Transcript
0:00:01 - Annalisa Holcombe
Did you know that the average human spends 92,000 hours at work during their lifetime? That's more than we spend eating, cleaning, driving, watching TV or even surfing the internet? In fact, work is what we do most. It comes second only to sleeping. Welcome to 92,000 hours, the podcast that believes in the integration of life and work.

I'm your host, Annalisa Holcombe. Before we begin, I wanted to tell you a quick story about why this podcast is so personal to me. I began practicing law at age 26 and learned many valuable lessons, including that I was deeply unhappy at work. Although I was on a path that looked like traditional success, I realized that I needed to quit my job in order to align myself with my passion and purpose. Now I am dedicated to making sure all of our 92,000 hours at work are spent well instead of simply spent. How do we construct a working world that values and accommodates our humanity? How do we construct a life that is not separate from, but fueled by, the purpose we find in our work? In this podcast, we will explore those questions and more. In each episode, I will speak to someone that demonstrates meaning, passion and purpose in their work. Join me in discovering what happens when we bring our whole selves to our work, schools and communities.

Today I am joined by Dr Gary Daynes. Gary is the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Barton College. He holds a PhD in American history with a focus on the history of efforts to build and strengthen community. Today we are speaking about trust, both in ourselves and in others. So let's jump in. I've told you about the question that I always ask at the beginning, and so I'm really interested in your answer. So it's the who are you as a human being type of question. You can't count work, school, volunteerism, sports, church-related activity, all of the things that you might tick off on a resume. You have to take that resume stuff out. What is your greatest accomplishment as a human being?

0:02:29 - Gary Daynes
I think my accomplishment is to care about and try to live in a way that is concerned with a long time horizon, right, that thinks about the span of time, and you would think, as a historian, that this would have been a thing like I would have said I love history, I love the long span of time. So of course, this will be an accomplishment of mine, but I stumbled into history. I didn't choose history on purpose. I don't think.

0:03:02 - Annalisa Holcombe
Or maybe you did, or maybe I did, I didn't know.

0:03:05 - Gary Daynes
I used to be a serious runner and I ran a couple of ultramarathons and you know the notion that you would run for five or six hours without stopping for many, many miles. That taught me some things about the value of endurance. Intellectually, I've been increasingly intrigued by people who do take the long term. There was this English philosopher and politician, edmund Burke, who made the argument that in every decision that you make has to be a decision that's informed by the generation that preceded you, your current generation and the generation that follows you. I used to think that was kind of sentimental, but I think that there's now an actual sort of beauty and discipline and responsibility in that, especially in a world of climate change and disintegrating institutions and political dysfunction and the lack, the notion that you would somehow make a set of decisions that respects your grandparents and your grandchildren, and that seems to be something that we ought to be worrying about a lot.

0:04:18 - Annalisa Holcombe
And then, Gosh, but it's really not there.

0:04:23 - Gary Daynes
No, it's not there. Valuable things are things that take a long time to arrive at and, at last, a long time after you're gone.

0:04:34 - Annalisa Holcombe
So that's beautiful, and I wish more of us would think that way, and I feel like everything that we talk about now is based on limited time horizons rather than long term, although there are places like you mentioned that actually do that. I think it leads into our subject matter about trust, and I think that trust plays into that long term horizon thinking, and so it makes a lot of sense that that's what we would talk about today in all sorts of contexts, because I think it has a lot to do with your interest in your professional life, your personal life, your community life and maybe even in a faith life. Like it's interesting, because I was reading something about how trust and faith sometimes are interchangeable, and I don't know if they are or not, so I want to talk about that a little bit too.

0:05:27 - Gary Daynes
So, as we Tell me what you think trust means, or how do you see it, no, that's a super interesting question, because I think trust means two contradictory things at the same time, or that is, we use the word trust to actually refer to two things that are opposites to each other. So in an institutional setting, when a person says that they trust another person, it usually means that person will do what I want them to do or what I expect them to do, so they know the rules, so I can trust them. So this is often what happens in a hierarchy, where a boss says to somebody who works for them I trust you Really. What they're saying is I know that you're going to do. You'll stand in for me, you'll do what I was going to do. You'll follow the rules, you'll behave.

