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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Reframing Academic Leadership Reframing Academic Leadership is the go-to guide for deepening leadership commitment, capacity, and impact. Gallos and Bolman tease out the unique opportunities and challenges in academic leadership and present powerful ideas and tools to guide and assist college and university administrators in: * Creating campus environments that facilitate creativity and commitment * Forging vital alliances and partnerships in service of the mission * Building campus cultures and shared vision that unite and inspire * Crafting institutional structures and strategies that foster innovation and excellence In this updated edition, the authors integrate time-tested conceptual frameworks with rich and compelling real-world cases and tackle contemporary, high-impact issues such as changes in the professoriate and in student populations, funding shortfalls, equity and social justice, the double-edged sword of technology, managing conflict and crisis, ethics and governance, and strengthening leadership agility and resolve. This readable, intellectually provocative, and pragmatic book is for all who care deeply about higher education, are committed to making it better, and understand its potential to transform lives, families, communities, organizations, and nations. Leadership matters more than ever, and Reframing Academic Leadership offers the seminal framework for understanding and leading in higher education today. PRAISE FOR REFRAMING ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP | 1st ED "Reframing Academic Leadership is the most comprehensive book on the topic and an excellent source of knowledge for faculty and managerial leaders in every college and university. An invaluable resource for students of higher education leadership!" --MAUREEN SULLIVAN, Past President, American Library Association and Association of College and Research Libraries "Reframing Academic Leadership provides a compassionate understanding of the stresses of leadership in higher education. It offers insights to those who do not fully appreciate why higher education is so hard to 'manage' and validation for those entirely familiar with this world. I recommend it enthusiastically." --JUDITH BLOCK MCLAUGHLIN, Senior lecturer on education and faculty chair of the Harvard Seminar for New Presidents and the Harvard Seminar for Presidential Leadership, Harvard Graduate School of Education "Bolman and Gallos provide a refreshing view of leadership essential for those assuming presidencies and other important leadership positions in higher education. This work is a bedside reference for aspiring and current leadership in higher education not only in the U.S. but also abroad." --FERNANCO LEON GARCIA, President, Sistema CETYS Universidad, Baja California, Mexico "Bolman and Gallos have written a practical, lucid text that brings together illustrative vignettes and robust frameworks for diagnosing and managing colleges and universities. I recommend it to new and experienced administrators who will routinely confront difficult people, structures, and cultures in their workplaces." --CHRISTOPHER MORPHEW, Dean, School of Education, Johns Hopkins University "Reframing Academic Leadership is filled with real-world examples from leaders. The book reads like a guide for leading a chamber music rehearsal where one's role constantly shifts from star to servant and where multiple answers may be 'right'." --PETER WHITE, Dean and Professor of Conducting, Conservatory of Music, University of the Pacific
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
About the Authors
Part I: Leadership Epistemology: When You Understand, You Know What to Do
1 A Tale of Two Presidents
Opportunities and Challenges
Purpose of the Book
Note
2 Sensemaking and the Power of Reframing
Learning for Effective Action
Summary
3 Knowing What You're Doing
Skilled Incompetence: Understanding Theories for Action
Learning and Effective Action: Habits of Learning for Daily Practice
Summary
Note
Part II: Reframing Leadership Challenges
4 Building Clarity and Capacity
Structural Options
Structuring Your Work
Structuring Your Organization
Structuring the Change Process
Institutional Norms
Summary
Notes
5 Respecting and Managing Divergent Agendas
A Political View of Leadership in Higher Education
Revisiting the Three P's of Change
Political Skills for Academic Leadership
Summary
Notes
6 Fostering a Caring and Productive Campus
Human Resource Leadership
Summary
7 Keeping the Faith and Celebrating the Mission
A Symbolic View of Leadership in Higher Education
Culture as Holding Environment
How Symbolic Leaders Work
Risks and Rewards of the Prophetic Leader
Summary
Part III: Leadership Pragmatics: New Ideas for Old Challenges
8 Leading from the Middle
Understanding Administrative Life in the Middle
Strategies for Effective Action
Summary
9 Managing Your Boss
Why Leading Up Is Important
Goals for the Relationship
Tough Cases: Narcissists and Gaslighters
Summary
10 Managing Conflict
Making Conflict Productive
Fix It Now or Fix It Later: Self‐Protection versus Learning
Summary
Note
11 Leading Difficult People
The SURE Rules of Engagement
Two Classic Archetypes: Bullies and Backstabbers
Summary
Notes
Part IV: Leadership in a Changing World
12 Coping with a World in Motion
Students: Numbers and Needs
Faculty: A Ticking Bomb?
Summary
Notes
13 Coping with a World in Motion
Money: The Perpetual Conundrum
Technology
Summary
14 Leadership, Strategy, and Governance
A Cautionary Tale: The Death of Mount Ida College
Strategy
Governance, Leadership, and the Role of the Board
Servant Leadership
Summary
Part V: Sustaining Higher Education Leaders: Courage, Hope, and Values
15 Sustaining Integrity
Developing a Personal Code of Ethics
Developing a Culture of Truth and an Institutional Code of Ethics
Summary
Notes
16 Sustaining Health and Vitality
Five Steps to Healthy Academic Leadership – and Healthy Academic Leaders
Summary
17 Feeding the Soul
The Developmental Journey
Inner Growth Matters
A Sense of Calling
The Journey Is the Challenge
Leading with Soul
The Courage to Learn: What Got You Here Won't Get You There
Summary
18 Epilogue: The Sacred Nature of Academic Leadership
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 4
Table 4.1 A Structural View of Academic Leadership
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 A Political View of Academic Leadership
Chapter 6
Table 6.1 A Human Resource View of Academic Leadership
Chapter 7
Table 7.1 Symbolic View of Academic Leadership
Chapter 8
Table 8.1 The Academic Leader's Work Worlds
Chapter 12
Table 12.1 Longevity of Universities vs. Corporations
Chapter 15
Exhibit 15.1 Introspective Questions to Help Develop a Culture of Trust
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Advocacy and Inquiry.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 President Quixote's implicit map.
