“A good leader leaves a path for the brilliance of others,” explains Ruth Farmer in this podcast interview with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. Here she elaborates on how collaborative community can think together about important issues and take part in real dialogue, even if the dialogue is messy, or starts one direction and ends up in another.

Ruth also looks at who comes to Goddard and what they find: “We attract a lot of different kinds of people wanting to ask some very hard questions,” and she speaks to how being open to not knowing the answer to such questions is at the root of real solutions for problems of our time. “Leadership requires courage, and it requires the courage to be wrong — the courage to actually listen to someone’s argument and point-of-view that you disagree with. It requires being able to be quiet sometimes (sometimes you just have to listen)….It might mean you actually change your mind about something.”