Humility is a Leadership Skill

Fairmont State University President Mike Davis joins When We Disagree to tell a story about being wrong and how it changed him. After discouraging a young colleague from pursuing her dream of becoming a pilot, he realized he was giving advice she never asked for and learned the power of listening instead. The experience reshaped how he mentors students and leads a college campus, shifting his focus from directing people’s paths to helping them discover their own. This conversation shows why admitting mistakes is essential to leadership, innovation, and trust. It’s a candid and fun conversation about humility, growth, and learning to let go of the need to be right in every interaction. 

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Transcript

Michael Lee : [00:00:00] When we disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. Ever notice how some people reject expert advice on topics that they really don't know anything about? This isn't just ignorance. It's a reactance to expertise, a specific form of resistance that emerges when we feel our autonomy threatened by others'.

Superior knowledge. The more someone knows, the more their advice can feel like condescension triggering defensive rejection rather than grateful acceptance in disagreements, this makes expertise a liability rather than an asset. The reactance to expertise plays out dramatically in health decisions.

Patients ignore doctor's recommendations while following celebrity health fads. Parents reject pediatrician's advice while trusting influencers. People dismiss nutritionists while embracing whatever diet their gym buddy suggests. The more credentials someone [00:01:00] has, the less trust they earn. With some populations, this reactance may show up as rejecting or ignoring an insight, or it might show up even with an endless round of what about X?

And what about Y or contrarian pushes for exceptions. Your friend who's a therapist offers relationship insights and suddenly you're defensive about your partnership. More broadly, organizations can pay for consulting expertise and then resist it, wasting resources and opportunities. Understanding reactants to expertise can help experts share knowledge more effectively, and some of us to receive it more gracefully.

Instead of lecturing, ask questions that lead others to conclusions. Use vivid examples that resonate. Tell human stories that connect instead of prescribing, offer options instead of credentialing, demonstrate competence through results. Most importantly, acknowledge the autonomy of those you're advising.

Sometimes the best way to share what you know is to help others feel smart about learning [00:02:00] it. I'm Michael Lee, director of the Civility Initiative and Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston. Our guest today on When We Disagree is Dr. Mike Davis. Mike Davis is the President of Fairmont State University.

Mike, tell us an argument story. 

Mike Davis : So mine is actually a little different. Mine is one where I was wrong. I know a lot of these are ones where people, have an argument they're passionate about, but so I had, and it was also one where I didn't know I was in an argument at the time.

It wasn't until afterwards, I had somebody who was working for me right out of undergrad and it was her first experience in higher education and she was doing a great job and she was really taking to the job and was talking about how much she loved it. So we had talked throughout her year about let's.

It was a one year position. We talked about her throughout the year. How do we get you into a master's program? How do we get you into another job in higher ed? And she kept saying I wanna go on and be a pilot. 

She don't wanna go flight school. And I was like, oh, that's silly. You wanna be in higher ed?

[00:03:00] You should belong in higher ed. And we kept having this conversation and it was probably a month of these conversations and finally she said, it's really. Really makes me upset and it seems really disrespectful that you keep arguing with me about what I should do with my career when it's something I wanna do.

If you're really my friend, you would just support me. And it actually changed not just my outlook on that particular issue or that relationship, but it changed my outlook on. All sorts of pieces of how I advise students, how I interact with faculty and staff. And it should have been, it should have made sense to me because I took a non-traditional path to get to be a chief of staff at the time now a president.

But it didn't occur to me that maybe somebody else needs to try some things out and figure out what they're doing. So it really was one of these instances where. It changed my orientation towards the world because now it's, I think my goal is to help people maximize what they want to do. And if they have questions about whether or [00:04:00] not they should be doing something, they'll ask me that question.

But she wasn't asking me the question I was answering. She was asking the question about how to get to where she wanted to be. And it really changed my outlook on the world. 

Michael Lee : I'm really struck by this story. I'm so interested to hear your answer to some follow ups 'cause I'm finding myself in immediately I think, agreeing with your initial position, which is that you were right to do what you did.

And wondering how you've made the change in your wor your worldview, your orientation, your attitude towards students. So I guess the distinction that's coming up for me and how does this land for you is you thought you were giving advice, she thought you were arguing. 

Mike Davis : Repeatedly, 

Michael Lee : repeatedly.

Mike Davis : She kept saying it and I repeatedly was like, no, you're wrong. 

Michael Lee : Then maybe that's it. Maybe that's the threshold is that give the advice and let it go. 

Mike Davis : But every time she said it, I was like, oh, yeah. Yeah. I know that's something you say you want to do, but you don't. 

Michael Lee : Okay. 

Mike Davis : Yeah, and I'm, I'm 25 years older than you, so I obviously know better what you should do with your life.

