Host Annmarie Caño speaks with academic leaders at Wayne State University to learn how they have developed their careers while empowering themselves and others.

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Provost Keith E. Whitfield

Keith E. Whitfield is the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs for Wayne State University. He sits down with EmpowerED to Lead to talk about the different hats he wears at the university. He also shares some of the challenges he's faced in his work and why dreaming big pays off, even if there are missteps along the way.

Show notes

Host Annmarie Caño speaks with academic leaders at Wayne State University to learn how they have developed their careers while empowering themselves and others.

About Keith E. Whitfield

Keith E. Whitfield is the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs for Wayne State University. He is also a professor of psychology. Whitfield is responsible for faculty hiring, promotions and tenure, and budget and policies for the university's more than 2,500 faculty and staff members. He also oversees student affairs, which includes student success, curriculum and housing.

Conversation highlights

Host Annmarie Caño begins the discussion by asking Whitfield what he loves about his job. He explains that, after coming to Wayne State from Duke University, he was looking for the opportunity "to make a difference to students who reminded me of me." While outlining his role as a provost, Whitfield says that he focuses on student success in addition to faculty and staff.  

Whitfield reveals that he was introduced to university leadership while in graduate school. He was advised, "If you really want to be a leader at higher levels, you need to make sure you go through the academy." With that in mind, he focused on earning his Ph.D. and moving up the ranks in academia.

For those who have an interest in university leadership, Whitfield encourages having a mentor whether informal or formal to see their style and get a better sense of what might be a good fit for you.

Whitfield shares a couple challenges he faced while working at Duke, from having to tell a colleague that they weren't going to get tenure to helping with the development of a new major at the university.  

Whitfield often tells people to dream big and not be afraid to make mistakes. "I could list so many failures, but they were never things that stopped me." Case in point: Sometimes he's applied multiple times for the million-dollar grants he's earned.

Whitfield recommends the book Good to Great to help identify talent and "get the right people on the bus."

Caño asks about the hearty response Whitfield demands while greeting audiences at various events. "We have so much to be excited about here," explains Whitfield, who reveals that his signature "corny line" was partly inspired by his experience in Southern churches.

Caño ends the conversation by asking what it means to empower someone to lead. For Whitfield, trust is key, and he also believes in the importance of spreading leadership. "Leadership does not mean a leader," he explains. "Leadership typically means a collective coming together and thinking about ways that we can actually make something better."

Additional resources

Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great. New York, NY. HarperCollins Inc.

Follow Keith E. Whitfield on Instagram at @provostkew.

Follow EmpowerED to Lead on Twitter @WSUFacSuccess.

Episode transcript

Annmarie Cano:
Welcome to EmpowerED To Lead, a Wayne State University podcast for academic leaders who are committed to empowering their community to succeed. I'm your host, Annmarie Cano, associate provost for faculty development and faculty success at Wayne State.

Annmarie Cano:
In this podcast, we'll explore the personal journeys of academic leaders, both current and emerging, to learn more about how they have developed their careers. We'll speak with faculty and staff about their work, and how they have empowered themselves and others along the way. By doing this, we hope to empower listeners like you as you continue on your leadership path.

Annmarie Cano:
Today, we're speaking with Wayne State provost and senior vice president of academic affairs and professor of psychology, Keith E. Whitfield. Provost Whitfield is responsible for faculty hiring, promotion and tenure, and budget and policies relevant to more than 2,600 faculty and staff. He is also responsible for student affairs, including student success, curriculum, the dean of students, and housing. Provost Whitfield has been continuously funded by federal granting agencies since 1990 and has authored or coauthored over 200 publications. His research spans a range of topics that focus on individual differences in minority aging. Welcome to the podcast, Provost Whitfield.

Keith Whitfield:
Thank you Annmarie. Good to be here.

Annmarie Cano:
Let's start with what you love about your job.

Keith Whitfield:
What do I love about my job? You know, it's interesting. I came from a very different context at Duke University, and one of the things that I was looking for in an opportunity was wanted to be able to really make a difference. I wanted to make a difference in students, too, who reminded me of me, who made it through from working really hard, might not have been, you know, gone to the college prep school or whatever, but really had the desire, hunger, and drive. I saw that here, and so that's what drew me here.

Annmarie Cano:
Okay, so being able to serve students and faculty and staff as well.

Keith Whitfield:
Yeah, as provosts go, I kind of have a unique role. Typically, provosts or just about the faculty. The president set this aside and sort of said, "It's going to be different, we really need you to be committed to student success." I think that's why the fit's very good, because that is one of my, I think, driving interests is, is to be able to help students succeed and knowing that faculty is a critical piece to that. Whether they be in terms of doing individual research with them or that class that that awakens them to things that they had never thought about before. Or even, just sitting down advising and talking to them about the path that they made. Faculty and academic staff I think are critically important in that. Being able to be responsible for both sides of the house, I think just makes such great logic and it's what makes my job very exciting.