Figure 5.2 Map of the denouement.
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 The four rules of engagement.
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Reframing Academic Leadership
SECOND EDITION
Joan V. Gallos
Lee G. Bolman
Copyright © 2021 John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data:
Names: Gallos, Joan V., author | Bolman, Lee G., author.
Title: Reframing academic leadership / Joan V. Gallos, Lee G. Bolman.
Description: Second edition. | San Francisco : Jossey‐Bass, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020027447 (print) | LCCN 2020027448 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119663560 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119663577 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119663591 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Educational leadership. | Education, Higher.
Classification: LCC LB2806 .B583 2021 (print) | LCC LB2806 (ebook) | DDC 378.1/01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027447
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027448
COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHY
COVER ART: © GETTY IMAGES / JAYK7
Preface
With a sense of relief and completion, we submitted what we thought was the final manuscript for this second edition of Reframing Academic Leadership. Then Covid‐19 hit with a vengeance. The world that everyone knew suddenly stopped in hope of slowing the viral spread – adding economic, political, societal, educational, and mental health challenges to the already devastating global health crisis of a fast‐spreading virus with no vaccine or cure. As we worked to tease out the myriad implications for academic leaders, Americans and allies around the world took to the streets for equity and racial justice following the death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. We knew that we could not ignore the impact of both on higher education. We recalled our submission and went back to the drawing board. Much of what we had written about academic leadership still holds, but no institution and none of us will ever be quite the same. Both stories remain very much in motion – and will for some time – but two things are very clear. Every crisis contains opportunities for innovation and progress if we stay strong and search for them, and leadership feels more important now than ever.
The death of George Floyd was the latest in a long line of police shootings of Black citizens, and the broad protest movement under the banner of Black Lives Matter had been pushing for reform since early 2012. It took the actions of a courageous 17‐year‐old girl who recorded the dramatic and painful 8 minutes and 46 seconds–long video of Floyd's death on her cell phone that was played and replayed on television and across the internet to finally open the eyes of a nation and the world to systemic racism and to send outraged citizens into the streets of large and small cities during a pandemic demanding change – to move the country, in the words of scholar Ibram Kendi (2016, 2019, 2020), from denying a history of racial injustice that has haunted the United States since the 17th century to launching a proactive, “anti‐racist revolution” (2020). To quote Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
The pandemic tells its own leadership story. It might have been stopped in its tracks in January 2020, but for an attempted coverup by local officials in Wuhan, China. The discovery of the “SARS coronavirus” in a group of Wuhan patients with an unusual and virulent pneumonia should have been entered into a high‐tech national reporting system that China had created expressly for such situations after the 2002 SARS epidemic (Cook, 2020; Kuo, 2020; Myer, 2020; Shi, Rauhala, and Sun, 2020). The rules and procedures were clear. But they were not followed. The failure was catastrophic, the coverup deadly. But the causes were dismayingly ordinary. Regardless of country or sector, leaders routinely try to protect themselves and their organizations by hiding problems in hopes of fixing them before anyone notices. They prioritize their own comfort and interests over those of their constituents and communities. They act as if they must choose between competing needs without recognizing there are options that address both. Officials in Wuhan unleashed a global disaster while trying to avoid local embarrassment. They failed to anticipate that their decisions would be catastrophic for themselves, their constituents, the globe, and, as one piece of the collateral damage, institutions of higher education.
Here's the rub: the same dynamics that produced the coverup in Wuhan – and allowed so many to deny the meaning and implications of Black Lives Matter for so long – are also endemic in academic leadership. In a later chapter on ethics (Chapter 14), we catalog examples of leaders in colleges and universities following their own versions of the Wuhan playbook. Even as we write in late 2020, academic leaders are wrestling with how to balance the financial health and even the survival of their institutions against possible health risks to faculty, staff, students, families, and local communities. At least implicitly, circumstances are asking them to put a price on human life.
Nearly 400,000 Covid‐19 infections and more than 90 college employee and student deaths were recorded across 1,800 institutions in 2020 (Ivory, Gebeloff, and Mervosh, 2020). Is this reason to celebrate the success of classroom safety measures? Are 90 deaths an acceptable sacrifice? Contact tracing and genetic analysis now confirm that community spread from students to their surrounding communities led to a higher death rate for older adults in college towns than elsewhere (Ivory, Gebeloff, and Mervosh, 2020). How far beyond campus borders do institutional responsibilities for health and welfare extend? How many constituent and community deaths should administrators risk in order to save their college and their stewardship of it? Sobering – and a strong incentive to clarify values and transcend either/or thinking.
These are indeed extraordinary times, and we have done our best to produce a volume that acknowledges the uncertainty and the possibilities in them. Returning from an unprecedented global calamity and seeking to build together a more just world, while overwhelming and disequilibrating, hold seeds for learning, innovation, and change. The world will go on and so will most – although probably not all – of our academic institutions. The wise and thoughtful will seize this transformational moment to recalibrate and to come back stronger and better. Louis Pasteur got it right: chance favors the prepared mind. Our goal for this new edition of Reframing Academic Leadership is the development of confident leaders who are prepared for the myriad opportunities and challenges they will face.
Threads of both continuity and change are woven throughout higher education's history. They continue as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, magnified by the extraordinary turning point of Covid‐19. Both are central themes in this second edition of Reframing Academic Leadership. So is our belief in the vital role of academic leaders for bringing fresh thinking to perennial concerns like access, affordability, and quality.
