South Asian American Leadership Conference Talk, UIUC AACC
I gave the following talk at the South Asian American Leadership Conference at the Asian American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on March 4, 2021. The theme of the conference was "Resilience" and the title of my talk was "Mentorship, Practice and Servant Leadership."
Intro
Hello. My name is Samarth Bhaskar. I graduated from UIUC in 2010 with degrees in International Studies and Communications. Thanks to the AACC for inviting me today and to you for attending this workshop. I hope to speak for about 20-25 minutes to set some context for our time together, and then I hope we can have a conversation with comments, questions and answers all together. Since our time is short, I’ll jump right in.
As my first point: I want to congratulate you on being leaders. I don’t know any of you but the fact that you showed up to a leadership conference today is a signal that you’re leaders. I imagine that many of you hold leadership roles in your lives already. Some of those roles are officially designated as such. You might be a vice president or president of a student group, you might be a supervisor at your workplace, or you might TA a class on campus. Other roles are probably more unofficial. Maybe you’re the roommate who herds everyone together to do apartment chores on time. Or you’re the family member who picks where to go out to dinner, when we used to do such things. There are big and small ways in which you’re already a leader and already exhibiting leadership qualities in your life.
One of the first steps you can take toward being a successful leader is to think of yourself as a leader. Thinking of yourself as a leader primes you to take responsibility for your growth, your actions, how you approach your peers and people who look to you for leadership. So showing up to a leadership conference is a great start. Check that off the to-do list.
Secondly: I want to say something that might immediately undermine everything else I say subsequently. I don’t think there’s much I can say here today that will make you a better leader. I’m going to try, but in my experience with leadership conferences and classes, you’ll probably remember little to none of it as soon as our time together is over. And that’s ok! Like I said, even just showing up here together is a positive thing. You could have been sitting on your couch day-dreaming about a trip to Insomnia Cookies, but you showed up here instead.
I think we can do two things to address this. The first is that you can note down my email address. It is samarth.bhaskar@gmail.com. After our hour or so here today, I hope some of you will reach out to me and we can find some time for a phone or video call so I can learn more about you, what you’re thinking about or focused on these days, and how I might be able to help you. That’s probably the best way I can directly help you. I wish there was some other way to have meaningful interactions these days, but this is basically the best I’ve found. So if any of what we talk about today resonates with you or kicks off a thought or question, please reach out to me.
The second thing we can do is change the context of our time together slightly. Instead of me imparting some knowledge about leadership or sharing #LeadershipHacks, let’s consider this a conversation. I’ll share some of my background, experiences and ideas about leadership. They’re mostly stories about my academic, professional and personal journey. With some theories or ideas about what leadership development can look like. And you, listeners, can consider how or if these ideas apply to your life now or in the near future.
UIUC Background
I’ll start at the beginning. I was born in New Delhi and raised in Bloomington-Normal, IL, not far from Urbana-Champaign. I came to UIUC in 2006 with fledgling interests in foreign policy, international relations, and the Middle East. 9/11 influenced much of my academic, political and social interests as I came out of high school. While I was at UIUC, I got involved in student organizations. I ended up playing a leadership role in T.E.A.M, Asian American Association, Indian Student Association, Student Alumni Ambassadors and Chai Town. Most of what I learned as a leader in college happened in these environments not in classrooms, conferences or workshops.
One big exception was LeaderShape. Do any of you know of or have you participated in LeaderShape? It’s a multi-day leadership conference that’s been around for more than 25 years. I believe it is still available, although may be altered to fit remote needs. If you get a chance to attend it while you’re here, I highly recommend it. There was something about that conference: the fact that we were all staying at a remote location off campus, that we had lots of unstructured time for writing, reflection and conversations, the way activities and small groups were structured, the number of people who attended and chaperoned; many specific memories still stick in my head. And I remember leadership lessons from it more than any other singular event.
But beyond that, the leadership skills and lessons I picked up at UIUC primarily happened in small, day-to-day interactions with students, faculty and staff. Instead of a body of knowledge, I now realize leadership is more a style, an approach and a set of habits. And it’s probably best learned through apprenticeship. This is why most of what we’ll do today won’t really matter. The things that will truly teach you how to be a good leader will happen in small moments throughout your time at UIUC and beyond. Leadership is something you’ll practice, now and forever basically indefinitely into the future.
You’ll practice first by emulating mentors, so you should very mindfully acquire good mentors. Mentors can be all sorts of people: family, peers, teachers, coworkers. Look for people to learn from in all parts of your life. Finding and cultivating mentor relationships was something I first did (knowingly and unknowingly) at U of I.
