn’t gotten into a seminar he wanted. She couldn’t fix it. There was no seat to give him. So she told him the truth: “I’m really sorry. If I were in your position, I would feel exactly the same way.” And, she said, “suddenly he just deflated. And he said, that’s all I wanted. I wanted someone to understand how I feel.” What she took from it has stayed with her for decades, that “really listening to what someone is saying, and to say something that communicates that you heard them, was absolutely essential to leadership.”

Christ is a violist, and she reaches for music to explain the same thing. “When you play chamber music, you can’t just say it’s all about me. You have to listen to the other players. You have to really be part of an ensemble. And that, to me, is very much what leadership is about.”

Tuajuanda Jordan, president of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has built that instinct into a rule she keeps in every meeting. She goes last. “I am always the last one to speak as president,” she told me. “A lot of them believe they have to speak first. When you do that, you inhibit your team.” If the president speaks first, the room calibrates to her, and the people most loyal to her are the quickest to fall in behind whatever she seems to want. So she holds her view until the end and lets everyone else think out loud first. She is blunt about why this is rarer than it should be: “Listening is a really important trait that I think is underutilized, because people just talk too darn much.”

Team One

None of this is soft. The clearest proof of that came from Mary Beth Cooper, president of Springfield College, who has built her entire leadership team around a rule she borrowed and named Team One. When her cabinet comes together, nobody is there to represent their own division. Every decision, she says, has to be about “what’s the very best decision for the college, and not for your division.” A vice president who needs to fight for their own area does it privately, with her, one on one. In the room, the job is the whole institution. She traces the idea to a line from Patrick Lencioni she has never let go of: “the best teams work in the best interest of the entity.”

It is a demanding way to run a group, and it holds together only on a base of trust, which is the other thing Cooper refuses to fake. “Students are like children and dogs,” she told me. “They know when you’re not authentic.” You can call yourself student-centered all day, but if you’re not at their games, not breaking bread with them, then, in her words, “it sounds like a really good soundbite.” The relationship is the proof. There isn’t a shortcut around it.

Giving the Credit Away

If Cooper’s rule is about how a team decides together, Georgia Nugent’s is about what a leader does with what the team produces. Nugent, who has led three colleges, most recently Illinois Wesleyan, put her whole approach in one sentence: “I hope, as much as possible, to give away the credit and to take the blame. And I think that’s important to building a team.” It sounds modest, and it quietly rearranges everything. The credit flows outward, to the people who did the work. The blame stops with her. She thinks of it as an extension of teaching, which is where she began. “We are all teaching all the time,” she said. “The way you interact with others, the way that you try and lead or support others, all of those are, in a way, teaching moments.”

Elizabeth Meade, president of Cedar Crest College, lands on the same posture through a mechanical image she immediately apologizes for. “It’s a kind of an unfortunate metaphor,” she said, “but it’s like being the axle around which the wheels spin. My role, I think, is to keep the wheels turning and moving, and ensuring that we have a smooth ride.” The leader isn’t the wheel. She’s what lets the wheels turn. And Meade is quick to head off the obvious misreading, that hearing everyone means deciding nothing. “Being an inclusive leader does not mean governing by consensus,” she said. She listens widely, and then, when she has to, she decides. The listening isn’t a substitute for authority. It’s what makes the authority land.

Before You Need It

It would be easy to file all of this under being nice, the soft part of the job a leader gets to once the real work is done. Listening to these women, I came to think it is closer to the reverse. The relationships are the real work, and they are what makes everything else possible.

That matters more than usual right now. A great many campuses are fractured, between faculty and administration, between the institution and the town around it, along the political lines that run through everything else. When a hard decision finally lands, whether an institution can actually move depends on how much trust is already in the system to absorb the shock. And trust is not something a leader can conjure in the moment she needs it. Herseth Sandlin building context before she would offer a vision, Christ learning that people mostly want to be heard, Jordan going last so the room keeps thinking, Cooper insisting the team serve the whole, Nugent handing the credit away: none of it happens during a crisis. It happens in the ordinary weeks beforehand, one conversation at a time, so that the trust is there to draw on when the institution has to lean on it.

That is the part I keep returning to. We tend to picture leadership as something a person does from the front, decisions handed down, authority exercised. What these women describe is quieter and harder to see. Leadership isn’t something you do to people. It’s something you build with them, slowly and on purpose, long before you find out how much you are going to need it.

Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson is a distinguished leader in higher education with over 35 years of experience shaping innovation and fostering institutional excellence. Currently leading the launch of The American University of Greece Global Campus, she is also Distinguished Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Bay Path University. During her tenure as Provost, she launched over 40 academic programs and secured over $6 million in grant funding. She is the author of several influential works, including IngenioUs Leadership: Creating Solutions to Wicked Problems in Higher Education.