2019 HBR McKinsey Award Finalist: Cross-Silo Leadership

I've been reading the finalist entries in the 2019 Harvard Business Review McKinsey Awards Competition and one that caught my attention is Cross-Silo Leadership from the May-June 2019 issue. There is a lot of talk in academia these days about interdisciplinary work, especially at places like SMU, the Vanderbilt of Texas, so I read the article with an eye on the lessons to be drawn for universities.

The authors highlight four practices to make effective "interface work".

1. Develop and deploy cultural brokers. In industry, they can be "bridges" (allowing different units to "work more synergistically even without directly interacting") or "adhesives" (who "bring people together and help build mutual understanding and lasting relationships"). The authors explain: "Adhesives facilitate collaboration by vouching for people and helping them decipher one another's language. Unlike bridges, adhesives develop others' capacity to work across a boundary in the future without their assistance." This takes strong interpersonal skills and a growth mindset. 
2. Encourage people to ask the right questions. "Managers with high levels of curiosity were more likely to build networks that spanned disconnected parts of the company." Leaders can encourage inquiry by being a role model in asking questions (especially "Why?", "What if...?" and "How might we...?") and by teaching employees the art of inquiry (favoring open-ended questions, processing the answers by checking that what they hear, which is based by their expertise, is what the person meant to say). 
3. Get people to see the world through others' eyes. For instance, organize cross-silo dialogues such as focused event analysis at Children's Minnesota and hire for curiosity and empathy.
4. Broaden your employees' vision, bringing employees from diverse groups together on initiatives and urging employees to explore distant networks.  

Academia of course faces its own unique situation and challenges. In trying to foster interdisciplinary work - which could lead to a multi-year project, in contrast with industry's shorter-term engagements - it matters to introduce the right people to each other and also to keep them talking for long enough so that they can define the right project to work on. But industry projects have always involved teams of people, while academia promotes its faculty based on their contributions in a specific field. Where to publish interdisciplinary work? How to assign contributions properly? How to evaluate such work? Perhaps such studies should be reviewed through synchronous panels rather than solely written reviews, giving the reviewers the opportunity to educate each other on the work's strengths in their own discipline, or published in special issues of prestigious journals or as book chapters at a top university press (rather than everyday submissions to academic journals).

Joint appointments would be useful too but the faculty member should be explicitly evaluated based on how well he educates each department about the other - that could be his service work, in addition to research and teaching. It is also good to make a distinction between interdisciplinary appointments and joint appointments. According to Columbia University, "An appointment is joint when a faculty member is qualified in the discipline of two (or more) schools/departments and fulfills significant functions and responsibilities in each school/department. An appointment is interdisciplinary when the faculty member is qualified in one discipline, fulfills significant functions and responsibilities in more than one school/department of instruction OR in a school/department and in an institute or Center." William & Mary has a helpful document about procedures.

The American Psychological Association devotes an entire guide on the topic. Here is a great quote from UC San Diego mentioned in the report: "Research at the interface between traditional academic disciplines is quickly becoming the norm for scholarly advances and innovation. The research university of the 21st century is a horizontally integrated academy where the generation of human and intellectual capital thrives on collaboration and interaction across traditional academic disciplines. To achieve this multidisciplinary culture without academic impediments requires that the campus re-examine how departments, divisions, schools, and campus units approach their traditionally vertical education and research missions. Multidisciplinary education programs exist and are increasing in number, and multidisciplinary research is supported by research centers and institutes (organized research units, multi-campus research units) that are outcome- based and not discipline-based. However, faculty appointments are most often governed by a vertical departmental structure that may not be conducive to recruiting or rewarding excellent faculty whose research focus is at the interface between disciplines and/or in new research areas that do not fit into the traditional departmental structure."

The guide advocates for a Memorandum of Understanding between the two academic units when the joint appointment is created and provides a detailed list of issues that need to be addressed in it. The best recruitment method is through cluster hiring with search committee members representing components of the interdisciplinary research. The document provides extensive guidance on the review processes. It is also good to evaluate the interaction faculty members with courtesy appointments have in their host department. 

Interdisciplinary work can happen on the teaching side too. Team teaching is often touted like the next big thing because the students will have to think "interdisciplinarity" in the workforce, but I've never seen team teaching in action and none of my immediate colleagues practices it either. It is tricky to pull off because the time commitment if you teach with a colleague is much more than half the contact hours. One idea I had to celebrate the start of Provost Loboa's tenure is to use the end of January term in a manner similar to the Independent Activities Period at MIT and use that time to have mini-lectures of team teachers, pairs of professors teaching audiences an interdisciplinary subject for an hour or an hour and a half. This would lower the barrier to get faculty to talk to each other about interdisciplinary work, as team-teaching for an entire semester can be daunting. And perhaps it would spark ideas in the audience. I don't know if anything will come out of this idea but it would be a good start.