Engaging Leaders

The challenge of inspiring collective commitment in universities

Paul Gentle, Dawn Forman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317750468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Addressing the question of how leadership can work most successfully in universities, Engaging Leaders strengthens the sense of shared professional knowledge and capability amongst leaders in higher education. Presenting a narrative of change which not only spells out why universities need to work differently, this book also takes the reader through clear practical steps which any practising leader can take in order to build a collaborative professional culture which supports and challenges all members of an academic community.

Using a selection of case studies from UK and international universities, the book explores why working collectively remains a fundamental challenge for many higher education institutions and looks at the benefits of creating a collective commitment throughout universities. It covers:

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• action learning and professional learning communities

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• emotionally-intelligent organisational cultures

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• feedback as an intrinsic tool

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• building partnerships and collaborations

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• Higher Education and public value

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• cultures of innovation and sustainable practices.

Engaging Leaders is for those who see themselves as leaders in higher education, whether or not this is recognised in their job title. It provides stimulating perspectives on what they might do to become more engaged and engaging, and includes examples of inspiring practice which is already making a difference in universities, colleges and new private providers. It will be of value to established managers as well as those new in post, and also for those participating in postgraduate programmes.

1 Universities and individualism

Academic and leadership identities

Why working collectively remains a fundamental challenge for many higher education institutions

As the prelude to an interview process for a senior institutional role in the past decade, I was taken around the building where I might eventually be working. This exponent of early twenty-first century university architecture offered incontestably the most stunning view in the city; a view that would have been a memorable highlight of the day, had it not been for what I was shown on two of its floors.

These were not the floors housing the user-friendly faculty administration, nor those with state-of-the-art teaching and learning facilities and spaces for students to meet and relax. Sandwiched between all of these were two floors that contained a vast uninhabited tundra of desks, filing cabinets and dividing screens. Across some three thousand square feet, I counted a handful of souls, none of whom even glanced up from their work stations.

‘And these,’ said the Faculty Marketing Assistant who was my guide, without a hint of irony, ‘are the academic floors. But nobody ever comes in, ’cause they don’t like it – so they always work from home.’

The challenge of influencing this invisible cohort of two hundred academics suddenly became crystal clear, and I subsequently turned down the post that the university offered me.

On reflection, it struck me that not one person in what would have been my ‘team’ had their own office, and furthermore that the building had expressly been designed so as to facilitate communication and co-operation. What had gone wrong?

Later in the day, I heard much about the need to improve the research output of individual staff, to drive up economic efficiency and to develop the enterprise agenda. I couldn’t help wondering which of these priorities the absent staff felt they had signed up to, and which they might most successfully be able to work on at a distance. It certainly didn’t seem as though the faculty’s work was essentially social or collaborative, or that people derived a sense of purpose from belonging to it as an organization.

This will not surprise many readers. The tension between individual professional autonomy and collaborative working is well documented in the higher education literature:

It’s really hard to get people to understand why collaboration is so important and that these are higher-order skills they need to acquire. They can acknowledge this intellectually, but every fibre in their body (and their experience, and history) is pointing diametrically in the other direction.

(Garrett and Davies, 2010: 36)

The pressures towards collaborative working are multiple, and highly complex. For a range of reasons connected to academic identity (Bolden et al., 2012), such pressures are often resisted using a counter-corporate rhetoric. In a tour de force of deconstructing the paradigm of the managed institution, Collini notes the longstanding ideal of regarding the university as a public good, which ‘entails a certain kind of withdrawal from society’s everyday activities, an indication of a concern with considerations that are longer term and less material’ (2012: 86).

Nevertheless, Collini also observes that ‘life in universities is now less unlike life in other large organizations than at any time in the long history [of universities]’ (2012: 18; emphasis in original). This practical reality brings with it a raft of associated questions about how much can be learnt about leading and managing organizations from other sectors; furthermore, from which other sectors might we wish to learn?

Interesting parallels can be drawn between other sectors with strong paradigms of individual professional autonomy, such as medicine, public service broadcasting journalism and legal practice.

There is much evidence to support the view that in the first part of the twenty-first century, universities have become highly effective organizations, and that in becoming so, many could claim to rival the commercial prowess and acumen of successful businesses. Many vice-chancellors and presidents rightly pride themselves on the extent to which they have steered their universities through turbulence to levels of success that not only are acknowledged by their peers, but also are praised by cabinet ministers, captains of industry and heads of cultural institutions. Indeed in the United Kingdom, one exemplar of all of these can be found in the role of Chief Executive in some individual providers of higher education. At the same time, many businesses, especially in the knowledge industries, aspire to being more like universities in terms of their ethos and working culture.

