Consensus is the process. Commitment is the decision with Canisius University President Steve K. Stout

Canisius University President Steve Stoute moved his chief financial officer’s office across the hall from his own. He wanted to be able to stand up, walk over, and say, here’s what I’m thinking, let’s talk. It was the first of three things he did to get the CFO into the rooms where strategy gets made. The second was trust, said out loud and often. The third was a standing meeting invitation that his team has learned to treat as a requirement.

Steve is the twenty-fifth president of Canisius University in Buffalo, a Jesuit institution facing the same enrollment, financial, and public-confidence pressures he described in a recent keynote. In this conversation with Howard Teibel, he talks about how he leads inside those pressures. He separates consensus, which belongs to the process, from commitment, which belongs to the decision. He explains why he tells the student newspaper that he does not have an opinion as president. He describes what happens when a vice president gets out ahead of him, and why his first question is what he himself might have done differently. And he makes the case for “pilot” as the most important word in a university’s vocabulary, because an institution that can start, test, and stop is one that can protect the people willing to try something new.

Links & Notes

• Steve K. Stoute, JD, President, Canisius University

• Humble Inquiry, Edgar H. Schein