The college years are a crucial time for young adults to cultivate the skills of leadership and character, which significantly influence not just students’ personal and professional development, but shape the values of the next generation of leaders. Mastering values-based leadership helps students effectively guide and inspire teams, fostering collaboration and problem-solving abilities that are vital in today’s dynamic work environments. Moreover, developing strong character traits such as integrity, empathy, and resilience lays the foundation for ethical decision-making and builds trust with peers and colleagues. Together, these skills not only enhance academic and career success but also contribute to creating purposeful change within oneself, one’s community, and beyond. The educators entrusted and charged with imparting these skills must translate abstract ideas into practical frameworks. What does it mean to teach character? To nurture leaders of integrity and purpose? Steve Sosland, vice chancellor for Leader & Culture Development for the Texas Tech University System, has spent his career finding answers to these questions across different organizations and sectors.

Higher education is Sosland’s fifth industry. After graduating from West Point, he began his career in the U.S. military, where he spent 11 years as an infantry soldier. He later worked in corporate America, first in the restaurant industry and later helping other junior military officers find jobs in the business world with companies that sought to hire veterans for their leadership and character skills. In 2010, Sosland became the chief operating officer of Hill Country Memorial hospital in Fredericksburg, Texas, where he and a team of leaders transformed the then-failing hospital into a pillar of excellent healthcare and leader development, for which President Obama awarded the hospital the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2014. 

Sosland’s first role in higher education was as the executive vice president and chief people and performance officer at the University of North Texas Health Sciences Center at Fort Worth. Today, in his role at Texas Tech, Sosland reflects on this unlikely trajectory and highlights the thread that connects each disparate sector and organization: in every dimension, his career has been dedicated to “working with organizations to incorporate a values-based approach to leadership,” which, he says, “advances personal development, quality of life, and wellbeing by helping individuals live in alignment with their own core values.” 

Sosland’s own life is an example of this dynamic process. Today, he says his purpose is “to influence those who will transform the lives of others,” but that mission wasn’t apparent to him at the outset. “When I was in my twenties, looking ahead at my career, I could not have predicted the path,” he explains. “When I was in my fifties, looking back at it, I wanted to find the common thread, and what I found was that I had worked in environments with a strong sense of core values and a culture built around those values. That culture was either there when I arrived, or I used leadership development as an opportunity to create it.”

Leader & Culture Development at Texas Tech takes a comprehensive, bird’s-eye view approach to bringing values-based leadership and purposeful work to the university system’s five campuses. “If we are going to help students, it is fundamentally important for us to first focus on faculty, staff, and administration,” Sosland says. “If we work with the students by directing them to leader development programs and helping them become leaders of character, but they don’t see role models around them, then it brings into question all of our work.” 

The Path to Purpose

To ensure that students have those role models, Sosland works directly with university leadership, shaping the tone and character of the institution. Part of that work involves  exploring purpose, both personally and institutionally. “The way that I work with senior leaders — college and university presidents, deans, department chairs — is by helping them to identify their purpose, both personally and for their entity,” he says. “We then identify their challenges — be them challenges of morale, wellbeing, efficiency, inter- and intrapersonal issues — and we address those challenges within the cultural environment, taking a people-first approach. I call this concept generational leadership. I might very rarely interact with students, but I interact with deans to help them lead their department chairs, who then help the faculty members, who help the students.”

“Our work reminds them of what was already inside of them.”

Purposeful work is often described as “aligning who you are with what you do.” Sosland describes this alignment as “a sense of oneness in a person’s values at home and at work, which is one way to define integrity: from the root integris, meaning oneness or unity.” Though research suggests that purposeful work can promote wellbeing and fulfillment throughout life, a 2022 Harvard University study found that 58 percent of teens and young adults reported having little to no sense of purpose in life. It is a remarkable figure, but not an entirely surprising one. In a 2021 study of more than 10,000 young people across 10 countries, 56 percent of 16- to 25-year-olds surveyed said they believed humanity was doomed due to the climate crisis. The study, published in Lancet Planetary Health, also found that 60 percent of respondents blamed their national governments for this bleak state of affairs. 

Amid a youth mental health national emergency, growing sentiments of dread and nihilism plaguing young people, and Gen Z taking to the internet to voice their existentialist views in the form of political memes and parody videos, the idea of finding purpose could seem almost quaint. But initiatives focused on character and values-based leadership have material impact and the potential to change lives—particularly the lives of college students, who are on the lookout for purpose and in the process of creating and sustaining their core values.

To make the case for purpose, leaders in higher education must not overlook the fact that high tuition costs and poor financial wellbeing lead students to increasingly seeking pay over purpose. In addressing this concern, Sosland cites James Truslow Adams, who coined the phrase “the American Dream” in his 1931 book The Epic of America. “Adams said that our college education largely focuses on how to make a living, but perhaps it should be how to make a life,” he explains. “How to make a living is important, but I think that as universities, we’ve lost our way. We are so hyper-focused on teaching how to make a living that we lose sight of teaching how to make a life. What we are doing at the Texas Tech University System is raising these as equally important matters. We are focused just as much on building the character of the students as we are on helping them get a job, because it is their character that will help them survive in challenging times. We are preparing them to find work that aligns with their core values.”

Grit is one value that comes up in Sosland’s conversations with higher education leadership, faculty, and students. “When it comes to purpose, we are asking, Why do I exist? We ask it on a personal level, and we ask it on an organizational level. Why does this organization exist? How do we create an environment that is rich and allows people to grow and develop to their full potential? And how do we do it so that, along the way, they gain the skills of resilience and grit that will get them through life’s challenging times and help them when they face failure?” Dr. Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and renowned scholar of grit and self-control, defines grit as the combination of passion and perseverance toward a long-term goal. Sosland cites Duckworth’s philosophy of grit as influential to his work in character and leadership development. “Our universities are in West Texas,” he explains. “Most of the population of Texas is in the eastern third of the state, but West Texas is largely rural. Our universities primarily serve rural areas with harsh weather conditions — sand storms, harsh winds, harsh temperatures. In these conditions where a lot of our students grow up, they have to be resilient. They have to navigate tough environmental conditions just to survive. Their grandparents and great-grandparents lived through the Dust Bowl. In their backgrounds, grit and resilience are imprinted deep within them. But, as with anyone, this gets lost. They get caught up in the what-ifs of life, and they sometimes forget what was imprinted from parents and teachers and coaches early on. Our work reminds them of what was already inside of them. That is what identifying and living in alignment with core values does for both individuals and organizations.”