Julia's Blog

I clearly hit a nerve the other day with a tweet I sent about social media courtesy. It went something along the lines of: if we’ve never met me please don’t say you’re my “friend” on LinkedIn without at least having the courtesy of saying why you should be in my network. Many retweets and comments followed. The gist was clearly that my annoyance was shared by many (and is a sentiment I’ve seen discussed elsewhere eg by Sit At The Table group members on LinkedIn itself). Since when is a “friend” a total stranger? This flurry on my Twitter account reminded me of a question asked at a recent session on social media hosted by Ryerson University’s Centre for Labour Management Relations for which I was a panelist.  The question was about social media etiquette particularly in the workplace. In some ways etiquette seems a quaint term. On the other hand, as our modes of communication become ever more immediate, our circles of acquaintance become broader and our reach enormous, thinking about what we say and do and how we say and do it perhaps are more important than ever before.

It seems to me the bottom line is this: communication is more than just an open line. In order to be valuable communication must be authentic. Authenticity means that what you say must be genuine and real and be from you in a meaningful sense. It must express who you are in a way that connects you into your social world. This is no more different in person than it is in the social media world. That’s why the words used to describe our relationships still seem to matter to us. “Friend” is different from “Follower”: a new follower is (almost) always a compliment (wow! You think I have something interesting to say!); a new friend is an investment in mutuality (we share a relationship).

What does this mean for social media particularly in our professional lives?

• Be yourself. That doesn’t mean your unedited after 3 beers self! But it does mean that the people who use social media just to “spam” out a series of corporate communications tend to get boring fast. (At least this is my excuse for the surfeit of tweets about Golda the awesome puppy dog).
• Invest in relationships: If you don’t monitor/respond/react on social media you lose out on opportunities to foster connections and even damage existing relationships. If I’ve complimented you thank me, RT etc! If I’m complaining about you, you’d better notice.
• The personal and the professional are intertwined like never before. While we used to be able to draw clear lines between work time and personal time, technology used for professional purposes and for business purposes, these lines have all become much more fuzzy. Controlling these borders is just not going to work so we need to develop policy frameworks that help us create shared understandings and, yes, a new etiquette to help us navigate.
• Command and control paradigms are going the way of the dodo. You’ve heard it before—leadership is ever more about leveraging relationship, building collaboration and developing engagement. These are hard things to do! I wonder if our universities with their collegial governance structures and leaders who’ve thrived in them will provide models to follow. The reach of social media is both a cause and effect of this paradigm shift.

Ultimately, whether picking up the phone, writing an op-ed in the newspaper, tweeting, connecting through Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook or whatever your favorite network, we look for effective, smart connections. How you build them is the key to success.

I’ve been reflecting a lot about different leadership styles as I’ve been reading Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs and observing the RIM leadership change and ongoing punditry about it. With the proviso that I’m no tech or business guru and I’m using these examples as metaphor (so don’t take them to be stock tips!) let’s take a look at how these two stories translate into leadership archetypes.

Steve Jobs is the poster child for iconoclastic, mercurial leaders. If only half of what is in Isaacson’s recent bio is true, working with him was grueling, filled with bullying, drama, tears and temper tantrums. But also exciting, creative, and episodically even empowering as he pushed individuals beyond what they could imagine they were capable of. Ousted from the apex of the company, Jobs’ odyssey through Pixar and NeXT ultimately brings him back to rescue Apple from its descent into ordinariness. This is the Harry Potter model of leadership: the chosen one, different and special from birth, with abilities virtually super human, able to do things ordinary humans can barely aspire to.