Yet all is not necessarily as well as it might be. Watson (2009) explores the extent to which the contemporary university is characterized by unhappiness, and starts by asserting that the immediate response from a typical individual working in a university to a question on what morale is like will probably be ‘At rock bottom!’

In rushing to demonstrate their ability to adapt to circumstances and transform their institutions accordingly, there is the risk that university leaders may not have taken public opinion with them. In many Western nations, for instance, the idea of the university as a public and social good may have lost some of its lustre. Politicians’ rhetoric is not always helpful in this respect, invoking the responsibilities of higher education to lead economies out of recession and into growth, or to upskill the workforces of the present and future. There is the danger that an instrumental purpose for universities begins to dominate the prevailing discourse.

This leads to the notion of taxpayers questioning the value for money offered by universities, to individual students, their parents, employers and a raft of other stakeholders. It detracts from questions of deeper educational value, of transformational learning which has the power to change people’s lives, and of the cultural and social missions that are the lifeblood of our institutions.

Collini (2012) has attempted to address this shift in perception, calling for a re-examination of the wider value offered by universities, and questions the notions of ‘excellence’ and ‘student satisfaction’ around which the management of universities often appears to revolve. Collini questions what has prevailed until recently as the benchmark for universities – ‘the nineteenth-century European ideal’ – and asks whether ‘it is the Asian incarnation of the Americanized version of the European model, with schools of technology, medicine, and management to the fore, which most powerfully instantiates the idea of the university in the twenty-first century’ (2012: 13).

The onus is now on authentic leaders in our universities to rise to the challenge of asserting the rights and responsibilities of universities in modelling the change we would wish to see in the world around us. A useful starting point might be to consider how we perceive ourselves, individually and collectively, as leaders.

In this book, all discussion of the work of leaders is intended to have an inclusive focus. There is no assumption that leaders are only found high up in institutional hierarchies – rather, it is taken as read that leadership is a quality that potentially suffuses all aspects of the work of universities and colleges. If all students and staff are seen as – and most importantly, involved as though they are – part of a collective leadership effort, there are enormous possibilities for enriching and sustaining our institutions.

Rooke and Torbert shed some interesting light on the matter of leadership identities. Their concept of ‘action logics’ – ‘how [leaders] interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged’ (2005: 3) – goes some way to explaining some of the fundamental gulfs in mindsets and behaviours that can play out in universities.

The authors define seven action logics into which leadership practitioners fall on the basis of a sentence-completion survey tool. These action logics are characterized in Table 1.1, together with a commentary on their prevalence in higher education institutions.

The narrative of Rooke and Torbert’s article (2005: 5) provides further exemplification of leadership behaviours in action. On reflecting on my own career as a leader in higher education, it strikes me that at one particular stage I made an unintentional transition – at least in one area of my job role – from the Achiever to the Individualist action logic, the catalyst for which was the appointment of a new Chief Executive at the institution in which I was working. This provided an insight into the potential threat that I appeared to represent, in the work for which I was responsible in international education, to some of my fellow senior managers in the institution. Individualists, for instance, demonstrate ‘awareness of a possible conflict between their principles and their actions, or between the organization’s values and its implementation of those values. This conflict becomes the source of tension, creativity, and a growing desire for further development’ (Rooke and Torbert, 2005: 5). This helps to explain my increasing interest at the time in using action learning as a source of development, and in engaging in a wide range of leadership development activities.

Table 1.1 Action logics in the context of higher education; adapted from Rooke and Torbert (2005)

Action logic	Characteristics	Strengths	% of research sample profiling at this action logic	Likely manifestation in universities
Opportunist	Wins any way possible. Self-oriented; manipulative; ‘might makes right’.	Good in emergencies and in sales opportunities	5	Depending on selection processes used by institutions, there is a possibility that some very senior leaders may be in this category. Comes across initially as charismatic and ‘visionary’.
Diplomat	Avoids overt conflict. Wants to belong; obeys group norms; rarely rocks the boat.	Good as supportive glue within an office; helps bring people together.	12	When opportunists are the dominant figures on teams, if they are surrounded by diplomats this is likely to contribute to deferential patterns of behaviour. In this case there may be a surface appearance of consensus in the group.
Expert	Rules by logic and expertise. Seeks rational efficiency.	Good as an individual contributor.	38	Academics and some professional services leaders are commonly found in this category. Where measurem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Universities and individualism
• 2 Towards the learning organization?
• 3 Catalysts for collaborative working
• 4 Emotionally intelligent organizational cultures
• 5 ‘When do we get to do feedback?’
• 6 Working in partnerships: higher education and public value
• 7 Systemic action in universities
• References
• Index