Mentors
I had mentors of all sorts. People like my Chai Town friend Sid, a graduate student at the time, who indulged my interests in reading about and discussing news events. And who, when visiting my family one day, told my Dad that he believed I would go places in life. That my interests and talents would be useful academically and professionally. His belief in me helped me believe in myself and helped me convince my parents that I was pursuing worthwhile things in college.
There were people like Dr. Chih at the AACC, who helped me as I led multiple student groups. Dr. Chih’s leadership in creating a place like the AACC gave me a home base for all my outside-the-classroom interests. And watching him and other student and faculty leaders over 4 years gave me models for the kind of leader I might want to be.
People like Professor Rajmohan Gandhi, who taught a course in comparative political science at the time (maybe still), who again took my interests and passions seriously. And just by the fact that he was himself (when you’re the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi you can’t help but carry a certain weight in any room you enter), I felt emboldened to pursue my interests more seriously. He was interested in learning about me and providing advice, and this filled my sails. People like my sociology professor Jennifer Carrera who pushed me to think deeply about my interests in the media, to interrogate my assumptions about race, the internet, the Middle East and held me to a high academic standard.
Mentors come in all forms. The art of finding, pursuing and engaging with mentors is worthy of a whole conversation in and of itself. And it’s something I’m still trying to figure out every day. For now, I’ll just leave this point here by saying: consider mentorship a central part of your leadership development journey. Find, pursue and engage with mentors of all sorts. Especially ones who believe in you. Make learning from them a top priority as a leader.
Practice
The next step in leadership development for me was practicing it in day-to-day interactions. This didn’t feel like leadership development, mostly it felt like living my life, but in retrospect most of what I learned about leadership while at UIUC came from small interactions, day-to-day challenges, and problems I faced as an individual or as a member of the small communities I was a part of. When I think back on my time here, more than any specific lesson or idea about leadership, I think about road trips with my acappella group where one of the members needed advice on a relationship or how to deal with his family. And how listening or being kind in that moment was the best thing I could do. Responding empathetically to the needs of my friends was, it turned out, a leadership quality.
Practice also looked like group meetings where I advocated for culturally-specific programming that accounted for a diverse student body instead of homogenous programming that looked like what student groups had done for years and years. It was difficult to advocate for that. I was the only person pushing for it sometimes. I faced pushback from others. But I knew it was the right thing to do, and I had to work hard to build coalitions of like-minded people to persuade others to come along. I failed many times and succeeded only a few. It was through these experiences that I learned how to shape my approach to leadership. These experiences helped me find out what kind of leader I was supposed to be, to lean into my strengths and abilities rather than try to be something I’m not.
Since UIUC, I’ve continued to learn about leadership through mentorship and practice. Professionally, especially for my first couple of jobs after graduation, I prioritized joining teams and finding managers from whom I could learn a lot. This was important for technical skills I needed to learn as a data analyst. But also important for organizational skills that have become useful over time. Things like: how to manage an effective meeting, what good feedback looks and sounds like, how to lead through influence and persuasion rather than authority, or how to balance the competing needs of leadership and staff in an organization.
One of the best places to practice some of the tenets of leadership are with myself. Although leadership is mostly understood as a social thing, something you do outwardly, in a way that affects at least one other person outside of you, I would say that much of what leadership is made of applies when you’re alone, too. The person you’ll lead most in your life is yourself.
The things I do when no one is asking anything of me—reading, writing, meditating, watching movies, listening to podcasts, exercising, cooking, cleaning—all these things teach me things about myself and about the world. They set my habits and shape my personality when stress is low and the pressure is off. So when stress increases in a professional or personal situation, these habits can kick in. Very little of what you’ll do as a leader will happen for the first time in a high pressure situation. When the opportunity to lead arises, you’ll likely respond by instinct. Shaping these instincts and behaviors when you’re alone is good practice.
So, as was my experience while at UIUC and in my life since, leadership has primarily been something I’ve learned and honed through mentors and through deliberate practice. I recommend all of you give some serious thought to finding and courting good mentors in this phase of your life, and hopefully in subsequent phases, too. And that you develop some deliberate practices to sharpen your leadership skills throughout your life.
So that’s a little bit about the mechanics of leadership development. That still leaves a big question unanswered: why should we work on leadership skills? To what end? What do you do when you’ve acquired these skills and you find yourself in a leadership position?
Servant leadership
Here I want to talk about servant leadership. Is this a phrase familiar to anyone here? It has been in and out of vogue for longer than most of us have been alive. The American version of Servant Leadership traces back to Robert Greenfield in his 1964 book of the same name. Greenfield was an executive at AT&T in the middle of the century, where he researched management, leadership, development and education. The main tenets of his philosophy can be summarized in 10 or so principles. Things like: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building community. These things are not difficult to define. I bet you might be able to define them yourselves by just hearing them enumerated.
