PODCAST | What Higher Education Needs (feat. Jeff Doyle)

Resources:

https://doylesdeepthoughts.home.blog/

https://www.vanderbloemen.com/schools

Transcript:

Christa Neidig:
Welcome to the Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Christa Neidig, Senior Marketing Coordinator here at Vanderbloemen. In today's podcast, William talks with Jeff Doyle about higher education and executive search. Jeff has spent over 25 years in higher ed, most recently, as the Dean of student learning and engagement at Baylor University. In this conversation, they discuss how higher education can benefit from the use of executive search. Read more about our work in Christian education at Vanderbloemen.com/schools. We hope you enjoy this conversation.

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, hey everybody. Thanks for joining us for a special education version of the Vanderbloemen Podcast. I'm thrilled today to have Jeff Doyle with us. Jeff has an amazing CV and has done a lot of work in higher ed. What won't show up on his CV is he, like me, share the common thread of being happy Appies. Jeff was on the faculty at Appalachian State and my senior year of high school, we had a partnership program where I actually took classes during my senior year of high school there. So great little hidden secret in the mountains of North Carolina. But Jeff, welcome. Thanks for joining us today.

Jeff Doyle:
Thank you. Good to be here.

William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I'd love to hear and let others hear a little bit of your story. We're mainly sending this to people that are in the education world, both the secondary and the higher education world, and just love to hear your journey to start so people know where you've been and what you've done.

Jeff Doyle:
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I grew up in Maryland, Eastern Shore, Maryland. My father was a professor at a historically black college called University of Maryland Eastern Shore. And as I went to college, I hadn't thought about going into higher ed, but I became a person of faith in college and I had a transformative experience. One of the quotes I use is you actively master what you passively suffer. And I wanted to go back and give a positive experience to other people in college. And I saw my father doing that for a lot of students that he worked with. So worked in universities since that time, some small Christian, some flagship state universities, regional publics, like App State, and most recently the last 11 and a half years, I was at Baylor University, which is a large private Baptist university.

William:
Yeah. I just graduated a daughter from there. So sick 'em.

Jeff Doyle:
Yay. Sick 'em, Bears.

William:
So if you were like, why does William just invite people that are from Western North Carolina into this? No, I was actually reading a paper that you wrote about, it was kind of a rationale for thinking through using executive search in the higher ed space. And I'd love it, we can certainly send the link out to the thing because it's well constructed and in depth. But give us a scan of that and particularly how you've seen what you put on paper came out of your experience. So how have you come to the conclusions you've come to. I'd love for you to just walk our folks through that.

Jeff Doyle:
Sure. Yeah, executive search was not on my radar for a while and I wanted to explore some alternative careers and so I had a friend say, "Hey, we'd be happy to have you help out with our group." And so started doing that. And at first I was like, "Can anybody really?" I mean, I'd been doing it and my colleagues had been doing it for years. I was like, "Can these people really do it better than us at the cost that they're doing?" And I think the biggest takeaway I had was that most people at churches at universities, we don't spend the time recruiting the leaders that we need. And I mentioned this earlier with you, but that biblical leaders are rarely people who promote themselves and try to become leaders. That the Lord typically raises up leaders that he has chosen, and sometimes like Moses gets it wrong early on and gets selected a lot later. Nehemiah had to wait a long time.

Jeff Doyle:
And so some of the greatest leaders are people that are lifted up without promoting themselves. In fact, there's a few sororities at Baylor that when they elect their president, you can't run for president. They basically vote for the people who best embody the values of their sorority. And when that person wins, they go to them and say, "Would you be the president because you do this." And I love that idea of finding people who can do an incredible job without them having to seek it out. And I think executive search taps into that is that we go out and we find people and help them realize you could have an incredible impact at a place like this, even though maybe you and your family had never thought about that. And that's something that most organizations are not able to do.

William:
Yeah. What would you say, you've been in higher ed a long time, what would you say are some of the gaps in hiring that you've seen executive search fill?

Jeff Doyle:
Sure. So obviously recruiting I think is a big one and spending time doing that. It's not an error where you can just post a job ad and people will apply. But I think also knowing who people are like, as you saw in my piece, most humans make it a judgment about who people are within the first few seconds of getting to know them, even when we try not to like, that's just the way our brains work because it's been advantageous to be able to make those judgements quickly.

Jeff Doyle:
But search firms will slow us down. If you think about the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, he talks about we have to slow our brains down some time and make wise decisions. And I think search firms do that. And one of the ways they do that too is through reference checks, talking to people. I'm shocked by the number of searches that don't check references. And when you're thinking I've had an hour at the most with this person, and I could talk to someone who's had 30 years with this person, who's going to have a better idea? Even if they're sending their champions forward, their champions are still going to understand some weaknesses that they have in them. And so I think that would be another area of reference checking that I think search firms have typically done a really good job with.

William:
That's great. That's great. And if you could go back and understand the pain points of people in higher ed right now, particularly at Baylor, and I'm not asking you to talk about Baylor, but it's a Christian, it's one of the CCU schools, I think it may be one of the largest ones, what are the things that are keeping people up at night in higher ed these days? And maybe they're different since the pandemic than they are than they were before. Maybe they're the same things, or maybe they're just bigger than they used to be. What would be the things that are keeping people up at night so that our listeners can understand, "Oh, I'm not crazy. That's keeping me up too." Or we can understand the journey, because the great puzzle to figure out in hiring is to say, what are the pain points and how will this person help.