Contrast RIM: co-chief executives have been at the helm, the technology has always felt like it was about being secure and functional rather than dazzling. As critique upon critique mounted (and the company’s market share fell) the company responded with incremental changes to the product and its marketing, tinkered with its corporate governance (hardly sexy), and eventually allowed its co-CEOs to plan a succession on their timing; the new leader is a trusted insider, low on charisma, no revolutions in sight. Even installing a fabulous woman as the chair of the RIM Board – a tectonic shift if you contrast the all male Board of Facebook – didn’t generate much media love. The drama of the rescue or the resurrection is absent from the RIM leadership story. The company plugs away and we wait. All the while Apple’s market cap is through the roof and it sits on more cash than the USA.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be the heroic mercurial leader. And that’s not because I’m especially humble or altruistic (and no one who watched Balsillie vs. NHL would accuse him of low-ego!). I’m a strong believer in the adage that all of us are stronger, smarter and better than any of us and I’m reliant on the experience and expertise my team brings to the work we do together. I lead by knitting together and highlighting opportunities for collaboration and executing values-driven objectives. As a great leader said, “There is no try, only do” (that would be Yoda).

Different environments lend themselves to, or have become accustomed to, one or the other style of leadership. Arguably elected politics relies on a kind of ego-driven competitive leadership that may not appeal to everyone and could be one piece of the puzzle of why women and other underrepresented groups have been slow to find their place in our parliaments. Toronto civic activist Dave Meslin has a great critique of local politics using the metaphor of the one with the lightening bolt on his forehead: see his TedxToronto talk here.

Shakespeare’s adage “To thine own self be true” is critical to authentic leadership. The world needs heroes but it also needs all kinds of other leaders.

So this is my advice: read about different leaders, their successes and failures, as part of your journey to discover and enhance the leader in you. It’s not about dichotomies: beg, borrow and steal the best leadership traits from those who succeed around you. Learn and be influenced by others from Steve Jobs to Tony Hsieh to Tina Fey to Martha Piper to Craig Kielburger to Andrea Jung to Kevin W. Williams to David Onley to Sheldon Levy to Sheryl Sandberg…the list of potential role models is long! Embrace your authentic leadership style, talk about it and live it.

Don’t get caught up in heroics—be the leader you are and who your world needs you to be.

I’ve lately been fascinated by the various accounts I’ve been reading about the neuroscience of why we do what we do. Some recent examples that have gotten my attention are the book Willpower, a recent cover article from the New York Times Magazine  ”Hey! You’re Having a Baby” and a commentary piece the same week in the New York Times, “Building Self-Control, the American Way” by Sandra Aamodt and Same Wang, the authors of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows From Conception to College. What all of these have in common is an investigation into the formation of habits, and how we can use that knowledge both to form productive habits and (possibly) break destructive ones.

While the Times Magazine piece has gone viral because of its pseudo-creepy take on the ways that marketers can use neuroscience (e.g. to determine a woman is pregnant before she’s told anyone just by analyzing her buying habits), at least as interesting is author Charles Duhigg’s examination of what he terms “the habit loop,” in his case to try to break a pretty intractable chocolate cookie habit that was packing on the pounds. The loop is cue then reward. You can read the article to see the impact on cookie consumption of putting some conscious thought towards this (spoiler alert: he loses weight!), but the same cue/reward cycle keeps you addicted to video games that have rewards throughout them that sustain the player through multiple failures. Willpower and “Building Self-Control” emphasize the impact that practice can have on developing the sustainability to persist at doing something, a key building block to overcoming obstacles and learning things that are just plain hard: learning a new language, riding a 1000 lb horse over a course of jumps, conquering a level in Halo 2, learning a musical instrument, mastering rules of accounting (more on that later). For parents and educators this set of premises runs counter to the fashion of focus on building self-esteem whatever it takes. Is self-esteem the product of being told you’re smart (or pretty, etc), or the product of persevering with a task and overcoming its challenges to success?

So, what does this have to do with leadership? It can sometimes get pretty easy to coast in your comfort zone. Among the many issues and challenges you face in a day-always more than you can get done so choices need to be made-you can steer yourself to those that play to your strengths. And why wouldn’t you? They are more likely to breed success (rewards). Maybe I’m more comfortable with government relations than fundraising? For sure I’m pretty much always happier in Word than I am in Excel. But am I as good as I can be if I stay in my habitual zone? Can I be better at what I do and lead others to be better at what they do (and don’t do) by putting in the hard work and sticking to the challenge of conquering something new?