So I can trust you I don't need to pay attention because you're going to do what you're supposed to do. So that's one form of it's one usage of the word trust and it's probably the more common usage of the word trust, but you can see what in there is really also distrust.

In fact we build systems around that kind of trust to make sure that the person stays in the lines. So in a work setting, if you're running a restaurant, you trust your night manager to obey the rules, but there's also this whole system of surveillance to make sure that they're obeying the rules, and then you get evaluated on your ability to obey the rules and stuff.

So there's a form of trust that's really about, I think, predictability and control, and then there's another form of trust, which is I trust that things will work out the way that they're supposed to work out, or I trust you so completely as a person that I believe that the decisions that you make you'll make with integrity and with the best interests of our organization in mind. And that's a trust that's based in letting go of control, in just believing, imagining, hoping that there's some kind of a logic or a direction to the way the good relationships point or the universe points. To use kind of faith language, that means that in the big picture, things are going to work out okay if you let go, if you trust that person to do their thing, to use their best gifts, to make decisions that you wouldn't necessarily make.

0:08:07 - Annalisa Holcombe
That's different from that other kind of trust right, Absolutely.

0:08:10 - Gary Daynes
So, but we use the word trust I mean both of those things simultaneously, or we can use it in a confusing sort of way. 0:08:19 - Annalisa Holcombe
And it changes everything about the environment that you're in, depending on which level of trust we're talking about which definition?

0:08:26 - Gary Daynes
Yeah, no, it absolutely does. It absolutely does.

0:08:30 - Annalisa Holcombe
And I bet what's also interesting is there will like I would want to work in the environment that you talked about the latter environment you talked about but I know that there are people who also want to work in the former environment, and that that's okay too.

0:08:45 - Gary Daynes
Absolutely, yeah, I mean, I think for the latter environment to work, what you have to have is agreement on a fundamental set of beliefs and then, within those beliefs, people can be free to do their own thing.

0:09:02 - Annalisa Holcombe
Is there a difference in terms of what trust might mean in that type of a context, based on the different areas in which you've worked? Like you've worked in academia, you've worked as a faculty member, a dean, a strategic planner, a consultant? Like there are different roles that you've worked in even in the same industry, but how does trust show up differently in those types of roles?

0:09:27 - Gary Daynes
So in a traditional kind of American institution of higher education, there is the notion of faculty governance right, that faculty own the curriculum and that they have some responsibility for determining what is taught and how it's taught and what the outcomes are.

So when you think about that idea, it's a really beautiful and uncommon kind of thing in American institutions, in institutions in general.

I mean think if you worked for Nike and Nike said well, the decisions that we make about what kind of sneakers we sell are going to be based on the folks that work at the sneaker factory, and so we'll set up this really complicated system for them to make a set of decisions about sneaker design, but then ultimately we'll put billions of dollars behind that.

Well, it just wouldn't make sense. But in higher education there are these places, these sort of vestiges of trust, and one of them is in faculty governance. Now, as faculty members, we tend to do a horrible job at that, either because we take very kind of low stakes decisions so our faculty governance is about what the course name is or the course number you take this course before or after that other course but also because we find ourselves fighting all the time about those components of the curriculum or the classroom, and I'm not sure exactly what drives that, except that in higher ed, I think a lot of a person's sense of self is tied up in what they teach, and so to adjust a course is to adjust a person. In fact, league governance doesn't pay attention to that.

0:11:29 - Annalisa Holcombe
Or allow for that humanity to be in it.

0:11:32 - Gary Daynes
Yeah, that's absolutely the case. Very small institutions have been the slowest to adopt data. That's not because they're backwards or they lack technological ability or they're incurious. I think it is that in the lived day to day experience of very small institutions you know stuff already that you could figure out also by using data, but it wouldn't be nearly as rich. You know those things because your relationships are deep and entangled. So you're not talking about a generic student or a student with sort of generic demographic characteristics. You're talking about that particular student.

0:12:16 - Annalisa Holcombe
Right, you're not talking about faculty in general.

