The Listening Tour Is the Work (opinion)

This fall, at colleges and universities across the country, new campus presidents, provosts and deans are starting their appointments with a listening tour. Just saying the words at the beginning-of-the-year assembly might elicit an audible groan from a long-suffering faculty member seated somewhere in the back of the auditorium.

Listening tours have become such commonplace rituals, especially on campuses that have experienced frequent leadership turnover, that they will almost surely be met with a tepid reception, if not overt skepticism. A groan is a thoroughly warranted response to a tour performed perfunctorily—highly documented for social media and amounting to little more than some scribbles in a notebook and opportunities for the new dean to show off an impressive wardrobe of campus T-shirts.

And yet, newly arriving leaders are facing stakes that are higher than ever. When financial deficits and enrollment pressures are layered atop an overt air of politicization and simmering mistrust of administrators, listening tours take on newfound importance and scrutiny.

As leaders who have undertaken our own listening tours—and who have sat across the table sizing up new leaders on theirs—we offer some perspectives to elevate your listening tour into the leadership act that it is. We are entering our third and fourth years in our current roles, and many of these insights are only apparent to us now.

What’s in It for You?

The biggest misconception about listening tours is that their primary purpose is to give you more information, context and time before making hard decisions. Structured conversations will almost surely reinforce what you already know, help you become fluent in the local jargon and deepen your well of arcane campus trivia. But you can probably gather this information, and perhaps more efficiently, in other ways. 

See yourself first and foremost as an ethnographer. The real value of a listening tour is that it provides you with rich nuance and insights into interpersonal dynamics that can’t be found in the fact book. What you hear between groups and individuals—points of pride, sacred myths, where there is shared agreement and where there decidedly isn’t—equips you to take informed, calculated risks.

And while there is much you can’t control as a new leader, such as the size of your incoming class or the budget deficit you need to close, you can control the quality of the attention you bring to those you have been entrusted to serve. The reward for your attentiveness is building the relationships that will serve as the real currency for the work you hope to do. This is anything but a hollow exercise; this is advanced statecraft.

Your listening tour is, for all practical purposes, the first formal demonstration of how you lead. In most cases, it will be the single highest-leverage act of your first year on the job.

What’s in It for Them?

Here’s a truth worth saying plainly: While you are touring them, they are touring you. Every colleague across the table is running a quiet calculation of their own, deciding whether you are someone worth investing in or someone to wait out. The tour is a two-way audition, and the leader who understands that they, too, are onstage behaves differently (and often better) than those who assume the spotlight only points one way.

So, what do your new colleagues actually get from these conversations? Ideally, it’s more than a chance to impress you or be impressed by you. For many, it is the first time in years that someone with the power to move resources has asked what they do all day, what they’re proud of and what they’re up against. Being made visible to power is not a small thing. This is especially true for staff, who hold enormous institutional memory and are asked to access it far too rarely. For them, simply being in the room is a powerful message.

Your colleagues also sense, at least intuitively, that a new leader’s priorities are wet cement for a semester before they are set. On Lisa’s listening tour as a consortial leader, one of her member college presidents told her directly and emphatically, “Less is more.” That succinct comment put everything in perspective and saved her from an innate tendency to overcomplicate things. It helped her realize that an early challenge would be identifying which competing priorities truly demanded attention. It gave her the confidence to refocus, invest in the programs that matter most and let some lesser things go.

Stakeholders know the tour is their narrow window to put something on your map before that map is drawn. And because you arrive carrying limited institutional history, people will tell you things they would never say to someone implicated in the last decade of decisions. That candor is a gift available only during the immediate transition, and the window closes fast.

None of this happens if, during your listening tour, you sit back and passively absorb, reserving judgment for a later time, a luxury the current low-trust environment doesn’t afford. Help your colleagues prepare for your visit by telling them what to expect, and ask for anything better handled in writing, like course enrollments, in a standardized format ahead of time, so it doesn’t crowd out the conversation. A few framing questions in advance help surface points of pride and institutional distinctiveness. But bring some presence and substance. No one expects you to walk them through a 25-point plan. They do expect to hear your early assessments and to begin to hear you talk about how your gifts and experiences align with the place and the moment.

What’s in It for Us?

Perhaps the real question all leaders and campuses should be asking at the outset of a listening tour is this: Is a listening tour the best use of a new president’s, provost’s or dean’s time?

To our minds, the value of listening tours is heightened in the current context of crisis, scarcity and fear. All leadership transitions are challenging, and these tours provide a designated period to smooth out the edges and ease some of the apprehension that accompanies the arrival of a consequential newcomer. Setting aside this time is a collective recognition that things are changing, and that we all benefit from having time to adjust.

Beyond their necessary meet-and-greet functions, listening tours offer a collective and public opportunity for a campus to reflect on its shared values and identify the projects most worthy of its time and attention. Even the smallest campuses have their silos, and listening tours are one of those rare chances when we, the silo dwellers, look up, look around and say, “Huh,” or maybe even “Wow.”

There are too few moments in higher ed these days where we get to believe that hard things are possible. The arrival of a new leader is one of those moments. And it’s important that we, as colleagues, get to bask in that sense of possibility. And sitting together, in an intimate audience with senior leaders best positioned to realize those possibilities, is a small but precious gift we can give ourselves.

Stick the Landing

The biggest mistake new leaders make with listening tours is thinking it ends with listening. Too many leaders spend hundreds of hours in conversation, but then nothing happens. Or at least nothing outwardly. Yes, you might have earned some trust and perhaps won a few fans, and you have undoubtedly learned a great deal about campus culture and history, but the tour doesn’t really end until you articulate your mandate as you understand it.

All your work was leading to this moment. Your listening tour gave you a perspective no other individual on your campus has, and your position provides a pulpit to do something with it that no one else can. Elegantly connecting these dots will likely contribute to your eventual success or failure.

To mark the end of Hilton’s listening tour, he produced a clarified mission, vision and values statement for his college. The clarified mission represented the shared thinking of faculty, staff and students across departments, programs and disciplines. He provided a framed copy of the new statement to all offices to display centrally, a clear, daily reminder of the ties that bind them together in a moment when there is powerful temptation to retreat inward.

And yes, it is nice when consensus emerges, and it surely makes your work a lot easier. But realistically, there will be hard decisions and hard work ahead. What a campus owes its new leader in exchange for being heard is to be led and to trade some of that well-practiced skepticism for the harder work of hope.

All that you learned on your listening tour will help you craft a strategy to share what you heard and what you propose to do about it. All faculty and college meetings are natural starting points, but now, fluent in the local language and customs of the place, you’ll be well disposed to choose your words thoughtfully and repeat them often in the places and with the individuals that matter. Now, you are one of them.