A couple of weeks ago I spent a week doing an accounting and finance boot camp. It wasn’t called a boot camp but, believe me, that’s what it was. My brain was doing pushups and had the cramps to prove it. Fourteen hour days focused on numbers, notes in tiny print, sharpened pencils and a calculator at my side along with annual reports and financial statements (and a healthy dose of tax law). And I also spent way too much time with Excel. This was hard work, involved some pretty clear failure, and required me to push through some mental pain (and occasional boredom too). The result? No fear that I’ll be taking over as CFO but I came home with a new set of analytic tools that I’ve put to use every day and a buoyed knowledge and self-confidence that allows me to delve thoroughly and deeply into things I was in the habit of skimming before.

Take the time to push yourself. Exercise your brain (and other muscles too!). Step out of your comfort zone and build yourself a new one. You’ve got nothing to lose but a bad habit or two.

A couple of days ago I was browsing through the Harvard Business Review online. The following quote jumped out at me from a great little piece by Tony Schwarz, the president and CEO of The Energy Project:

Whatever else each of us derives from our work, there may be nothing more precious than the feeling that we truly matter – that we contribute unique value to the whole, and that we’re recognized for it.

I completely agree. Stopping to recognize the small things and the large is how we remind each other and ourselves that it is the people who truly matter.

Encouraging success

Highlighting the way that our people matter—“employee engagement” is the jargon in the literature—is both about every individual and about making us a better University.

A recent UK government report entitled Engaging for Success makes this point about the contribution of employee engagement to organizational success:

If it is how the workforce performs that determines to a large extent whether companies or organisations succeed, then whether or not the workforce is positively encouraged to perform at its best should be a prime consideration for every leader and manager.

Simply put, and you wouldn’t think you’d need a report to tell you this, great organizations rely on great people doing great work. What can we do to stimulate this virtuous circle?

Celebration

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating group hug-fests and cupcakes for all (although I’m the last person to snub a good cupcake). Rather, in addition to privately and simply thanking people for doing good work, and compensating people fairly for what they do, I believe that bigger, more organized and public recognition of individual and team accomplishments is important for Ryerson’s success. Why? To

• encourage awareness, recognition, innovation and collaboration across and among academic and administrative groups; and
• foster our University’s culture of respectful, diverse, inclusive and engaged community-building.

It’s an overused phrase, but all of us really are better, smarter and more effective than any of us individually.

Bringing us together

The newly launched Ryerson Awards Night  was created with these goals in mind. It is the start of a new tradition at our University: bringing our SRC, teaching, and administrative award winners together so we can all celebrate their accomplishments and contributions to Ryerson.

Beginning the evening of April 4, 2012, Ryerson’s teaching award recipients will mingle and celebrate right alongside with SRC winners, who will rub shoulders with University administrators all being honoured for excellence.

Simply put, it’s about putting people first.

Here is the 2011 roundup of some of my best of 2011. Don’t look for an order—this list represents what stands out in my mind and it was tough to whittle this down to 10 since there were so many great moments of 2011.