0:12:19 - Gary Daynes
You are talking about my institution, the 75 faculty who I know every single one of them, and they all know me and I've hired 45% of them Like we're actual human beings in relationship with each other. We're not the faculty and the administration often. So I say that just to say that probably this latter kind of trust that we were talking about, the trust to be free to make wise decisions within a vision or a commonly held vision or a mission it only happens at certain scales. I think that's really interesting and I don't know at what point you get to a scale where you can't have that kind of trust or that sort of trust doesn't work, but it's probably not very big.

0:13:01 - Annalisa Holcombe
Tell me about that, like about trust within working relationships. I think it's really important. I think that we don't talk about it very. I mean, I can't imagine you sit down and have like honest conversations about trust with the people, either who work, who report to you or to whom you report, and I like I'm really interested in that. How do we reach a space of a feeling like we are trusted or we trust other people or we are in a trustworthy environment?

0:13:31 - Gary Daynes
Some of it has to do with self-knowledge, or at least self-understanding, that is, you can trust other people better when your own sense of self is secure enough, or based in non-work-related things deeply enough so that it's okay for somebody to sit down across the table from you and say, no, actually you're wrong, or I don't believe that, or to work through really long and difficult conversations about hard and complicated things.

I've come to believe more and more that the ability to trust, like I said, is rooted in a sense of self, in that, for me at least, that sense of self is grounded in a set of faith commitments, and they're like increasingly old faith commitments for me. So I think you knew I grew up Mormon, my family, my wife's family, even Mormons. Since they were Mormons, they walked across the plains, we found ourselves very much on the margins of the Mormon Church and when we moved to North Carolina through happens dancing, good luck we ended up in an Episcopal congregation, and so for me, episcopal worship, where every Sunday you sort of go through the same liturgy and you often repeat the same prayers and the same words over and over again. It gave me a kind of grounding, a kind of a hope depth, or at least like ancientness to some language that gave me over time a clearer sense of self or a greater self-confidence, but greater comfort in like the.

0:15:35 - Annalisa Holcombe
This is okay to be this, yeah, yeah.

0:15:38 - Gary Daynes
And that, in turn, makes it, I think, simpler to trust in other people.

0:15:47 - Annalisa Holcombe
I love that you talked about that, because I think that we often and I talk about this in the podcast about bringing our whole selves to wherever we are, and yet we often are not our whole selves, like we are a piece or what we think we're supposed to be. There's some kind of a facade, but when we see each other really I think that you're saying like that trust happens more.

0:16:14 - Gary Daynes
It does, but our systems are set up to make sure that we don't bring our whole selves. So think about, like the whole range of human resources policies and guidelines they are. Many of them are meant to not bring your whole self to the table. Yeah yeah. I mean think about job interview questions that are forbidden. Well, I understand why they're forbidden. They're forbidden in part because they've been used to discriminate against people in the past, to ask about marital status, for instance.

0:16:49 - Annalisa Holcombe
Right.

0:16:50 - Gary Daynes
People have been discriminated against. Hundreds, thousands of people have been discriminated against because that question was allowed, so now it's not allowed, and the unintended consequence of that is that an important part of many people's adult lives doesn't come to the table when they're making decisions about their work and their employment. Faculty members are among the last people, the last sort of category of people, who are allowed within boundaries to be weird.

0:17:21 - Annalisa Holcombe
Yes, like it's sometimes a bad demeanor, yeah yeah, yeah.

0:17:25 - Gary Daynes
But I mean, if you think about, one of the things that differentiates a higher education administrator from a faculty member is administrators tend to be non-weird.

0:17:34 - Annalisa Holcombe
And not allowed to be.

0:17:35 - Gary Daynes
Not allowed to be and often for that reason not very interesting.

0:17:39 - Annalisa Holcombe
Right. 0:17:40 - Gary Daynes
Because we're all. We're weird people, people are weird, we're quirky. We like strange things and interesting music and weird food and you know like we knit, we're garden or whatever, or play role-playing games, or whatever.

One of the cool things about living in a little southern town is your social circle is relatively small, so over time you come to discover things about people you normally wouldn't discover. But it just comes up because there's only one bar. So if you want to beer, you go to the same place all the all the time and it's astonishing how interesting people are when you get to know them. It's astonishing how interesting people are.

