Positive Academic Leadership

How to Stop Putting Out Fires and Start Making a Difference

Jeffrey L. Buller

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118552223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

In Positive Academic Leadership, Jeffrey Buller offers newinsights and practical tools, as well as language and tactics, for fostering a more effective approach to leadership. With acumen and a dash of humor, he shows leaders how they can take the focus off the negative and change what they say, their perspectives, and their strategies. This more constructive leadership style plays to the strengths of leaders rather than to the weaknesses of their institutions.

Offering time-tested and fresh ideas for becoming the type of leader who acts as a coach, counselor, and conductor for faculty, staff, and students, Buller demonstrates how positive leadership can become a day-to-day practice. With its down-to-earth style, the book draws on the most current research on positive leadership in neuroscience, psychology, management, organizational behavior, and other disciplines and translates their lessons into readable and accessible recommendations. It then makes these recommendations come to life by providing real-world examples that illustrate how to implement positive leadership strategies in all spheres of the leader's activities and institution.

Positive Academic Leadership is a wise guide for transforming any leader's attitude about inevitable daily crises into manageable challenges that are based on a philosophy of accepting the environment and situation but working to make things better.

The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series

To James Barta, Warren Jones, Harry Carter, Cynthia Tyson, Brenda Bryant, Edward Scott, Christine Licata, Bob Smith, Walt Gmelch, Bob Cipriano, John Pritchett, Anne Boykin, and Eliah Watlington—the most positive academic leaders I've ever met. It's been my honor to work with you. I'm sure you'll all recognize yourselves in the anecdotes told here. (Hint: They're the stories where the administrator comes off looking pretty good. The other stories—well, those are about somebody else. You'll probably know who they are too.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffrey L. Buller has served in administrative positions ranging from department chair to vice president for academic affairs at a diverse group of institutions: Loras College, Georgia Southern University, Mary Baldwin College, and Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Best Practices in Faculty Evaluation: A Practical Guide for Academic Leaders; The Essential Department Chair: A Comprehensive Desk Reference; Academic Leadership Day by Day: Small Steps That Lead to Great Success; The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career; and The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership. Buller has also written numerous articles on Greek and Latin literature, nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera, and college administration. From 2003 to 2005, he served as the principal English-language lecturer at the International Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany. More recently, he has been active as a consultant to Sistema Universitario Ana G. Méndez in Puerto Rico and to the Ministry of Higher Education in Saudi Arabia, where he is assisting with the creation of a kingdom-wide academic leadership center. Along with Robert E. Cipriano, Buller is a senior partner in ATLAS: Academic Training, Leadership, & Assessment Services, through which he has presented numerous workshops on positive academic leadership.

INTRODUCTION

What is it that makes some academic administrators successful while others struggle? Certainly there's no one answer to this question. The leader who may be perfect for one situation may not be at all right in another context. Different administrators have different skill sets, levels of experience, and amounts of formal administrative training. But through observation of hundreds of different academic leaders at hundreds of institutions, I've increasingly come to observe one repeated phenomenon: successful academic leaders generally practice what I call positive academic leadership; struggling or failing academic leaders generally take a more negative approach. Negative leaders become fixated on problems; positive leaders are aware of possibilities and can build something useful out of even the worst type of problem.

In the pages that follow, I explain in detail what distinguishes positive academic leadership as an administrative approach. But one central point can't be repeated too frequently: positive academic leadership isn't a matter of coming to work each day with feigned optimism, pretending to see the sunny side of disasters, or acting as though bad things don't happen in academic life. It's also not about filling your walls with those annoying motivational posters. (Okay, full disclosure here: I do suggest one poster at the very end of the book. But it's intended to be a reminder to us as positive leaders, not a stratagem to manipulate unmotivated employees.) Even curmudgeons and grumps can become positive academic leaders, and their levels of achievement will grow as a result. I've seen it happen too many times for it to be a fluke. Change your language, change your perspective, change your strategies—and you'll begin seeing more achievements than frustrations. No matter how you define productivity in your programs, it will increase—not immediately and not overnight, but eventually and noticeably. And in the meantime you'll feel better about what you do. Your morale will improve; the morale of your faculty and staff will improve. Then someday you may find yourself coming to work each day with more optimism, not feigned this time but as genuine as it comes.