Interviewed in the midst of the pandemic, E. Gordon Gee – who has held more university presidencies than any other American – noted that when he began his first presidency in 1981, surveys found that 95 percent of the population believed higher education was important. Now, said Gee, it's less than 50 percent, “even though higher education is the most important element in our culture and our economy right now” (Carlson & Friga, 2020). When Covid‐19 threatened health and lives around the globe, political leaders turned to university‐educated scientists, physicians, professors, and campus‐based research centers and labs to help them understand and manage what was happening and what could be done about it. When they ignored or downplayed that expertise, they paid a price in lives and livelihoods lost. The pandemic is a particularly dramatic example of the extraordinary pace of change in our society and around the world that has put new pressures on colleges and universities to adapt and to deliver – and of the value when they do. History reminds us that innovation and change in response to radically shifting circumstances have always been key to the sector's survival and growth. Our goal in this revision is to support academic leaders as they find ways to do that again.
We are writing for an audience of readers who care deeply about colleges and universities, appreciate their strengths and imperfections, and are committed to making them better. We have worked to provide a research‐based yet pragmatic approach to academic leadership. This new volume reflects changes in higher education, in the world, and in our own understandings. Additions, revisions, and occasional excisions all contribute to a book that aims to offer guidance for today and beyond. This second edition includes four new chapters – one each on ethics and on strategy and governance, and two on understanding the changing higher education landscape. Meanwhile, many ideas and some of the cases that we used in the first edition return because they are as relevant and instructive as ever. Throughout, the emphasis is on encouraging academic leaders to understand the unique context in which they work and to build their skills and confidence so as to lead well in response to it.
There are many roads to careers in academic administration. Some leaders in student affairs, advancement, business, operations, and other nonfaculty posts bring extensive training in their fields and in higher education administration. Other administrators are scholars and educators who hope for impact in a leadership role or who have chosen a different path in response to disappointment with the pace and focus of faculty life or to an honest assessment of their interests and strengths. Then there are the many accidental leaders for whom an administrative career just seems to happen. A nudge from somewhere combines with a willingness to serve – to fill an unanticipated administrative gap, to take one's turn as a division chair, to use one's talents to salvage a program or launch a needed project. Before long, service turns into more than a temporary assignment. Many an interim becomes permanent after a year or so on the job. This sets in motion a series of choices, consequences, and rewards that can turn an initial administrative foray into a longer journey down a road with no turning back: years away from teaching require retooling for the classroom, and scholarship once put on hold gets ever harder to restart as fields march forward.
The administrative world is different from faculty life, and it offers many rewards. Academic leadership is a highly social endeavor. The collaboration and partnerships needed to get things done foster a sense of community, connection, and shared purpose often missing in the isolation of the classroom, research desk, or laboratory. Much as we may complain, a calendar filled with meetings and events has its charms. Administrative life offers a pace, rhythm, and structure that focus one's time and energy. Deadlines and academic calendars encourage discipline and closure. And there is deep excitement and satisfaction in seeing tangible and measurable outcomes from one's efforts. A new degree program, dormitory, or sports complex has a durability and sense of completeness that are not always as easy to find in teaching and research.
But along with its benefits, academic leadership brings challenges and even heartaches, particularly in times of political controversy, public doubts, technological changes, demographic shifts, mission drift, and financial crisis. In the pandemic of 2020, administrators had to solve problems they had never encountered under extraordinary pressures of time and resources. Mistakes get made in decision‐making under conditions of uncertainty and emergency, and many campuses will find in after‐action reviews that some things could have been done better. But even under the best of conditions, higher education administration is demanding work that tests the mind, soul, and stamina of all who attempt it. We know because we've been there, and we have worked with many others over the years to help them learn to do it better. We have studied the factors that make the work so difficult, written about them, and benefited from the research of colleagues. Colleges and universities constitute a special type of organization whose complex mission, dynamics, personnel structures, and values require a distinct set of understandings and skills to lead and manage well. That is what this book aims to provide: ideas, tools, and encouragement to help readers make better sense of their work and their institutions, and to become more skilled and versatile in handling the vicissitudes of daily life.
Our approach builds from multiple sources. One is our experience both working in and teaching higher education leadership for more years than either of us likes to acknowledge. One or both of us have served as an adjunct instructor, tenured faculty member, alumni affairs officer, principal investigator, academic program director, campus accreditation coordinator, department chair, dean, academic vice president, and special assistant to a university president for strategic planning. We have studied, lived, and worked in both elite private and urban public institutions, large and small. We have years of experience teaching higher education leadership to aspiring professionals in graduate and undergraduate courses and to experienced administrators in executive programs and summer institutes. We hope this book reflects all that we have learned from our experiences and from our students and colleagues. We are grateful and better for having had them in our lives.
Throughout this second edition are cases and examples drawn from our experiences and from the experience of the many thousands of academic leaders with whom we have worked over the years. Some of the cases are clearly labeled public examples. Others are amended and disguised. Some are composites created, like good teaching cases, to illustrate dynamics regularly seen across institutions and situations. You're likely to encounter more than one example that sounds a lot like something that happened at your institution not so long ago, but that is purely coincidental. In higher education, it can truly be said, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again” (Eccl. 1:9, NIV). That is true even of pandemics. A century ago, more than half the students on many campuses were infected with the Spanish flu, a virus that was particularly lethal for young people. The University of North Carolina lost two presidents within a few months to the disease (Carlton, 2020; Cozens, 2020). Masks, social distancing, and outdoor classes were all among the methods universities employed then to combat the deadly disease (Carlton, 2020).