0:18:39 - Annalisa Holcombe
If this conversation has caught your attention and you want to join in on conversations like this, check out our website at connectioncollaborative.com. Welcome back. You're listening to 92,000 hours and today we are chatting with Gary Danes. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what that's like. I know that you're engaged and have been in community building, like as a as a vocation in some ways. Talk to me a little bit about that, about community building, what it means to you and what what it means. I don't know if there's a way to weave in trust, but it seems like the trust Goes along with building community.

0:19:38 - Gary Daynes
Yeah for a long time, I was working out of an assumption that universities, colleges and universities needed to be involved in the community, because college and university students Didn't really have a sense of community and so when they came to college, they needed to learn the skills of democracy and be exposed to social issues and problems and challenges and stuff like that, and that was all the rhetoric Of service learning at the time, when I was getting involved in the 1990s. So turns out, though, that in the present college, students actually have Rich senses of community, and the students who come to my institute this institution where I'm the provost Most of them are deeply entangled in their families and their neighborhoods and their communities, for good and for ill. Some of them don't want to live on campus because they have obligations to their families. Lots of them want to return to these little towns in eastern North Carolina that, you know, people generally haven't heard of and wouldn't seem to be desirable places, so, but they have this rich kind of sense of community that we need to be more attentive to and more respectful to.

Institutions of higher ed still have this notion that, like the weight for a young person to grow up is you extract them from all of their relationships and you put them in a residence hall and then you say sleep here and will entertain you and you go to class, and that somehow that makes you into an adult. I just think that needs to be examined. There's a whole set of assumptions there. They may be true, but they certainly.

0:21:18 - Annalisa Holcombe
They certainly we haven't examined them.

0:21:20 - Gary Daynes
No, no, they're based in a set of assumptions.

0:21:22 - Annalisa Holcombe
That's radical for us.

0:21:24 - Gary Daynes
Well, I mean they're. They're based in In assumptions about who goes to college that date from the 1970s and 80s, when most of the people who went to college were from upper middle class families. They were often suburban, they didn't always have a lot of experience with diversity, so it wasn't that those were just like stupid benighted ideas that some Administrative too much time on their hands had. They were real, but they didn't. They didn't adjust. Those assumptions didn't adjust with the world in which we live. So, um, so certainly that's kind of one piece.

How, one way, how I got to be interested in In community. I have learned that probably in every single community, when you get past the kind of superficial, there are deep relationships and they exist quietly and they often exist outside of the view of formal institutions and they give meaning to people's lives in the way that a job, a title, wealth Even though all of those things are good, those things don't give the sort of meaning that real human relationships in bounded by place Do give so when we talk about that, I mean that's really important, but I can also hear in the back of my head um Listeners saying that that sounds great.

0:22:44 - Annalisa Holcombe
I have no idea how I'm going to find community and in fact, right now my place is located on a screen, right like there's so much, and I I'm really interested in that because through my work with young adults, I've learned that and I say it out loud that we have so much ability to be connected and yet we feel so separate, um, and that we're really yearning for what I think you're talking about in terms of community. We're yearning to Be heard, to be seen and to really listen, but we don't have the opportunity to do that. We search it out in ways that don't that actually lead us to trust each other less, probably, or? Um? I'm just interested in a how do we develop or exercise this um yearning in the environment that most of us find ourselves in?

0:23:39 - Gary Daynes
in my own experience, the richest sorts of online community, if you will, are of two types. One is where Technology allows already existing relationships that are separated by distance To be together right and that happens all the time and actually happens really richly across generations. I mean, my mother is not a technologically adept sort of person, but she's way better at staying in touch with my kids than I am, because she.

0:24:15 - Annalisa Holcombe
She sends the emojis. Yeah, she does.

0:24:18 - Gary Daynes
She follows them, as much as they sometimes don't like it on facebook, so there's an ability for already existing relationships to be strengthened across distance through technology.

The other thing that technology lets you do which I think is also really healthy is find similarly quirky people to you. So I mean, if you look at the people that I follow on twitter, there are some people that you would expect right other higher ed folks and other people in Wilson. There's also a whole bunch of people who study stained glass in old english churches, because I really like old english churches. I mean, becoming a episcopalean is part of anglicanism and I have this thing for old church buildings. I feel holiness in in those places, so, but I don't live anywhere near.

