Navigating the Perils of Leadership in Higher Education
The landscape of higher education is undergoing seismic shifts, presenting leaders with uncharted territories and unprecedented challenges. “How do you lead when there is no map? When the territory is unknown? What skillsets and mind shifts are necessary?” [1]. This article serves as a survival guide, examining the common pitfalls that can cause higher ed leaders to derail and offering strategies for navigating the complexities of the modern academic world, focusing on “How Higher Ed Leaders Derail A Survival Guide For Leaders.”
The higher education sector is under immense pressure to transform and adapt to the rapid pace of change. Factors such as inflexible processes, lack of performance rewards, inefficient change interventions, and centralized decision-making often hinder the transformation agenda [4]. Traditional management styles and diminished academic freedom exacerbate the issue. The widening gap between current leadership skills and future requirements necessitates a new approach.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is profoundly changing how we work, live, and relate to one another [5]. Universities must reconsider their teaching methods and leadership approaches. Leaders face challenges such as changing student demographics, motivating staff, increased competition, and declining funding. The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the need for institutional redesign and the “tyranny of the urgent.” These conditions create a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) environment [7].
Amidst this increasing complexity, disruption and uncertainty, the question raised by Amit Mrig and Pat Sanaghan [9] concerning the future of higher education is extremely relevant: “will higher education seize the future or fall victim to it?”
The Illusion of Preparedness
Many higher education institutions (HEIs) require creative, resilient, agile, courageous, and effective leaders. However, leaders are navigating unfamiliar territory without a map. As Nasima Badsha noted, leaders in South African universities “had no neat script to work off, nor ‘manuals’ or prescripts of ‘good’ leadership or practice” [10].
Leadership training is a rapidly growing market, yet many leaders revert to old habits. Sanaghan and Lohndorf, in How Higher-Ed leaders derail (2018), highlight the “peril of smartship” as a key reason for leadership derailment. Leaders often rely on past experiences and intellectualism rather than embracing originality and risk-taking. They must be mindful of the “confirming evidence trap,” seeking information that confirms existing beliefs [15].
HEIs are going through significant disruption and change. Adaptive challenges, requiring risk-taking, innovation, and continuous learning, differ from technical challenges with known solutions [16]. Adaptive leadership involves mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive [17]. The responsibility for solving problems should shift to all employees, with leaders facilitating the process.
Universities that navigate both adaptive and technical challenges will emerge stronger and more competitive. However, the path for change is unclear, requiring new ways of leading. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of leadership and the opportunity to reimagine and reinvent it. As Mrig and Sanaghan stated, “Leadership matters; rarely has it mattered more than now” [20].
Alt: Collage illustrating the multifaceted responsibilities of higher education leadership, encompassing academic achievements, faculty collaboration, and research endeavors.
The Imperative for a New Leadership Paradigm
If leadership is more critical than ever, a new type of leadership is needed for the VUCA world and the 4IR. This complexity-fit leadership should move beyond traditional models that prioritize vision, academic reputation, and charisma [21]. Institutions need clarity regarding their value propositions and must address fundamental questions: Why do we exist? Who do we choose to be? What do we want to create together?
A leader is defined as anyone willing to take responsibility and influence others, guided by a deep sense of purpose. In a VUCA world, leadership must be exercised at all levels, not just at the top. The entire system needs to be ready to adapt, recognizing that “Leadership is an Everywhere Phenomenon.”
The Perils and Pressures of Academic Leadership
“To lead is to live dangerously” [24]. Leading academics has been compared to “herding cats.” In the current environment, it’s more akin to “riding a tiger” [25, 26]. As Margaret Heffernan notes, “The organizational adaptability required to meet a relentless succession of challenges is beyond anyone’s current expertise.”
Leaders need the agility to tolerate discomfort, the courage to seize opportunities, and the ability to question deeply entrenched assumptions. Adaptive leadership requires surrounding oneself with diverse people willing to challenge ideas. Effective leaders confront loyalty to legacy practices that hinder progress [29].
Leaders must empower innovation and future thinking by “pointing the way,” as explained by Peter Senge [30]. However, resistance is inevitable in cultures valuing stability over risk-taking. Leaders need courage to deal with this resistance and embrace continuous learning. “There is no safe way to be great, and, there is no great way to be safe. The safe paths have all been taken.”
Challenges facing universities have created a watershed moment. Leaders must recognize the need for reinvention and that “waiting” is no longer an effective strategy [33]. Old patterns and behaviors are difficult to relinquish, even when survival depends on it [34]. Leaders often revert to outdated behaviors, stifling talent [35].
Developing leadership capacity is crucial [36]. The primary challenge is to develop a new mindset that anchors and advances new behaviors. To truly lead universities through disruption, leaders themselves must change. You need to disrupt your leadership. Our ability to change institutional culture begins with understanding how we have helped create it.
Five Essential Shifts for Higher Ed Leaders
To navigate the VUCA world, five critical shifts are needed:
- Awareness Shift: Leaders must expand their awareness to include their internal landscape and its interplay with their behavior [39, 40]. This involves shifting from external forces to less visible physiological, emotional, and mental processes.
