Building Academic Leadership Capacity

A Guide to Best Practices

Walter H. Gmelch, Jeffrey L. Buller

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118299487
• eBook ISBN: 9781118989302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

A clear, systematic road map to effective campus leadership development

Building Academic Leadership Capacity gives institutions the knowledge they need to invest in the next generation of academic leaders. With a clear, generalizable, systematic approach, this book provides insight into the elements of successful academic leadership and the training that makes it effective. Readers will explore original research that facilitates systematic, continuous program development, augmented by the authors' own insight drawn from experience establishing such programs. Numerous examples of current campus programs illustrate the concepts in action, and reflection questions lead readers to assess how they can apply these concepts to their own programs.

The academic leader is the least studied and most misunderstood management position in America. Demands for accountability and the complexities of higher education leadership are increasing, and institutions need ways to shape leaders at the department chair, dean, and executive levels of all functions and responsibilities. This book provides a road map to an effective development program, whether the goal is to revamp an existing program or build one from the ground up. Readers will learn to:

• Develop campus leadership programs in a more systematic manner
• Examine approaches that have been proven effective at other institutions
• Consider how these approaches could be applied to your institution
• Give leaders the skills they need to overcome any challenge

The field of higher education offers limited opportunity to develop leaders, so institutions must invest in and grow campus leaders themselves. All development programs are not created equal, so it's important to have the most effective methods in place from day one. For the institution seeking a better way to invest in the next generation of campus leaders, Building Academic Leadership Capacity is a valuable resource.

Chapter 1
The Call for Academic Leadership Development

Where Have All The leaders gone? Have they ever really been here? In the corporate world, some of the most widely quoted experts in management have complained that advances in leadership simply have not kept up with achievements in other areas:

We have learned a great deal over the last decade about designing more sophisticated interventions to educate our future leaders. Yet in other ways, we have simply progressed from the Bronze Age of leadership development to the Iron Age. We have advanced, but we have yet to truly enter the Information Age. (Conger and Benjamin, 1999, 262–263)

If the situation is that dire among the Fortune 500, we in higher education must be in severe trouble indeed. Business may not yet have made it into the Information Age, but colleges and universities should count themselves lucky if they have progressed beyond the Stone Age. In 1996, more than two thousand academic leaders were surveyed, and only 3 percent reported that they had any systematic leadership development programs on their campuses (Gmelch, Wolverton, Wolverton, and Hermanson, 1996). Not much has changed in the past two decades. A 2013 study by Robert Cipriano and Richard Riccardi found that only 3.3 percent of department chairs came to their positions with formal course work in the administrative skills they need.

The same sorry state of affairs is likely to be true of deans as well. Many of them rose to their leadership positions because of their success at committee work and their duties as teachers and scholars, not because they had any formal training in the best way to run a program. Presidents and provosts may fare a little better. Although practically everyone in higher education knows of upper administrators who came to their positions as the result of political appointments or successful careers in the military or corporate worlds, most university chief executive officers and chief academic officers have practical, on-the-job experience in academic settings. Most, too, have probably participated in formal leadership training programs like those run by the Harvard Institutes in Higher Education, Higher Education Resource Services, the American Council on Education, and others that are profiled throughout this book. In short, many administrators, at least at the college or department levels, begin their positions without:

• Formal training
• Significant prior experience
• A clear understanding of the ambiguity and complexity of their roles
• A solid grasp of what it means to lead within a system of shared governance
• A realization that full-time administrative work requires not a mere shift in focus but a metamorphic change from what their perspective was as a faculty member, as well as a corresponding change in their self-image (the “Who am I now?” question)
• An awareness of the full cost that administrative assignments will have to their careers as scholars, artists, and researchers
• Preparation to balance their personal and professional lives

To put it bluntly, academic leadership is one of the few professions one can enter today with absolutely no training in, credentials for, or knowledge about the central duties of the position.

As a result, while institutions of higher education become increasingly complex, many academic leaders begin their jobs woefully unprepared for the challenges awaiting them. Only the very rare graduate program, like the PreDoctoral Leadership Development Institute at Rutgers University (www.odl.rutgers.edu/pldi/), makes a sustained effort to provide leadership training to potential faculty members before they receive their PhD. And it is not as though the dangers of a lack of administrative training have not been identified. For years, blue ribbon commissions and executive reports from such organizations as the American Council on Education (Eckel, Hill, and Green, 1998; Kim and Cook, 2013), the Kellogg Commission (Beinike and Sublett, 1999), the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (Eckel, 2012), and the Global Consortium of Higher Education (Acker, 1999) have been calling for bolder and better college and university leadership. Nevertheless, little has changed. Despite the high profile given these white papers when they are released, there is still no universally accepted credential or certification process that indicates who is qualified to deal with the opportunities and challenges of higher education today. Even on the campus level, the literature is all but silent on best practices for developing deans, directors, and department chairs. There is simply no broad consensus as to what effective leadership training looks like at the level of the system, institution, program, or individual discipline.

