Law Day is held May 1 every year to celebrate the role of law in American society and to deepen understanding of the legal profession.
Asked about Law Day this year, Craig M. Boise, dean of Syracuse University’s College of Law, sees special significance:
“I think the events of just this year have illustrated how important the rule of law is. We saw an attack on the U.S. Capitol by people who would have overturned the results of a valid election. That was a wake-up call for people to realize we tend to take for granted the system that we have, where we believe that the law is supreme. It’s more important than an individual, than an individual leader, that we have a system of law. Law Day celebrates that and hopefully draws attention to it outside of the community of lawyers.
“The rule of law is a fragile thing, and it can be lost. Even up until recent years, the U.S. has been an exporter of the concept of rule of law. The ABA (American Bar Association) has a project that works to implement the rule of law in other countries and develop sound legal rules.
“It’s important that all of us inform ourselves about issues and that we participate, particularly in our local governments. That’s the kind of involvement with the law and development of policy that can draw people together because it’s local. I think that people should be involved and understand that it’s on us to preserve the democracy that we have.”
The pandemic has canceled the Onondaga County Bar Association’s annual Law Day program. However, the association is streaming a Facebook Live interview with Anthony Ray Hinton at 5:30 p.m. April 29. Hinton survived 30 years on Alabama’s death row and was freed in 2015 when it was proven he was wrongly convicted. The program, part of the Bond, Schoeneck & King series on Race and Justice, is free and open to the public; details are at www.onbar.org.
Were you in leadership roles growing up?
Not particularly. I was always involved in some pursuit, whether it was the school spelling bee or writing competitions or public speaking competitions, but not many leadership roles. I was treasurer of my high school chapter of the Future Farmers of America. Does that count? (Laughter)
I grew up in Holt, a small farming town, about 50 miles north of Kansas City, Missouri. Growing up, I think I was mostly learning, observing, and absorbing a lot of things that have become useful.
My aunt and uncle have a cow-calf operation in the Sandhills, west of Broken Bow in Nebraska. I spent every summer from junior high through high school on the ranch. One of my cousins married into a big farming family there. I was branding calves, fixing fences, riding horses, combining wheat, and running irrigation systems. Hence the interest in the Future Farmers of America.
What lessons did you learn from those ranch and farm experiences?
Definitely work ethic. I was surrounded by hard-working farm people. The work had to get done. You’re not afraid of hard work and long hours – let’s put it that way. That comes in handy for any leader, because leadership jobs are not 9 to 5. It involves a lot more.
Walk me through college and your path to Syracuse.
I didn’t have a clear idea of what I would do after high school. A lot of my classmates went into the military or went straight to work – the Ford plant or that kind of thing. A lot of kids did not go to college.
I ended up going to college but not in an agricultural line. I had been playing the piano since about second grade. In a high school piano competition, one of the judges came up to me afterward and invited me to apply to the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music, where he taught, to study piano.
So that’s what I did. I was a piano performance major for a couple of years, and then I ran out of money. I came from a very modest background. I did a couple of jobs. I worked in a warehouse briefly in Kansas City, and I worked for a law firm as a messenger. At that job, I met a paralegal who was a reserve officer in the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department. One day she said: You really ought to think about applying to the police department. They’re hiring.
I applied, and I became a police officer. That was in 1986. I went through the Academy. That’s where I got interested in law. We had to learn Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment cases, criminal statutes, and so forth. I really did well in that area.
I was in the department for five years. I was a field training officer, training new recruits. The last couple of years, I was on the SWAT team as a sniper.
The last three years I was in the department I finished my undergraduate degree. I changed to political science with an idea of going to law school. In 1991, I left the department and went to law school at the University of Chicago. I clerked for a year after law school in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit for the Hon. Pasco M. Bowman in Kansas City. Then I went into practice, briefly in Kansas City, and then in New York at a couple of big firms. I got my master’s degree in tax law at NYU while I was working in New York.
