Mallory’s favorite color is yellow. Butter yellow, golden yellow, she has not met a yellow she doesn’t like. When she was five, she asked her dad his favorite color. He said yellow. She decided that was a great idea and has owned it ever since.
Mine is grey.
She asked, reasonably, whether grey is even a color. It is. It’s more slimming than white and less severe than black. You can drape color over it. You can drape color under it. It’s the utility player. Charcoal and silver, if you’re keeping track.
The question was a setup, of course. Rob’s firm is called Navigate Gray. What I didn’t know yet was that he would spend the better part of an hour on Higher Ed Icons making the case for grey as a place to do good work.
In our line of work, grey has a reputation. No one’s land. A lack of clarity. The space a reorg is supposed to fix.
Rob sees it differently. As vice chancellor at IU East, he had communications and marketing, gift development, alumni relations, campus events and campus life under one roof. “We had so many grey areas between offices,” he told us, “and it wasn’t necessarily a problem.” He read the overlap as a signal. “Not every overlap or every area of ambiguity needs to be eliminated. I think sometimes that’s a sign that there is shared accountability or shared ownership.”
Then he said the thing that made my heart feel Mallory’s jaw drop. Higher ed needs silos.
Mallory says every AMA she has attended has had a slide telling us to break them down. She helped launch a podcast about it. Rob’s argument is that our missions are too broad and our expertise too deep to do without them. “They’re not bad,” he said, “but it’s how do we integrate across those?” Mallory walked away with a new assignment for all of us. Build a better hallway.
Somewhere in there, my favorite color started to sound like a job description. Grey is the color that lets the others work. It sits under them and between them and holds the room together. Rob was describing the same thing inside an institution, the places where functions overlap and ownership is shared.
Clarity, in his telling, doesn’t mean getting rid of the grey either. His line is that clarity is a leadership act. “It’s not that the ambiguity goes away,” he said, “but what leadership makes possible” when it’s there.
At the end of our conversation I told Rob that talking with him made me realize how important the grey is. Especially when it’s grey because the responsibility is shared. That isn’t a gap to close. It means two teams care about the same thing.
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/higher-ed-icons/id1889996806?i=1000799559814
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5bj4ClSdNlEfGClqiG8liD?si=8fe9350974e54588
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MJQv4E6lAWA?si=fYx1_2bQMWWAbBnc