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Raising Ethical Leaders
By Amy Selby

Life University President Dr. Guy Riekeman speaks with Betty Siegel, Ph.D., of the Siegel Institute for Leadership, Ethics and Character.

Editor's Note: Beyond the challenges of our personal lives and professional practices, all of us face the threats and opportunities the future brings. These onrushing forces—destruction of our natural environment, turmoil in the health care system, deterioration of social values, and problematic leadership in government, business and even the religious sphere—affect us regardless of our personal perspectives and best intentions. How can we come to grips with these dynamics?

One way is to talk about them and listen to those who have dedicated much of their lives to addressing this big picture. Life University is creating a think tank, informally called the Octagon, to bring together leading thinkers on Eight Life Core Proficiencies. It is a place of the mind, first, and later a building, where "the world's greatest conversations" are taking place.

In this installment of our World's Greatest Conversations, Life President Guy Riekeman and the editorial board of Today's Chiropractic LifeStyle sat down with Betty Siegel, Ph.D., distinguished chair of the Siegel Institute for Leadership, Ethics and Character. From 1981 to July 2006, Siegel served as president of Kennesaw State University (KSU), in Kennesaw, Ga. Under her administration, the university evolved from a four-year college with 4,000 students and 15 baccalaureate-degree programs to its current university status with enrollment exceeding 18,000 students and 55 undergraduate and graduate degree programs.

Siegel has focused her efforts on ethical leadership. Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

Riekeman: Betty, can you give us a history on how you became interested in this subject of ethical leadership?

Siegel: It came about because I had read a book by Carl Sandburg called "Remembrance Rock." He said you should go to a rock and you should ask it three questions every year: Who am I? Where do I come from? And, where am I going? I love that concept, and then I started telling people about it. My minister at Big Canoe said I should ask it a fourth question: What is my meaning? Then I gave it to Frances Hesselbein, of the Drucker Foundation, and she said I should add two other questions: What is my legacy? And, do I matter?

Then I was getting ready to speak at a prayer breakfast. I was struggling with what to say, and just before I went downstairs for the meeting where there would be 2,000 people there, I was a little bit apprehensive. I just picked up a book by Stephen Covey, and he said I should ask the question: Who's am I? And, then, that became my mantra—those questions. I started to think about how are you formed? How are you shaped? I believe very strongly from my psychology roots that we're made up of the memories of past invitations. They'll tell us whether we're able, valuable or responsible or not.

I think that what we are about today in terms of ethics, that we think in terms about that it's not just about what you do to people, it's who you are. It comes from people who helped you to go up that ladder of trust and respect to move to self-actualization. To me that's living the good and decent, full, well-motivated and well-engaged life.

Riekeman: How did that set of values help shape the work you did at Kennesaw State University? Please talk about what happened over 25 years at Kennesaw.

Siegel: I have to put this in the perspective that I was thrust into leadership in 1972. I was a happy professor at the University of Florida. It's interesting about my odyssey there. I came in 1967, and I came pregnant. And I believe I was the first pregnant professor there in its history. I was the first woman in the department. I had the baby over the break, like I said I would—which was luck. I became known at the university as "that woman."

What happened was two years later in 1969, in one of those wonderful life-changing moments, I was named one of the three distinguished professors at the University of Florida. This is a big thing. Imagine being a junior professor and being named that. I was propelled from being named "that woman" to being named a distinguished professor.

Two years after that there was a job available as the Dean of Academic Affairs. And, somebody put my name in. It was kinda sweet. I had no administrative experience at all. I got the job. Then I had no experience in administration—this is the first woman in an academic position in the state at that time. I read everything I could on leadership. I'm telling you this because the books in those days were all about being tough. You were supposed to put on a helmet, go out into the jungle and wrestle people to their knees—you remember those stories. It was generally a man's way.

Then I read a book called "In Search of Excellence," and it changed my life. I began to see that the role models that I had been seeing and wanting were those people of extraordinary integrity. They didn't swim with the sharks or anything like that. You ought to be who you are and how you do that that in more inviting terms. So that began to shape my administration.

By the way you do know that the '70s was a period of tremendous movement on leadership. It was all about hardball and I elected to use a different model and I think it served me in great stead.

