Education Is Still the Best Bet on the Future

Jon Clifton:
[0:07] Today on Leading with Strengths, I am with a very dear friend, the president of West Virginia University, Gordon Gee. He hails from Utah where he got his undergrad degree. He got his JD and EDD at Columbia University. And then at the very young age of 37, he became the youngest university president in the country. After that, he was the president of five different universities. And in 2009, Time Magazine said that he is one of the top ten university presidents in the country.

Gordon, it's great to have you.

Gordon Gee:
[0:44] Yeah, it's wonderful to be here, Jon. Thank you. Honored to be here with you.

Jon Clifton:
[0:47] How did you first come across strengths?

Gordon Gee:
[0:50] Oh, you know, when StrengthsFinder came out as a book, kind of the modern iteration of it, I was one of the first ones to read it.

Jon Clifton:
[1:01] When would that have been?

Gordon Gee:
[1:02] Oh, that would have been, what, 10 years ago?

Jon Clifton:
[1:05] So you were at what institution at that time when you first started?

Gordon Gee:
[1:08] Yeah, I was at Ohio State.

Jon Clifton:
[1:09] Ohio State, okay.

Gordon Gee:
[1:10] Right, and it was introduced, actually it was introduced to me. I saw it, first of all, in the Wall Street Journal. I can remember that. Okay. And then it was introduced to me by one of my friends at the university who said, you might like reading about, reading this book, and I did. And I became fascinated. And so, you know, so I have a copy everywhere I go almost. You know, I do have a copy at home. We now have our own personal copy that we have made for West Virginia University that we're giving to parents. And I just think that it doesn't take on biblical proportions, but it's pretty close to being a guide to what people ought to be thinking about in terms of their own personal lives.

Jon Clifton:
[2:00] Gordon, when you first took CliftonStrengths, of the top five, which one resonated with you the most?

Gordon Gee:
[2:05] Well, you know, the one that resonated with me the most was Woo. I'm one of the few Wooers in the world. But I think that the thing that resonated with me the most, obviously, was Achiever. Because, you know, I come from a very small town. No traffic lights, you know, the fact that a guy from a very small town in rural Utah could continue to do really wonderful things and have exceptional opportunities is something that I think does apply to me in terms of that strength. And let me just say, I mean, I think the whole CliftonStrengths issue is paramount for so many people to really understand who they are. And by the way, when I took it, all of a sudden I understood who I was. You know, it's as if an angel was on my shoulder and they understood who I was, you know, kind of my foibles and a variety of other things. So for those who haven't taken it, take it. For those who have taken it, learn from it.

Jon Clifton:
[3:06] So one of the top seven demands of leadership that we found in our research is leading through change. And you're talking about leading change at West Virginia. Can you talk about how you use your Achiever or any of your top five in order to do that? 

Gordon Gee:
[3:20] Well, I think that, you know, every one of my top five really work in that regard because changing within a university is very, very difficult. In fact, you know, universities hail back to the year 1200 with Bologna, and they don't want to really change. They believe that they really have the kind of God-given formula for how universities ought to operate, which is untrue. And it's been very difficult to try to make those kinds of changes. But with me, the way that I view it is that with, that we're trying to convince people to be the architects of change or else be the victim, the way that I look at it. And so therefore, you think about it. People want to think that you have some intellectual capacity. They want to think that you have some drive, I want to think that you've got to be able to persuade people. You've got to be able to understand where they come from and be able to adapt to that. I mean, all of those are really, in many ways, my top strengths, at least in terms of the change process. And if they hadn't been my top strengths, I'm not certain that some of the changes that we're implementing would be able to, that I personally would be able to lead in some form or other.

Jon Clifton:
[4:42] Can you talk about what some of those most difficult changes are and what strengths you're using?