Jeff Doyle:
Yeah. Yeah. I think so part of that is with regards to a place like a church or a university like Baylor is how do you assess someone's faith in an interview? And that's extremely difficult to do. We know the people that can go to church on a Sunday and say all the right things and yet be dying inside. And so that's one of the things you wrestle with is when you're interviewing, I knew faculty members who were like, "I was told that they were going to ask me these questions about my faith and this is what I should say." And so Baylor's had to be more intentional than ever about seeking out that alignment with their Christian faith.

William:
You tell me recently about a book that helps you with recruiting and hiring. It's an Adam Grant book. Maybe a lot of people have read it, but walk us through that.

Jeff Doyle:
Sure. Yeah. So Adam Grant in this book, he looks at over 30,000 people and identifies people as givers, matchers, or takers. Givers are more likely going to keep giving, even when something happens to hurt them. Takers are typically going to keep taking no matter who gives to them and matchers are going to do an equal swap. And he says, who are the people that are most successful? And he says that they're surprisingly, and no one's ever guessed this right including me, was that the people at the bottom are the givers because there's a lot of people who give a lot, get stepped on and get pushed down. But the people at the top successfully are also the givers because they're rewarded over time. And the matchers identify what he says the takers are and they pull them down a notch and they elevate the givers because they want people that better reward their environment of a safe environment to be staff members.

Jeff Doyle:
I say that because in a place that you work, you want to be around people that are givers, but we struggle to know who those people are. Going back to the reference check question, how do you know who somebody is without spending some time really studying them? And that's what Adam Grant says. He says that you have to ask, like one of the questions he says is a key question is can you explain to me who the three people in your life that you've most influenced? And that takers will typically mention three people that are ranked above them in the hierarchy because they are choosing to identify something that makes them look good, where givers will typically mention three people that no one has ever heard of that they're proud of. It's like, what are you most proud of? And people talk about their kids. It's like, we don't know their kids. It's not relevant to us. But it reveals their heart of what they care about versus I'm proud of these external awards or famous people that I've rubbed shoulders with.

William:
That's great. That's great. And as you are thinking forward, where do you see the world of hiring in higher education going? A lot of people would say, "Oh, we just raise up our own people. Oh, we always go from the outside." But as you're looking down the pike, you've been doing this a while. You've been thinking this through. What do you see as the future for hiring in the education space?

Jeff Doyle:
Well, it's a pretty wide assortment of opportunities, but I don't think we'll ever get away from the need for quality people who care about what they're doing and the challenge in doing that. You've been around a long time and your company has too, and it's amazing to me how we can be so confident we're going to get something right and still get it wrong in terms of a hire. And so this is not a science, this is an art. And there are things that your company and others have learned to do to make better choices. But I think we will continue to wrestle with how do you identify the character of someone that's going to come in and be successful? And one of the things I often tell people is you've got to continue to be a learner. As soon as you think you've gotten there, you've got a problem.

Jeff Doyle:
Because you stopped learning and you never do that. And sometimes people rise to these positions of leadership and then they fail in a colossal way because they started to believe their own hype. And the fact is the more well known, entitled, and pay we get, the more likely that sins going to creep into our hearts and we're going to start to believe the hype about who we are. And so I think part of it is looking for the people that are humble and willing to continue learning and putting those people that are below them on the chart, above them the same way our Lord and savior did.

William:
That's good. That's good. Well, so for those who are out there trying to land that job, we're in the middle of this great resignation and there are lots of people moving around. You've seen people who get hired versus don't. What separates candidates from the pack? What makes them stand out in your mind when you're sitting down to interview someone?

Jeff Doyle:
Sure. Again, for me, I know that my instincts aren't always going to be right. We're naturally more attracted to people that are like us. And so in my head I'm telling myself, "You don't know this person fully. Don't jump quickly to a conclusion." I don't know how many times great candidates have risen up from within and never been given that shot because they can do an incredible job, but we're looking for... It's like, you're looking for this perfect person you want to marry in life, but yet the greatest marriages are often people who are committed and loving each other steadily and loyally over the years.

Jeff Doyle:
And so in an interview, I'm not looking for a lot because I know that who that person is is much deeper than what I'm going to get out of that time. I would need to go to a group like Vanderbloemen and say, "Tell me more about this person. I got a glimpse of who this is, and now tell me about who they are. Tell me about the people that they've impacted, how people share that they've been transformed or impacted in their lives." Because anybody can look good in a short window of time.

William:
Yeah. My friend Dave Ramsey says, "William, anybody, even a donkey can look like a thoroughbred for three interviews."

Jeff Doyle:
Yep. That's right.

William:
Oh, well. Well, Jeff, this is great to make a connection. And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the website that they should look for?

Jeff Doyle:
Sure. The website I use is www.deepthoughtshighered.blog.

William:
deepthoughtshighered.blog.

Jeff Doyle:
Yeah. It's a take on our generation of Jack Candy and there is a link in there of Jack Candyisms if people are interested.

William:
That's good. That's good. Well, thanks so much for making time for us today, Jeff. Thank you all for tuning in and we'll talk again soon.

Christa Neidig:
Thanks for listening to the Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast. At Vanderbloemen and our sister company, Christian Teams, we help Christian organizations build their best teams through hiring, succession, compensation and diversity consulting services. Visit our websites Vanderbloemen.com and Christianteams.com to learn more. And subscribe to our Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts to keep up our newest. Thanks for listening.