My young family and I decided to move out of the city. We moved to Cleveland, where my wife was from and where I had relatives. I worked in a firm there for about three years before I got a call from one of my law school classmates who was teaching tax law at Florida State.
He said: I know you’ve been doing high-level tax work, and we’re looking for a tax professor at Florida State. Would you be interested in applying?
I had never considered teaching, but it made me think that I might want to pursue that. He and I had a number of conversations about what was involved with teaching, about the writing and publishing and so forth. In 2003, I went on the market and was hired by Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. I taught at Case Western for six years.
Then I was recruited by DePaul University in Chicago to head up their graduate tax program. I went to DePaul in 2009. I was there for two years and then ended up taking the dean position that came open at Cleveland State University in 2011. I was there for five years and came here in 2016.
What’s your advice to lead effectively?
For me, what’s been helpful is to remember a few C words.
The first C is consultation. As a leader, you can’t be so arrogant as to think that your thought processes can’t be improved by ideas and the input of your leadership team and the people we serve. Seeking that counsel, consulting with your team, reinforces your leadership, because people will appreciate that you respect the knowledge and ideas that they bring.
The second one would be building consensus. When I make difficult decisions with high stakes, the wisest path forward is generally one that would be agreed upon by at least a plurality of those that I consult. Seeking consensus will also provide a built-in basis of support as you begin to implement and communicate that decision.
Once you’ve made a decision, I think it becomes critical that you effectively communicate not just the decision, but also the rationale for the decision. It’s important for key people to hear from you directly about what you’re planning to do rather than through the grapevine. It’s important that people know about that in the appropriate order. For instance, it’s much better that the chancellor hears about a decision I’ve made from me directly than from a student or a faculty member. It conveys the respect that you have for people’s roles within the organization.
And then I think the final C is to be prepared to correct course. It’s inevitable that you’ll make a mistake at some point or you’ll overlook something. It’s important to own that and correct course as necessary.
What qualities do you see in good leadership and in leaders you admire?
A good leader needs to be able to listen – and I mean really listen – to a range of perspectives. Listen carefully to what people have to say and let that marinate. The best decisions really require the ability to listen and not simply jump in and say, here’s what I think we ought to do.
My dad always would say your judgment is no better than your information. I don’t even know what context he first said that to me, but it stuck with me over decades. It’s so true.
One component of poor leadership is making leadership all about yourself. Leadership is others trusting you with decisions about the direction and goals of the organization. You need to honor that trust by putting the well-being of the organization and the people in that organization first. If it’s just about you, I don’t think you’re going to be a successful leader.
What attributes do you see in ineffective leaders?
It comes back to not doing those four Cs. The leader that just doesn’t listen. You can talk to that person and you realize they’re not really listening to hear you. They’re already on to how they’re going to solve the problem or address it.
One of the big failures that a lot of leaders have is in communication. I read The Chronicle of Higher Education. You see almost daily high-profile examples of where communication breakdown has led to a serious problem or a scandal or anger. It’s impossible, I think, to over-communicate.
What do you think employees need from their leaders?
I think that people want to know that, first of all, somebody sitting in that CEO chair or the dean chair is competent, that they understand the business or the organization. It’s very important that people are confident that the person who’s leading knows the operation and has a vision for where the organization can go. People need to know that you’re not just going to sit in the chair, but that you have some plan for moving the organization forward.
It comes back to these basics. People need to feel that they’re heard and that their interests are accounted for in how the organization moves forward. They want to be consulted in the execution of that. They need ongoing communication, so they know they will not be left in the dark.
Tell me about a time when your leadership was tested and how you handled it.
I don’t think that I’ve had a more difficult set of leadership challenges than those that have been presented by the pandemic.
I’m an avid sailor in my spare time and dealing with issues of providing a legal education in the time of COVID-19 is like navigating in the dark without clear, reliable markers and no sense of where you’re going.