Outline of the Book
The chapters in Part I (Leadership Epistemology: When You Understand, You Know What to Do) develop a central theme in the book: deep thinking and learning are at the heart of effective leadership. The opening chapter (Chapter 1: A Tale of Two Presidents: Opportunities and Challenges in Academic Leadership) contrasts the experience of two talented, well‐known, long‐term college presidents in very different institutions whose presidential denouements were sharply contrasting. Their stories provide an entry point for exploring the many factors that make leadership in colleges and universities simultaneously complex, satisfying, and dangerous. Chapter 2 (Sensemaking and the Power of Reframing) explores how you come to know and understand your world and the people in it, and how your thinking can limit or enhance your vision, choices, and strategies. Chapter 3 (Knowing What You're Doing: Learning, Authenticity, and Theories for Action) extends the discussion of sensemaking to the specific issue of learning from experience and from relationships with others. Starting from a key premise that leadership is in the eye of the beholder, it discusses how leaders can learn more about their tendencies, strengths, and gaps.
Part II of the book (Reframing Leadership Challenges) focuses on the big picture: how to understand the institutional landscape and translate intentions into effective action. We take on four of the knottiest concerns endemic to higher education administration and use a variety of case examples to provide concepts and guidelines for both diagnosis and action. Chapter 4 (Building Clarity and Capacity: Leader as Analyst and Architect) addresses the leader's role in institutional structure and design, as well as the challenges in building linkages that enable people to work together in institutions that often seem designed for disconnection and dissension. Chapter 5 (Respecting and Managing Divergent Agendas: Leader as Compassionate Politician) tackles head‐on how leaders can best handle political realities they would often prefer to avoid: enduring differences and the ubiquity of conflict in higher education. Chapter 6 (Fostering a Caring and Productive Campus: Leader as Servant, Catalyst, and Coach) examines the complexity and importance of managing people in ways that foster respect, creativity, and commitment. Chapter 7 (Keeping the Faith and Celebrating the Mission: Leader as Prophet and Artist) uses a contemporary case at a well‐known public university to explore ways that academic leaders can bring meaning and vision to their institution by embracing skills and strategies often associated with spiritual leaders and spirited artists.
Part III of this volume (Leadership Pragmatics: New Ideas for Old Challenges) tackles a series of issues that are chronic features of academic leadership. Each of the four chapters offers practical advice on how to diagnose and respond to recurrent dynamics that can derail even the most skilled. Chapter 8 (Leading from the Middle) examines the opportunities and hurdles in working with multiple constituencies. When you are buffeted by conflicting demands from every direction, how do you cope? Chapter 9 (Managing Your Boss) addresses the important but often neglected issue of how to influence and work effectively with your boss and other powerful players in the institutional hierarchy. Leadership is sometimes equated to managing people who report to you, but wise academic leaders understand that leading up is every bit as important. Chapter 10 (Managing Conflict) explores a perennial hazard of administrative life: conflict. Effective administrators look for the possibilities in conflict and use it to foster creative problem solving, to build commitment, to weed out inefficiencies, and to make wise trade‐offs among competing institutional objectives. We offer tips for how to generate lasting solutions from thorny situations by orchestrating disagreements so that things don't get too hot or too cold for progress. Chapter 11 (Leading Difficult People) addresses ways to productively handle the dysfunctional relationships and rogues’ gallery of idiosyncratic folks who sometimes seem overrepresented in higher education. People problems regularly top the list of challenges that can easily overwhelm leaders’ coping strategies and produce harm for both academic administrators and their institutions.
Part IV (Leadership in a Changing World) looks at the larger world in which higher education is embedded, emphasizing strategy, context, and the power of a clear direction. The first two chapters review and reframe today's challenges as tomorrow's opportunities for innovation and growth. Chapter 12 (Coping with a World in Motion: Students and Faculty) explores needs and changes for two of higher education's key constituents: students and faculty. Chapter 13 (Coping with a World in Motion: Money and Technology) examines the perennial issues of funding and technology as complications on the road to a better future. Chapter 14 (Leadership, Strategy, and Governance: Institutional Survival) examines the roles of both boards and academic leaders in building a workable strategy and working relationships that chart a course toward institutional well‐being.
Part V (Sustaining Higher Education Leaders: Courage, Hope, and Values) focuses on the deeply personal relationship between leaders and their work. The chapters are written to sustain (or reawaken) your search for the best in yourself and in your institution. Chapter 15 (Sustaining Integrity: Ethics and Leadership) looks under the rocks of several well‐publicized ethics scandals, asking why such things keep happening and what leaders can learn. Chapter 16 (Sustaining Health and Vitality) addresses the reality that administrative life can tax a leader's physical and psychological health. The chapter offers a series of steps academic leaders can take to sustain their stamina and work–life balance. Chapter 17 (Feeding the Soul) explores the ethical and spiritual dimensions of higher education leadership: the role of faith, calling, and a deep sense of self as essentials for steering academic institutions and programs to greatness.
We conclude with an Epilogue (The Sacred Nature of Academic Leadership) that challenges higher education leaders to recognize and embrace the sacred nature and moral purpose of their work.
Acknowledgments
We have been helped by far more people than we will ever succeed in acknowledging, so we will name only a few who have been particularly significant for us. One is Terry Deal, whose ideas and influence are everywhere in this book – and elsewhere in our lives. Another is the late Chris Argyris, an extraordinary teacher and wonderful friend who was instrumental in both our decisions to make a career of studying organizations and leadership. Our first‐born son is named Chris, so no more need be said about the place that Chris Argyris holds in our hearts.
We continue to be thankful for everyone who helped us with the first edition, and to the many more who have taught, challenged, and inspired us in the years since. They include the bright students with whom we have tested many of our ideas and the many gifted and dedicated higher education leaders and faculty colleagues with whom we have worked at Babson College, Carnegie‐Mellon, Harvard, Princeton, Radcliffe, the University of Missouri–Kansas City, the University of Massachusetts–Boston, the former Wheelock College, and Yale. We have also learned from participants in many workshops, programs, and institutes across the world. We are particularly grateful to those we have taught over many years in summer programs under the auspices of the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education (HIHE). These talented academic leaders trusted us with their professional stories, some of which are the basis for case examples in this book. We also appreciate our HIHE faculty and staff colleagues, many of whom have become dear friends.