Annmarie Cano:
Great. Can you tell us about your trajectory and university leadership?

Keith Whitfield:
You know, that's interesting. As I think about it, I was introduced to leadership, at least to administrative leadership, when I was in graduate school. I actually served as the assistant director for new student relations and the coordinator for minority affairs at Texas Tech University. But, I was given some very sage advice, which was, is if you really want to be a leader at higher levels, you need to make sure that you go through the Academy. I turned away from that in graduate school and made sure I finished my PhD, and then spent a lot of years working, going through tenure and getting promoted to full.

Keith Whitfield:
Then, more and more opportunities came from, including leading the graduate program at Penn State University to being a chair of a division at Duke and being on a university committee that oversaw all of the curriculum that got produced at Duke. Then, being a vice provost for academic affairs. I don't know if it's a trajectory as much as there were some interesting steps along the way that provided me a really broad set of experiences to be able to be as well as anybody can be prepared to try to be a provost.

Annmarie Cano:
You've had a lot of different experiences overseeing different kinds of programs, working with different groups of students, staff, and faculty. How would you recommend that others who have an interest in university leadership, whether it's formal leadership roles or informal leadership roles, develop their skills and their experiences?

Keith Whitfield:
Well, I think if I think about my own trajectory, it was that I always had a formal or informal mentor. I always had someone who I could look to and see and watch them. I mean, my background's in psychology and so we're kind of about the mind and watching behavior anyway. Actually seeing the kinds of impact that they had, seeing their style, seeing some of the styles fit me and some of the styles didn't fit me, seeing how they tried to make sure that they were always being inclusive. There were key things that I saw from those bits and pieces.

Keith Whitfield:
I think anybody who wants to get into leadership, there's just certain critical things that you need to learn, and sometimes they're best seeing them in action. Participating in committees, and when you're asked to do both formal and informal. I think there's a lot of great informal leadership that goes on that really helps to prepare someone and to really make sure that that's something that you want to do. It's not for everybody, but everybody can contribute in just different ways. I think that when you can find that of yourself, of what really is a good fit for you, then you can make a great contribution to greedy universities like ours.

Annmarie Cano:
Great. Now, everyone experiences challenges or disruptions at some point in their trajectory, and I was wondering if you could describe a challenging situation that taught you something about yourself or about your work.

Keith Whitfield:
Had a lot of challenges. I think there's probably two that I could note. One was, as a chair of a division within the department of psychology at Duke, I basically had to tell somebody that they weren't going to get tenure, and I had to leave the discussion for them not getting tenure. What I didn't like was that I wasn't able to interject myself into that person's career trajectory early enough. By the time I came in as chair, there was only really a year, and this person did better, but they did not end up doing enough to be able to get tenure. I always lament saying, you know, when you have the opportunity to be able to help somebody, you need to jump in and help because you never know what kind of trajectory that might help put them on. That's one.

Keith Whitfield:
The other important, I guess, lesson that I learned was in helping to develop the major in neuroscience at Duke. While there were these great proponents of it, I was kind of the gatekeeper on whether it was going to be something that succeeded or failed. One of the things that I impressed upon the authors of it was that they really needed to be inclusive. They needed to make sure that everybody had a chance to make sure that they had some input. Particularly, interdisciplinary programs like that, it's critically important to have everybody actually thinking that, they've got some skin in the game and that they approve of it. Consensus is typically not easy, but for those kinds of programs, I think it's critically important. I required it of them. I think that the chairs of lots of different departments responded and it made it a much better, stronger base from which they started that program. To this day, it's an extremely successful program and I think that that was a small piece of its success.

Annmarie Cano:
One thing that you often tell many groups on campus is to dream big and to not be afraid of failure. From these, it sounds like being able to think about something big or try to intervene in some way, and that the failures can teach you just as much as the successes.

Keith Whitfield:
Sounds like you're getting more out of what I said than what I said. I do believe in dreaming big. I always attribute it too, that I could list so many failures that, those, but they were never things that stopped me. I even talk about actually my grant record, that for the major grants that I've had, and I even have a current very large grant, and I always failed two times before I got it. It took three submissions for these million or a million-plus dollar grants, and that it was dreaming big. It was doing things that people hadn't done before. It was really the innovative piece to it. Then, I think that sometimes we have to give ourselves a little bit of a break of that, when we do try to dream big and sometimes it doesn't work out, that those are the times when you can perhaps learn the most.

