A Guide to Leadership and Management in Higher Education

Managing Across the Generations

Poppy Fitch, Brian Van Brunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317430582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

A Guide to Leadership and Management in Higher Education shares an innovative approach to supervision, leadership, and management in the higher education workplace. Drawing from humanism and positive psychology, Fitch and Van Brunt weave together a compelling narrative for managing employees across generational differences. This book shares key leadership lessons and advice on how to inspire creativity, increase efficiency, and tap into the talents of your diverse, multi-generational staff. This guide offers practical and detailed advice on establishing new relationships, setting expectations, encouraging accountability, addressing conflict, and supervising difficult staff. Focusing on how to build and strengthen connections through genuineness and empathic caring, this book provides important guidance for today's college and university leaders.

Part I

A New Way of Thinking

Chapter One

Relationships Matter

KEY TAKE-A-WAYS

▪ Leaders and Managers who excel in the higher education workplace do so through an awareness of the challenges faced by each of the four generations as they interact with each other and their students.

▪ We should acknowledge our privilege of leadership and carry this softly and with grace. By doing so, we emulate a process that provides employees with an example of behavior to model towards our students and those we supervise. No one benefits from a dictatorship or a leader who carries their authority heavily, without reflection and some vulnerability.

▪ The unprecedented intersection of four generations of employees in the contemporary workplace presents an opportunity for leaders within higher education to capitalize on the diverse strengths and expertise of their workforce and to demonstrate a willingness to understand and meet their employees’ priorities and work styles.

WHY A GUIDE TO LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: MANAGING ACROSS THE GENERATIONS?

For the first time in contemporary history, four generations of employees work side by side, bringing to the workplace their own unique set of talents, needs and expectations (Toossi, 2012). A natural extension of this phenomenon is a change to the workplace itself, as each generation brings its own set of values, priorities and work styles. Keeping pace with these changes, while maintaining our sea legs against the changing tides of higher education, will be the focus of this book.

Leadership within higher education takes a divergent path from business leadership. We are, after all, educators at heart. We hold a belief in the transformational power of education. We lead our students by being. However, when the lens turns from our students to our staff, a shift happens. The technical skills of management begin to matter more than ever before and, while we may be educators at heart, the business of education is an arena where we may find ourselves unprepared.

The exploration of leadership across generations comes amid a changing paradigm in higher education. The current model is one of increased focus on outcomes. And, while the pursuit of results and metrics measuring factors of effectiveness for a successful college or university is laudable, an over-reliance on contemporary cognitive, solution-driven management approaches in a higher education setting can be seen as a case of square peg/round hole.

So, why read this book? You want to be a better leader in order to increase the effectiveness of your department? You need to positively impact student retention? You wish to get the most out of your staff in order to operate leaner? You imagine seeing your staff use their strengths and soar? Some or all of the above? Keep reading.

A CHANGING AGE

Let us begin by exploring what is, for many, the current narrative in leadership: A cognitive, solution-focused approach, but which may not be effective in leadership of a cross-generational workforce. Why? In his work, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-brainers Will Rule the Future (2005), Daniel Pink explores the shifting tide from left- to right-brained approaches by presenting the reader with an overview of the four major ages. He describes the current movement from the most recent Information Age, characterized by knowledge workers, and introduces the current Conceptual Age, characterized by empathy and creativity. Pink posits that leaders who focus on creativity and innovation will be the successful leaders of the future. What is so resonant about this assertion is its relationship to the generations in confluence with this new age: Generation X and Millennials, characterized by their empathy and creative innovation respectively.

Cognitive, solution-focused leadership approaches were developed to be responsive to the needs of a left brain focused workforce during a time of rapid technological change for knowledge-focused workforce management. Taking a cue from Pink’s work, we acknowledge that a changing age calls for new ways of leadership. Pink’s work urges an understanding of the contemporary Conceptual Age and presents leaders within the realm of higher education with an opportunity to shift the way we interact with staff, more closely aligning this to the way we have traditionally interacted with our students.

Indeed, even traditional business is changing. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is famously quoted as saying, “Care more than others think wise.” At Google, Chade-Meng Tan developed Search Inside Yourself, a program he describes as “the unexpected path to achieving success, happiness (and world peace).” This program, and the book of the same name (Tan, 2012), provide a case study in the application of mindfulness meditation as a means to increase emotional intelligence, and of compassion and self-knowledge as building blocks to success in business and in life.

Four Letter Words Go To Work: Love, Care, and Hope

In his book, Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends (2002), Tim Sanders, Chief Solutions Officer for Yahoo, explores the application of love in business; he calls this approach being a “Lovecat,” and he is convinced that this is the way to be a success in business and to make friends. Sanders isn’t alone; Princeton Business Professor Robert Sutton explores the concepts of care and civility in his book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (2007). Most recently, in his book, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (2014), Shane Lopez explores hope as a human emotion and helps the reader understand the power of hope to effect change.