Still—don't go putting up any annoying posters.

One of the goals of this book is to make positive academic leadership easy for administrators to implement. As you'll see by the sheer number of references (works from which quotes or ideas have been taken and cited in the chapter) and resources (additional useful materials that haven't been directly cited) that appear at the end of each chapter, there's a huge body of scholarly research on the subject of positive leadership. Experts in neuroscience, psychology, management, organizational behavior, and a host of other fields are all validating the effectiveness of the very strategies I outline in this book. But many of these studies are written in the type of dense academic jargon that makes it extremely difficult for anyone outside that specialty to figure out how to apply these ideas in day-to-day situations. Here's an actual example:

We expand the conceptualization of positive leadership and hypothesize that leaders' ability to influence followers across varied complex situations will be enhanced through the development of a rich and multifaceted self-construct. Utilizing self-complexity theory and other aspects of research on self-representation, we show how the structure and structural dynamics of leaders' self-constructs are linked to their varied role demands by calling forth cognitions, affects, goals, and values, expectancies, and self-regulatory plans that enhance performance. Through this process, a leader is able to bring the “right stuff” (the appropriate ensemble of attributes) to bear on and succeed in the multiple challenges of leadership. We suggest future research to develop dimensional typologies related to leadership-relevant aspects of the self and also to link individual positive self-complexity to more aggregate positive organizational processes. (Hannah, Woolfolk, and Lord, 2009, p. 269)

That particular article happens to contain a great deal of valuable information, but busy academic leaders won't have the time to make their way through such dense academic verbiage in order to learn how to improve their administrative technique. They want ideas they can use now, and Positive Academic Leadership seeks to meet that desire for immediate information. With that objective in mind, I've tried to make the range of current research as accessible as possible, sometimes blending the findings of scholars with examples drawn from popular entertainment or the types of management books you see people reading on long flights. I'm firmly convinced that people with Ph.D.s don't own the patent on wisdom and insight, so it's possible to draw valid parallels, applications, and illustrations from an exceptionally wide range of sources. Furthermore, my goal in this book is never simply to give you information about positive academic leadership but rather to demonstrate how you can practice this leadership. In the end, your own experience in trying out these ideas will matter more than the reams of studies that led to their development.

Positive academic leadership isn't just something I train others to do. It's also how I try to approach my own responsibilities at my college and in my university. For this reason, there are a lot more personal anecdotes in this book than in any other I've written. That's intentional: positive academic leadership is an approach best taught by example, and all of us are familiar with situations (both good and bad) that we've experienced ourselves. But I'll admit it: I'm not successful at positive academic leadership every single day, and you won't be either. If you try it, however, and stick with it, you'll eventually notice improvements—a little bit at first, then more, then a flood. You may even become an advocate of this administrative approach and want to spread it throughout your institution and through academia as a whole, as I recommend in the last two chapters. That's a good thing.

We face a wide range of challenges in higher education. There's never enough money to meet our needs. Competition among institutions is increasing. Enrollment limits on courses are higher than ever before. And the amount of respect the public at large gives to four-year undergraduate education in general, and college professors in particular, seems to decline each year. (Community colleges and graduate programs still often receive widespread admiration, but not what is too often referred to as “that overpriced, ineffective, meaningless bachelor's degree.”) We can see all these developments as catastrophes and go into crisis mode as we try to solve them, but then we'll just be running from fire to fire, putting out one blaze only to see another erupt from a different quarter. Problems at universities are like candies in a PEZ dispenser: as soon as you remove one, another pops right up. But we do have alternatives. We can say, “It's not a crisis. It's just the environment in which I work. Now how do I go about making things better?” And then we can create something wonderful out of the materials we have at hand. That's the essence of positive academic leadership, and that's what you'll learn about in this book.

