Cale Jaffe ’91 returned to Landon to deliver the Nelson Leadership Lecture at an all-school assembly. The Christopher A. Nelson ’86 Leadership Program is a lecture series held in honor of Landon student Chris Nelson, who lost his battle with leukemia in 1982.
Jaffe is a Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law where he also serves as Director of its Environmental Law & Community Engagement Clinic.
In this Q&A, Jaffe shares his keys to leadership and the goal of his address.
1. What message did you share with the boys during your lecture?
The title of my talk is “Listening for Listening’s Sake.” So often we go into a conversation or a classroom or a courtroom, as motivated listeners with our own agenda of what we want to accomplish in the conversation. You can think of countless conversations you had where you enter it not with an open mind, but by trying to win the conversation, as if you were trying to win an argument. What I really want to encourage folks to think about is the value of setting your own goals and agenda aside. Truly come in with curiosity, humility, and without judgment, and recognize that, by doing that, you see the expertise in others that you might have missed, and then you benefit from that. You can move forward on your own goals, if you've got the confidence to actually set those goals aside and enter a conversation as an open and humble listener.
2. How would you say that listening ties into our Core Values of leadership and teamwork?
Think about the captain of whichever team you happen to be on. Who makes a good captain? It's not necessarily the person who's your most athletic team member. It's the person who can make everyone else on the team feel valued and heard and included. So, what does that mean? It's someone who's actually a really good listener.
We see a lot in the world that leaders are the people who step up and grab the microphone and speak out. And what I want to say is, actually, a pretty important part of leadership is sitting back and sharing the mic, hearing from other voices.
3. How did your Landon experience set you up for success in college and beyond?
It was absolutely academic rigor. Whether it's long reading assignments or infinite problem sets in a math or science class - when I got to college, I was sort of surprised that not everyone had had that experience in high school of managing that much work. So that really set me up well. I would also say the great teachers at Landon who are asking more questions of you than they are giving you answers. Amazing teachers, of course, like Mr. Sorkin, but also folks like Mac Jacoby, Señor Benavides, Bernie Noe, both Mr. and Mrs. Farnstrom. Folks who, I think, really drilled in this idea that we're not just teaching critical thinking. We're teaching you how to become a person who is a critical thinker.
4. How do you hope your work will inspire future generations, both at Landon and beyond, to engage with their communities?
One thing I hope they take away is the value in getting out of our own bubbles, not just our social media bubbles, but our physical bubble in the communities that we move through day to day.
I partnered with a group in Virginia that organized a historic preservation effort at the Pine Grove School. Landon School is an incredible facility that provides so much to students, but the Pine Grove School was a simple, two room schoolhouse: no running water, no electricity, heat from a simple wood stove in the middle of the building. The graduates of that school, folks who went there in the in the 1950s and 60s, had no school bus to get them to school. The leader of the preservation group, Muriel Miller Branch, who's 80 years old now, had to walk as an elementary school kid as much as four miles one way to get to the school.
Muriel is now a published author and educator. One of her classmates retired recently as a vice president at Aetna Insurance. Pine Grove graduates have achieved incredible things in careers in science and art and literature. When I worked with the preservation group, Muriel told me what she wanted was to be heard and to be valued. You might think, “Well, I'm a lawyer. Isn't what's supposed to be most important is that I win your case for you?” And yet the first thing she mentioned was listening for listening's sake. It’s about process as much as outcome.
