An Interview with Jeff Hittenberger

Pursuing a technology solution before articulating your greater aims is a recipe for trouble. Dr. Hittenberger works to foster emotional intelligence among all of the employees at the Orange County Department of Education. He shares how vital this process can be in maximizing the potential of each individual while encouraging healthy communication and conflict resolution.

Dr. Hittenberger cautions us about the dangers of not having the discipline to hold off in sending an email before we have thought through our goals and considered how it might be interpreted. It takes self-awareness to cultivate this skill along with the executive function to not get defensive or pursue more ego-driven purposes in our email and other technology-based communication.

Tell me a little about your journey and career in education.

Let me start by sharing my ‘why’ – why I started teaching.

I grew up in Haiti, in the Caribbean. My parents were missionaries in Haiti for 21 years and I attended an international school. A lot of my Haitian friends had no opportunity to go to school.

Consequently, I saw the difficulties and challenges they faced in their lives because public education was not available to them. Early on, these experiences cultivated in me a sense of responsibility that I wanted to be involved in providing possibilities to people who hadn’t had the kinds of opportunities that a public education would afford.

That is really why I went into teaching. I began by teaching fourth grade and eventually went to the high school level. This was while I was doing my graduate work at the University of Southern California (USC). My dissertation focused on the California Partnership Academies, as I was part of starting one – the Global Business Academy – at Valley High School. It is now in its 28th year.

Partnership Academies are designed to connect students with opportunities in higher education and career development that might not be available to them otherwise. For example, in the Global Business Academy, we had students doing internships with Wells Fargo, PIMCO, or other finance companies that got them on a track toward careers and also prepared them academically to integrate their career preparation with their studies in higher education. It was a super exciting thing to be a part of!

From there I transitioned to administration at the Monterey County Office of Education and was involved as a curriculum administrator for the county. I then went to Vanguard University and became a professor. I ultimately became the Dean of the School of Education and Provost of the University. It was in that role as Provost at Vanguard when I was invited to become the Chief Academic Officer here at the Orange County Department of Education.

It was like coming back – full circle – into the public education system. I am now in my sixth year in this role.

What matters most when you consider leadership and technology?

For me, it really is about the ‘why’ – focusing our efforts on what we are trying to accomplish. The technologies are the tools that can help advance the fulfillment of our mission and build the relationships among the people who share the mission.

People must be at the center. The mission has to be at the center. The ‘why’ has to be at the center. We then choose the technologies based on what is going to help us advance the mission, build the team, and accomplish the thing that we share as our common ‘why.’

What are some ways that you try to have technology enhance your leadership and not be a detractor?

I have really centered on emotional intelligence. It is something that we have spent a lot of time thinking about and working on at the Orange County Department of Education.

There is a general awareness that skills and knowledge are good and helpful for a lot of things, but unless we are functioning with emotional intelligence, we are not going to get to the ultimate mission that we are trying to accomplish. Emotional intelligence gets at what makes people tick. It gets into the core.

What we have done here is create a team. We have about 1,500 employees and we have provided opportunities for them to participate in learning groups around things like growth mindset and emotional intelligence with the sense that we all need the opportunity to keep growing in these areas of our lives. If we do, we are going to be more effective at doing our jobs, carrying out our mission, working with our teams, and so on.

What happens in an organization is that small issues become big problems if they are not handled with emotional intelligence.

A fire can be started really, really quickly. There might be an interpersonal dispute that then accelerates onto social media or becomes a long cc: line of grievances against a person. An individual’s emotions may start coming out in the stuff that he or she is posting if emotional intelligence tools are not used to process the stimulus before writing.

That has been a really important journey for our team. We have used Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Carol Dweck’s Mindset, which are foundational in this field and for a growth mindset.

Daniel Goleman has a four-quadrant model of emotional intelligence that has self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Team members in my workplace have studied these in-depth.

When this is applied to technology, self-awareness would be: How conscious am I of the way I am using technology? Am I using it to share my feelings and to express myself on social media? If I am posting things that become public – is it really self-disclosing? How is it going to reflect on my work, my organization, or my colleagues? So there is a self-awareness about the use of technology that is really important. These four things all apply to the way we move in and engage with the world.