The sheer magnitude of this problem is all but overwhelming. Nearly fifty thousand people currently serve as department chairs in the United States, with about a quarter of them being replaced each year. Deans, on the average, serve six years. The training programs provided to most of those who will fill the resulting vacancies may charitably be described as episodic and well intentioned. In-house programs are often only half a day long, with more extensive retreats rarely extending beyond two or three days. Many sessions at these workshops are devoted to legal and fiscal issues; the goal, it would appear, is to keep the institution out of trouble (and out of the Chronicle of Higher Education) rather than to develop well-rounded academic leaders. Even some very good programs, which hire a skilled trainer or experienced administrator for an intense, multiday workshop, often deal with only general issues. Outside consultants may be experts in their areas, but they cannot be expected to know the local culture of every institution they visit. (We know: we are those consultants.) For all these reasons, it is not an exaggeration to conclude that the development of academic leadership is one of the most misunderstood, least studied, and most critical management challenges that exist in higher education today.

The Cost of Poor Administrative Preparation

Our failure to provide adequate training for leaders at colleges and universities affects us in several important ways.

Programs Suffer

Higher education is undergoing a period of intense change. Academic programs are facing increased competition for resources, including students (whom we often describe as our most important resources), as for-profit universities, nonprofit universities, and online universities all compete with one another for the same tuition dollars. Moreover, low-cost or no-cost sources of higher education—such as MOOCs (massive open online courses), iTunes University, academic podcasts, the Teaching Company, Rosetta Stone Language Courses, and the like—mean that potential students have a far greater menu of educational choices than they ever had before. In order to be nimble enough to respond to all the challenges their programs face, chairs, directors, and deans cannot afford to approach administration with the belief that “I'll be able to pick it up as I go along.” If these administrators do not hit the ground running, their programs will suffer, perhaps irreparably, because their competitors will be succeeding while they are still winding their way up the learning curve.

Institutions Suffer

Because of their complexity, colleges and universities are governed by what sometimes seems to be a bewildering array of rules and regulations. There are institutional policies, state educational guidelines, state and federal laws, accreditation requirements for both the school as a whole and individual programs, trustee or legislative initiatives, and more. Administrators who are unaware of how all these policies fit together might act in a way that leaves their institutions liable for fines, damages, and other sanctions. For example, someone who is unfamiliar with where academic freedom ends and protection against hate speech begins could make a decision that results in a lawsuit that proves disastrous to the institution and its reputation. Members of a governing board sometimes place pressure on administrators to act in a way that would violate the principles of academic freedom and thus put the school's accreditation in jeopardy. With legislatures and governing boards taking more of an activist approach in their treatment of universities, even one poor decision—no matter how pure the administrator's intentions may have been—could set back the goals of the entire institution. Administrators need to know not only where these potential land mines are, but also what effective strategies exist for negotiating their way through them.

Individuals Suffer

Not being adequately prepared for the challenges of leading a college or department can wreak havoc with an administrator's career. It is not uncommon in higher education to hear about university presidents who either resign or are forced out of their positions in fewer than three years because they were not fully prepared for the job and the public scrutiny that came with it. While one article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes university presidents as “Bruised, Battered, and Loving It” (Glassner and Schapiro, 2013), another calls their occupation a “Precarious Profession” and notes that their time in office “is shrinking rapidly” (Fethke and Policano, 2012). That same sort of career damage occurs elsewhere on the institutional hierarchy as well. By not being adequately trained for the challenges they face, chairs, deans, and provosts sometimes experience votes of no confidence from the faculty that result in a swift and painful exit from their positions. Finding another administrative appointment after a public and humiliating failure is difficult. Even returning to the faculty can have its challenges. It can be difficult to restart a research agenda once it has been interrupted for several years. As a result, many well-intentioned administrators find their careers stalled because they got in far over their heads in terms of leadership challenges. Even worse, their personal lives may suffer in the meantime because they end up spending so much time trying to address a rapidly spiraling series of problems that they stint their obligations to their family and other loved ones. They come away from their brief administrative careers convinced that becoming a chair or dean was the worst mistake they ever made.

But Don't Current Programs for University Administrators Already Fill This Need?

It can seem a little hard to reconcile our claim that leadership training is lacking...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• The Authors
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Call for Academic Leadership Development
• Chapter 2: Strategy
• Chapter 3: Structure
• Chapter 4: Systems
• Chapter 5: Staff
• Chapter 6: Skills
• Chapter 7: Style
• Chapter 8: Shared Values
• Chapter 9: Putting It All Together: Comprehensive Academic Leadership
• Appendix Resource Guides
• More from Wiley
• Index
• ATLAS
• End User License Agreement