We are grateful for the friendship and colleagueship of Orlando Taylor, whose many leadership hats currently include strategic initiatives and research as VP at Fielding Graduate University and as the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Distinguished Fellow in the Office of Undergraduate STEM Education, as well as significant NSF‐funded grant projects to advance women in the STEM fields into leadership positions at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and at Tribal Colleges. Dr. Taylor has infused the central ideas in Reframing Academic Leadership into these important initiatives, and we have learned much from them. Joan adds appreciation for the amazing work of Dr. Kelly Mack and her teams at Project Kaleidoscope and AAC&U, and Dr. Camille McKayle and her colleagues and students at the University of the Virgin Islands.
Lee is ever grateful to the members of the Brookline Group – Dave Brown, Tim Hall, Todd Jick, Bill Kahn, Phil Mirvis, and Barry Oshry – who have provided 40 years of learning, inspiration, and camaraderie. Joan gives a special shout‐out to gal pals – Marcy Crary, Diane Kellogg, Judy Paradis, Ava Penman, and Sandy Renz – who are joys to be with and impressive forces in their efforts for a better world.
We have been hanging around Jossey‐Bass and now John Wiley & Sons for so long that they feel like family. We deeply thank all who have helped us along the way, especially David Brightman, our friend and editor for the first edition (now senior editor at Stylus Publishing), and now Pete Gaughan, Riley Harding, Jeanenne Ray, and Mackenzie Thompson, who worked with us to bring this second edition to fruition.
We dedicate this book to our family. Our two sons, Brad and Chris, are talented young men who enrich our lives. We love them, and we're so deeply proud of them both. Chris is a serial entrepreneur currently building Brightest (https://www.brightest.io), a software and internet organization that aims to help nonprofit and other purpose‐led groups and organizations bring people together around their missions. His projects always wed technology and soul; and his love of learning, passion for social change, and artistry at work and in his music impress us. We await a new album of his music to drop soon. Brad deserves a special nod as the last in the roost. He was still at home through the daily ups, downs, and sideways of the first edition. Since then, he has finished college, guided debate teams to national championships, plunged into a doctoral program in the history of science, and worked on a dissertation about the use of dogs in experimental science and medicine. A committed scholar with plenty of awards and publications already under his belt – and undeniably a better writer than either of his parents, Brad is a continuing source of ideas and intellectual stimulation.
Lee's older children contribute their own brands of artistry, gifts, and grace to the family. Theater, music, teaching, writing, and our dance‐wizard of a grandchild, Foster, fill the lives of Shelley and Christine Woodberry. Scott Bolman is the jet‐setter as international lighting designer extraordinaire and theater faculty member. Lori Holwegner anchors part of our Arizona contingent and stays close to her talented daughter Jazmyne, who has finished college with honors and moved on to graduate school in digital media relations. Our other Arizonans, cartoonist Edward and his film‐making son James, amaze us on a regular basis.
Finally, we continue our tradition of giving a nod to some wayward canine who has served as a loyal distraction from writer's block. This book's award goes to the gorgeous, toy‐playing, love sponge of a Springer Spaniel, Charles Darwin, whose growing social media presence as the world's first #VirtualComfortDog during the trials of pandemic life surprised even us. Family life in all its richness is grand!
The two of us, like many others, stumbled unplanfully into academic life and later into academic administration. As children, neither of us imagined a university paycheck in our future. None of our parents were college graduates, and all were chronically puzzled about what we did and how it could qualify as real work. Elizabeth and John Gallos and Florence and Eldred Bolman are no longer with us, but we know they would have been tickled to see this joint venture and to see themselves saluted in it. We honor their encouragement and support – and love of learning that we hope we have passed along to our children – by proudly adding their names to our acknowledgments.
It was more than 40 years ago that we made our first attempt to write together. It resulted in an unpublished manuscript that may still lie buried in a file drawer somewhere. It is not accidental that we waited a long time before trying again. But we didn't give up. It was worth it for us, and we hope for you as well, to persist on both the first and second editions of this book and on Engagement: Transforming Difficult Relationships at Work. We're proud of what we've been able to do together in life and work, and we reconfirm our commitments to each other and to our shared interests. Onward!
About the Authors
Lee G. Bolman is retired as Marion Bloch/Missouri Chair in Leadership Emeritus at the Henry W. Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where he also served as department chair and interim dean. He holds a BA in history and a PhD in organizational behavior from Yale University.
He has written numerous books on leadership and organizations with coauthor Terry Deal, including Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership (7th ed., 2021); Reframing the Path to School Leadership: A Guide for Principals and Teachers (3rd ed., 2018); How Great Leaders Think (2014); Leading with Soul: An Uncommon Journey of Spirit (3rd ed., 2001); The Wizard and the Warrior: Leading with Passion and Power (2006); Escape from Cluelessness: A Guide for the Organizationally Challenged (2000); Becoming a Teacher Leader (1994); and Modern Approaches to Understanding and Managing Organizations (1984). His books have been translated into more than 10 languages; and his publications also include numerous cases, chapters, and articles in scholarly and professional journals.
Bolman consults and lectures worldwide to corporations, public agencies, universities, and schools. Prior to his position at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, he taught at Carnegie Mellon and then for more than 20 years at Harvard, where he also served as director and principal investigator for the National Center for Educational Leadership and for the Harvard School Leadership Academy and as educational chair for two Harvard executive programs – the Institute for Educational Management (IEM) and the Management Development Program (MDP) – and as co‐founder of MDP.
In 2003, Bolman received the David L. Bradford Outstanding Educator Award from the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society for his lifetime contributions to teaching and learning in the organizational sciences.