The pandemic created enormous challenges on a personal level for students, our staff, our faculty. All of these folks were dealing with the impact of this on themselves. And that’s something that we needed to attend to as an organization. We needed to make sure that our people – students, faculty, and staff – were able to be OK in the course of this. And, of course, many lost loved ones.
There’s a great deal of stress created by the conditions, the isolation, especially for students who are social and for whom being social is a big part of higher education. So, along with that, we had the logistics of mounting an educational program in the midst of shifting health mandates, strained fiscal resources, a great deal of general angst. It was one difficult decision after another. When you got to a point where you had a consensus around the decision, then the underlying assumptions changed, so, it was back to the drawing table.
Last summer, our senior leadership team was meeting very frequently on a range of things. What is our fall semester going to look like? How do we do what we need to do? How do we account for the need to do something remotely? But also recognize that, particularly our first-year students, it’s very difficult to start without even being in the presence of faculty members. Then we had to respond to limitations. We could only use about a third of our space, so we had to prioritize that in some way.
We ended up prioritizing the classroom space we had for our first-year law students. Of course, that made other students angry that they weren’t having that in-person experience, such as it was with masks, socially distanced and all.
How do we facilitate faculty trying to manage a live classroom and accommodate the students who are not comfortable coming in person because of a particular health risk? We had to hire student assistants to help faculty members with the people who were Zooming in because they couldn’t monitor both at the same time.
There were a host of issues. How do we administer exams? We have exams that are proctored. Students come into a room, and there’s a proctor. How do we do that when nobody’s in a room and are we going to do these exams remotely? How’s that going to work?
That’s a taste of the range of decisions that we had to address and also trying to feather in our decision making with what the university was doing, because of course that is a big relevant factor.
We couldn’t have done all that without consultation, consensus, communication, and in some cases course correction.
You already had some experience with innovative online programs. Right?
We were the first law school in the country, and we’re still one of only a handful, to develop a hybrid online JD program making use of the virtual classroom. We did that before COVID forced a lot of schools into that. We were also the first to develop a hybrid online joint JD MBA program.
We admitted the first cohort of students in the virtual classroom in January 2019. It had taken some time to get approval from the ABA to do that. The ABA currently has a limit of 30 credit hours of online as part of the 90 credit hours that go into a law degree. And we had to go through a pretty lengthy process to get the program that we developed approved so that we were able to launch it.
This past year, we ended up helping a lot of other law schools and their faculty pivot to the online space because of the experience we already had there.
For us, it’s all about innovation and moving legal education into the 21st century. One recent example is when we launched an innovative pipeline program with three partner HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities) to expand opportunities for students of color to pursue a legal education. The program is with Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Clark Atlanta University.
So you’re experienced in leading innovation and change. What’s your advice for a leader to spark innovation and entrepreneurship in an organization?
When we talk about being entrepreneurial, an entrepreneur is someone who creates a new business, bears most of the risks, and enjoys most of the rewards.
Not everyone is by nature entrepreneurial. But I think most everyone is down for enjoying the rewards. And I think that’s kind of the key to getting the people in your organization to think entrepreneurially. I really subscribe to Steve Jobs’ philosophy: Why would we hire really smart people and then tell them what to do?
I think that my job is to free the people that work with me to leverage their own skills, knowledge, and imagination to move the whole enterprise forward.
If you don’t set that tone, people are afraid to take risks, and you won’t see innovation and you won’t see entrepreneurship within the organization.
It doesn’t happen by accident. You really have to cultivate that. I think it begins with letting people know that you have faith and confidence in what they bring to the table and that you want to see them use that. You’re not trying to stifle their creativity.
The weekly “Conversation on Leadership” features Q&A interviews about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. To suggest a leader for a Conversation, contact Stan Linhorst at StanLinhorst@gmail.com. Last week featured Karen Sammon, former CEO of PAR Technologies near Utica.
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Craig Boise’s 4 Cs for leadership: Consult, build consensus, communicate, course-correct - syracuse.com
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