Old english churches yeah but if I got on my twitter feed I'd see All these pictures, all these pictures and explanations and remarkable things that I could never experience again. So that's that's meaningful to me. It's not a thick relationship. I mean, you know, those people know who I am. None of them have like followed me back because they're not interested in, like, english church, people aren't interested in Vice presidents of small colleges in rural eastern north carolina, but nonetheless, there's that a kind of ability to have tightly defined community with like sort of bonding, social capital, inward-facing connection. That's actually easier on the internet and that's good right. It's good to have things that you are interested in, people who share those interests, a place in which to discuss and ask questions about those kinds of things.

0:26:10 - Annalisa Holcombe
It makes us feel less separate.

0:26:13 - Gary Daynes
Yes, the world is better because that exists. We shouldn't assume, though, that A that that's an end in and of itself. I guess I'm old-fashioned, but I believe that there's a power to physical proximity. There's a relational power to physical proximity that matters. Even people again back to my monk thing even people who have chosen in some ways to separate themselves physically from much of the rest of society do it in community. You have a monastery. You're going way back. You know the desert fathers, the first hermits, fathers and mothers who went into the desert in Egypt in the third and fourth century. They didn't just go by themselves, there were communities of hermits, as odd as that sounds. So there's something about physical presence and interaction that matters, and I think it's about the ability to express emotion and nuance and sympathy and to get past disagreements that are spoken or that otherwise might tangle you up. It is ascribed to millennials and to Gen Z that they favor experience over acquisition, right?

So you know, rather like in Indonesia instead of have a BMW or something like that.

Well, there's a deep and rich part of human life in that which is we learn powerfully and lastingly through experience. So this cuts both ways. If you only have every experience once and your experience is bad, then you're going to mistrust that thing. So first time you go to McDonald's you don't like the Big Mac. You're going to hate McDonald's forever. But if people return again and again to certain experiences, they become practices, they become rituals or habits. Then there's a really deep sort of knowledge that grows out of that and I believe that that kind of practice builds trust. It gives people the willingness to overcome something that might happen one time because it doesn't happen the next time when you go back.

0:29:04 - Annalisa Holcombe
I want to talk a little bit about. I think I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about trust in our personal lives and you brought it up a little bit at the beginning with regard to making professional decisions that affect your personal life and what that means, and one of the things that I'm interested in is that when I talk about the issue of trust with young adults, it's often people immediately go to their personal lives often, and before they say anything about trust, they talk about betrayal. It's always the opposite. The language that they talk about is actually betrayal, and I'm wondering about how we bring trust into our personal lives, how you might have done it and how we, over time, how to talk about or really learn to trust in our relationships in a personal space.

0:30:01 - Gary Daynes
Dang it. Betrayal is a very strong word, and it's a word that covers all sorts of other. You might think of the word betrayal as an umbrella under which there are all sorts of other things that may not be as bad as betrayal. So, disappointment can feel like betrayal.

0:30:25 - Annalisa Holcombe
Or fear.

0:30:27 - Gary Daynes
Fear, dishonesty, losing out.

0:30:33 - Annalisa Holcombe
Pain.

0:30:34 - Gary Daynes
Abuse. I mean, there are all sorts of really negative and powerful things that lead to betrayal as well.

So I wonder if part of, in the same way that the word trust contains its opposites. The language that we have to describe our setbacks and disappointments maybe isn't as rich or as nuanced as it needs to be in order for us to be healthy. To describe what you have experienced to somebody else and have that other person listen is often a really valuable thing and something that people in general lack, and young people don't have very good access to at all. So anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is you said that when you talk to young people about trust, they often start by talking about betrayal. That should be taken seriously and should be given enough airtime to understand what that actually means.

0:31:50 - Annalisa Holcombe
Absolutely so. I have a question for you to lead us to just closing down the conversation, which is something that just matters to me and, as you know, I deeply love the idea of mentors in our lives, and I'm interested in you telling me about who has been a mentor to you and why were they a mentor? What did you learn from them?

0:32:16 - Gary Daynes
I'm not sure that I've had very many mentors in my life I have had. There have been a few people that I've worked with who have really been formative at certain points in my career.

0:32:29 - Annalisa Holcombe
But by saying that I don't mean to say woe is me, I haven't had mentors or like. I think a lot of us have that experience.