Gordon Gee:
[4:48] Yeah, oh, absolutely. I think that, first of all, the most difficult change within the university is to get people to realize that there is a different kind of a future. And I think that the number one issue in many universities, particularly the large public universities, is complacency. We're happy doing what we're doing. We don't want to change. And so, therefore, the issue of taking those strengths that we've talked about, particularly the Achiever, particularly the Woo, particularly the intellectual side of it, is important because what it allows you to do is to make certain that you are talking at a level with very smart people but bringing it to a reality to them. And I think that those strengths really have worked for me. And by the way, I think that one of the great gifts of the strengths program is the fact that you also start to hire people around you who have different strengths than you.

And to me it's very important that I not have people around me who are like me. I want to have people that I enjoy, that we that we're truthful to each other, we support each other but who bring different strengths. I tell the story and I probably shouldn't do it, but I'll try to do it very quickly and that is that when I first became president of Ohio State the first time around, I hired a provost who was just like me. Wonderful guy. I loved him dearly, and he and I would laugh and the trains never ran on time. Second time I became president of the university, I hired a guy who was exactly the opposite from me. Hardly spent any time together, but, boy, the trains ran on time because we were compatible. And that's one of the beauties of the strengths program is that if you're really a good leader, Jon, you're going to get everyone to take this, and then you're going to take a look and see where you can move people so that their strengths contribute to the whole because it's a mosaic. And I like to think about what we're trying to do as a mosaic.

Jon Clifton:
[6:58] What inspired that philosophy? To talk about culture and then to talk about strengths.

Gordon Gee:
[7:02] You know, I think it's because of the fact that I've increasingly over time realized that you can have as much talent, and universities have tremendous amounts of talent, that you can have as much talent as you want. But if people are not supporting each other, if they're not getting along, if they're not thinking about the world in some common valence, then the institution is not going to achieve what it should achieve. Institutions, you know, in some ways it would be interesting for you to be able to develop a way for institutions to take StrengthsFinder, you know, to see what their strengths are and how you change and how you cajole that and how you move forward with their particular strengths. That's what I'm trying to do with the culture issue.

Jon Clifton:
[7:49] Well, your number four strength is Arranger. And people who have Arranger have an unusual ability to fit individuals into the right roles in order to make complex processes happen. Can you talk a little bit more about how you lead with Arranger?

Gordon Gee:
[8:06] Yeah, I think that that's interesting you just said that because I think about this a lot. I think for me at least, the opportunity to really hire people who have a sense of purpose themselves but who also believe in the larger goal, but also understand that they have unique responsibility that fits into the larger role, but that they play to their strengths and that we together create this kind of wonderful fabric. We're sort of, you know, in some ways, I think the university president is kind of a knitter. You know, you're knitting this fabric together so that there's a real opportunity for people to work very closely together. And by the way, we talk a lot about it. One of the things we do, I'm not a great believer in meetings. We meet on Tuesday as a senior leadership team, and I also believe in very small groups. When I was president of Ohio State, the senior leadership meeting we'd have to have in the stadium. I like to have it around a small table. But for the first half hour of an hour to an hour and a half meeting, we just talk about our culture and our strengths. That's all we talk about. We don't talk about who's going to win a football game, what the legislature is going to be doing, or anything else. We spend a good deal of our time talking about who we are and what we're trying to accomplish and how we can work together. That's that mosaic.

Jon Clifton:
[9:48] Now, speaking of deep thought, big ideas, you have Intellection number one. Can you talk about how Intellection manifests itself for you?

Gordon Gee:
[9:57] Well, you know, first of all, I read a lot, but I try to think not just simply about what's on the news, but really try to think about the world that I'm in and how I can be impactful. One of the things that I thought a lot about is in coming back to West Virginia, which was, by the way, not planned. I mean, it just happened. I had retired from Ohio State, and I was off doing other things. And then they asked me to come back for three months, and I came back for nine years now. But what it is for me is to think about ways that I can really impact the lives of others, of these young people that I have responsibility for, for the people that I'm working with right now. Right now, we're going through a very, we, like many institutions, have inherited a structural deficit. So you know, it'd be pretty easy to say, well, you know, we'll cut everyone across the board, a variety of other things. No, instead of doing that, what I'm doing is I've really done a lot of reading about how one creates a new reality. And that's what I'm trying to do right now. Secondly of all, I just think it's important to read. I read all the time. I never go to bed without reading for an hour before I go to bed. The only time I fall asleep is when I read some of my own books.

