As a senior VP responsible for the core operations of an institution with 48,000 students and 2,700 staff, Dangerfield has signed on for his most challenging, and rewarding, gig to date. He shares his insights about how the worlds of business, the military and education intersect.
You rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the military. I’d like your take on leadership, and how your military background plays into your work in civilian life.
One thing military experience gives you is a real perspective on, and appreciation for, diverse cultures. That may seem surprising if you think about the traditional military image, but nowadays, with its peacekeeping and peacemaking roles, the military is far more educated than before. It has to be.
These days, you’re likely to be in a situation where you need to be aware of the environment you’re in. The military takes you places where you experience other cultures, and where you must understand what makes those different people in different cultures tick. It gives you exposure to their values. To work effectively, you become immersed in the experience of other cultures.
When you’re spending long days and hours away from your family, you sit around a table with other soldiers and you talk about the politics of the country you’re in. It’s a very positive thing. You really understand what’s going on, and so it gives you an awareness, an acceptance of what the country is all about. You have to deal with that and you have to get on with that, and appreciate the good things but also deal with the difficult things.
I found this to be true through my entire career. It didn’t matter whether it was Rwanda, whether it was Croatia or Bosnia. You must get a sense of a place.
When you did your tours overseas, was that as a peacekeeper?
Yes. I did almost all of my overseas time in the ’90s. I was involved in peacekeeping. I served in Bosnia, with NATO. You might say it was more along the lines of peacemaking.
There’s a cliché out there that in the military you bark out orders and people follow them. How much of that is true?
You still have to bark out orders, but it’s in the same way that, on a football team, a quarterback barks out the orders in the call. The players then get back into the huddle and chat about what’s going on. That happens in the military, too. You have a captain, yes, but every single player in the team is central and essential. If you’re not listening to the other people on your team, you’re losing out.
You often hear the story of the strategic corporal. This is the young corporal who’s on patrol or guarding a bridge or whatever. The corporal is all of 20 years old, with a CNN camera in their face while they’re making decisions. You’ve trained them and now you trust them. Yes, you bark orders when you have to; it’s to make things move quickly. The preparation for barking that order has been preceded by extensive communications with the entire team. There’s a lot of learning going on, all the time. You consciously practise and practise. You learn from each other and you talk to each other, and that’s in everything from the staff work right on through to the operations.
Is that why you chose, when you left the military, to go into academia, because of your interest in the learning process?
It was a good fit for me, but I didn’t leave the military with a clear path to heading off into academia or anything post-secondary. The connection or the link was that we do a lot of training in the military, so I understand education. I was a chief instructor for some time, as well. I went to a national training centre, so I also understand learning outcomes, and how to put things together, and how to get the best performance and results from a program.
Why did you leave the military?
I served for 20 years, right almost to the day. They were 20 great years, but like a lot of people, after 20 years, I said, “Wow, what else can I do?” It was the right time, right place, family-wise, to step out of the military. I had attended military staff college where you do high-level strategic planning program, sort of like a graduate-level Masters. I had also completed my MBA through Royal Roads University while in the military. Through those experiences, and the job I had here in Vancouver as a chief of staff, I had built up a network, so the transition was quite easy.
At Capilano University, you were the dean of the business school. Did you have a business background prior to that?
Running a brigade as a chief of staff is a lot like running a business. I had a large staff, a budget, public relations folks, HR people, all of it. Every component that you would have in a business was also in the brigade. Having completed an MBA at a civilian university, I was able to put all that together and do some consulting for businesses in the fields of strategic planning, organization development and succession planning, that type of thing.
You moved very quickly and successfully into academia. How did your military training help you, and what are the common leadership elements in academia, business, and the military?
In the military, you’re in a changing environment. There’s a fast track. You’re doing a new job every year, or every other year, so you learn to be a quick study to get a hold on things. A strength of the military system is that they don’t throw you into jobs and see if you sink or swim. They train for every position. They coach you. They mentor you in a performance culture, so you’re constantly being given the skills for both the job you’re in and for the next job. In most cases, these skills and training are very much transferable.
You have to be able to motivate people. Different people are motivated different ways. Academics are motivated in a different way than corporals, but they’re not motivated a lot differently than senior staff officers. The other big similarity between the military and business is planning. In business you often need to learn to think and plan on your own, unless you have completed an MBA or taken a workshop or something like that. Knowing how to write a strategic plan and turn it into an operating plan is difficult if you’ve not been shown how to do it and practise it. They do a lot of that in the military.
How do you motivate someone, whether it’s a corporal, or a private, or a prof?
I call it situational awareness. Situational awareness means understanding and getting to the heart of what makes people and organizations tick; what actually reaches through the barriers and gets to them. It’s something as simple as saying to someone, “Where do you want to go, and what do you want to do, and how can I help you get there?” Nine times out of ten people want to do well.
Too often I hear people saying, “Oh, I have to do a performance review, and it’s taking so much time.” If you don’t think that that’s what your job is, to motivate people and help them develop, you’re not going to get out of the gate.
Number two is, you’ve got to create the environment for them to be successful. It’s along my lines of how I define leadership. Lots of people are good at project management: let’s use that as an example from a business point of view. You can put together a project in the business plan, and you can do Gantt charts. But, if you can’t create the environment for the project to be successful, your project won’t go anywhere. So, you have to prepare the people, you have to prepare the environment. You have to have the resources in place and have the situational awareness to understand what’s important and central in the long run. You have to know what’s going to be key to launch the project.
How would a friend or a colleague describe your leadership style?
Leadership is something you learn and perfect. A person describing me 15 years ago might say something different to what they’d say now about my leadership style, because it’s constantly evolving.
I don’t think values can evolve. I don’t think the key leadership characteristics evolve. But I think what people would say about me now is that I’m the type of person who tries to bring people together and find the best in each person and the organization. There’s a lot of conflict in what leaders have to do. It’s not a matter of avoiding conflict, and I don’t avoid it. I try and get rid of the conflict by making people understand each other. I think people would also say I’m strategic and look at the longer term and I’m very persistent in getting there. You have to have perseverance. Good leaders are good vacuumers. You vacuum when you have to. Sometimes you can get away with vacuuming once a week and other times, when it gets messy, you have to vacuum every single day. As a leader, you’ve got to be ready all the time.
Do you recall when you first started thinking about leadership as a skill or a concept that could be developed?
I discovered the concept when I was a teenager. I was involved in sports and a couple of leadership projects through Outward Bound. But I didn’t really start to understand leadership until well into my 20s. That’s when I realized I could begin to develop my own style, and figure out what worked for me and for the people around me. I was fortunate. I had a lot of training, a lot of mentors, coaches and other people putting me through that.
How do you cultivate leaders within an organization? It seems organizations work better when there are many leaders within them.
A colleague of mine has a good expression: “Gold attracts gold.” And I believe that. Ram Charan [author of Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty] talks about leadership at all levels. To cultivate leadership, you need to bring potential leaders together and have to understand that part of the role of leaders is to dedicate their time to their people. Typically in organizations, it takes 10 or 15 years in a management position before a person finally gets the job right. It means spending a lot of time coaching them, helping them deal with tough situations, allowing them to take risks, continually training them, putting them in environments where they get a chance to try new things. It doesn’t happen by accident. Yet I’ve talked to many organizations that think it does.