Sidneyeve Matrix on Empathy, Learning, & Leading

Brimming with wisdom, experience, and a fierce resolve to shatter stereotypes, Mayra Olivares-Urueta  captivates us with her mission to dismantle institutional barriers and create a more inclusive future in higher education.

Readings and Resources:
Olivares-Urueta, M. (2022, March 28). From at risk to at promise: Fighting fiercely for the community college students we have to safeguard the futures they deserve. Teachers College Record, Date Published: March 23, 2022 https://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 24015

Olivares-Urueta, M. (2021). Mamis rising: Challenging the narrative of who belongs in community college administration. Journal of Applied Research in the Community College, 28(2), 79-92. https://www.montezumapublishing.com/jarcc/issueabstracts/fall2021volume28issue2

Olivares-Urueta, M., & Allen, T.O. (2021). Community colleges leaders’ role in nourishing student success at HSIs. In R.T. Palmer, D.C. Maramba, T.O. Allen, & A.T. Arroyo (Eds.),Exploring the unknown: Understanding the work of student affairs professionals at Minority Serving Institutions. Routledge.

Other episodes you might like:

Episode 67: Teaching is An Act of Love. So Is Leadership.

Episode 22: Feminism is Optimism, with Elise Robinson.

Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.

Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡

Dr. Elizabeth Keating is a linguistic anthropologist who explores language -- and more recently, narrative -- to understand people's daily experiences. In her new book, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations, she explores the power of asking open-ended questions that create connections by revealing the particularities of people's lives. 

As much as I find this topic compelling in my personal life, I am intrigued by how leaders can use this approach to learn more about their campuses. This approach seems particularly useful when folks are new to a campus or a role, and seek to understand what is unique about their new community. 

In particular, we discuss how specific questions that seem concrete open the door to meaningful memories, and the magic of asking people how they spend their time.

Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.

Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡

Last week in a newsletter I suggested to leaders that they reach out to their teams to talk about what’s happening in Gaza and Israel. Even as I made those recommendations I knew those conversations might be hard – not just for the leaders, but for everyone involved. Because talking about suffering is hard. One person – someone I trust – responded to my suggestion in a way that shows what hard can look like, and I thought it would be instructive to share that here. 

This is a short episode, but if you just want the thesis, here it is in three parts. 

Leaders of teams have a responsibility to reach out to people and have conversations, even when they’re hard. Those same leaders are likely to make mistakes in the process. When they do, they will benefit if they shut up and listen, genuinely learn, and do better next time. 

Part 1: Reaching out to do hard things. 
Part 2: Screwing up in the process.
Part 3: Shutting up and getting better.

That’s it.

Well, there's a little more. Thanks for listening!

Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.

Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡

I don’t know about you, but I did NOT end up having the summer I intended to have. 

I spun off in two directions: one pragmatic and logical, the other experiential and mystical. 

And it broke my brain. 

Listen to what I learned and how it's affecting this podcast. 

Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.

Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡

Teaching is an act of love.

After thinking about this with recent guests and faculty Rand Park, Sidneyeve Matrix, and Stephanie Cawthon, I've come to wonder if we don't expect far too much of our educators and far too little from our leaders.

Teaching requires emotion: compassion, empathy, affection. Even love. These are necessary for learning to take place.

If colleges and universities are learning institutions, then shouldn't the same principles apply? Leading also requires compassion, empathy, affection -- and love.

Readings & resources:
Ken Bain, What The Best College Teachers Do.

Joan V. Gallos and Lee G. Bolman, Reframing Academic Leadership.

Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.

Theresa Amabile, The Progress Principle.

Scott E. Page, The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy.

Other episodes you might like:

#65: Sidneyeve Matrix on Empathy, Learning, & Leading.

#38: Excellent Teaching, Excellent Leading.

#19: The Entanglement of All Things: Educating for Democracy

Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.

Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡

Today we wrap up our month of conversations about what teaching and leadership have in common in a conversation with Stephanie Cawthon, a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Stephanie uses her experience as a stage manager and her lifelong love of teaching to find innovative ways to engage the folks around her -- whether they're in a campus classroom, an online course, or an administrative meeting on Zoom.

Our conversation is grounded in our love of Priya Parker's book The Art of Gathering, which is a wonderful guide to creating spaces where people feel welcomed, included, and purposeful.

Stephanie spotlights the advantages of combining a clear framework and self-driven learning abilities in both teaching *and* leading. She also shares strategies for engaging students online and in person, which translates remarkably well into planning efficient meetings and honing our leadership skills.