Jon Clifton:
[11:26] When you're reading, when you're thinking about what to read, that hour at night, what do you read?

Gordon Gee:
[11:29] Yeah, well, I read biographies. I read some fun things. I'm just reading a John Grisham book right now. You know, just things to take my mind. But I do a lot of reading of newspapers. I read four or five newspapers every day. I do a number of other things like that because I want to be informed. I think that intellectual capacity is also curiosity in the best sense of the word. And I think the minute you lose your drive to be curious about the world you're in is the minute you ought to hang it up in some way or other.

Jon Clifton:
[12:09] You know, one of the other seven demands of leadership is for leaders to think critically. And I think one of the big challenges that we see, at least here in the United States, is that when we ask Americans, how many books have you read in the past 12 months, a third of them say, I didn't open one. That's the percent that admits it. But what advice would you have for aspiring leaders who want to be able to think more critically? What should they be doing?

Gordon Gee:
[12:34] I think that, first of all, that's an interesting piece of data that a third of our folks are not even opening books. That's pretty frightening to me. But I think that, and particularly if you're a university president, but I think for aspiring leaders, I believe a couple of things that in terms of just the intellectual life itself. First of all, you need to be curious enough to continue to do writing and research. I've written a couple of books recently. I wrote one on the future of the land-grant university. I've written one about the nature of the public university, mainly not because I want to publish, but because I want to put my ideas out in some way and see if they can't bounce off of other people. So I think that's important. I'd advise that to any leader. Don't give up on who you are. And take advantage of the fact that, in this instance, you're in a university in which there's a lot of assets that are available.

Secondly of all, one of the things that I advise everyone is think about the university as a seminar. You know, I try to take maybe a half a day every week to just go around and see something that is really happening on the university campus, whether it be in the medical center, whether it be on our farms or our fields. Whatever you can do to kind of understand what is happening at the institution. But also, you learn all sorts of things. I mean, I have more damn trivia, you know, that I've learned just from being around. The other thing that I try to do in terms of advising other people and doing it myself is make certain you are surrounding yourself with the public you serve. There are 55 counties in West Virginia. My goal is to be in every county every year. I do most of it in the summer. But the real reason is because I want people to tell me what is happening in their lives and what I can do to be helpful to them as the president of the university. You know, in rural West Virginia, you can imagine some bow-tied-wearing Ivy League lawyer shows up. But after a while, they really enjoy having you come because you come and you come and you come again. And that's the issue of showing up.

Jon Clifton:
[15:01] The one strength we haven't talked about yet is Woo. I think that's the strength that a lot of times when people hear President Gordon Gee, they think of Woo. Talk about how you use that. Is it something that you use to build those communities in the 55 different areas throughout West Virginia?

Gordon Gee:
[15:17] You know, it was funny the other day at commencement, this woman rushes up to me. She says, aren't you the president of the university? I said, yes. She said, but you're so small. And I said, well, yeah, you know, height is not a requirement of my job. But the reason I say that is the fact that, you know, I'm 5'5 and 145 pounds, and so what I have to do is to use humor and grace and being very engaged with people. Besides, I love people. I mean, my daughter will joke all the time that my idea of a quiet evening at home is to have 400 people for dinner. And that really is, I mean, I enjoy the life of commerce with individuals. One of the things that I do, and, you know, I just told you I'm 79 years of age and I shouldn't be doing this, but every Friday or every Saturday night I call up a couple of students. I say, let's go out. I take them to get pizza. Student Affairs gives me a list of all the parties that are going on. I show up to 21st birthday parties, I go to the bars with these kids, trying to get them to, you know. I just want to see people in their place. And for me, And that's part of Woo-dom, if you will. It's that connective tissue that I love.

Jon Clifton:
[16:43] Have you ever had a moment where you just couldn't win someone over?

Gordon Gee:
[16:46] Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. 

Jon Clifton:
[16:47] What was it?