I'm grateful to Magna Publications for allowing me to adapt and reuse some material that originally appeared in Academic Leader. (Reprint permission was granted by Magna Publications and Academic Leader.) In addition, I thank Tamara Howard for her contributions in researching this material; Megan Geiger, Sandy Ogden, and Cecilia Chin-Pallés for editorial assistance; and Lawrence Abele, Heather Coltman, and everyone involved in the annual K-State Academic Chairpersons Conference (particularly Kathryn Harth and Sharon Brookshire) for their generosity in letting me pilot this material in its rough, initial form. I'm greatly indebted to all those scholars whose work contributed to the concept of positive academic leadership. You'll notice their names cited repeatedly throughout this book: Martin Seligman, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Kim Cameron, Ian MacDonald, Catherine Burke, Karl Stewart, Kaye Herth, Kina Mallard, and Mark Sargent. Finally I'm indebted to all the positive academic leaders I've met in so many colleges and universities around the world. They're the people who taught me what truly transformative academic leadership can be.

Jupiter, Florida
September 1, 2012

Jeffrey L. Buller

Reference

Hannah, S. T., Woolfolk, R. L., & Lord, R. G. (2009). Leader self-structure: A framework for positive leadership. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 30(2), 269–290.

PART ONE

EXPLORING POSITIVE ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP

CHAPTER 1

WHAT POSITIVE LEADERSHIP MEANS

Very few administrators begin their positions as confirmed cynics or pessimists, although some of them end up that way. It's just human nature. When most people are offered their first leadership position, they're enthusiastic about the opportunity, excited by the possibilities, and eager to make a real difference in the world. They want to help shape a program, guide students and faculty members toward achieving their goals, and leave their college or university better than they found it. So why is it that this initial optimism all too often gets stifled by the reality of the job, and day after day gets spent on countless vexing problems, those petty little details we know collectively as “administrivia”? Here's how Frederick L. Ahearn, a former dean at the Catholic University of America, describes his work in his essay “A Day in the Life of a Dean”:

Another day begins, and my agenda, as usual, is full. Sometimes I wonder if my life has become one long meeting. Fitting things into my schedule is becoming a juggling act—so much to do in so little time . . . An angry student complains that she is not able to register for an elective course that her faculty adviser has recommended she take: “With the high tuition that students must pay today, the school should have extra sections of the important courses that students need for their professional training.” . . . As I walk back to my office, I think about how much more difficult it is to be a dean when you have to cut a budget that is already inadequate, and when the AVP [academic vice president] has little regard for the school. I have always tried to emphasize how the school contributes to the university and its mission, but I feel that the AVP does not understand the school or its mission . . . The five members of the school's Committee on Appointment and Promotion (CAP), all senior faculty, enter as I finish my phone call. As dean, I am an ex officio member of this committee, and I chair the meetings. However, I do not vote with the CAP; I express my vote separately on each matter that comes before the committee . . . I finally end the meeting knowing that this split will continue to interfere with other business in the school. How will I be able to manage these differences? How can I breach the differences and negotiate a compromise? I will have to end up siding with one group over the other. I am disgusted! . . . Driving home this night, I feel tired. I am not happy with my meetings with the academic vice president and the senior faculty on the Committee on Appointment and Promotion. (Ahearn, 1997, pp. 9, 10, 13, 17, 18, 20)

Who in the world would ever want a job like that? One problem to be solved after another. Angry or apathetic stakeholders. A feeling of exhaustion, disgust, and disappointment at the end of the day. There are probably lots of department chairs, deans, vice presidents, provosts, presidents, and chancellors who can sympathize with the situation Ahearn describes. We come to our positions with the impression that we'll be dealing with major issues and key decisions, but we often find our days weighed down by one crisis after another. Once we've spent a year or two on the job, we discover that we've become so focused on solving problems that we hardly have any time left to achieve all the goals we had when we started.

Part of the problem stems from the way in which administrative positions have been designed at most colleges and universities. If you do an Internet search on such phrases as “job description department chair” or “responsibilities university dean,” you'll find numerous listings where administrative duties are fragmented, ill defined, and occasionally even contradictory. For example, visionary assignments like “provides leadership in all areas of the discipline” or “recruits, retains, and develops a faculty recognized for excellence in both instruction and research” often stand side by side with paper pushing: “ensures that all book orders are submitted in a timely manner,” “verifies the accuracy of catalogue information,” “requisitions supplies as needed,” and so on. It's no wonder that some academic leaders find their energy sapped by minutiae. Is there any way to improve this situation?

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