Teagle Essays

Integral Leadership

Richard Morrill

The Teagle Foundation

I have thought and wondered, and fussed and fumed about the travail of academic leadership and governance for the last 40 years. I have done so as a faculty member, college president and now as a foundation executive. Much of this experience came to a culmination when we opened the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond in 1992. At that point I had to at least pretend that I knew something about the subject of leadership. I learned enough eventually to offer courses in the School on strategic leadership in higher education. Three books on leadership later, perhaps I've learned a few things that would be of interest to those of you who exercise responsibilities as chief academic or chief financial officers.

It is important to set the stage by noting the impossible organizational decision-making cultures in which we do our work. I'm here to give you a bit of cognitive therapy and to cheer you up. Whatever frustrations you might have in your relationships with each other or with faculty members, academic departments or faculty committees, I can assure that they are normal and universal. They are built into the world of decision-making that we inhabit. So, don't blame yourselves for the structural conflicts in which you may find yourselves. They pre-exist you.

Why is this case? Academic organizations try to bring together two worlds of decision-making that resist being combined. On the academic side of the house, the primary roles are played by academic professionals. The system of academic authority is widely dispersed and highly decentralized. It depends upon processes of peer judgment and collaborative decision-making that are based on professional expertise. Decisions on academic programs and faculty performance are made by departments, programs and committees that are largely self-governing.

In this world, academic people also define their identities by what they do. Self-worth gets wrapped into the tasks of scholarship and teaching as a kind of calling. With that comes a sense of ethical expectations for the processes through which academic decisions are made. If the collaborative process is off track, it is not an error but an ethical failing for which someone has to be blamed-usually the CFO, the CAO or the president.

In this world, academic people also define their identities by what they do. Self-worth gets wrapped into the tasks of scholarship and teaching as a kind of calling. With that comes a sense of ethical expectations for the processes through which academic decisions are made. If the collaborative process is off track, it is not an error but an ethical failing for which someone has to be blamed-usually the CFO, the CAO or the president.

Administrators, especially the president and the chief academic officer, are attributed the responsibility for what happens in the academic sphere since it embodies the mission of the organization. Yet presidents and CAOs typically have little direct authority to determine what is taught by whom, when or how, nor what is made the subject of research. Depending on the size of the institution, the president and chief academic officer typically have more of a role in the process than in the substance of deciding who gets appointed or tenured on the faculty. As board members constantly remind us, the wheels of academe also grind slowly and finely. The system of faculty committees and levels of review on most campuses is fragmented and cumbersome and it makes change in the academic program difficult to achieve.

A parallel system of decision-making operates in more typical hierarchical fashion in administrative matters. In the spheres of business, finance and student affairs, the lines of authority and responsibility are defined more clearly and norms of decision-making are based on goals and metrics. Often the administrative and academic systems overlap, especially when academic priorities are at stake in decisions over finances and facilities.

What leadership should be and do in such a truncated system often bedevils governing boards, especially when change is required. As one authority on university governance put it in commenting about the presidency in the Association of Governing Boards' 1996 study of the presidency, Renewing the Academic Presidency, ". . . university presidents operate from one of the most anemic power bases in any of the major institutions in American society . . . they are like other chief executives in their responsibilities . . .. But they are unlike others in the source of their authority."

In the academic world authority is shared, but we often fail to understand how to reconcile the tensions and conflicts involved in the sharing. Often, we try to resolve the conflicts by asserting our administrative responsibilities and turn to the board for support and confirmation. They usually give it, but often our power and influence rings hollow or fails to address the real issues. On controversial academic issues, faculty members are still free to say what they want do as they choose. Other times we try to clarify and define the precise forms of our differential responsibilities under shared governance. This is worth doing. But definition and clarification are not enough because the conflicts persist even after the governance constitution has been rewritten. We need to go further and to reconceptualize and reformulate the way we carry out shared governance.

Why is this? The real source of the challenge is that the conflict in academic governance is structural. The conflict has many sides, but one of them is that academic people believe that they are serving intrinsic values that do not have to justify themselves by their utility or by an appeal to something external. Learning is good for its own sake, and does not to be measured by credit hour generation or instructional cost per student. On the other hand, the organization legitimately requires and depends on an effective system of instrumental values that underlies responsible administration. This depends in turn on financial controls, reporting lines, good policies and effective regulation. We all know well the big and little conflicts that this clash of cultures generates. As a professor, I do not appreciate the dean telling me that my Kierkegaard seminar with 5 students is too small to be offered. What kind of bean counter is the dean? As a president, I sometimes drove the provost nuts by studying the course enrollment numbers. I would ask why we had two seminars on 17th-century French theater taught back-to-back with 7 students in one and 8 in the other. He pulled the data out of my hands and told me to do my job and not his. Fine, I would say. Just tell me why half the faculty is teaching all their courses on Tuesdays and Thursdays? I refuse to tell you my schedule when I returned to teaching. What this all adds up to is a disproportionate set of measures about two different sets of values-intrinsic versus instrumental.