Gordon Gee:
[16:48] Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, never give up. And secondly of all, just understand that sometimes there are people that no longer, that you just can't win over and don't fret about it. I think that one of the things that, in terms of Positivity, which I think is my number 10, I think is always important is always look forward. I advise people never look through the rearview mirror. I think it's very important. I think the three ingredients in terms of strengths for your success are one, you just need to have a very thick skin in today's world. You need to have a good sense of humor and you need to be able to look for nerves like sewer pipes and I think all of those come into the Woo business in my view.

Jon Clifton:
[17:36] At what point did you come to that realization? I mean many people with Woo, they want everybody to like them so that can be kind of a barrier. 

Gordon Gee:
[17:44] Yeah, I think I used to you know when I you know this is almost literally the truth when I was at West Virginia first time around, the first time the student newspaper ever wrote a terrible article about me, I went home and went to bed. I mean it was horrible, and now what I do is I collect all these articles and so forth and I kind of use them as a as a way to entertain myself and other people you know when people write me stuff. But more importantly just understand that some somewhere, Jon, there was a time in which I crossed a Rubicon in which I realized that they were not saying terrible things about me. It was because I was a university president, and they were just personalizing it. And I think when you can cross that Rubicon to realize that it's not about you, but it's rather about the fact that you have responsibilities that they don't have and that they feel compelled to be able to tell you how to run your business. And when you get to that point, I do not go on social media. I do not, I mean, I use social media. I have a Twitter account, et cetera. But I don't read social media because I think if I did all the time, I'd probably never get out of bed. It's just very discouraging. People in their pajamas at 2 o'clock in the morning saying awful things about you. You need to move on.

Jon Clifton:
[19:11] What does it mean to you when you win someone over? Talk more about what that looks like.

Gordon Gee:
[19:15] Oh, I think there's nothing quite like a convert. As I said earlier, but I think that it's not just about winning someone over to like you. It's about winning someone to a point of view that hopefully will enlarge and ennoble themselves and the university that I'm in charge of or whatever the project that we're dealing with. In my view, the greatest impediment to so much of this is cynicism, the cynical nature we deal with, and I think that that's the one thing. And on those 34 strengths, I didn't notice the word cynicism. And I think that that in and of itself is something we have to try to figure out how we squeeze out. And so I think that allowing ourselves to have an effort to get people to think positively about who they are is really part of what we're trying to achieve here.

Jon Clifton:
[20:26] If there was a student that was at West Virginia and they took strengths, they found that they had Woo in their top five. If anyone was starting on their strengths journey, they found out, what advice would you have for them?

Gordon Gee:
[20:35] I'd tell them to run to Woo. No, I'd tell you something. I know that they joke about it with me because there are not many of us around, but I think it brings me great joy to have those kind of conversations with people and to really try to find out who they are and to make friends. You know, I love having friends. I love making friends.

Jon Clifton:
[21:04] How many friends do you think you have?

Gordon Gee:
[21:06] I have a lot.

Jon Clifton:
[21:07] If you had to put a number on it.

Gordon Gee:
[21:08] Oh, I don't know. But, you know, I've gotten, I've got, you know, I have the largest number of, I have my name on the largest number of diplomas of any American ever, you know, and I consider all of them my friends.

Jon Clifton:
[21:24] How do you stay connected to all your friends?

Gordon Gee:
[21:25] You know, telephone, I write, I email, I do everything. I do believe in connection. I really do. And I believe that people, you know, for me, at least, if someone drops me a note, I want them to know that I heard from them. So many people, I don't know if you've noticed this, but when you text or email, never hear from someone. I want to remain connected with as many people as I possibly can. It's not about numbers. It's just about the fact that I think if you like people, you're going to like yourself.

Jon Clifton:
[22:04] Now, Learner's your number two. And Learners want to learn everything that there is. Throughout your journey of everything that you've learned, what advice would you have for somebody that has Learner? Is there a point where you need to say, we've gone through the process of learning too much? What advice would you have for them?