1.  I love every time I hear from a Ryerson employee whose child has been admitted to Ryerson. There is nothing like the pride of our community in the university. Dependent tuition waiveris one of the most impactful benefits we give to our employees—a multi-generational impact that makes real change in people’s lives. I’m proud of every one of those kids who has worked so hard to get into Ryerson & keep sharing this good news with me!
2. We have started many initiatives this year that demonstrate our commitment to Putting People First. Among these are our Employee Assistance Plan; developing an employee survey; planning for our first university-wide awards celebration; and rolling-out new employee awards (more news on these last two coming soon!).
3. I have personally benefited from a great mentor group. My team of students and young alumni give me great advice and keep me in touch with issues that matter to our students.
4. Is it funny that Twitter has been one of my best tools to “travel” the 21 acres that makes up our campus (while giving me a chance to learn from the world)?  I gain a tremendous amount of insight from my social media connection to students and colleagues and I’m available to our community in an immediate way. And every once in a while I’m able to get in there quickly and fix a problem that I might never even have heard about otherwise. And there are some great laughs!
5. Great teamwork is one of the things I’m grateful for as I look back at 2011. One standout example is the Email and Collaborative Tools Project. The team drew from expertise across the entire university and was jointly led by the Chair of the Academic Computing Advisory Committee Dr. Dimitri Androutsos, and Director of Computing and Communications Services Brian Lesser.   
6. Gould Street continues to create an amazing a sense of campus and community for our University. City Council extended pedestrianization for another six months; the Farmer’s Market  was a great team effort  of the farmers, students, and colleagues from University Business Services and Facilities & Sustainability;  the Community Garden showed great initiative and hard work from our students in collaboration with Facilities & Sustainability; and the new look around the Image Arts Building designed by Daoust Lestage has increased the beauty of our campus and reminded us of the inspiring impact of the public realm on our well-being.
7. Opening the Image Arts Building was another great collaborative effort. Faculty, students and staff in the School of Image Arts showed huge commitment to the project and patience with its challenges working with the team from Capital Projects and Real Estate. This building is a new gem for the University.
8. Every year it seems like there is another giant policy development mountain we have to climb!  These aren’t glamourous but they are important and necessary and take tons of work from lots of folks. The two projects that stand out this year for me are the implementation of workplace violence amendments to the Occupational Health and Safety Act and the implementation of new government procurement/purchasing directives.  Literally dozens of people worked on these projects led by teams from Human Resources, Environmental Health Safety & Security, and Financial Services and involving colleagues from Senate, student reps, student services, and the list goes on.
9. Our campus can be a great lab for our students and colleagues. I love the creativity I’m exposed to when students take on everything from Gould Street to the new Health Science Building project and demonstrate the application of their education and considerable talents to problems and projects my teams are actively engaged with. We love learning with them.
10. Winning a Canadian Architecture Award of Excellence for the design for our Student Learning Centre brings pride to the entire University. Snohetta and Zeidler have designed an exceptional building that will make a huge impact on Toronto and this is only the beginning of the recognition I’m sure it will receive.  Even with such fantastic architects, the SLC couldn’t achieve its promise without the creativity and hard work of a great team of students and colleagues from the library, student services, drawing from among faculty and staff experts, the Provost’s office and Capital Projects and Real Estate.

 Thanks to everyone who made 2011 another incredible Ryerson year. I’m looking forward to a great 2012.

 What are some of your fondest moments of 2011?

Each December 6th, the Ryerson University community pauses to remember the 14 women who perished at the École Polytechnique de Montréal on a frigid late-fall day in 1989.

This year, I was honoured to be invited to speak at the ceremony marking that horrifying event. As I collected my thoughts, I remembered very clearly where I was on that evening and felt  sorrow and anger that all these many years later we are still confronting gender-based violence against women. But, as I reminded the audience at Ryerson,  kindled out of our memories of that great tragedy, there are also small flames of  hope.

Sorrow and Anger

Twenty-two years ago I was a third-year law student at McGill quietly studying for an exam the next day. I still vividly recall the sense of numb confusion I experienced when I heard on the news what had happened just on the other side ofMont Royal. Women my age or younger – women, like me, pursuing a professional education viciously murdered. At the time we were confused as we tried to interpret the event. Were the killings random, we half-hoped? It became clear that they were not, that the victims were separated out because they were women and because they were students at l’ École Polytechnique.

It seemed impossible to believe that in my country such a violent act of misogyny could occur. Yet, one of the things we learned from the Montreal Massacre is that while on the surface it may appear that society accepts women’s right to pursue their dreams and to carve out their own futures, there is a lingering and often deeply entrenched distaste for women who speak up and go their own way. So it was then, so it is even today.

“Global Pandemic”

Across the globe, women who exhibit independence of body and mind are often severely punished. The United Nations reports that up to 70% of women experience gender-based violence in their lifetimes:

• Up to 6 in 10 women suffer physical or sexual abuse.
• Women aged 15-44 are more at risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, car accidents, war and malaria.
• Here inCanadabetween 1994 and 2008, an average of 178 women were killed, including, in 2008, 45 women murdered by their spouses.

No wonder that just a few weeks ago Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, labelled violence against women a “global pandemic.”

Hope

So, are there signs of hope?

1)     Since that shocking event 22 years ago, December 6^th has transformed into the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women in Canada. On this day, thousands of us both remember the dead and commit to take action to put an end to the psychological, physical and financial oppression and abuse of girls and women.