Why are so many thought leaders writing about love, care and hope? And, what does this mean to higher education leaders and their staff who are responsible for stewarding young people into adulthood and who must adapt to the changing tide of each new generation? In order to stay relevant and effective, higher education leadership must evolve to meet the conditions in which it exists. While we might have always cared for, and even loved our staff, the time to begin authentic leadership relationships with these particular four letter words squarely at its foundation, is now.

Barriers to Change

As leaders, we hold a particular privilege, and as with any position of privilege, it is a foundational task to recognize and acknowledge this privilege so that we can think, act, and (most importantly) feel differently (Malcolm, 2005). However, to care is to make oneself vulnerable, and this may be a primary barrier to shifting ways of looking at leadership. It isn’t that we propose an obligation to behave a certain way; rather, that vulnerability with employees accomplishes two things: First, it suggests that supervisors adopt a stance of reflection and humility that allows for deeper insight and creates opportunities to build connection and trust with their employees—people tend to follow and seek guidance from those that they trust, and can sense a quality of genuineness and congruence in word and in deed. Second, by acknowledging the privilege of leadership and carrying it softly and with grace, leaders provide employees with a model of behavior to emulate with students.

Relationships and communication should become the lingua franca of the office, providing opportunities to better understand the motivations of employees to improve efficiency and effectiveness on tasks. In a world dominated by 360-degree evaluations and annual performance appraisals, there is the real potential of losing track of the individual humanity of our staff and the needs of those struggling to find a larger sense of meaning and purpose in the workplace. By attending to these underlying needs, managers and supervisors can better motivate and inspire staff to focus on work-related tasks. Ignoring these underlying needs leads to a disengaged workforce resulting in excessive use of sick days, lack of productivity, and employees who are working—in the words of Peter Gibbons from the movie Office Space—“just hard enough to not get fired.” (Sound like anyone you know?)

It is this authentic, genuine, personal caring that becomes the gasoline in the tank that helps improve productivity and effectiveness of the employee. We all work harder for a supervisor who cares about us as people. By connecting to this deeper well of personhood, the manager unlocks the potential of the employee and becomes the standard by which future opportunities and challenges are addressed.

ACROSS GENERATIONS

A natural intersection of this shift in focus on an authentic relational dynamic in the management and supervision process, is attention to the generational differences and conflicts that exist in the changing workplace. These exist as potential hotspots, but also as opportunities for growth among co-workers, managers and leaders, as the four generations—Millennials, Gen Xer’s, Boomers and Matures—interact and must collaborate and cooperate with each other, in order to foster a productive workplace.

The disconnect between current leadership styles and the college and university workforce is particularly startling to our Millennial staff, having only just transitioned from the warm embrace of their own studies. Indeed, the question “What do Millennials want?” within the context of the workplace is the question du jour for many leaders.

But in our zest to understand the newest, and now largest, proportion of the workforce, let us not forget the Gen Xer’s who are simultaneously graduating their children from high school while caring for aging parents (Fry, 2015). Boomers are looking toward (delayed) retirement while caring for their aging parents. Matures have likewise maintained their employment and delayed retirement in direct response to the shrinking retirement accounts resulting from the Great Recession.

Imagine a scenario where Sara, a Millennial staff member, is being supervised by a Boomer named Karl. The supervisor struggles to understand why the younger staff member lacks attention to detail and seems to have a poor work ethic in terms of completing tasks on time and showing initiative on projects. Sara sees Karl as out of touch with current technology and social media and as unwilling to be flexible on project timelines and daily expectations around customer service. Conversations between the two are unproductive and often dissolve into Karl feeling like Sara just needs to buckle down and get things done. Sara has little faith in Karl’s leadership and decision-making and feels that no matter what she does, it won’t meet Karl’s standards.

Leaders and managers who excel in the higher education workplace do so through an awareness of the challenges faced by each of the four generations as they interact with each other and with their students. While it would be over-expansive to suggest that all of the challenges in the workplace center on these generational differences—addressing the differences in worldview—communication style and motivation is one important step toward improving productivity and building a balanced and efficient team. In the case of Karl and Sara, the challenge becomes helping each understand the potentially limiting ways they see each other and how to establish a common ground that allows for an appreciation of the contributions of one another within the workplace, fostering better communication and observable progress.

Never has it been more critical for leaders to create an environment of mutual understanding and authentic care for their teams. The unprecedented intersection of four generations of employees in the contemporary workplace presents an opportunity for leaders within higher education to capitalize on the diverse strengths and expertise of their workforce, and to demon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: A New Way of Thinking
• Part II: Putting It Into Practice
• Afterword
• References
• Index