This episode is very special to me: it was my first experience working directly with ASL interpreters, auto-captions, and video to make sure our conversation is widely accessible. I'm super grateful to Stephanie and her team for teaching me. You can watch the video podcast here. 

Readings and resources

Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering

James Clear, Atomic Habits

Joan Gallos & Lee Bolman, Reframing Academic Leadership

Ken Bain, What The Best College Teachers Do

Other episodes you might enjoy

Episode 63, How Teaching Prepares You for Leadership

Episode 46, How to Use Feedback to Build Trust

Episode 41, The Role of Dissent in Psychological Safety

Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.

Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡

Successful teachers, like successful leaders, know how to engage people's hearts.  Sidneyeve Matrix is one of my favorite people to talk about this with. A marketing professor and graphic designer with a Harvard credential in Instructional Design, Sidneyeve devotes I'm guessing most of her waking moments to thinking about how to help people learn by surrounding them with beauty. 

Sidneyeve joins us to today to share her insights into how design can stimulate empathy, facilitate learning, and act as a catalyst for entrepreneurs. We talk about how visual cues prompt our brains to fire, and how color, curiosity, and empathy keep us engaged in what we're learning. Sidneyeve shares examples from her college teaching, the coaching she does with entrepreneurs, and from her own design shop, Valentine Course Design. 

In higher ed we talk a fair bit about how visuals support teaching -- the visual syllabus is nothing new -- but I'm struck by the analog to leadership. Imagine how joyful it would be to attend meetings where documents were actually enticing to look at, or where visualizations were used to engage our hearts and minds and prompt rich conversation. Sidneyeve makes even basic ideas -- like using color-coding to help cue people to where they are, or creating simple  leaderboards with eye-catching graphics -- begin to feel not only manageable but desirable. 

No matter where you are in your leadership journey there's something in here for you. And maybe you'll come out on the other side not just with ideas for using color and images in your LMS, but possibly with an idea or two for creating pretty agendas and event programs to bring life to your administrative docs. 

Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.

Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡

Meet Rand Park! He's a senior lecturer in the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at the Carlson School of Management, and he joins us this week to share his insights into how extraordinary teaching and authentic leadership can lead to both transformational learning and leading. 

Our discussion is threaded through with the importance of self-knowledge. Rand talks about how he learned to "be himself" in the classroom, and we explore the challenges of "being yourself" in leadership roles -- which is part of the journey both of us have taken in deciding *not* to pursue college presidencies.

My favorite part of this conversation is where we explore the tensions leaders face in decision-making. We talk about how leadership decisions set the tone for entire organizations, how empowering it is to grant autonomy and ownership to faculty and staff, and the importance for leaders to build up a strong and diverse team. 

Whether you're an educator, a leader -- or BOTH! -- this episode is for you.  

Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.

Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡

It's officially back to school season! Let's kick things off by thinking about all the things you already are really good at that you've learned by teaching, and how you can use those same skills in your leadership this year.

We'll talk about...
>> Listening & Empathy, and the power of building trusting relationships at work;
>> Providing Feedback, and why the single annual review is a *terrible* idea; and
>> Differentiated Instruction, and what it means to truly meet your team members where the are.

I'll also share the details of my new membership, designed exclusively for women leaders. The Leadership Community is open for registration this week only, from Monday August 7 through Friday August 11 at 8 pm central. Learn more at theclareogroup.com/community. 🧡

Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.

Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡

For our Summer Session we’re running a fan favorite playlist: a combination of the most-listened-to episodes as well as listener-requested favorites. Our Summer Session gives you a chance to revisit episodes you may not have heard in a while or even to listen to episodes you might have missed.

Today we're replaying Episode 26: In Community: Interracial Feminist CoMentoring, with Christina Holmgren and Jayne Sommers at the University of St. Thomas. Here's your link to the episode's original show notes. 

If you're enjoying the podcast, enter a chance to win a free book! Head over to Apple podcasts (or your fave platform) and leave a review on the uplift page. Once a month I'll randomly select one of that month's reviewers to receive a $20 gift certificate to bookshop.org. You get more summer reading, and I get to help you build your library! It's a win for us both. 

So grab a nice tall glass of your favorite summer beverage, pull up your favorite outdoor chair or grab your hammock, and enjoy a few moments of summer, on me. I’ll be somewhere doing the same. 😎

Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.

Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