Yeah, and it really, I mean it, if you think about it, it takes a lot for a then [00:05:00] 23-year-old, 24-year-old to say to me as her supervisor, but also her friend to say, Hey what you're doing is upsetting to me. 

Michael Lee : So under what conditions in your new orientation now that you've learned from this experience in which now I agree with you now that I hear that differently.

Yeah. I'm like, okay I'm on board. Under what conditions would you give advice versus help somebody explore the path that they're already seeking to take? 

Mike Davis : I think part of it is. How certain they are. And how much exploration they've done. Her dad was a pilot, right? So she obviously knew what she was getting herself into.

I have a lot of conversations now about goal setting, right? Where do you want to be in 10 years? Where do you wanna be in 20 years? What sort of parts of your job do you like? And I think that was the part that as I applied to be a president I really came to this realization that instead of saying, I want to be a president of university, I want to be a chief of staff, whatever job you want, say, what kind of work do you [00:06:00] like to do?

Because when she started to talk about why she liked to be a pilot it was, or why she wanted to be a pilot, it was all of the same things that she was good at. What, which is were the reasons why I thought she should work in higher education. She was detail oriented she was always on task.

She was driven. All those kind of things also would make her great pilot. Yeah. 

Michael Lee : Do you think that one of the reasons that trying to get to your motivations for the repetition of the advice and being argumentative in an advice giving context, 'cause it seems like you're blurring the line between those two, and you mentioned wanting to help people maximize their time, their life, and their opportunities.

And figure out what their real goals are in a way. And then you mentioned that you took a non-traditional path, so it was somewhat hypocritical for you perhaps to do that. But is there some part of you that thinks that you wasted some time and that you could have been more efficient in your path had somebody given you 

Mike Davis : advice?

Oh no. Not at all. No, not at all. I think that every. Wrong turn. I've taken every job I applied for that I didn't get, led me to the job I [00:07:00] have now, which I think is the perfect job for me. It's the perfect fit for me. When I was applying for jobs as president, I wouldn't get one and I would say, oh, it wasn't the right fit.

But I knew in my head I was like, part of it was I was rationalizing it. But now that I'm here, I'm like, oh, that was a hundred percent true, right? I was a hundred percent in this space where somebody didn't see me as a fit, so they didn't hire me. And then when I finally got this job there. It was the perfect fit and somebody else saw it, and it was the same sort of thing as I thought I was doing that advice for someone else, where it's I see something in you that you've never seen.

Michael Lee : Well said. Yeah. There's a rascal flat said it best when they said, God bless the Blo Road, right? 

Mike Davis : Yeah. 

Michael Lee : Oh, 

Mike Davis : absolutely. 

Michael Lee : Yeah. So sketch out, you've mentioned it briefly, but let's really tease it out now. How did that experience change your interaction with colleagues and students? In other words, can you either give an aggregate of an examples where you once would've done it one way and now you do it a different way, or maybe a specific instance comes up?

Mike Davis : No, I think I start now. Like I was saying, I [00:08:00] start with what is it you like about your job? Because I wanna make sure people are still matching with the things they like as opposed to what they imagine jobs are. There's a lot of times, especially for the 18 to 22 year olds or even young professionals on campus, they imagine a job, a particular ring, right?

When people talk about what a university president does, I was like, oh, you have no idea, right? You think I go to receptions and parties. I was like, but that's a very small portion of everything else I do. So I think part of my. Role is to say, what do you like to do? And then make sure what they're saying they want to do matches that, as opposed to saying everybody should love the thing I love.

And that's really what was happening with me pushing her to be in higher education is, I think higher education is life changing. And I think everyone should wanna do life changing things, therefore and she was good at it. A lot of times I was encountering people who I was like, I wish you had some of her skillset.

So I wanted her to stick around because she was good at what she was doing. So some of it is selfish, right? I saw what I thought [00:09:00] was Yeah. The right path for her because she was gonna help the thing, the industry that I love, 

Michael Lee : what'd she end up doing? 

Mike Davis : She's in, she's te she's actually teaching flight school in Florida now.

So she went through the flight school and then became an instructor. 

Michael Lee : So in a way, you ended 

Mike Davis : up, so still doing education. Yeah. Kind of 

being 

Michael Lee : half right? Yeah. 

Mike Davis : And the laborers, when I interviewed for this job. We have a flight program. And when I was prepping for the interview, I was like, I don't understand a single thing I'm reading about this flight program.

So I called her and said, Hey, walk me through all of this. Tell me what I'm looking at. So then I relied on her expertise. 

Michael Lee : Yeah. 

Mike Davis : Four years after we'd had that initial conversation. 

Michael Lee : I love this story for a couple reasons and I'll get a little meta here and then I'll take a conversational risk or take a question risk, which is when I ask people to come on the show, oftentimes I say, people come on the show and they talk about times that they were right.