Gordon Gee:
[22:21] Yeah, well, you know, my number 34, I think it's number 34, is Deliberative. You know, in other words, I don't deliberate very long. I try to gather as much facts as I can, but I'm very quick to make a decision. And I think that's one of the great things about being a Learner, is the fact that you're constantly soaking up information, and you kind of know how you can navigate some of these issues, but you need to do it very swiftly. I think speed is the best friend of a university president. You can get too far out in front and you have no one behind you. But on the other hand, so many of my colleagues that I see spend so much time trying to deliberate over every issue that they become catatonic. And I just think that's unacceptable.

Jon Clifton:
[23:18] And what strength of yours is it that drives you to crack off a decision?

Gordon Gee:
[23:24] Well, I think two things. One is I think that I have, I think as a Learner that I have a lot of confidence in what I've learned and what I'm seeing. I think that the other thing is the fact that, you know, as an Arranger, I just want to get things done, and I want to get them done fast. I think that those two, if you think about strengths, but for me, I think it's really the realization that if you don't move fast, you don't make decisions quickly, that you're going to end up putting the university in the ditch or putting whatever organization you're leading in the ditch. Too much deliberation. You know, the perfect squeezes out the good, and that just can't happen.

Jon Clifton:
[24:16] Now, when we look at strengths-based leadership, we found that there are four needs of followers, and one of the four is creating hope. Of your top five strengths, which ones do you rely on in order to create hope? How do you do it?

Gordon Gee:
[24:31] Well, I think that, first of all, I think Learner is important. I think the Woo is important because you have to exhibit and talk about it. But I think that the Learner side of it is very important because the fact that the more I learn, the more I see. I can see pathways for hope. I don't see pathways for misery, and I try to find from my reading and from my thinking and from all the conversations I have with people because learning is talking with a lot of different people, ways that you can that you can see where there are where there are opportunities and options and pathways. You know I was telling someone the other day that when I came to West Virginia we'd raced to the bottom in terms of healthcare and a variety of other things. And people just didn't see hope. So what did we decide to do? We decided that what we were going to do is we were going to take what was a nice academic hospital and we were going to create a hospital system that could serve the needs of every West Virginian in terms of healthcare and create hope. And guess what? In the last six or seven years, we've bought 24 hospitals. We now have people really knowing that they can get great healthcare. And that creates a hope cycle that really makes a difference to the people in my small state.

Jon Clifton:
[26:00] Now, every leader has had obstacles, challenges that they need to face, obstacles that they need to overcome. What's a big one that you had where one of your top five strengths or a mix of them helped pull you through it?

Gordon Gee:
[26:12] Well, I think that when I came to, you know, I can talk about institutions. Let's talk about Ohio State. When I came to Ohio State, it was a massive institution, 65,000 students. But it really was kind of an open admissions institution. It was you all come and then look to your right and look to your left, and a lot of you won't be here. And so I really felt that in order for the university to achieve what it should for the people of the state was to develop a selective admissions, to really take a look at how we could make certain that we were focusing, that we weren't a Red Cross unit, that we were just not educating or trying to educate people, we actually were engaging in the educational enterprise. I received tremendous amounts of resistance to that because it's a farming state. The land-grant mission, of course, was to let every kid come to the university and then let them go forward. And so what I did is I really developed a ... I really used my learning and my intellectual efforts to develop a strategy to convince people that, by the way, if we did this, that we were actually going to improve what we were doing for the smaller communities and people in that state. And I came back 10 years later to Ohio State to become one of the really selective institutions among the big public land grants. And the people of the state really valued it much more for what it was about. But it was a tough slog. It was touch and go there for a while whether or not I was going to survive that one.

Jon Clifton:
[28:17] Speaking of creating change at universities, you are now creating a major initiative at West Virginia around strengths, where every student can get in touch with their own top five strengths and learn and grow around those. Can you talk more about what is that and also what inspired it?

