Reframing Academic Leadership. Lee G. Bolman
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rather than wondering if their advice was flawed. Academic administrators may do no physical harm when they frame a situation incorrectly, but they can still damage their credibility, their careers, their constituents, and their institutions. We all get in trouble when our sensemaking fails us.
Learning for Effective Action
From the outside, it may seem that effective leaders have an uncanny ability to read situations quickly. Many do, but they weren't born that way. They acquired their capacity from practice and experience. Effective leaders have learned thought processes that enable them to register what is going on, reflect on it, assemble it quickly into a conscious pattern, and see the big picture. What Malcolm Gladwell (2005) calls the blink phenomenon is a learned form of rapid cognition. Kahneman and Klein (2009) remind us that there is no shortcut to developing this kind of quick judgment – it takes effort, time, practice, and feedback.
Academic leaders can develop their skills in reframing – train themselves to see their role, work, and institution more broadly and from different perspectives. By learning how to think and act in such diverse roles as institutional architect, politician, servant, coach, prophet, artist, and diplomat, academic leaders can expand their mental maps and cognitive frameworks. The images build on more than a century of theorizing about organizations and about human behavior in them, and capture much of what we know about organizations as rational systems, human enterprises, political arenas, and theaters of worklife (Bolman & Deal, 2021).
Paradoxically, learning to make quick and accurate situational diagnoses requires slowing down. When you are feeling overwhelmed by everything coming at you, slowing down is counterintuitive and hard to do. But it is vital. The next time that happens, stop and ask yourself some questions. What's happening here structurally – how do institutional rules, roles, and policies contribute? What are the people issues at play? What are the political dynamics, and who are the key constituents to consider and reach? What's the meaning of this situation and of the options to me and to significant others? With practice, the process of reframing takes on the characteristics of any well‐learned skill: quick, automatic, and largely tacit. Such skills emerge from active learning and from practice. Five strategies can help the process along. None is rocket science, but all are easier to espouse than to do well and consistently.
To build your reframing skills …
1 Embrace the life of a reflective practitioner.
2 Be aggressive in seeking growth opportunities.
3 Actively and regularly solicit input from others.
4 Anticipate and practice the future through data gathering and scenario building.
5 Step outside your comfort zones and “break frame.”
Embrace the Life of a Reflective Practitioner
A consistent research finding on professional effectiveness is that those who learn best, lead best. “Leadership and learning,” according to John F. Kennedy, “are indispensable to each other” (Kennedy, 1963). Publicly modeling engagement in learning as a daily professional imperative is a mode of leadership in and of itself (Preskill & Brookfield, 2009). For higher education administrators, this suggests developing skills as a reflective practitioner (Schön, 1983). No one can anticipate and prepare for all that might arise on a college campus, but we can all get better at learning from our experiences. Skillful academic leadership depends on reflection‐in‐action (Schön, 1987): the capacity for leaders to think deeply before taking action, to reflect on how things are going as they act, to stay flexible and open to change, and to continue learning throughout their professional careers. Over time, reflecting on what we do also teaches us about our preferences, comfort zones, routine responses, and trigger points. It's easier to break habits when we know what they are.
Be Aggressive in Seeking Growth Opportunities
One of the best ways to learn is to take on new challenges and to be deliberate in determining how you will use these opportunities to build leadership capacities. Leadership is as much a performing art as a science. Like artists, leaders can enhance their skills by regularly practicing their craft and honing their talents. A key quality among successful executives is a dogged tenacity in learning about themselves as leaders and managers and in seeking rich and varied opportunities for professional development (McCall, Lombardo, & Morrison, 1988). “Learning is not attained by chance,” reminds Abigail Adams (1780), “it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.” Don't be afraid to experiment – stretching oneself broadens life and work skills. It can be risky: you may not learn as quickly as needed, and you can find yourself in over your head. Think carefully before you leap, and then keep an open mind. We learn from failure as well as success, and sometimes learning is even easier when the going is rough (Dotlich, Noel, & Walker, 2008).
Actively and Regularly Solicit Input from Others
We are all human and limited in our understanding of the world around us. But that need not derail our leadership. Constituents can teach us a lot about ourselves, about leading, and about our organizations, if we encourage them. They can offer alternative ways to view situations and help to identify our frame gaps and tendencies. Skillful leaders routinely seek information and advice from diverse others. They thank them for their honesty through nondefensive listening, and they acknowledge constituent contributions to successful outcomes. Such conversations will also broaden our appreciation of those around us. We learn about their preferences and talents and strengthen our capacities to work with them. Respecting others and seeking their participation and involvement deepens their commitment to our organizations and to our leadership success.
Anticipate and Practice the Future: Data Gathering and Scenario Building
The future is hard to anticipate, which is why it is vital that we try. A powerful way for academic leaders to clarify their thinking and to test assumptions is to develop their own scenarios or stories about how specific leadership choices might play out over time. Scenario building has been used in industry for a long time – a way to “rehearse the future” and anticipate the impact of a host of forces. There's plenty of advice out there on how to build scenarios if you want a structured method (e.g., de Geus, 1991; Ratcliffe, 2000; Schwartz, 1991; van der Heijden, 2005). Strategic planners sometimes approach the process as though a science, but it can also be a more informal and playful process of looking ahead (Heracleous & Jacobs, 2008). If you craft alternative stories for yourself about possible futures based on different choices and assumptions, your sagas may identify interesting plot twists, winners, and losers – things you'd want to know before facing them in real time.
Take Nancy Turner's case. Her colleagues suggested a number of different paths. She might pick a few and construct alternative scenarios about each. Taking on the role of a novelist or playwright, she could, for example, envision one story where she started with creating a vision, and another where she started by getting the right team in place. Playing each out, she might find that one seems much more promising, that her two paths converge eventually, or that she can see ways to do both at the same time. In any event, the process of projecting will help her to think and to communicate more clearly about possible futures for her college. She will be better able to predict and to prepare for the twists and turns of different paths going forward because it will be easier to recognize when the story is or is not going as anticipated. She will also lessen the risk of losing her way – or her footing – in the face of unanticipated challenges.
Many institutions turned to scenario planning as a way to chart an uncertain future as they struggled to make plans for Fall 2020 in the midst of the Covid‐19 pandemic. Harvard announced in June that most undergraduate instruction in the Fall would be online, but sketched three possible “paths” for the presence of students on campus: low‐density with very few undergraduates on campus, medium‐density with 30 to 40 percent,