A favorite quote of Carolyn Humphrey’s is etched in stone in a downtown park in Charlotte:
“Life is mostly froth and bubble, two things stand like stone Kindness in another’s trouble, Courage in your own.” —Adam Lindsay Gordon
“Maureen’s work at the leadership program plants the seed. Myers-Briggs may not be life changing, but it does reveal ideas around ‘What’s good, what’s not so good?’ in the way we communicate and lead. Organizations are starting to hire based upon your ability to navigate relationships.” is when cell phones hit the market. Anyone who invested in pay phones was out of luck! Traditional universities are competing with more flexible, technologically savvy enterprises such as the University of Phoenix. So, there is a real opportunity for the ivory tower to be more innovative in how it operates— and a big part of that will be breaking out of the silos!” International students must not only compete academically, but read a cultural landscape without a map in hand. Graduates of the Emerging Leaders Program, like Kolar, feel they were handed an essential coda. “I try to help people develop their strengths. Many are already global citizens, but how to harness this? How to leverage it? To move us beyond working where we are?” asks Humphrey. “How do we develop students and faculty to expand upon our understandings and be open to learn more, versus being only concerned with competition?” With the test results from the MBTI in hand before the attendees arrive, Humphrey has a clear sense of each participant’s preferences around such leadership essentials as information gathering and decision-making. 6
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It’s An Oval-Watermelon World—or IS It? Humphrey believes in mental conditioning, likening it to racing. She calls mental conditioning sprint challenges, which require you to do something in a focused way over a short period of time until you figure it out or see progress and become more mentally agile. “I came up with the idea of sprint challenges, to help people not feel so overwhelmed with the leadership development process—almost anyone can commit to something for a short time if it promises a positive result,” she explains. The cliché “thinking outside the box” is hackneyed. But mental agility is an idea that has roots in newer research, such as that of positive psychology. Certain psychological strengths, including a positive attitude, can be taught and learned, according to psychologist Martin Seligman. Turning conventional thought into a mental challenge, or sprint, can be nurtured with mental exercise. Thinking how to work within a box helped Japanese innovators come up with ideas like square watermelons, Humphrey
explains. Yes, square watermelons, which are more easily stored in the refrigerator than oval shaped watermelons. True, nobody had actually seen a square watermelon before, but this didn’t stop innovators from changing Mother Nature’s age-old design. Humphrey thinks that if watermelons can change, we can, too. Change is difficult, she explains, and humans are almost hard-wired to resist it. But innovators do not. They overcome this innate resistance to tackle changemaking ideas head-on. There are many famous figures that re-shaped conventional approaches, handing us valuable keys to innovation, says Humphrey: Galileo, Da Vinci, Picasso, Edison, Ford, Tesla, Watson, Coltrane, Disney, and the team of Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs? The decades-old evaluative test reveals ways that innovation is tied to preferences. Understanding this is key. Listening and observing is an important way to discern the best way to understand other’s communication preferences. “We have to have an ability to relate to other people, to work collaboratively and globally. To understand how someone sitting in a conference room at Wachovia Bank has to relate to a client–say, Wal-Mart. Myers-Briggs helps them understand how,” explains Humphrey. She reviews the test during the two-day leadership program. Not quite household names,