Gordon Gee:
[28:35] Well, two things. One is the fact that as we're going through this transformation of our university, I want to focus on three things. One, I want to put students first. Unfortunately, too often we don't put our students first. We organize universities for the convenience of those of us who work there. Secondly of all, I want to be fiercely land grant. I want to believe that Abraham Lincoln, if he were alive today, would say, now that institution is doing what I think it ought to be doing rather than kind of having filtered away in another way. And the third thing is differentiation. The strengths program plays into all of those. It puts our students first by helping them to understand who they are and helping us understand who they are and helping us develop strategies to play to their strengths, wherever they find themselves. Secondly of all, on the land grant side of it, what it really does is I think the StrengthsFinder, the whole strengths program, is all about building communities.

It's not, you know, you may not think about it this way because you guys are so immersed in it. But to me, what I have really enjoyed about the strengths program as I've gotten so immersed in it is the fact that it really is about building communities. It's about people coming together with different strengths and figuring out how they can work together. And I think that that's so immensely important. And the third thing is differentiation. I want Gallup to be our partner in developing a demonstration project that a large public university in a small state that is rural can develop a program in which we really use what you have learned as an organization on how we can improve the quality of life for people in ways that no one else is thinking about. I mean, it's pretty simple. I'm very driven by that notion of being a demonstration project, being unique, and using what we learn with our partnership with you to take to the world.

Jon Clifton:
[30:50] What's the difference between a graduate who hasn't necessarily identified their strengths, what it is that makes them great, and a graduate that has?

Gordon Gee:
[30:58] I think the ones who graduate without having really thought about these things, what they do is they float. They float from thing to thing. They're not quite certain. They don't have confidence. They're not clear about what their objectives are. They're not clear about who they are and what their purpose in life is. I think the students who are going to graduate from our institution with our strengths program are going to be confident. They're going to be humble. They're going to know that they have a calling that is bigger than them. They're going to know that if they follow that calling, that they can really make a difference in the world. It's not just about their own families, but it's about their own families and their own lives having an impact that goes beyond them.

Jon Clifton:
[31:52] When there are professors, teachers, faculty that are implementing strengths, what advice would you have for them in the process?

Gordon Gee:
[31:59] Well, first of all, I want to try to get them all to start implementing. I think that they're going to be a ... universities are kind of divided into thirds. You're going to have a third of them who will be cynical and say, well, what a dumb idea. You're going to have a third of them say, I'm curious. I think that's kind of ... and a third of them will embrace it because the fact they see it as something that they ought to be. What I want to do is I want to get that first third to start thinking about how this can be value-added to their teaching and their learning. And so what I would say to them, I'd say, you know, try it. Give it a chance. But start with yourself. You know, I think, for me at least, the revelation was when I really took the strengths profile, I realized all of a sudden, you knew more about me than I knew about me. And I think that revelation would be very helpful to a lot of people. And I think once you start with that, once you start with the notion that I've learned something from this, then it becomes a conversion. There's nothing like a convert to these kinds of issues.

Jon Clifton:
[33:05] The Surgeon General came out recently with a report on loneliness here in the United States. We've reported on it globally, that there's a global loneliness crisis.

Gordon Gee:
[33:14] And there's an unhappiness crisis. That's right.

Jon Clifton:
[33:17] That's right. As someone who has done such an incredible job cultivating friendships all over the world, what advice do you have for people?

Gordon Gee:
[33:24] Well, I think that, first of all, I think that he is right, the Surgeon General, about loneliness. If you take a look at it, one of the number one ingredients of this generation is they're lonely. The reason they're lonely is the fact that they're not connected to other individuals in person. They're connected through the internet. They're connected through texting. They're connected through TikTok or a variety of other things. You might know someone in that vein, but it is another form of loneliness. It's that you're in a dark room in your bedroom or somewhere you're doing this, and it's not worthy of the kind of connectivity you should have. So I think that the issue is that what we have to do is we've got to stop texting and we've got to start talking. And I think if we can do that, we're all going to be much more engaged in just changing people's lives.

Jon Clifton:
[34:26] President Gee, thank you so much for building a strengths-based university. And thank you for being a great partner of ours.

Gordon Gee:
[34:33] And thank you for letting us be your partner. And as I say, we're going to use a demonstration of West Virginia to change the world. Amen. Amen.

Transcript autogenerated using AI.