Janet L. Holmgren often likes
to think of herself as a crab.
It has nothing to do with her
demeanor — the students at
Mills College, where Holmgren
has been president since 1991,
can attest to the fact that she’s
actually quite pleasant. Rather,
it’s something a friend once told
her about progress.
“He said to me, ‘Remember,
Jan, all progress is crablike;
you take one step forward, one
step to the side and then, hopefully, another step forward,’”
she says.
Holmgren thinks of that often
at Mills, an independent liberal
arts college for women that also
offers graduate programs for
both women and men. With
students, faculty and community members constantly at her
door trying to get the college to
take on different causes with its
$74 million budget, Holmgren’s
role is to act as the driving
force to make the decisions that
will allow Mills to take its next
forward step.
Smart Business spoke with
Holmgren about how to clear
up confusion about who is in
charge and why you have to
lead communications.
Pick a direction and articulate it. First of all, you make sure
that you have gotten a full
picture; you have to inform
yourself first.
Picking a strategic direction
and sticking to that direction is
a process for the leader, and
you have to know your community that you’re working
with, you have to know your
budget, you have to know
your market. Then you have to
have the opportunity to really
talk and talk and talk and reiterate and point out the advantages for the whole community to moving forward in a single direction — or at least a
direction that everyone understands or is a part of.
So it bears complex analysis
and straightforward and
repeated explanation. And
sometimes I get a little mixed
up there, sometimes any
leader sees so clearly where
an institution or an organization should go that you don’t
necessarily take the time to
articulate why that is and get
people behind you.
One of the things that I often
say as president of Mills is it’s as
important for the public safety
officer at the front gate to know
the college’s mission and its
goals as it is for me as president.
Create clear lines of leadership. There also has to be honesty
in interaction and no confusion about who takes responsibility and who has authority
because sometimes trust is
based on a false assumption of
democratic leadership, and
that’s not true.
A leader must be willing not
only to, in the end, have listened and attended to the concerns of everyone but also be
willing to make the decision
and take responsibility for it.
Sometimes, you have to use
different modes in different
contexts. So early on in my
presidency, occasionally, I
would find myself in a situation where I would have
groups of people — whether
they were students or faculty
or alumnae — saying to me
that such and such a decision
had to be overturned or
changed, and I would say, ‘You
know, I’ve listened, and I
understand your concerns,
and I have reconsidered, but
the fact is, this is a good decision, and we’re going to go forward with it.’
I have yet in my career at
Mills to find one of those that I
wasn’t successful in addressing that way. But sometimes,
you have to be pretty tough;
you may have to be even stronger than you anticipated
in order to simply make the
lines clear so no one steps
over the line, either.
It’s like being the mayor of a
town. You’re listening to everyone’s concerns, and you want
to meet them if you possibly
can, but you have to think
about where the resources are
best put.