The second area is self-management, which includes: What strategies do I have to manage myself in electronic spaces?

If I am feeling angry, do I have mechanisms to pull myself back and reflect on what I am about to say? If I am using email, am I cc:ing or bcc:ing multiple people when I send, drawing other people into something that needs to be handled one-on-one? Am I re-reading my messages for emotional tone before I send them? These are the kind of self-management skills that apply to technology.

In regard to social awareness, we need to ask: Am I picking up on cues about what other people are feeling in electronic spaces? Do I have the strategies to de-escalate conflicts either in person or in electronic spaces? How accurately am I interpreting other people’s communications online? Am I assuming or over-interpreting things and then stewing over them? Am I rehearsing them over and over in my mind and thinking, ‘What might they be saying?’ instead of going to them and having a conversation?

And that is really where we get into the fourth area, which is relationship management. Do I know the right time to actually have a conversation with someone in person rather than putting it in an electronic message or even a phone conversation?

I do not know if that is helpful or not but it is an angle on the whole use of technology as a leader that we do not always think about. I think it is absolutely essential because how effectively we use technology as a leader is very closely related to how we have cultivated our emotional intelligence competencies and applied them to our use of technology.

Society is full of obvious examples of people who are not functioning with emotional intelligence in the technology sphere.

The lack of emotional intelligence can have devastating effects. It can undermine the things we are trying to accomplish. It can alienate us from the people we need to be working with. And, conversely, if we use it well – we can build relationships, focus on a common mission, and move a team toward a shared vision.

The distinction between using technology well and not well has a lot to do with our exercise of emotional intelligence in this sphere.

What is human-centered design thinking and what are some ways that technology is making life better for humans?

There is a movement in education, human-centered design thinking, that draws on things that teachers have always done because educators are designers by definition. They are designing educational spaces. They are designing learning experiences. They are designing the curriculum.

We have always been designers in education, but we haven’t always thought of the process in relation to design. 

We do lesson plans and so on, but we do not necessarily call it design.

We have really tapped into the design movement and a lot of it has been articulated really well by the Stanford D School – The Design School at Stanford University and a company called IDEO – both of which were co-founded by David Kelley.

A nice introduction to David Kelley can be found by Googling ’60 Minutes David Kelley.’ He articulates this human-centered design thinking concept and has used it over the years for companies like Apple. It is a lot about user experience and approaching our designs in terms of the people who are going to be using it, involved with it, or served by it.

In applying human-centered design thinking to education, of course, there is a natural connection. What is cool about this particular design process is that the engineering design processes have similar elements, but the first step in the human-centered design thinking process is empathy.

Starting with empathy, one empathizes with the people being served.

You try and really understand them. You start with empathetic interviews, going deep into the experience. This is part of the reason and way Steve Jobs and the people at Apple have been able to transform intimidating technology devices into things that are very personal, that people could come to love. The iPhone is a prime example. Now we have three-year-olds using iPhones and iPads and so on because of the focus on the user experience and empathizing with the user.

In education, as leaders, we must focus on our users – our students, teachers, and community. 

We begin at that place of empathy, which again is an emotional intelligence competency.

We can cultivate it in ourselves and then we go from there to defining the design challenge and doing the ideation – which is kind of the brainstorming of possible ways of responding to the design challenge. Then we move to prototyping solutions and testing them out. It is a cyclical process where we keep making things better.

We are never really done.

We are always in beta and we can keep making our processes better and more human from the point at which a person makes their first contact with the school – whether it is a phone call, a phone message, a website they are looking at, an app they are utilizing, or walking into the front office for an interactive experience.

How human is the experience for somebody walking into the school office or using a website? Is it speaking to them? Is it communicating to them an openness, inclusion, care, or partnership? Or, is it off-putting? Is it distant? Is it bureaucratic? Is it technical in an off-putting sense or are participants invited in to be part of a design community that is creating learning experiences that every student is able to thrive in and benefit from?

There is a whole network to be found at IDEO. It has an education wing and they are cultivating design-thinking mindset in education. It is called the ‘Teachers Guild.’ If one googles it, he or she will see a huge variety of tools and interactions that are sort of human-centered design thinking applied to education. It brings this technical, creative, and critical thinking process together with emotional intelligence in a way that is really powerful.