You combine a philosophical and psychological bent to the works of Maslow, Erikson and Carl Rogers, and you can see I was searching for a leadership model that would be much more what today people would call transformational. But it's not new. It has come from the excesses of the '70s—I didn't want to be like that. So I began to study leaders and I found even in the academy that there were leaders playing by those old rules of hardball. I didn't want to do that, and I found that you didn't have to do that. You can still be who you are and make a difference.

Riekeman: I came from a university before Life that played by those old rules, still even today.

Siegel: I found a metaphor that helps me pretty well. I went to a wellness conference years ago and I asked them why they invited me because I don't exercise well and all that stuff. But they wanted me to talk about psychological wellness. And it really hit me that the different levels of wellness that are physical could be made into four different levels of wellness that are emotional.

You're really sick and you know it;

You're not sick but not well, but you know something is wrong;

Third level is that you're intermittently well.

My next point is: How are you intentionally well? My point is being intentionally well can be a metaphor for the way you lead. And what companies you lead. There are companies that are very sick. Other companies are not sick and not well. And we could name dozens of them. There companies that are intermittently well. I can name even more companies like that. Let's try a little Stephen Covey. Let's try a little Six Sigma. You know, I'm done with that, aren't you?

Riekeman: There's no university that I can think of that had a long history of intentional wellness more so than Kennesaw State University. And you reflected that wellness in phenomenal growth, et cetera. How did you accomplish this?

Siegel: We've written about it, a colleague and I. We use a metaphor of a starfish. The starfish can open an oyster shell very quickly, but it does it with five points. It always uses five points in intentional alignment. It's the people, the place, the programs, the policies and the processes. If we did have success, I'd like to think that it was using that metaphor, that philosophy, that way of action at KSU during the last 25 years. We intentionally worked on those. We developed leadership programs that taught it.

We wanted to say that we like the students that we have, not the students that we thought we were going to have. We worked on being supportive of the students we had. In education, some people say, "Educate the best, just shoot the rest." We didn't want to do that. We did a major study on who our students are. That was a life-changing thing for Kennesaw. Who are our students? Who are the students that we wanted as students? The first question was what are the students we might have wanted? The second question was for our students, how do we make our teaching more facilitative, more inviting? If these are our students, and we are teaching them the best that we can, then we ask the question how can we make the administration more facilitative. How do we work collaboratively? What about the community? What is the most important vision of the future that we can come up with? It served us well. And we did it every five years, every 10 years, and so forth. Then we found ourselves moving from that path, because we intentionally put administrators, teachers and staff in leadership. Then we broadened our programs with outside voices.

I deliberately picked outside voices, and I invited them to come and say what I already believed about them. And having an outside voice tell it is infinitely better than having your leader tell it. So, all during 25 years outside voices—and I can admit it now—were hand picked. Because they were leaders that ushered in the essence of integrity.

Riekeman: You know one of the things we have talked about is courageous conversations. We'd love to have you comment on that and what it has to do with the Siegel Institute of Leadership, Ethics and Character.

Siegel: The Courageous Conversations came about five years ago as a new view of the future. I think that the pace of higher education is five years, and that you need to step back and reflect before you go forward again. So if there's anything we did right it was to be thoughtful about what the future would be. I had read about Courageous Conversations through the Drucker Foundation. David Whyte—he has done brilliant work on our campus—said that you must have a courageous conversation with the future.

I think that's very important. He also said to have a courageous conversation with yourself. And another conversation with your plans. And then he said you should have a conversation with those who are not in your world of clients. You know, the community. Not just the students you were working with.

Those are four or five steps we didn't have, and I did them deliberately. I had 30 conversations with outside groups and asked what should the university be like, what should we be like? I slept over with the students in student housing. I thought that was crazy, but I got 200 pages of typed notes of what students wanted. I visited 30 classrooms one year. I sat in the class took notes listened to the students, listened to the faculty, interviewed them and I learned what students liked about teachers.

So leadership was put into place that was designed to address the ideas that lay before us. Who are we, where did we come from, what are our students like, how do we become more facilitative? How do we make it more inviting for them? What do we do for the community? And then it was a no-brainer.

Riekeman: How did what you learned from those courageous conversations make their way into the students' lives on campus?