Joan V. Gallos is Professor of Leadership Emerita at the former Wheelock College, where she also served as Vice President for Academic Affairs. She holds a bachelor's degree cum laude in English from Princeton University and master's and doctoral degrees in organizational behavior and professional education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Prior to Wheelock, Gallos was tenured Professor of Leadership, University of Missouri Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Director of the Executive MBA Program at the Henry W. Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where she had also served as Dean of Education, Director of the Higher Education Graduate Programs, Coordinator of University Accreditation, and Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Strategic Planning. Gallos has also held academic appointments at the Radcliffe Seminars, Harvard Graduate School of Education, University of Massachusetts–Boston, and Babson College; and has taught in executive programs at a wide variety of institutions around the world.
Gallos has published widely on issues of professional effectiveness, organizational change, and leadership development. She is the editor of Organization Development (2006) and of Business Leadership (2nd ed., 2008); coauthor with V. Jean Ramsey of Teaching Diversity: Listening to the Soul, Speaking from the Heart (1997); creator of a wide variety of published management education teaching and training materials, including the instructional guides for the Jossey‐Bass Reader series in management and for the seven editions of Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership; and author of numerous articles and chapters in scholarly and professional journals. She is also the former editor of the Journal of Management Education.
Gallos lectures and consults in the United States and abroad on leadership and organization development. She has served as a Salzburg Seminar Fellow; as president of the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society; on a large number of national and regional advisory boards, such as the Forum for Early Childhood Organization and Leadership Development, the Kauffman and Danforth Foundations’ Superintendents Leadership Forum, the national steering committee for the New Models of Management Education project (a joint effort of the Graduate Management Admissions Council and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business), and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation College Age Youth Leadership Review Team; and on civic and nonprofit boards, including the Friends of Chamber Music, the New Repertory Theater, and as a founding board member for Actors Theater of Kansas City and for the Kansas City Library Foundation.
Gallos has received numerous awards for her writing, teaching, and professional service, including both the Sage of the Society and the Distinguished Service awards from the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society; the Fritz Roethlisberger Memorial Award for the best article on management education (and finalist for the same prize in subsequent years); and the Radcliffe College/Harvard University Excellence in Teaching award. She also served as founding director of the Truman Center for the Healing Arts, based in Kansas City's public teaching hospital, which received the 2004 Kansas City Business Committee for the Arts Partnership Award as the best partnership between a large organization and the arts.
Joan Gallos and Lee Bolman have worked together for more than 40 years on a variety of teaching, training, and consulting projects for universities, corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies. In addition to the first edition of this book, they are co‐authors of Engagement: Transforming Difficult Relationships at Work.
Part ILeadership Epistemology: When You Understand, You Know What to Do
The three chapters in Part I develop a central theme in the book: thinking and learning are at the heart of effective academic leadership. Colleges and universities are complex institutions that put a premium on sensemaking: the ability to decode messy and cryptic events and circumstances. One source of that complexity is the reality that academic institutions are inhabited by people and are designed to foster human creativity and development, which means that all the mysteries of the psyche, human groups, learning, personal and professional growth, and human relationships are central to the everyday work of academic administrators. Effectiveness in such a world requires both self‐knowledge and intellectual tools that enable leaders to understand and decipher the ambiguous situations they regularly face in order to make sensible choices about what to do.
Chapter 1, “A Tale of Two Presidents: Opportunities and Challenges in Academic Leadership,” opens with stories of two prominent university presidents whose careers ended very differently, before digging into the institutional characteristics that make academic leadership unique, rewarding, and tough. It previews many of the central ideas and issues that will be developed in later chapters. Chapter 2, “Sensemaking and the Power of Reframing,” examines everyday epistemology: how leaders come to know and understand their world and work; and how their humanity can limit or enhance their choices, tactics, and strategies. Chapter 3, “Knowing What You're Doing: Learning, Authenticity, and Theories for Action,” extends the discussion of sensemaking to the issue of learning from experience and from relationships with others. Leaders can never prepare for all that they may face. Strong capacities for ongoing learning and self‐reflection are indispensable.
1A Tale of Two Presidents: Opportunities and Challenges in Academic Leadership
After 13 years as president of Spelman College, Beverly Tatum retired in 2015 amid widespread praise from constituents who credited her for leaving Spelman much stronger than she had found it (Watson, 2014; McAllister‐Grande, 2015). One of her contemporaries, Lou Anna Simon, served almost 15 years1 as president of Michigan State University but resigned in much less happy circumstances, pushed out in 2018 in the wake of a devastating scandal around a serial sexual abuser. Simon and Tatum were both talented, high achievers, but the stark differences in their presidential denouements are emblematic tales containing vital lessons for contemporary academic leaders.
Tatum was new to Spelman, but came with a record as a distinguished scholar and a successful academic leader at one of America's oldest colleges for women, Mount Holyoke, where she had served as department chair, dean of the college, vice president for student affairs, and acting president. Spelman, when Tatum arrived, had a long history as an elite women's college in the world of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) but was facing a challenging new environment with increased competition for talented students and faculty from elite institutions with massive endowments, as well as growing infrastructure needs, a revolving door in the provost's office, and low faculty morale (McAllister‐Grande, 2015). Tatum chose to focus on the opportunities the situation presented, describing Spelman as a jewel to be polished and a place that could realistically aim for “nothing less than the best” (McAllister‐Grande, 2015).
Tatum quickly engaged her constituents in an ambitious array of initiatives: a more collaborative and metric‐driven culture, a new 21st century curriculum, a record‐breaking capital campaign, and stronger infrastructure in key areas like advancement, enrollment management, and technology. She infused new life into an inherited strategic plan by translating its 43 pages into a compelling vision under the acronym Spelman ALIVE (Academic excellence, Leadership development, Improving our environment, Visibility of achievements, and Exemplary customer service). She created myriad opportunities to engage and excite others about it. In 2013, Tatum became the first president of an HBCU to win the prestigious Academic Leadership Award from the Carnegie Corporation. By the time she retired in 2015, Tatum had “gained the respect of her colleagues, her students, and those outside of the world of higher education” (Commodore & Gasman, 2014).