Yeah, that somebody had really pushed them in a way, in a relationship that had become toxic or abusive, and they needed to know what time it was and you told 'em what time it was. 

Mike Davis : Right. 

Michael Lee : Sometimes people are in disagreements and a few minutes into the disagreement or a few years into the [00:10:00] disagreement, they look up or they look back and they say, how the hell did we get here?

And what are we even fighting about? 

And then sometimes people come on and they tell stories about being the villain, and sometimes people come on and tell stories about being wrong. Yeah. You can imagine which of those we have the fewest episodes about. 

Mike Davis : Right. 

Michael Lee : So the first thing you open up with is I'm gonna tell a story about a time that I was wrong.

Yeah. And you instantly had me, of course. 'cause I love that's part of the work that we do. But why is it important to you? Why was it important to you to come on this show and tell a story? You could have told any story, but she told a story about being wrong. Why is that? 

Mike Davis : Because I think that I'm in a business where.

We try so hard not to be wrong, but the truth is the best things we do are often the times where we're failing horribly. And I think that because of, because higher education gets such a bad rap and we get beaten up for not fulfilling every promise we've ever made, we're so terrified of being wrong that we've [00:11:00] gotta lean into being wrong.

It's the only way we innovate. And especially true for regional publics. I think for a long time we were looked at as little versions of the big places. And now that we have fewer students, there's not as much space for those. So I think that we've gotta find a way to differentiate ourselves and part of the way small places differentiate themselves is by making big mistakes.

So we try a program and, if we try 10 things and four of them work, that's still really successful. And we've gotta be willing to lean into that and make those errors. 

Michael Lee : There's the one other thing is the fact of being wrong and really acknowledging it to yourself.

One thing is adjusting your relationship to being wrong and the way you admit it to others. But then the third one, and this is the one that really becomes difficult in a social media and a hyper mediated world, which is being wrong in front of an audience and really taking the ego smack. And those seem to be three different variables, each of which you're modeling here.

Mike Davis : [00:12:00] Yeah. 

Michael Lee : How do you change? Let's stake on this path because you and I are both in agreement on this. Alright. We are warriors for MO remodeling. How we relate to being wrong. More people should admit they're wrong more often than not. That's a position that it sounds like you and I both agree on.

Mike Davis : Yep. 

Michael Lee : You run a university, let's say you wanted to start a being wrong as good campaign. 

Mike Davis : Yeah. 

Michael Lee : What are the kinds of things that you would put in that campaign as we brainstorm this? 

Mike Davis : And one of the things I've tried really hard to push since I've gotten on campus is a respect for expertise. So at someone, we have to give up the things we think, right? And we all walk around a college campus or walk around anywhere. We go to a restaurant, we say, why didn't they do it this way? Why didn't they do it that way? Why'd they build the sidewalk where they built it? And I think we actually, to be wrong, we have to assume the other experts are right.

Let them be wrong if they're gonna be wrong, but don't hold it against 'em. Just same with us, right? It's the, it's attribution error, right? We're willing to say, oh, I made a mistake, a good, honest [00:13:00] mistake. The other person did something because they were incompetent, right? And we need to flip that script and not necessarily say we're incompetent, but willing to say that person was doing their best. They didn't make the mistake on purpose. One of the things I've said is we've made, we've had some things happen here at the university that are not. How I would've planned them, not how I would've scripted 'em out.

And I've had to say to people, we did that for the first time. Which means there's gonna be mistakes and you've gotta give people some grace and then help us figure out decompress, figure it out. And part of what helps me is I've committed, I've told people this is the last job I'm ever gonna have.

So I'm gonna be here for 20 years, which means I've got 70 and a half years left to go, which means I don't need to knock everything out of the park right now. I'm not a president who's looking for my next job, so I don't have to. Crush it every day, right? I can get a little bit better every day.

And that's where a lot of that growth comes in is I say to people all the time, 'cause they're like we should have done X, Y, and Z. And I was like, yes, we should have. We didn't. Let's be better next year than we were this year. We're already better than we [00:14:00] were last year and let's keep doing that.

And it builds in that room to experiment, that room to fail where people are often terrified of that. 

Michael Lee : Yeah. It seems like at least one of the common denominators in what you just said is this quest for perfection can really do a lot of us wrong, whether we're experts. And universities are higher ed or frankly, in life and in our personal relationships.

Two follow up questions here about this as we're building out this case for being wrong more often. One, as you mentioned, expertise, and two, you talked about leadership, and I wanted to ask about both of those and how they relate to this idea of humility. The case for being wrong is really just the case for greater humility.

But when the rubber hits the road, what is humility except admitting that I'm not that smart. Admitting that there's errors in my knowledge or there's huge gaps in my knowledge. Embracing some curiosity about those gaps and not being defensive about those. But then also, those are easy.