Siegel: The secret to our success was that we examined who we were and what was the nature of our teaching and what was the end of our teaching. Then we would offer leadership programs for every group on the campus. They were all based on who you are and how you use yourself intentionally.

We did leadership programs on how you become a servant leader. We were named one of the 20 "colleges on the move." That was a big thing for us. The next five years we were named the rising star of regional universities. We began to see that what we were doing was in sync with what people were looking for. Then we got speakers of distinction then we were recognized as one of the 12 founding colleges with the success of the First Year Experience. The First Year Experience was one of the most critical things we did with John Gardner. We taught people that the First Year Experience is not just an introduction to college, it's an introduction to the academy, to a life of learning. Not long ago, we one of eight universities recognized for our international initiative. You can see that the first year experience, the international initiative and the commitment to leadership flowed out of that five points of leadership.

Riekeman: Tell us about what the Siegel Institute is doing at Oxford.

Siegel: Thank you because that's my heart and soul right now. The Oxford Conclave on Global Ethics is a new initiative in higher education that we launched in 2005. The Conclave serves as a catalyst for a movement to renew higher education's commitment to the development of ethical leadership. The first year we developed a conclave statement on ethics of a changing university president.

What we've said is that we're more than a collection of courses, we'll be more than a ticket to the trade. As leaders we pledge that we will be leading in higher education to shape the future of the world. That was the statement of ethics and responsibility, which I'm very proud of. These presidents, eight of us, did this. And we worked day and night to write it up. This year we went to Sundance, Utah, to write up our best practices. Our program next year will go back to Oxford and develop a new global perspective and talk about social responsibility. You can watch the progress of ethics; we are ethics in action.

Riekeman: This fits in line with what we're working on at Life. What we have to prepare students for is not a skill or technology, which will become obsolete, but the ability to learn, unlearn and then relearn. We focused ours around these eight core values or proficiencies. If we have that base, then they will be able to establish the learning they need in order to fit into the technology of the time.

Siegel: This has got to be the education of the future. One of my friends, who travels all over the world, has learned that cynicism is at an all-time high, and trust is at an all-time low. I said, "Oh my gosh." So, if we as educators are not sympathetic to this idea that we must prepare students for the future, not to be cynical, but to be trusting—if we don't, how's it going to get done?

Riekeman: We love a quote around here from Martin Luther King, Jr., that says that real education is about knowledge and character. I know you have a lot to do with that. It's amazing what you have learned in your years.

Siegel: I spent three months at Stellenbosch University in South Africa as a visiting scholar. Again, my life has changed. I think life is changing all the time. We can be wise if we let ourselves change at all. This has taken my life in a whole new direction. I was brought to Stellenbosch to talk about the First Year Experience and ethical leadership. Stellenbosch is the university where apartheid was incubated. That's a chilling indictment. They are only 13 years away from apartheid. This wonderful university, with a new director and a new vision is moving toward being an incubator for reconciliation. Isn't that powerful?

Mandela has been given an honorary doctorate there, and he is the first black president in Stellenbosch's history. In April of this coming spring, I'll be going back. He has called a major conference of all the major universities in South Africa. It's going to be on ethical leadership and social responsibility. Isn't that exciting?

Riekeman: Betty, it's obvious your achievements abound, but what are you most proud of having accomplished?

Siegel: I'd like to think that what we're doing in ethical leadership and social responsibility is the most important thing. I'm really not at the stage in my life where I'm much interested in fund raising, building raising. If I hear one more time that the president's job is to raise money, I'm going to throw up.

Riekeman: Thank you.

Siegel: If that's what they want, believe me, that university will not be better for it. They may have more buildings, but I wouldn't want to go into the presidency as a fund-raiser.

I'd like to think I'm a friend-raiser. That is very important; it's about relationships and teaching people how to have relationships. They have a responsibility for something bigger than that. For the programs that we have in place all have an ethical base. The friendships we make with the people we have around us should be caught up in the same aspect of it.

Riekeman: This has been a treat for us and I have to say that when I see people around you, I feel they are sitting at your feet learning.

Siegel: Let me return that kudos to someone who I come to for real advice on how you create an intentional university. Thank you, soul brother.