Reframing Academic Leadership. Lee G. Bolman
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for understanding the unique dynamics of the academy as well as realistic and practical strategies to get the cats to follow, the jelly to stick, and the pea to move uphill – without too many scraped or bent noses. It was written to challenge readers to reflect on their experiences and to consider new ways of thinking and leading. You may already suspect that what got you here may not be enough to get you where you hope to go in the future.
Leadership preparation for higher education is of two kinds, and this book is written to offer both. One is intellectual – the acquisition of ideas and a conceptual roadmap, if you will, that help academic leaders see more clearly what they're up against and what options they have. Leadership sage and former university president Warren Bennis captured this mission simply when he noted: “When you understand, you know what to do” (Bennis, 2003, p. 55). Knowledge is power, and academic leaders empower themselves when they know where to go, what they are up against, and what they can do about it.
A second mode of preparation is more personal and behavioral. Leadership requires a moral compass and individual qualities like courage, confidence, agility, resourcefulness, and creativity – the foundations of healthy leadership resolve and stamina. We strengthen those qualities in ourselves when we compare our worldview with what others see and when we understand how the mindsets we have formed from our everyday experiences open us up or close us off to options and to new learning. Higher education cases that are sprinkled through the book offer opportunities to think about what you might have done – or done differently – in similar situations. Leadership success rests in the quality of the choices made by leaders, and leaders make better choices when they are mindful about their thought processes and actions. Research and experience tell us that academic leaders go awry for two principal reasons: (1) they see a limited or inaccurate picture – they miss or misread important cues and clues in their environment – and as a result take the wrong course; or (2) they fail to engage others and take people along with them – they move too fast, too unilaterally, or without full appreciation of the power of existing cultural norms and traditions to help or hinder buy‐in. The goal of this book is to reduce your risk of falling into similar traps by helping you expand the ideas and understandings that you bring to your work and the self‐awareness essential for using them effectively.
Our approach builds from multiple sources: our work as academic administrators, our teaching of higher education leadership to aspiring and seasoned professionals, our experience as students of organizations and leadership, and our own and others’ scholarship. We draw on ideas and concepts from a variety of sources, including seminal work on organizational learning (Argyris & Schön, 1992; Senge, 1990), professional effectiveness (Schön 1983, 1990), cognition (Bargh, 1994; Dane & Pratt, 2015; Gladwell, 2005; Groopman, 2007; Kahneman, 2011; Langer, 1989), and academic leadership (Birnbaum, 1992, 2001; McLaughlin, 1996; Padilla, 2005). Our perspectives are informed by a conceptual framework that has been important to our individual and collective work offered by Bolman and Deal (Bolman & Deal, 2021; Gallos, 2008), who argue that it is easier to understand colleges and universities when you learn to think of them simultaneously as machines, families, jungles, and theaters. Each of those images corresponds to a different frame or perspective that captures a distinctive slice of institutional life. The capacity to embrace multi‐frame thinking is at the core of the model of academic leadership effectiveness developed in this volume.
The image of the machine, for example, serves as a metaphor for the task‐related facets of organizations. Colleges and universities are rational systems requiring rules, roles, policies, lines of authority, and coordinating mechanisms that align with campus goals. Academic leaders succeed when they create an appropriate set of campus arrangements and reporting relationships that offer clarity to key constituents, coordinate the efforts of multiple people and units, and facilitate the work of faculty, students, staff, and volunteers.
Successful academic leaders …
1 Create campus policies, arrangements, and reporting relationships that offer clarity, coordinate the efforts of multiple people and units, and facilitate productivity for all.
2 Create caring and productive campus environments that channel talent and encourage cooperation.
3 Respect differences, manage them productively, and respond ethically and responsibly to the needs of multiple constituencies.
4 Infuse everyday efforts with energy and soul.
The family image focuses on the powerful symbiotic relationship between people and organizations: individuals need opportunities to express their talents and skills; organizations need human energy and contribution to fuel their efforts. When the fit is right, both benefit. Effective academic leaders create caring and productive campus environments where all find ways to work cooperatively and to channel their full talents to the mission.
The jungle image encapsulates a world of enduring differences: diverse species or tribes participating in a complex dance of cooperation and competition as they maneuver for influence and scarce resources. Diversity of values, beliefs, interests, behaviors, skills, goals, and worldviews often spawns destructive campus conflicts. But diversity is also the wellspring of creativity and innovation – and hope for the future of higher education. Skilled academic administrators are compassionate politicians who anticipate and respect differences, manage them productively, and respond to the needs of multiple constituencies without losing sight of institutional goals and priorities.
Finally, the theater image captures university life as an ongoing drama: individuals coming together to create context, culture, commitment, and meaning as they play their assigned roles and bring artistry and self‐expression into their work. Good theater fuels the moral imagination, and successful campus leaders infuse everyday efforts with energy and soul.
Multi‐frame thinking is necessary because colleges and universities are messy and difficult organizations that require from their leaders simultaneous attention to vastly different sets of needs. Academic institutions need a solid organizational architecture that effectively channels information, resources, and human talents to support institutional goals. At the same time, they need workplace relationships and a campus environment that motivate and foster high levels of satisfaction and productivity. Innovation comes from managing the enduring differences at the center of university life that can spark misunderstandings, disagreements, and power struggles. Finally, every institution needs a culture that aligns with its values, inspires individual and collective efforts, and provides the symbolic glue to coordinate diverse constituents and contributions. The continuing success of institutions like Harvard and Stanford rests as much on their culture as on their money and talent. In such a complex institutional world, multi‐frame thinking keeps university administrators alert and responsive to the demands of the whole while avoiding a narrow optic. Oversimplified views of reality cause academic leaders to stumble down the wrong path, squandering resources, time, and credibility along the way.
Strong academic leaders are skilled in the art of reframing – a deliberate process of shifting perspectives to see the same situation in multiple ways and through different lenses. Experience, training, and developmental limitations leave many leaders with a limited palette of perspectives for making sense of their work. The dearth of training and pre‐service preparation for college and university leaders exacerbates this barrier. As a result, academic leaders can get stuck in their comfort zones – shielded from experiences that challenge them to see beyond their current preferences (Gallos, 2005). When things turn out badly, they blame circumstances, the environment, a lack of resources, or other people, unaware that limits in their own thinking have restricted their options and undermined their efforts. More versatile habits of mind enable academic leaders to think in more comprehensive ways about their own leadership and about the complexities and opportunities in leading colleges and universities (Aziz et al., 2004; Debowski & Blake, 2004).
Above all, our goal is to encourage optimism, confidence, and clarity of purpose. Academic leadership is a noble enterprise, albeit a challenging one – made even more complex by a pandemic that turned the world upside‐down overnight and raised deep questions about what we need and do and about where and how we work. We may never fully escape