Admitting that I was wrong is way harder than those things. So let's go back to the first one, which is, how do you square admitting being [00:15:00] wrong more often? With expertise, because at least on the one level, we go to experts because they're more likely to be right. 

Mike Davis : Yeah. I think that part of it's, we have to be honest about where our expertise is.

And I've been working at universities for a long time, so my expertise is often in, I've had some experiences that have led me to this place. Like I meet with our student government. President every two weeks I have lunch with her. And I just, I meet with our student government leadership and they'll come to me with these ideas that they have that are, for ideas that 18 to 22 year olds would have.

They're often the start of a good idea, but they're not completely fully formed. They've got, some things that they're working out. And I'll say, oh here's how you should do it. And I complete the idea for them, and they're always like. How do you know all this stuff? And I was like, I've just been around a long time.

It's the long line from Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray movie. Maybe the real God uses tricks or maybe he's just been around so long that he knows everything. That's how I feel on a, when I'm talking to students on a college campus. [00:16:00] I'm, I've got 30 years on them, so I've got 30 years of making mistakes.

Michael Lee : Yeah. 

Mike Davis : That have helped me figure those things out. 

Michael Lee : Does that Groundhog Day line land with your students? 

Mike Davis : No, they have no idea. 

Michael Lee : Don't drive angry. Okay. The second one is how do you square admitting being wrong more often as a subset of this case for humility with leadership? Because at least on its face, we can both think of models of leadership that are about reducing errors, not embracing them.

Mike Davis : Yeah, I think that there are certainly occupations where. Reducing errors is the purpose, right? If you're a macca, if you're running an airport, you want fewer errors. I actually think part of our job in higher education is to make some mistakes in enemy. I think a lot terrified of that.

That they forget to, and that's why we end up with 60 universities that all look the same and don't have anything unique about them that helps 'em compete. [00:17:00] 

Michael Lee : Okay, let's make a big final public pitch for this case for humility. So if in our public lives, in our private lives, and in our university campus, 'cause that's where the majority of this conversation has been given, where we're both currently located.

What is the immediate benefit for all of us, for being more humble, more often and embracing, admitting, being wrong? 

Mike Davis : I think that. This is obviously not a unique insight, but I think that, we see so much of people's highlight reels, right? Facebook is, I have this success I'm doing great.

I think that's an unrealistic way of how most of us interact with the world, right? I think most of us fail more often than we succeed. And we're so scared of doing it that it makes other people feel like if they fail. They've done something wrong. I was talking to somebody on campus who was like a little uptight, right?

Was a little worried about what was going on and was trying to maintain control of everything. [00:18:00] And at this point in my career, I'm a pretty laid back guy, so I told some stories about, oh yeah, when I was in my previous role, I did stuff like this all the time because I was constantly like trying to keep control of all these different pieces.

They were surprised because now I don't seem that way, and I think that's true. I'm 53 years old, I'm a much more finished version of who I was at 18 or 30 or 45, right? And five years from now, I'll look back and say, oh, I can't believe I thought X, Y, and Z. But I don't we ever show people that so they don't realize that there's this.

Trial, this necessary trial and error in what we do. 

Michael Lee : It's a, it is a kind of like case for knowledge production. Yeah. There needs to be a kind of productive, controlled antagonism and that being wrong advances the march of knowledge. In a way, it's almost like the scientific method, but then there's also an ethos.

Thing happening here where we often think of ethos or the Aristotelian idea of ethos as [00:19:00] expertise and do I know more stuff right than or do I work harder than you work? But there is also a cares about others element to ethos. Yeah. And that's about pretending not be perfect. We also, we 

Mike Davis : also worry about what it is we know as opposed to knowing about systems and connections.

And that's why. On my campus, it's unlikely in most areas that I know more than any person I'm talking to. My area of expertise is seeing the connections between complimentary systems. So if I'm a really good president, what I'm doing is when I'm talking to a faculty member and they're saying, I'd really like to get this program off the ground.

I say, oh, there's so many in student affairs who can help you do that, 

Michael Lee : Uhhuh. 

Mike Davis : And then I get to get out of the way. That's the best part of my job is when I get outta the way and then three weeks later they come to me and say, we figured it out. That's if I'm doing my job really well, that's where my success lives.

Michael Lee : I hope you'll invite me to the grand opening of the Center for Humility Studies at Fairmont State University. I love 

Mike Davis : it. I love it. Let's do it. 

Michael Lee : Mike Davis, thanks so much for being on when we Disagree. 

Mike Davis : [00:20:00] Thanks. Thanks for having me. 

Michael Lee : When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee.

Recording and sound engineering by Jesse k and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at When We disagree@gmail.com.