Leadership reflections

6 characteristics that help define Upstate’s head of research

Dave Amberg, PhD, Upstate’s vice president for research, was featured in The Post-Standard’s weekly “Conversation on Leadership” series. Here are six takeaways from that conversation:

He considers himself a servant leader, in place to help faculty succeed. “They should be the intellectual drivers of the university,” Amberg says. “I shouldn’t be telling them what they should be working on. They should be telling me what they want to work on, what they think is important and how to support it.”

He isn’t a fan of committee meetings, and the ones he leads tend to be short, maybe no more than 15 minutes. “I’m a very resultsoriented person, and I want to drive every meeting to a set of deliverables and as quickly as possible.”

He is inclusive. “Sometimes leaders want to exclude people that they perceive as being difficult to work with,” he says. “I’ve frequently found that the difficult people to work with are the most passionate about the subject at hand. If you don’t have them in the room when you’re making decisions, if they haven’t been a part of the process, they’re going to undermine it.”

He models good email communication, which he says means never blind copying and never forwarding emails without the sender’s permission. “Those are two aspects of what I call weaponized email. If you’re doing those things, you’re not doing them for a good reason.”

He makes decisions quickly, based on having enough information to be pretty sure it’s the right decision. “In some decisions, the right decisions are obvious immediately. Why not make them right then?”

He values emotional intelligence. “It can be an extremely valuable sixth sense if you can feel and sense how people are responding to what you’re doing or how you’re doing it.” u