Education

Richard Jusseaume

By Matt McClellan

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Richard Jusseaume says the trick to leading a diverse work force is really quite simple: Just show everyone the same respect, because they are all worthy of your respect, and they all have something to offer. Jusseaume has been president of Walsh University since 2001, a post he took after retiring from the corporate world. He previously spent 17 years at Canton-based Graphic Enterprises Inc., where he served as chairman, president and CEO. His business experience and his outlook on employee relations have served him well as head of the university, which has an annual budget of $39 million. And since he joined Walsh, enrollment has grown by 44 percent, to 2,291 students.

Smart Business spoke with Jusseaume about why every CEO needs an elevator speech and why if people aren’t following you, you’re not a leader, you’re just someone out for a walk.

Create an environment for excellence. You can’t really motivate people; people must motivate themselves. What you can do is create an environment where they’re able to motivate themselves.

Creating that environment is articulating the vision of what you want to accomplish, giving them the opportunity to share in that vision, being passionate about that vision, and they either buy in to it or they don’t.

If they do, they will motivate themselves to perform at the highest levels. If they don’t really buy in to the vision you’ve articulated in a passionate manner, you’re probably not going to be able to lead them anyway. It’s all about vision and creating that kind of environment where people feel they can make a difference.

Ultimately, the test of leadership is this: Are people following you willingly? Look over your shoulder — if they are, you’re leading. If they’re not, you’re just out for a walk.

Don’t take over. In terms of day-to-day operations, the leader’s job is to be supportive. It’s not to go to an event and take it over but to affirm those who have organized it and are performing or are in some way doing something productive.

If it’s a baseball game, you don’t need to throw out the first pitch. You just need to be quietly standing there so the students know you care about what they’re doing.

The role of the leader in daily operations is not to fall into a management mode, where you start questioning and second-guessing every process and procedure, but rather to be supportive of the efforts of those who are charged with the responsibility of managing the operations.

Otherwise, if you do it any other way, people start to look past those who are legitimately responsible for managing and start looking to you. At that point, you’ve really failed in a leadership role.

Work on your elevator speech. Communicate every way you possibly can. Through the obvious, normal, human communication of speech and writing, but somehow regardless of the topic, whatever the event, regardless of the circumstances or prestige of the audience, articulating the vision and mission have got to be the constant. You’ve got to repeat it so often that lots of other people are able to repeat it, if not verbatim at first, then eventually verbatim. Repetition with passion.

When I first got here, I talked about the three parts of the mission of the founding of Walsh. My goodness, if I haven’t said that 1,000 times on this campus, I haven’t said it once.

You can stop a lot of people on this campus and say, ‘What’s the founding mission of Walsh?’ and they can tell you.

But you need to have an elevator speech. If we get on the elevator together on the first floor, and you say, ‘What’s the mission or the vision for Walsh?,’ I need to tell you before you get off on the 10th floor. That’s the practical side of how to do it.

Treat people with respect. It really is a diverse group, when you consider that we have part-time people on the maintenance staff and full-time Fulbright scholars with doctoral degrees. The range is quite broad.

But in our case, it’s quite simple. It’s all about recognizing what it’s all about — if you truly, in good faith believe that we’re all God’s children, you take the position that everybody is worthy of respect, that everybody has dignity, that everybody has the same kind of goals, albeit they might be couched in outward ways, but to the extent that you’re willing to look the freshman student coming across the quad in the eye and say, ‘Good morning,’ as much as you would to the vice president who’s heading out of another building, to a donor who just arrived on campus.

People can sense that. If the salutations and the greetings and the friendliness are reserved for an elite group, that is very divisive in a community like this. But if we start out with the notion that we all have dignity and we’re all equally deserving of respect, and that the mission and the vision applies equally to each of us, that takes away all of the external and superficial differences and puts us all in the same level. We’re all in the same arena.

So many times, I’ve seen a worker in the cafeteria [or] a landscaper on the campus be a tremendous influence to that young person who had a tear in their eye or looked frustrated. They became a mentor for an hour. We must never lose sight of the fact that everybody really does have something to offer.

Forget your prestige. It’s very easy for a leader to fall into a management mode. Management, after all, is about titles and prestige and the exercise of, albeit legitimate, authority.

Leadership is about vision and passion and influence. You manage people — if you’re good at it, without them resenting it — literally by articulating the plan and telling people what to do. You can’t lead people that way. You must lead people because of who and what they are, because of their desire to follow you and because of the vision.

And if you fall out of the leadership mode, of being focused on the vision and leading other like-minded individuals in pursuit of those goals, then you fall into the management role of exercising power and authority and thinking it’s about your prestige.

At that point, you begin to lose people, and they’re no longer following you willingly. You might be able to continue managing them, but you’re no longer leading them.

HOW TO REACH: Walsh University, (330) 490-7090 or www.walsh.edu