Global Lessons from the Soul of Leadership

This post is one of a series of powerful, eye-opening interviews from Jensen’s ongoing research on Leadership into the Future of Work, as well as from the study by Ultimate Software/Jensen Group: Reimagining HR for the Augmented Era. 

Susan Mullins is Board Chair of UWC Costa Rica. United World Colleges (UWC) is a global education movement that makes education a force to unite people, nations, and cultures for peace and a sustainable future. UWC has 17 International Bacculaureate schools and colleges on four continents, mainly focused on 16 to 19 year-olds. Central to the ethos of UWC is the belief that education can bring together diverse young people, crossing national, religious, economic and gender divides, on the basis of their shared humanity, to engage with the possibility of social change through courageous action, personal example and selfless leadership.

What Have You Learned About Leadership? 

“In 2013, UWC-Costa Rica asked me to join the board and then to be the Board Chair. Immediately after accepting, I had a panic attack: What the heck am I doing? Is this beyond my own skills?

“The next day I met with a group of students from the mediation program who were telling me about being third-party mediators.  I decided to reframe their conversation, asking them about how they handle their own conflicts. That ignited the room! That was the moment when I realized what I needed to do to lead — ask the right questions at the right time. As a leader, I didn’t need to have the answers. I needed to hold the space and ask the questions to enable everyone to go to the place where personal learning comes out.

“At least initially, a lot of leadership is: Be quiet. Step back. And be willing to listen. Then ask questions that open up everyone’s thinking — including your own. And make sure others are also invited to ask those questions. Surface what wasn’t considered, what wasn’t being discussed or seen.

“One example: We worked for a long time on our campus master plan — how to expand and improve the infrastructure of the school. Then we brought the students into our exploration process.  As we explored together all the possible options to completely renovate our current campus, one student asked: ‘Have you ever considered that maybe it would be better to build the new campus on another site?’ We never thought about that. We assumed that the students would never consider that because they were so attached to the current location.

“That 17 year-old’s willingness to ask the leaders of his school that question opened up completely new possibilities for us!

“Corporate boardrooms need to do a lot more of that. Engaging everyone, from the newest hire to the most senior executive, in key decisions. It does take more time, but the richness of the conversation and possible solutions creates so much more buy-in!

“I try to spend time sitting down over coffee with students, faculty, the housekeeping staff. I talk to them about themselves. Their lives. ‘How’s it going?’ That leads to conversations we need to care about. One housekeeper recently told me about a student who wasn’t leaving her room much, and that enabled our Residential Life team to get her some help. One cook in the kitchen cared enough about the students to notice another girl’s eating disorder, which enable her to get help.

“Everybody is a partner in the success if the organization, if… if you treat them that way. If you get to know them, not just their jobs.” 

Creating the Space for Personal Transformations

“We had a student from Syria who announced to me, ‘I will never like a Jew,’ because of what they had done to his family — he was a refugee from Palestine, taking refuge in Syria. 

“By the next year, his best friend was a boy named Noam from Israel. They shared with our community about how they built the bridge. They argued with each other, but they stayed in the process. My takeaway for the larger world’s challenges is that the secret is the willingness to stay in connection, in the process, even when it gets hard, even when you don’t know the outcome. 

“This is not easy. It’s time-consuming. But the payoff, I believe, is huge. It is nothing less than changing the world, one person at a time.

“Currently, we have students from 69 different countries. They come with different languages, different religions, different cultural and economic backgrounds.  Some are refugees from areas of conflict, others from families of privilege. The idea behind UWC is to bring together people who are very different, but they all have one thing in common. They come wanting to have their boundaries challenged. They want to be part of a global community. That takes courage on their part to leave their comfort zone for an unknown country faar from home. And it also takes us, at all of our UWCs, to create and hold a safe space for that to happen.

“We emphasize critical thinking skills. We embrace and are intentional about extreme diversity. One student said, ‘When I came here, I thought I would learn to tolerate people who are different. And now I love our differences.’

“As an example, most students have very strong opinions about the food in the cafeteria. Most often, they want more of whatever they ate at home. During one of those conversations, a boy from South Sudan spoke up. He said, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but in my country, we don’t even know if there will be food to eat.’ Every student suddenly realized that there were other realities. And that boy’s contribution changed the whole context of the conversation. 

“Conflict transformation is one of our core competencies. In a diverse world that’s also being constantly disrupted, we must learn to speak and listen to each other differently—with open hearts and minds. We must learn to speak up for ourselves in ways that are honest and transformative.

“The most important basic thing to do for a coach, manager, facilitator, or mediator is to guide interactions in such a way that when everyone leaves that conversation they have the tools and prompts to continue the conversation in the same way. 

“I would make some form of conflict transformation communication, or crucial conversations, a requirement for everybody in every organization.

“This is hard. Because the work is hard, the issues are tough. So we need to remember to create fun at the same time. Emma Goldman, the Russian writer and some say anarchist, said, ‘If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.’ In this very hard work, we must also find the joy, and fun, and laughter.”

Why Did You Make Your Career Shift? What Makes You, You?

“My parents were heads of the volunteer fire department in Sandy Springs, Georgia. And when my brother, sister and I were very young, they told us what a resuscitator was, and that they needed to buy one for the fire department, and they sent us to the grocery store and all over town with raffle tickets. Who could resist little kids trying to say resuscitator? 

“That’s my earliest memory of being pulled into the idea that no matter how old or how little you are or how much money you have, or don’t — that we are all called to service. That’s how I was raised.  

“In my career, I went from being a public television executive and producer, to Hollywood to be a studio executive on shows like The A-Team and Knight Rider and TV movies. That paid me well enough so I could continue to do service work that fed my soul. My job fed my wallet, the service work fed my soul.

“I was on the board of one of the earliest shelters for battered women, went to El Salvador during their civil war with a medical relief group, to working on the AIDS quilt that went to Washington DC, homeless feeding projects, etc.

"After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan began, I was feeling very cynical and depressed, and feeling hopeless, like there is no way out of this. That was the first time in my life I ever felt like that.  

“When I was feeling my lowest, I ran into a friend who said, ‘You’re not going to believe what I’m doing.’ He said, ‘I'm at a school called UWC-USA, running The Bartos Institute for Constructive Engagement of Conflict, in Montezuma, New Mexico. We have 206 students from 83 countries. You’ve got to come see what we’re doing.’

“So the next weekend I flew there and spent four days with these special students from all over the globe. And I discovered something—that it was in the younger generations that I found hope for the future.

“I started by going there up to four times a year to help with retreats on conflict transformation and leadership. A few years later, a colleague from UWC-USA asked me to be part of a very special Project Week bringing some of our students from the UWC-Costa Rica school to be with teen leaders from rural villages in El Salvador. Our students came from Finland, Netherlands, Brazil, Paraguay, and Belgium. They had been trained to do community building, creative problem-solving and, most importantly, invite more open conversations and connections between these youth who never had the opporunity to do this.  It was transformative in both directions.  Our UWC students, learned and were equally inspired by the resilience and courage of teens who are finding their way in a post civil war country.  This is how we can transform and shift our thinking and our realities.

“For seventeen years now my calling is to help create, support and sustain this unique educational and  UWC Costa Rica so we can continue to build the next generation of leaders.”

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