2)     Twenty years ago, Jack Layton co-founded the White Ribbon Campaign (WRC). Now in over 60 countries, the WRC is spreading a message of peace, respect and diversity. Here at our University, I am proud that we have a vibrant Ryerson White Ribbon Campaign. Led by Jeff Perera, this coalition of students, faculty and staff engages men across Ryerson to become part of the solution to ending violence against women.

3)     While I am saddened that the federal government has introduced legislation to repeal of the long-gun registry, I am thankful for the many Canadian voices that continue to advocate for gun control. These include Ryerson’s Vice-President of Research & Innovation Wendy Cukier, one of the co-founders – in the wake of the Montreal Massacre – of the Coalition for Gun Control and still a champion of licensing firearms and curbing their proliferation as well as recently the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

4)     I recently moderated a panel of seven outstanding women leaders at a student-led event: TEDxRyersonUWomen. The panel was comprised of inspiring women, including current students, recent alumnae and practising professionals. Based on the panellists’ remarks and the questions that were posed, it’s clear that gender-based biases are still major obstacles. But these types of events give me hope. Championed by our White Ribbon and TEDx student groups, I am confident that a new generation of leaders will continue to push forward the social, employment and political horizons for all Canadians regardless of their gender.

Sincere Thanks

Our University’s moving December 6^th Memorial – which included a candlelit procession and a specially choreographed number by Ryerson Dance students – was the result of the dedication of an organizing committee led by Ann Whiteside. My sincere thanks go out to Ann and her fellow committee members from Discrimination and Harassment Prevention Services; Campus Facilities and Sustainability; Security and Emergency Services; Ryerson Women’s Centre; Office of Admissions; the (acting) Assistant Vice President/Vice Provost, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; student representatives from the Ryerson Student Union; and the groups Ryerson Engineering Students’ Society and Women in Engineering.

I am grateful, too, for all those who took the time to remember with us on December 6^th. They not only help keep alive the memory of the women who perished in 1989, but also to stoke our collective belief that a better, safer, more equitable world is possible.

I recently popped the search term “failure” into the Harvard Business review site and got 965 hits. Articles/blogs on hbr.org had great titles such as “Enjoy the Fun of Failure,” “The Worst Failure of All Is Wasting a Failure,” and “Today’s Innovation Can Rise from Yesterday’s Failure.” The Harvard Business Review had a whole special issue on failure. Just for fun I tried Google and got 400,000 hits including a great commercial entitled “Failure” featuring Michael Jordan with a quote I’ve long had pasted on my desk.

So this is my “data” (wholly unscientific) on the popularity of failure particularly as it relates to its sister concepts risk, innovation and entrepreneurship. These terms are finding broad usage far beyond their origins out into corporate, institutional and government sectors. All this talk about failure seems to set up a dichotomy between those who take chances and failure, otherwise known as the “innovators” (and maybe the “cool kids”) and those who stick to the rules and don’t tolerate failure, “the bureaucrats.” So what is the reality behind this failure talk? And how much tolerance do I really have for risk and failure in my work?

A friend was recently lamenting his own failure to successfully conclude a multi-party deal with complex governance and multiple stakeholders. His analysis came down to “why am I so lousy at what I do?” My challenge back was two-fold:

If one of your team had failed to close a similar deal would your conclusion about her be that she’s lousy? He immediately admitted that the answer was of course not: he’d coach her to find the lessons learned and would redirect her in a more positive direction. In other words he’d do exactly what we’d expect a great leader to do. We need to think about what tolerance we have for our OWN failures if we are going to successfully lead others.

If you are going to take risks (and his was a multi-million dollar very public effort) then we have to sincerely be willing to fail and not just pay lip service to failure because it is in vogue. When we fail we have got to analyze, learn the lessons and move on to the next thing. In other words, leaders should not model failure equating DEFEAT.

I also wonder if there is a gender dimension to how we interpret failure. I was recently reminded by Michael Bryant, the former Ontario Attorney General, of an observation we made about applicants for appointments to be judges of the Provincial Court. Women who applied and weren’t appointed seldom re-applied, while men didn’t seem to have any compunction about applying many times over. Did the women interpret from the “failure” to make it through on the first try that they weren’t qualified? Did the men take a more “better luck next time” approach?