Keith Whitfield:
I've tried to take, particularly around grants, for example, using the example that I was providing with you, to share that with junior scholars so that they really understand that I'm doing this work as a process. All the work that we do is a process. We should be continuing to grow as people and as individuals and as scholars and as folks that contribute to the university community. I think sometimes we do things for the right reasons and sometimes we maybe don't do them the perfect way that ends up working out, and we just have to kind of learn from it, you know, take our lumps, but then move on. We can't close ourselves off to other possibilities, because our world is moving at such a fast pace that the more that we can keep up with it, the better that we actually are able to do, the better we can do for our students and a better university we actually create as a collective.

Annmarie Cano:
Great. You've given us some great advice. Are there books or other resources that have been helpful in your own development that you would recommend to others?

Keith Whitfield:
I think the one that I'm, at least currently, the biggest fan of is Good To Great. It's been out for a little while and people are very familiar with it. I like some of the value propositions that are offered in there. Things like trying to get the right people on the bus, whether it be that people are interested or whether it's not right timing, sometimes to move things forward, to generate a big idea, to carry out and to create something new and different, you've got to find those people who are going to be the folks who can offer different elements to be able to make something successful.

Keith Whitfield:
Actually, well, it is in the book, and that's about talent identification. I work on that a lot, of trying to figure out, who are the people that you see that are really talented on different sorts of things and then trying to encourage them to come on and be, one of the classic lines in the book is "get the right people on the bus." That's the one that I've shared with our deans, I've shared with my staff, I share with the people outside the university that I mentor just as a book that provides a very good framework about thinking about trying to dream big and how you can actually carry things out.

Annmarie Cano:
Great, thank you. Now, many of us have noticed that you value a hearty response when you greet the audience at events. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Keith Whitfield:
You know, that's interesting. I think it comes from a couple of different places in my head and from my experiences. One is, is that I spent a pretty reasonable time in the south, and if you ever go to church there, when the minister comes up, he says, "Good morning," and everybody says good morning with his hearty good morning. I think that I've kind of interpreted that as that, they're there with you. In some ways, they get that you're present with them and you want to try to get them present with you.

Keith Whitfield:
For me, because I'm excited to be there, I have a great job. I think we kind of talked about this at first of what I liked about my job. It doesn't limit itself to any one thing. I have one of the best jobs at the university because I get to interact with both faculty, staff, and students. At all of the things that I go to, I'm really excited to be there. We get to celebrate these wonderful accomplishments. We get to talk about great things happening at our university. I'm really excited, so I'm hoping that I can get them to be present and be excited with me too.

Keith Whitfield:
That's where that corny little line comes from. I think people have now kind of heard it enough times that, you know, people just laugh when they know I'm going to say, "You had didn't give me enough," and I ask for a little bit more energy. But, I think it's that we have so much to be excited about here that I just want to make sure that we remember that as we're starting to celebrate or talk or do whatever we do at these different events that I get asked to come to.

Annmarie Cano:
I see a lot of leaders modeling that now, where they didn't do that.

Keith Whitfield:
It has been so corny that they figure, you know, if nothing else, you can start off with that little corny thing. But, I think it is too that you're seeing in the leaders that they're excited about what they're doing, too. You really do want to share the excitement and enthusiasm. That's a great way to be able to start it.

Annmarie Cano:
Great. We end each one of these podcasts with this question, and we'd like to get your perspective on this. What does it mean to empower someone to lead?

Keith Whitfield:
That's an interesting question, because it really does vary by who it is, by what level that they're at, by the project or activity that you might be doing. But, I think that there's a couple of essential components to it. One is, is that as you empower somebody to lead, you have to actually trust them to lead. That is something, you try to make it so that trust is earned. Sometimes it's just from observing someone trying to really be the best leader that they can be, and so you want to give them more opportunities and responsibilities. That's the trust that comes from having seen them do kinds of great things.

Keith Whitfield:
Also, it's the idea of thinking that everybody should be able to lead, and so you want to be able to try to spread leadership around. Leadership doesn't mean that you've got some formal title and that somehow means that you are a little taller and a little smarter than everyone else. There's so much that so many people can contribute. Leadership does not mean a leader. Leadership typically means a collective coming together and thinking about ways that we can actually make something better. When I try to do empowerment, there needs to be a lead to kind of herd the cats, as it were. But, I always like to see that leader actually makes sure that they're trying to empower and be inclusive of others.

Keith Whitfield:
As some have said in the past, when you're leading cats it's hard, but if you really want to herd cats, you just move their food. You know, finding ways to be able to enrich their leadership by making sure that they figure out ways to be able to get people to find things that resonate with them, that they're excited about, that then empowers them. Then, there's multiple layers I think of that empowerment that you're speaking of.

Annmarie Cano:
Thanks so much for sharing your insights, Provost Whitfield, you can follow Provost Whitfield on Instagram @provostkew. We're glad to have you listening to EmpowerED To Lead. To learn more about our podcast, follow us on Twitter @WSUFacSuccess.