We can play out this structural conflict in values in other ways. The academic professional can only be creative and effective with a large range of professional autonomy and a guarantee of academic freedom. The systems of controls that institutions require are irksome at best and pernicious at worst to most of us in academic life. The fact that we have to comply with budgets and file federal accounting reports is so much annoying busy work. We live out this conflict between autonomy and control in a thousand different ways on campuses every day, and it is always lurking below the surface. If it ever touches on questions of basic academic freedom, it can become a highly charged element of institutional life.

Now, the two chief officers below the president who often exemplify these two different ways of construing the world are the chief academic officer and the chief financial officer. In order to understand each other fully, you have to understand the different value systems and thought processes that are in play in each of these two contexts of decision-making: intrinsic versus instrumental, autonomous versus bureacratic.

The key question becomes how to find ways to mediate and to reconcile the structural tension. I think the beginning of the answer is found in reinterpreting the concept of shared governance around the notion of collaborative leadership. Along with the president and the governing board, it is the CAO and the CFO who are the key players in reformulating and re-enacting our understanding of academic decision-making. In 2006, AGB published another report on the college presidency called the Leadership Imperative that uses the evocative but vague term "integral leadership "to describe a way to reconceptualize the process of governance.

The emphasis is now not just on the formal roles and powers that each participant has in governance, although that motif is not neglected. Clearly, the president and the president's team have to be armed with powers and responsibilities, as well as with skills and abilities, processes and behaviors, knowledge and values. The accent now, however, moves toward the active relationships and partnerships that each of the participants must have with one another. Shared leadership is an active process that embraces the governing board, the organization's key external constituencies, the faculty, staff and students. The president's team is a key to the process, and the team's effectiveness is one of the central marks of the president's leadership.

In describing what he calls embedded leadership James MacGregor Burns, the dean of American scholars of leadership, says, "Instead of identifying individual actors simply as leaders or simply as followers, we see whole process as a system in which the functions of leadership is palpable and central but the actors move and out of leader and follower roles" (Transforming Leadership, 2003). As a chief financial officer you lead a large team, but serve a critical role in following the leadership of the president and the board. As a chief academic officer, you often lead by listening and by following the best ideas that your faculty have to offer, and then giving them currency and support through the leadership position that you hold. Together, you are in places where the mediation between intrinsic and instrumental values has to be given form and become exemplified in the ways that you work to understand the valid claims of both sets of values.

Integral leadership has many parallels with what I have described at length in a recent book by the title Strategic Leadership. The emphasis is not primarily on creating a strategic plan but on strategic thinking. To be sure, effective collaborative processes, good information about the institution and the world around it, and effective implementation are critical elements of the total work of strategy. The right kinds of documents and reports are also of critical importance. Nonetheless, what is most important is the forging of an embedded process of collaborative leadership to complement, supplement and reorient the limitations and the fragmentation of traditional academic governance. We have to develop integrated ways of thinking in order to set and implement the agenda for the organization's future and to respond to the most threatening economic environment that we have ever seen.

Everyone here knows well the mechanics of strategy, so I will not repeat them. But I can ask you to situate strategy in a context through which it becomes a tool of leadership, and in doing so the collaboration between the chief academic and financial officers becomes critical. Strategy starts with finding and articulating the vital sense of values and beliefs that animate the institution. They may be complex and even contentious, but they are there in the way people live out the narrative of the organization's identity and aspirations. The story is not just the fanciful creation of a romantic past, but comes with hard numbers, ratios, indicators, and measures of institutional resources. They are part of the story, too, along with the saga through time of great teachers and leaders, the sacrificial commitment to students and distinctive marks of achievement. If strategy is about clarifying purpose, setting directions, and establishing priorities driven by a vision, it has to be a form of leadership. It is about purpose, not just process. Unlike other pictures of leadership, it does not depend only on the charismatic force of a single person, or the exceptional talents or energy of one or two people. Leadership in this case takes the form of a collaborative process that allows and expects initiative and involvement from many quarters. Following Burns, we see it as becoming embedded in the organization. To be sure, the president has to be deeply and centrally engaged in the process and give it top priority. The governing board has to assure that the work of strategy is occurring and to review and enable the effectiveness of the process if necessary. The board needs to focus closely on mission and vision and to affirm the purposes that have been articulated. The CAO and CEO are two of the lynchpins to guarantee the integrative force of the work, and to articulate together how strategic priorities reflect both the academic and fiscal dimensions of choice. Together they can offer an inspiring and realistic sense of what the institution can best do to excel in the future. The chief academic officer and chief financial officer can and must make common cause to fulfill the tasks of integral strategic leadership.

These remarks were delivered at the closing plenary session of the Council of Independent Colleges' Chief on November 9, 2010 in Williamsburg, Virginia.

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