So, how much and what kind of failure am I willing to tolerate in myself and in others? I’m still figuring that out as part of my leadership journey. Here is a start: I don’t have any time for failure to live up to  “north star” values such as respect, tolerance, civility and equity or for failures in holding ourselves to standards we have agreed that we’ll achieve:  that’s the responsibility and challenge we take on, for example, when we clearly articulate our values.

Also, we simply can’t fail when it comes to obligations under the laws and policies that govern our activities. On the other hand I want to see risk-taking/failure that results from well-defined experiments in innovation from which lessons can be learned and improvements developed. And, I can’t help but think that failure that is small, fast and cheap is likely also to be smart (see “Entrepreneurs and the Cult of Failure” on “good” failure).

How much tolerance for risk and failure do you have?

In Part 1 of this blog post I proposed that Ryerson’s building projects are informed by a vision of creating seamless communities that unite our University to the life of the city that surrounds us. Now, in Part 2, I’ll go into more detail about the Master Plan that guides our efforts. I will also discuss the matter of space – both theoretical and real – as it informs our community-focused building projects.

Ryerson’s Master Plan

Since 2008, Ryerson’s city-building urban-landscape efforts have been guided by Ryerson’s Master Plan. This flexible framework is a powerful guide for our revitalization of the Ryerson campus and has proven to be a powerful catalyst for change and renewal in our University’s downtown neighbourhood. The Master Plan has three main principles:

• Urban intensification
• Putting people first
• Commitment to design excellence.

Each of these elements is critical to city-building and long-term sustainability, and they are guiding Ryerson in our visible and community-focused role within Toronto’s dynamic urban landscape.

Space matters

Sufficient, suitable, and well-designed and maintained space builds community pride as well as contributes to student engagement and better learning outcomes. Researchers at the Center for Postsecondary Research at the University of Indiana contend that “Through buildings, signs and the landscape of the [university] campus, the physical environment communicates messages that influence students’ feelings of well-being, belonging and identity.” 

In a similar vein, early in his first term President Levy made improving Ryerson’s space one of his top priorities. Sheldon’s commitment to this priority was based both on a philosophy of community wellness, and on a number of space-related challenges facing our University:

• Ryerson’s physical location is one of our biggest assets and one of our most immense challenges when it comes to capital projects. We simply do not have abundant undeveloped campus space waiting to be built upon. So, that means sometimes we need to re-imagine existing buildings to meet new needs; for example, at our newly opened Image Arts Building and the soon-to-open Ryerson Image Centre.
• In terms of athletics facilities, Ryerson lags far behind many other universities. And this space shortfall has led to lower participation rates in athletic and team activities at our University than we’d like. The Ryerson Athletics Centre at the Gardens will change that forever. 
• Ryerson students lack sufficient space for studying, group work, informal collaboration, and just plain hanging out together between and after class. Again, research has shown that highly engaged students have higher quality experiences at university, and their learning outcomes are better. So, we are thinking creatively about how to engage students, keeping them on campus to get involved with peers, faculty, and extra-curricular events. Hence our plans for an exciting Student Learning Centre.

City-building for people 

Ryerson’s building projects are defined by the experiences we wanted to create for students, staff, and faculty, as well as for members of the broader communities in which we operate and that we serve. But our projects are also tied to the particular geography this University inhabits, and that’s where city-building comes in.

I hope I have been able to give you a sense of the city-building seamlessness for which my colleagues and I at Ryerson are striving. By following the goals and principles of our Master Plan, we are following a course that will powerfully contribute to creating a more inclusive, innovative, interesting, healthy, and prosperous city for us all.

On October 7, 2011, I stood on our Gould Street pedestrian zone to speak about Ryerson University’s vision and activities related to enhancing our shared urban experience. My presentation was part of the TED^x RyersonUSalon focusing on The Urban Landscape.