0:32:35 - Gary Daynes
So you and I both worked very closely with Sid Seidelman at Westminster College. Sid did that for me. I was working in a different institution and I got invited up to interview for a job and I sat down in Sid's office and he just gave me like the best and truest description of that institution at that time. He said look, this is a place where, if you come and you want to make a difference, you can, and for me at that moment in my life, it was the thing that I needed to hear. I was in a big, unyielding institution where I didn't feel like I could make a difference, no matter how hard I wanted to try. So at that moment in my life, the person that I needed more than anybody else was Cid Seidelman.

0:33:28 - Annalisa Holcombe
It's kind of nice when they show up when you need them too. It's the whole conspiring to help you.

0:33:33 - Gary Daynes
Right, right, yeah, no, in fact, I'm sure one of the challenges that you face in trying to do mentorship work is that when people reflect on their mentors, it's often serendipitous. It doesn't often happen through some kind of an intentional it's exactly you up with this person. At a difficult point in my life. I hired somebody who turned out to be a good mentor. I mean, I just like found a job coach who turned out to be really good and I felt like I was.

I was really Fortunate to have that and then in retrospect there have been people who I now recognize this, having been mentors, but I didn't realize that they were mentors at the time. So I think for me an important part of mentorship is reflection. Right, it's Mentorship often happens Before you know it.

0:34:28 - Annalisa Holcombe
Yeah, ultimately, we're focusing on how we Spend our time in a professional sense, in a way that invokes purpose and meaning. How do we make sure that All of that, all of those hours that we are spending, are spent well rather than just simply spent? So how do you know that that's happening for you in your life? What are you doing? What do you? What gives you the purpose and meaning that you know that this would, this time you're spending is well spent time recognizing and Also adopting limits helps.

0:35:07 - Gary Daynes
So I Like most people when you're new in a position. When I was, you know, new as the provost, I was like oh sure, everybody all work all the time and I'll answer emails all weekend long, and and that was just pathological for me and for the people that I worked with. I mean the last thing that they needed was to be worrying that. You know a note that they sent on Friday afternoon I was going to be responding to on Saturday at 6 am.

0:35:34 - Annalisa Holcombe
Then they have to work on Saturday at 4 pm.

0:35:36 - Gary Daynes
Yeah, yeah, so so putting limits around work that are, of course, informed by the work that you have to do, you can't be like a nurse and say, oh, I'm only gonna be a nurse between like 3 and 7 pm or so. So limits, putting limits in place, is one thing. The second thing for me is writing the. The work that most provost do is best done behind the scenes. It's it's often hard managerial and administrative Sort of stuff. But I as a person Need to be able to think and express ideas.

I was a good professor, I I Like words, I speak relatively well, and the notion of laying out on the page a Series of thoughts that add up to something that has meaning has been very important for me. And then the last thing is there has to be a vision. My work is more meaningful when I believe it is attached to a mission or vision that is greater than the day-to-day, that's greater even than the functional success of the organization that I work for. And If there's not a vision or if I can't apply a vision, or you can't see your own work in in that, yeah yeah, then Then I don't do good work either for the institution that employs me or for myself as a person.

0:37:47 - Annalisa Holcombe
My Sincere thanks to dr Gary Danes for taking the time to speak to us with such honesty and clarity. You can learn more about Gary's work by connecting with him on LinkedIn or reading his book entitled Making Villains, making Heroes. Joseph R McCarthy, martin Luther King Jr and the politics of American memory. Next week, I will be joined by dr Mike bills. Mike is the chief client officer at Atlas RTX and he holds a PhD in leadership and change from Antioch University. He is a leading expert in using technology and data science to improve student learning outcomes. We will be discussing failure and growth. Join us next time, as always.

Thank you for listening to 92,000 hours. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review. We really appreciate your support. If you're interested in integrating the personal and professional through authentic conversation, just like you heard on our episode today, please check out our work at Connection Collaborative. You can find us at connection collaborative comm or send me an email at Annalisa at connection collaborative comm. Thank you, and see you next week on 92,000 hours. 92,000 hours is made possible by connection collaborative. This episode was produced and edited by Brianna Steggell. Lexie Banks is our marketing director and I'm your host, Annalisa Holcombe.