Like Tatum, Lou Anna Simon had years of notable success at her institution. She was a Michigan State alumna whose career at the university spanned more than four decades and was marked by a steady rise to the top administrative positions of provost, interim president, and then president. In 2008, three years after she became president, Simon won many fans by declining a pay raise in a time of fiscal challenges (Haag & Tracy, 2018). Simon retained broad support until shortly before she was swept away by a wave a criticism over her handling of the scandal around Larry Nassar, a physician who had worked for the university for some 20 years as a faculty member and team doctor.
The first accusations against Nassar dated to 1997, but it was not until 2014 that Simon was informed that a Michigan State University physician had been the target of a Title IX investigation (Thomason, 2018). The victim testified that Nassar had massaged her breasts and vagina, but the university's inquiry concluded that Nassar's actions were nonsexual. Nassar was not penalized and continued to see patients (Thomason, 2018). He was only fired two years later when the Indianapolis Star reported that he had been accused of sexual abuse by two women athletes (Evans, Alesia,& Kwiatkowski, 2016). Nassar initially denied everything but eventually pleaded guilty in 2017 to multiple counts of criminal sexual activity.
Simon's presidency still seemed secure until January 2018, when more than 150 women accepted a judge's invitation to attend Nassar's sentencing hearing and share their stories of abuse. Their passionate testimony, punctuated by calls for Simon's resignation, produced a wave of revulsion on and off campus. Michigan State's board initially reaffirmed that Simon was “the right leader for the university” (Kolowich & Thomason, 2018). But the board's resolve evaporated within a few days as a media firestorm and a flood of outraged constituents led to a quick reversal. Simon resigned under pressure, expressing sorrow that a “trusted physician” had inflicted so much harm. In her own defense, she added, “As tragedies are politicized, blame is inevitable. As president, it is only natural that I am the focus of this anger” (Haag & Tracy 2018). After leaving office, Lou Anna Simon was dogged by charges of lying to police about when she first learned of accusations against Nassar (Smith & Davey, 2018; LeBlanc, 2019). A county judge eventually dismissed the charges for insufficient evidence, but Michigan's attorney general affirmed them as “solid” and said that her office likely would appeal the dismissal (Banta, 2020).
These two presidential sagas have much to teach about the similarities and the differences among colleges and universities – and what it takes to lead them. Intellect, skill, experience, and vision are always essential. So is a fit between individual and institution. Simon and Tatum both brought history and skills that aligned with the needs of their respective workplaces. The chair of Spelman's presidential search reported knowing at their first meeting that Tatum was the right person for the job: a visionary leader with the “academic bona fides” that faculty would accept, respect for Spelman's history and culture that alumnae would demand, and demonstrated fund‐raising prowess that Spelman sorely needed (McAllister‐Grande, 2015). Michigan State praised Simon's “strategic and transformative” leadership as vital for adapting the institution's land‐grant heritage to twenty‐first century global challenges, citing accomplishments like the early and above‐goal completion of a $1.5 billion capital campaign and the hiring of more than 70 new faculty members in the university's most promising research areas (Michigan State University, 2020). Skill, strategy, and opportunities to play to one's strengths are foundations of leadership success. Know thyself is a basic requirement for the job.
Every institution of higher education is unique, and its leaders face distinct challenges as a result. Spelman, a small, historically Black, women's liberal arts college in Atlanta with some 2,100 students is a very different place from Michigan State, a vast, public, land‐grant research university with a complex mission serving roughly 50,000 students. Spelman had a “highly personal, loyalty‐driven” campus culture (McAllister‐Grande, 2015), and Beverly Tatum had a personal relationship with a high percentage of Spelman's 600 employees. It was almost impossible for Lou Anna Simon to know all of the 13,000 employees who worked for her university, which multiplied the opportunities for someone, somewhere, to engage in corrupt behavior at a distance from her purview. Context matters, and understanding the unique leadership demands of an institution's culture, size, mission, and organization is vital. These two stories also underscore the importance of luck and of ethical principles: fortune sometimes causes bad things to happen under the watch of even highly competent leaders. When bad things happen to good leaders, how they respond is fateful.
Institutions across the higher education landscape also have much in common. Simon and Tatum faced many of the same challenges that confront leaders throughout higher education – fundraising, recruiting and retaining a talented workforce, fostering academic excellence, balancing complex priorities and budgets, and supporting student success. Both were demographic exceptions in the president's role, given that “[t]he typical college president is a 62‐year‐old white man with a Ph.D. who thinks his faculty just don't get it and that his college never has enough money” (Stripling, 2017). They were also atypical in that both served more than a decade as head of their respective institutions. The tenure of college presidents has been getting shorter as the job has been getting harder – down to an average of 6.5 years in 2017 from 8.5 in 2006 (Stripling & Tugend, 2019; Thomason, 2018, May1). Not surprisingly, evidence also points to a declining pool of qualified candidates (Harris, 2019; Harris & Ellis, 2018; Pierce, 2014). Welcome to the daunting reality of academic leadership!