In this blog post I include some of the thoughts I shared that day on communities and seamless communities in the context of Ryerson’s building projects. Part 2 of my blog post will delve further into Ryerson’s Master Plan and the direction it gives us when dealing with space both as a theoretical concept and a real-world set of physical constraints.

Communities

For me, a community is individuals and groups who share both physical (or virtual) environments and meaningful experiences within those environments. In other words, a community facilitates experiences that enhance individuals’ and groups’ participation in civic, academic, leisure, commercial, or other activities that contribute to giving their lives structure, purpose, and identity.

In its latest Vital Signs report on the state of Toronto, the Toronto Community Foundation noted that major international publications and organizations have recently ranked Toronto as one of the most economically competitive and liveable cities on the planet. The Foundation cautions, however, that in order to maintain and improve the quality of life for all Toronto’s citizens, “we must construct a vision for our city and commit to the long term. We need to build the city we all want – smarter, healthier, more inclusive, more creative, more prosperous.”

I raise these points because they fit so well with Ryerson’s role as a community-focused city-builder. At Ryerson, we believe in the importance – as we undertake new building projects – of understanding and incorporating the needs of the University’s neighbours: both the residential and business communities that surround our precinct and, more broadly, the City of Toronto as a whole.

Seamless communities

In a speech to the Canadian Club a few years ago, Ryerson’s President Levy drew inspiration from the way the University of California Berkeley was working with its city on improving such “campus perimeter” features as landscaping, lighting, pedestrian safety, and transit. Sheldon especially liked the way the UC Berkeley planners described the streets at the edges of their campus, as “’seams’ linking campus and community, and not borders dividing them.”

Ryerson is committed to realizing our institutional ambitions and those of our city. We are, therefore, working closely with the City of Toronto, the Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Association, and neighbourhood associations. Through open dialogue and information-sharing, we’re confident all of Ryerson’s new buildings will foster seamless communities that have a positive impact on the vitality of Toronto’s urban landscape and the people who live, work, learn, and play in it.

Part 2 will be posted on October 25, 2011

Recently a senior executive from one of our suppliers called me. There was one purpose behind the call: to say he was sorry. His company had committed to a deadline the week before and hadn’t made it. I knew about the missed deadline and my team had contingency plans in place. The call took me by surprise. What I got was an apology and one done right. No excuses, an indication that they’d missed the mark and knew how serious that was and how disappointed we must be. He also indicated his firm’s on-going commitment to our business and to doing better for us.

This call happened to take place the week before Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement observed by my family. The tradition dictates that failures between people can only be forgiven by those people—there is no divine absolution. Apology to the person harmed, sincere and complete, is what is required.  So, for example, I apologized to my kids for not being as patient as I could be and for all the times I snapped at them or didn’t listen to them over the course of this year.

The convergence of my out of the blue call from George and a holiday with meaning in my personal life got me to thinking: how important is apologizing in our work life? According to “womeninbiz” blog conflicts at work arise easily because our work relationships are more superficial than with friends or family so we may be less aware when we offend. Furthermore, the nature of hierarchy in work relationships may make hurt feelings more challenging to address.  In workplaces like Ryerson, our diversity requires lots of communication across differences that may also create opportunity for misunderstandings to arise. We value our culture of civility at Ryerson. Key to this culture is respect and trust and the ability to apologize builds both.

What makes for an effective apology? Harvard Business School’s Management Update “The Art of the Apology” offers some Dos and Don’ts among them:

“Find words that are clear and accurate—not provocative. …

Don’t apologize for the wrong thing. …

Don’t think in terms of an “expression of regret.” Instead, your goal should be actually communicating your regret, that is, getting it across to the other person.

‘I want to apologize’ is not an apology. It’s no more an apology than ‘I want to lose weight’ is a loss of weight. Do the work. Deliver a clear, direct apology; don’t hide behind vagueness, circumlocution, or clichés.

You may not be able to control whether your apology is accepted, but you can control its quality. “

Nothing makes us more effective than collaboration. Interpersonal relationships that are broken make teams less effective. I’m going to embrace the possibilities that a good apology brings and the power that “I’m sorry” has to surprise, heal and rebuild trust. I’m challenging you to do the same and looking forward to hearing how it goes.