Oh Great and Powerful Leader

Academic Leadership

Askling, B. & Stensaker, B. (2002). Academic leadership: Prescriptions, practices and paradoxes. Tertiary Education and Management, 8, 113-125.

Try this link (then click on the PDF link)
http://ezproxy.cqu.edu.au/login?url=http://www.springerlink.com/link.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1023/A:1015612510179

Saying that public management ideals may be difficult and dangerous in higher education because higher education is complex and paradoxical, implies that business are simplistic and that the leadership of both are mutually exclusive. I have no experience in business, but this sounds a little degrading of businesses and CEOs.

In fact, they are saying that the whole managerial environment is so very different that influences from corporate management have had little success in the university environment. What they do say is that leadership is the key to the success either way, and that the style of leadership should, by necessity, differ in each case. Corporate leadership is a role: strong, meaningful and set. Academic leadership is a process: fluid, guiding and integrally linked to the situation.

A difference that is important to the ability of the institution to change, is that academic leaders be able to adapt to difficult and complex situations that they may never have seen before, and that the very set (not to say bad) leadership of the corporate world may not be able to cope with those situations.

Interesting they talk about dispersed leadership and lower level leaders. While that might increase the pressure on these leaders, my own experience at this university is that it can lead to ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’. To run a multi-faceted, whole of university event – orientation – the ‘leaders’ I must approach are: 2 Executive Deans, 10 Deans, 3 Pro-Vice Chancellors, 4 Directors and at least 6 Managers. So I need good leadership skills and I am only, as they say, a lower level leader myself.

It is the same that I have noticed with ‘quality’ as this article talks about. Not only do you need quality leaders, to obtain across institutional ‘quality learning and teaching’ all of those leaders must agree. So do we need even stronger academic leadership at the top? As the control that is increasingly going down the chain, is it going to be an impossible task to ‘lead’ a university into the future? Perhaps, as the paper says, that would be detrimental… but there is no way I would like to work for any organisation, academic or otherwise that doesn’t have strong leadership through change and improvement processes.