The idea of servant leadership is also present in South Asian cultures. “Seva” or being a good “sevak” was a central tenet in independence movements, in Hinduism and Buddhism and more recently has even been brought up in political environments like PM Modi calling himself the “Pradhan Sevak” or Prime Servant of India. I’ll withhold any more commentary about how appropriate or inappropriate those terms are, politically, for now. But suffice to say, there are strong cultural and historical connections between servant leadership and South Asian culture.
More than any specific definition, servant leadership is again better understood as an approach, a set of habits and attitudes or a set of values. To me, servant leadership is an idea I come back to when I feel like leadership is frustrating or challenging or when I don’t know exactly what next step to take. In these moments, I stop and ask myself: “how can I be of service to the people I’m leading?” I don’t always do this at the right time. I don’t always do this in the most graceful or patient way. But the times when I’ve stopped and asked myself this question, then asked the people around me this question, and then earnestly set about trying to serve them, have been among the most satisfying leadership moments in my memory so far.
For example, between 2015-2020, I worked at the New York Times. For most of that time, I helped lead a team that was responsible for the digital transition of the NYT newsroom. The Times is a large, historic, traditional, organization. It was founded in 1851, it is still majority owned by its founding family the Sulzbergers, and it is arguably the most powerful journalism institution in the world. To manage the transition from a premiere print newsroom to a premiere digital newsroom was no small ask. Time and again, the team I helped lead was asked to take on huge projects like training 1600 journalists, across the world, in new publishing workflows and systems. We trained hundreds of journalists in data analysis skills. We created systems for goal setting, feedback, and setting and evaluating editorial strategy.
These projects had to strike a balance: we had to push the organization to change quickly but not so fast that the staff would feel overwhelmed or unduly burdened. Whenever we ran into difficulties, we tried our best to go back to basics. Listen to staff. Persuade them these changes were worthwhile and the right thing to do. Build consensus and buy-in so people felt ownership of the changes, too. Increase our empathy with people who were working very hard and being asked to do a lot. Provide opportunities for airing of grievances and healing. As much as possible, approaching these challenges through the lens of “serving” the organization, its leadership, its people, was worth trying to get right.
One of the things I learned to do through this approach was to see the importance of storytelling in leadership. As leaders, one thing you’ll be entrusted with is people’s attention. What you do with their attention, how you choose to serve them, what stories you choose to tell them will be very important. At the Times, it became very important to craft narratives that reflected back onto the staff that what we were doing was hard but that it was working. We were staying true to the important tenets of journalism while changing the way the organization worked, or who worked there, or what kinds of editorial choices we made. When we were successful in telling this story, people felt motivated to take on challenging things. When we failed, frustrations grew.
In fact, I’ve come to believe in the last few years, some of the strongest failures of leadership in our society, even at the national political level or with our media, are failures of storytelling. Our leaders have failed at this core responsibility. But I digress.
How to develop empathy
The development of these skills is as much a personal project as anything you’ll learn at work or through mentorship or leadership books or classes. How you go about accomplishing this task will be as unique as your own fingerprint. Some of you might try therapy. Some of you might dive in and start your own company and become a leader on the job. Others might read books or attend talks or get more academic training like an MBA or JD. Some of you might realize that you don’t want leadership positions in every aspect of your life, so you’ll take a step back at work or at home and let someone else take the wheel. Your path will be yours to shape and walk down.
I’ll mention something that may sound counter-intuitive but I’ve found it very useful in my own journey in developing some of these core servant leadership skills: watching movies, reading books, listening to podcasts, engaging with art, listening to music and writing. Engaging critically with art is basically an unparalleled activity when it comes to some of the key aspects of developing servant leadership qualities. One of the most important qualities servant leadership requires is empathy. Art is an empathy generating machine, as Roger Ebert once said. Art helps you understand the world, different people in it, your relationship to it, and what you want from it, in ways that almost nothing else can. And it’s pleasurable, to boot!
I hope many of you are fans of these things already. And maybe some of you already think about your relationship to art in similar terms. But if you just think of it as something you do with your free time, something you do to “turn your brain off,” I encourage you to reconsider that. Even if you think art isn’t doing anything to you, try to decipher it more and see how it may be changing you. Spend time thinking about movies and books and music and so on and see how it can help you with some of those servant leadership qualities. Read books like “Better Living Through Criticism” by AO Scott to develop critical habits.
Open for discussion
I’ve been speaking for a while and I promised I would leave time for conversation. So let me wrap up here.
Find and cultivate mentors. Practice leadership in your day-to-day life, especially when you’re alone. Consider leadership a servant position. Engage with art to expand your empathy. And email me at samarth.bhaskar@gmail.com to talk about any of these things and more if you’d like.
Thank you. I’m eager to know if any of these things struck a chord for you or brought up any questions. I’ll do my best to moderate a discussion for our remaining time.
