King Arthur and Academic Leaders?

(This is a sneak peak of the new book that I am writing with Dr. Josephine Ibironke. We are excited about it and hope you will be, too!)

Have you ever heard or read that academic leadership is one of the most complex endeavors that a person can undertake? We have heard these statements many times and believe them to be true! Having both served in faculty and administrative roles in higher education, we have lived this experience. Our careers have been challenging, rewarding, painful, fulfilling, and everything in between. We have experienced challenging times while remaining focused on providing our students with the best possible education. Think about severe economic changes, worldwide pandemics, strained race relations, political involvement in education, and more that we have endured. These are the challenging lives of higher education administrators.

We all know the stories of great business leaders that enter a corporation and implement immediate change like Jack Welch or Meg Whitman. They hire and fire people 'at will' in order to improve the bottom-line earnings of their corporation. They institute sweeping changes in ways of doing business and adjust the hierarchical structure. They make decisions quickly and with little consultation. They are celebrated for their execution of brand-new ways of doing business and increasing income for all stakeholders.

Jack Welch's success at General Electric was rooted in a strategy of cost-cutting, aggressive management, and a relentless focus on performance. He instituted a vitality curve where the bottom 10% of employees were fired and the top 20% were rewarded financially. Have you ever heard of an academic leader doing this? Never! In academia; governance is shared, faculty outlast administrators, and emotions are always close to the surface. If someone has ever transitioned from a for-profit entity like a manufacturing company to higher education, the differences would be startling. No longer would you only be concerned with profits and losses, but you’d be embroiled in debates over authority, fairness, processes, and feelings. Therefore, we argue, an academic leader cannot operate like a business leader. An academic leader must operate within the formal constraints of faculty governance and university policies while balancing progress with thoughtful people management. All this may seem impossible, yet institutes of higher learning exist and continue their mission of education students around the country.

While we understand that every situation in higher education has its own unique challenges, we believe there are some themes that everyone has in common. These challenges include; no one person can control very much at a college or university, the speed and efficiency of decisions become bogged down in complex structure, people and positions cannot be easily changed (or ever changed in the case of tenure) and leadership development is almost non-existent. Couple these problems with the current economic and political challenges in the United States and an academic leader has a very low chance of success.

In one of our favorite books about academic leadership entitled, Reframing Academic Leadership by Bolman and Gallos (2011), they spend the final chapter of their book outlining ways for an academic leader to maintain “health and vitality”. So heavy is the burden of academic leadership, that they state, “Learning about, understanding, bearing witness, and working close to strong emotion takes a toll.” Often, we’ve commented that our professional degrees should have been in psychology rather than optometry because we spend most of our careers managing people’s emotions. Bolman and Gallos outline five steps to healthy leadership; boundaries, biology, balance, beauty, and bounce. We highly recommend following their guidance to prevent “compassionate fatigue”, better known as academic burnout.

It is our opinion that the only way to conquer the academic challenges of today is with a team of like-minded people. One person or leader cannot do it all. We believe that it is going to take more than a village to succeed, but rather an army. An academic leader once told us that everything and anything that was accomplished at their institution “happened around a table”. We may have misunderstood or been a bit hard of hearing, but we thought that they said, “a round table”. Whatever was actually said doesn’t really matter, but this conversation launched a journey of linking best practices of today in higher education leadership with the lessons taught in the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. We hope that you’ll find by the end of this book that a round table represents a powerful tool for gathering information, accomplishing goals, sharing values, developing leaders, and more. We’ll use this linkage to Medieval folklore to help illustrate that our recommendations are not new, but rather the stuff of legend. Winston Churchill is quoted as saying, “The further backward you look, the further forward you see.” So, let’s look back to Camelot to see what we can learn.