The everyday choice of leadership

Laura Link’s 18:83 Speaker Series talk weighs impact of job titles versus skill sets in developing leadership traits

When Laura Link asked questions of her audience, she didn’t want a “North Dakota nice” response.

Her questions took the form of action. And for every action, she wanted a loud reaction from those present for her 18:83 Speaker Series talk.

“You stayed late not because anyone asked, but because someone needed help and you were there,” Link said. “Is that you?

“You noticed someone was struggling, and you said something out loud to them directly.

“You told the truth in a meeting when it would have been much easier to stay quiet.”

As she went on, she kept pumping the crowd, “I can’t hear you, North Dakota,” she said with a hand to her ear.

She asked people to respond if they took care to remember someone’s name; if they gave feedback because they cared more about growth than their own comfort; if they advocated for someone who wasn’t in the room; or if they changed their mind out loud, in front of others, when learning something new.

Of all these questions that received shouts and claps from her audience at the Memorial Union, she never mentioned a title, a position or superlative.

“There is a tendency to conflate two things that are actually very different,” Link remarked. “Administration is a role. Leadership is a practice.

“Administration is the job that somebody gave you. Leadership is the thing that you choose every day, with or without permission.”

Through her time on stage, Link made the case for real leadership as being the trust, credibility and moral standing that makes others want to follow — that positional authority does not equal relational authority.

Laura and the elephant

Link, an associate professor of Teaching & Leadership and director of the Teaching & Leadership master’s degree program at the College of Education & Human Development, was the latest to take part in UND’s leadership speaker series, named for the University’s founding year.

Much of her talk went back in time to one of her most formative experiences: entering kindergarten as a 4-year-old, ecstatic for art class.

On the second day of school, Link met the art teacher. Walking into the room, she noticed this teacher’s particular choice of decoration: rules, procedures and policies posted throughout the room.

 “It wasn’t going to tamper my excitement,” Link said.

Their first activity was to trace animal patterns for the class’s bulletin board. Link already had an extravagant design in mind, remarking that she thought of it as her “first gallery showing.”

But her teacher had specific rules: face the front, stay seated, wait patiently and do not touch the patterns under any circumstances.

However, when the young, eager Laura Link received her pattern — resembling an elephant — it teetered on the edge of her desk.

“I started blowing on it because I didn’t want it to fall, thinking that would somehow encourage it to stay up,” Link recalled.

When the elephant fluttered to the ground, it was Link’s instinct to get down and pick it up.

“Her voice just filled the room,” Link said of her art teacher. “‘I told you, all of you, to not move a muscle while I passed out the patterns. Take your chair to the hallway, Laura. You’re not allowed to be part of this activity if you don’t follow the rules.’”

She sat in the hallway for 40 minutes.

On stage, Link recalled in detail the faces of those walking by, including her siblings and neighbors. And after being brought back to the class, she was told she would get an F on the assignment and would never have her name (and beautifully decorated elephant) on the classroom bulletin board.

“And after that, I just colored strictly within the lines, whether it was art class or regular class,” Link said. “I did not raise my hand. I decided that the arts, that expression, was not for me.

“In particular, I learned that being noticed wasn’t safe.”

‘Real leaders help everyone rise’

Decades later, through a career in education that led to becoming a scholar of K-12 grading, Link developed a few takeaways from that memorable experience.

First of all, the teacher was a terrible grader, Link said. “She scored me on a behavior, a simple movement, totally unrelated to the art lesson that we were supposed to learn.

“She used her grade book as a weapon to punish … to instill fear … to silence and marginalize me that day.”

It was a way of showing who had the authority in the room. But Link argued that the art teacher practiced a type of anti-leadership. She had a title, she had rules, “and she used every bit of it to make a 4-year-old feel even smaller than she was,” Link said.

That’s administration without leadership.

Link argued that one doesn’t need the loudest voice or the corner office to be a leader.

Link’s first art teacher chose power over building followship. She chose to punish rather than teach. It was “her way or the hallway,” as Link phrased it.

“Real leaders help everyone rise,” she continued. “They understand the importance of supporting other people rather than just managing their own optics. They engender goodwill and trust.”

Practicing leadership is an everyday choice, and it’s already within one’s reach.

“My advice to you is to go pick up the elephant, even if it’s a metaphorical one,” Link said. “Not because anybody is watching, not because it’s in your job description, but because it fell and you were there.”