- Identity Shift: Leaders need to disrupt their identities, moving from “smartship” to humility and curiosity [43]. This requires shifting from a performance mindset to a learning mindset, embracing experimentation and partnership [44].
- Mindset Shift: Leaders must transform their understanding of power from control to empowerment [48, 49]. This involves “UNBOSSING” the university and fostering an entrepreneurial contract with staff.
- Paradigm Shift: Leaders must shift from viewing leadership as cognitive labor to emotional labor, emphasizing emotional intelligence (EQ) [55]. This includes self-regulation, managing emotions, and supporting others.
- Shift from fear to psychological safety: Creating a climate where it is safe for them to take interpersonal risks and share not only their knowledge and ideas, but also their emotions and feelings.
5.1 Shift One: The Awareness Shift
Leaders need to shift their awareness from external forces to forces that are less visible such as their physiological, emotional, and mental processes in order to increase the efficacy of their leadership. Only by developing your inner leadership will you be able to develop in your outer leadership.
Dan Siegel calls this awareness “mindsight”—the ability to observe our internal mental processes unfold [42]. This metacognitive practice allows us to see the internal workings of our own minds in the present moment.
By internal “tuning in” and paying attention to our mind’s intention in a non-judgemental and nonreactive way by self-observation, we become “our own best friends” as described by Siegal.
5.2 Shift Two: The Identity Shift
This shifts requires that leaders disrupt their identities. However, there is a deep humility needed in leaders as a way of facilitating the creativity of employees, especially in an industry changing as rapidly as higher education. This will require a shift from a performance mindset to a learning mindset, fueled by curiosity [44].
Most of the revolutionary inventions and noteworthy discoveries throughout history are the result of curiosity. Curiosity, humility, and the willingness to admit error go hand-in-hand since you must be humble enough to know you do not have all the answers and confident enough to admit it.
Therefore, in a sense, the very elements that make academia strong also make it vulnerable.
5.3 Shift Three: The Mindset Shift
In the VUCA world, this one-directional view of power has become outdated because leadership is about EMpowerment. In their book How HE leaders derail, Patrick Sanaghan and Jillian Lohndorf [49], state that the pace of change is too fast and the challenges too complex to be figured out by one individual.
This kind of shift in power is accompanied by a significant change of the centrality of leaders in our universities—a kind of phenomenon we can call UNBOSSING the university and forming an entrepreneurial contract with people, where every staff member accepts ownership for the success of the university as if it was their own.
There is a lot a talk in HE about decolonising the curriculum, however, we also need to decolonise leadership.
5.4 Shift Four: The Paradigm Shift
Leaders need to be able to self-regulate and manage their emotions and emotional impact on people in the face of uncertainty. At the same time they need to be able to support others to deal with their own fears, anxiety and discomfort [56]. In fact, one of the strongest forms of contempt is to say to someone: ‘Let’s not get into the touchy feely issues’.
Our current context asks for a rebalancing of the relationship between IQ and EQ. It requires a paradigm shift from viewing leadership as cognitive labour alone to viewing leadership as emotional labour which requires EQ and a high level of emotional maturity. Napoleon is famous for saying that leaders are merchants of hope.
Without exception, innovation is a social process which requires creative abrasion and constructive dissent. Our ability to be innovative will depend on our ability to be able to tap into the strength of the diversity in our teams. Therefore, we need to move beyond diversity to build a deeply inclusive culture for which we need leaders with a highly developed EQ [60].
5.4.1 Shift from fear to psychological safety
EQ will also enable us to make the critical climate shift in our institutions from fear to psychological safety. Psychological safety empowers people to perform to the best of their ability. For our universities to flourish in a world where innovation will differentiate institutions as successful or failing.
The Fork in the Road: Shaping a Future of Stewardship
According to Prof Klaus Schawab, “there has never been a time of greater promise, or greater peril.” Leaders must shape a future that works for all by putting people first and empowering them.
The final shift needed is from leadership to Stewardship. Peter Block defines stewardship as holding something in trust for another [65]. Stewardship is a willingness to be accountable for the well-being of our institutions, because we hold our universities in trust for future generations.
Alt: Image depicting a collaborative brainstorming session led by a leader, highlighting teamwork and inclusivity in a higher education setting.
In conclusion, steward leadership starts with wanting to the best FOR the world or the university, not only the best IN the world. This approach puts leadership in the background and prioritizes the well-being of the institution and its people.
Reflection: Future Leadership Skills
To ensure relevance, institutions need to begin a robust conversation with leaders around three questions:
- What are the eroding skills? What leadership behaviors are now outdated?
- What are the enduring skills? What attributes have stood the test of time?
- What are the emerging skills? What behaviors are now essential?
Future-fit leadership development requires more than acquiring new competencies. It involves transformational development, gaining greater capacity, and expanding mindsets. Leaders need to combine wisdom with experience and competencies. Leadership development should address the identities, beliefs, and mindsets that drive behavior.
This article serves as a guide to navigate the complexities of higher education, emphasizing the importance of adaptability, emotional intelligence, and stewardship. By understanding the common pitfalls and embracing a new leadership paradigm, higher education leaders can create a thriving and sustainable future for their institutions.
Acknowledgments
The TUT LEAD programme is funded by Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) University Capacity Development Grant (UCDG).
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