How has your personal journey informed your motivations to do this work?

I have always been a leader, starting in elementary school. I was always the class president (or wanting to be the class president) or the organizer of the event.

Growing up in the Netherlands, you are aware of big infrastructure works. That’s why the Netherlands even exists—because they build dykes and polders to keep the water out. I was intrigued by national highway plans, fascinated with the urban environment, so I studied sociology but with an interest in urban sociology. It was more or less random that I got a job in Chicago at the Department of Urban Planning. When the director of the center left, I became acting director. Right around that time, I got my PhD, and when they did a search to fill that position on a permanent basis, with that came the faculty position in Urban Planning. So in a sense, I’m an accidental professor of urban planning.

It’s not accidental that I’m a professor. I certainly applied to jobs like community organizer or social service provider. I was interested in doing good in some way in the city, but I also realized I wasn’t really a frontline person. I was willing to be in the trenches part of the time, but I also wanted to be able to step back and reflect on, and write on, and possibly teach about what I was doing. The academy, of course, is a perfect place for that.

To pursue a PhD, you have to be willing to spend a lot of hours by yourself, so it attracts personalities who are not necessarily good about being with other folks. If you are just slightly better than most, you’re going to fall up. That’s how I describe my career. I didn’t set out to become a president or dean or anything like that. But I benefited along the way from mentors who told me I had leadership potential and encouraged me to pursue things. I benefited from a whole variety of training programmes: the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) when I was in Chicago, a training programme at Wharton, a programme at Harvard…. So I’ve done various forms of leadership training, and those have been relevant and helpful.

What does innovation mean to you in the context of your work as an institutional leader?

I don’t use the word innovation all that often. Change, improvement, progress, yes. Innovation always seems a little bit pretentious, frankly. I assume they mean a more drastic form of change than the gradual evolutionary process that always happens in organizations.

At Portland State, I would use the word innovation with regard to totally changing the nature of how we do our internal budgeting, or developing the performance-based budgeting that allows us to allocate cost. The other big one is reTHINK PSU, to really change and rethink how we went about our pedagogy.

How did you experience the severity of external pressures on your institution?

Portland State’s community engagement came out of fights with our larger sister institutions that didn’t want us to grow. That required us to create strong coalitions with the local business, government, political, and not-for-profit sections, because we needed them to stand up and say, ‘Yes, we care about this university’. We attracted more and more faculty who saw their work as being about community engagement, and then it became self-propelling because now the whole faculty body was going that way.

I was influenced at that time by the rise of MOOCS [massive open online courses]. I didn’t think it was necessarily the answer, but I did think that we couldn’t keep doings things the way we always had. We were not going to be a MOOC university, but we needed to think about the availability of online learning and the new learning styles of people who are technological natives—how that changes what we do, how we do it, and who we do it for. It wasn’t like all of a sudden half our students were signing up for MOOCS, but it was a big change in the environment that could become a crisis if we didn’t deal with it. It would involve a focus on how to use technology to change the nature of our teaching.

How would you describe the leadership structure you created?

My three key components of leadership are vision, commitment, and participation. If you want a change, you have to get a champion for it. That person is, in a way, more important than the unit. There’s got to be somebody whose responsibility is to really drive it. On the whole, that is how you’re most likely to be successful. The risk of that model is that if you make it a unit, that unit ends up being vulnerable if there’s a leadership change.

Clearly, there is a team. We’ve spent a lot of time doing team-building exercises over the years with retreats and with different compositions of the executive committee. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I’ve played a pretty big role in issues. Certainly, other members of the executive committee have brought issues to the floor. The performance-based budgeting, the initiative for that did come from me, but 90 percent of the actual making it happen came from the Vice President of Finance and Administration, first, and then to some extent the provost as well.

If you talk about the general leadership model, it’s certainly a system of distributed power. It’s not like every decision either runs through me or even through the executive committee. There’s a lot of power vested in the deans when it comes to the colleges, in the vice presidents for their divisions, in the various unit directors for their units. It’s an organization where power is fairly decentralized. I don’t want to say it’s democratic or bottom-up, but units have a fair amount of autonomy over their activities.

How did you frame your vision for this work? What was the story you told about why this was important?

A vision does not arise full-blown from the leader’s head, but it comes from the leader’s interpretation of the institution and where it wants to go. But you can’t do it without participation. It’s got to be based on broad participation.

One of the most important roles of a leader is to be the “storyteller-in-chief”. You allow people to see the best in a new light. There’s a story about three baseball umpires discussing how they call balls and strikes. The first one says, ‘I call ‘em as I see em’. The second one says, ‘I call ‘em as they are”. The third one says, ‘They ain’t anything until I call them’. It’s the notion of respective sense-making. You tell the story of where the institution has been, the challenges it has faced, how it came to be where it is now. Obviously it has to be grounded in truth, but all stories are selections. All histories are selections that become compelling stories to help people understand why we are where we are now—and how they might move forward, building on that history, facing those challenges, or taking advantage of those historic opportunities.