Opportunities and Challenges
The basic issues that can cripple presidencies are built into the daily lives of higher education administrators at every level, from chief executive to department chair, in support functions as well as in core academic units. That's because no one person or group can ever control very much at a college or university. Presidents, provosts, and deans are often seen by their underlings as imperial figures who bestride their world like a colossus, but experienced administrators are usually more impressed by the limits of their influence and authority. Outsiders, particularly corporate executives, frequently ask why universities can't be run more like a business. They envision the superlative levels of speed, efficiency, and unity of effort that they like to think typify their corporate worlds – and wonder why higher education holds onto arcane practices like faculty governance and cumbersome collegial decision‐making processes. But business provides abundant examples of failure as well as success. The 2008 meltdown in the financial sector, for example, took much of the world's economy with it. It took only a year for Enron to evolve from one of America's most admired companies to the poster‐child for everything that's wrong in the corporate world. More recently, two iconic firms, Volkswagen and Well Fargo Bank, plunged into legal, financial, and public relations nightmares by cheating customers and regulators. Volkswagen somehow hoped not to get caught selling diesel automobiles designed to fudge emissions tests (Ewing, 2015). Wells Fargo advertised itself as a warm and friendly community bank while cheating student borrowers, manipulating customer transactions to increase overdraft fees, and signing customers up for credit cards and other “solutions” without their knowledge (Randall, 2010).
One study (Hogan, Curphy, & Hogan, 1994) estimates that one‐half to three‐quarters of American managers are incompetent in the sense that their skills don't match the demands of their work; another report puts the number of underqualified managers even higher at more than 80 percent (Gallup, 2015). But the less competent people are, the more they overestimate their performance, partly because they don't know good performance when they see it (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Skilled professionals are more apt to know when they don't know, but nonexperts often think they know when they really don't (Kahneman & Klein, 2009).
This is not to say that business can't serve as a fertile source of management ideas and innovation. Colleges and universities have some of the same elements found in almost any organization – goals, structures, administrative hierarchies, coordinating mechanisms, cultures, employees, vendors, and powerful stakeholders, to name a few. Leaders in higher education should learn from advances in other sectors whenever they can. Not every managerial wheel needs to be reinvented.
But the differences between business and higher education do matter (Birnbaum, 2001; Bowen, 2012). Higher education's distinctive combination of goals, tasks, employees, governance structures, values, technologies, products, and history makes it not quite like anything else (Altbach, Gumport, & Johnstone, 2001; Bok, 2013; Thelin, 2004). It is different first because of its academic mission – a complex and variable mix of teaching, research, service, and outreach. Creating, interpreting, disseminating, and applying knowledge through multiple means for many different audiences and purposes is exciting and significant work, but it is not easy, and outcomes are often difficult to observe and assess.
The “production process” in higher education is far more intricate and complicated than that in any industrial enterprise… . Students vary enormously in academic aptitude, in interests, in intellectual dispositions, in social and cultural characteristics, in education and vocational objectives, and in many other ways. Furthermore, the disciplines and professions with which institutions of higher education are concerned require diverse methods of investigation, intellectual structures, means of relating methods of inquiry and ideas to personal and social values, and processes of relating knowledge to human experience. Learning, consequently, is a subtle process, the nature of which may vary from student to student, from institution to institution, from discipline to discipline, from one scholar or teacher to another, and from one level of student development to another (Berdahl & McConnell, 1999, p. 71).
It is no surprise, then, that teaching and research are complex enterprises, requiring significant intellectual and financial capital. In today's world, academic leaders at all levels and in both the private and public sectors scramble to find talent, resources, donors, income‐generating projects, and tuition dollars in an increasingly competitive environment. Colleges and universities must also respond to a host of forces. They face pressures to become more accountable, businesslike, and market‐oriented in service to individuals, communities, government, and industry. They have to cope with profound and ever‐evolving changes in technology; major demographic and global shifts in student populations; formidable new competitors in virtual and foreign universities; escalating pressures to increase access, diversity, and affordability; and widespread concerns that higher education lags in giving today's citizens and tomorrow's workforce the twenty‐first‐century skills they need.
In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, budgets in many institutions were decimated by precipitous drops in endowments or state funding at a time when student demand for courses and services kept growing – and many institutions still have not fully rebounded from the fall. In recent decades, continuing decline in state support has steadily shifted more of the financial burden onto students, making college increasingly unaffordable for many poor and middle‐income families. The pandemic of 2020 created another dramatic blow to budgets – increasing costs while cutting revenues from students, fee‐generating services and events, and public funding.
Academic leaders are always under tremendous pressure to initiate change (Fullan, & Scott, 2009; Mintz, 2019; Selingo, 2013) and to embrace an entrepreneurial mindset in order to keep pace with rapidly evolving conditions – and they need to find a path that avoids either of two unproductive extremes. Those who move too slowly will lose touch with their markets and fall behind speedier competitors; but those who move too precipitously will sow confusion, breed discontent, and undercut their institution's traditional purpose, contributions, quality, and strengths (Newman, Couturier, & Scurry, 2004). Even when circumstances like an unprecedented pandemic force academic leaders to move quicker than they should, the results were not pretty. The fast move to 100 percent online education with campus closings from the arrival of Covid‐19 in Spring, 2020, was necessary, but still left faculty, staff, students, and families confused, angry, or unprepared for what they faced. Institutions too quick to announce the full reopening of their campuses in Fall 2020 generated predictable faculty conflict and student pushback by failing to bring key constituents along with their plans. And those who needed to reverse or modify their reopening decisions close to the start of term only added to the chaos.
Higher education's mission requires that many of its key employees be teachers and scholars whose contributions depend on their unique training, expertise, dedication, and capacity for professional judgment. As in many other specialized professions, much of their performance can be assessed only by their peers. Their expertise supports faculty claims that they are uniquely qualified to make decisions about the core teaching and research activities of the institution. Faculty thus attain levels of individual autonomy and collective power beyond most employees in other sectors. The faculty role in institutional governance varies by institution and faculty composition, but consistently creates challenges and dilemmas for academic administrators, who often find themselves in a turbulent and contested in‐between zone, chronically buffeted by the conflicting concerns, viewpoints, and agendas of faculty, students and their families, other administrators, governing boards, and a variety of important external constituents.
