Can Scholar Leadership Rescue Academia From Obsolescence?

I recently jumped on a Zoom call with one of my favorite colleagues—a smart, fiery, equity-minded professor I’d coached off and on through her promotions from assistant professor to assistant vice provost—curious about the nature of her urgent meeting request.

She wanted my advice on how to correct her course after campus members rejected a recently released institutionwide workload policy she and fellow committee members had labored over for several months. As our call progressed, it grew clear to me that core committee members feared being seen as unresponsive to faculty concerns and wanted to demonstrate their sincere intentions to create an equitable workload policy and accounting process, as well as an inclusive faculty community.

To exacerbate the issue, committee members, of which she was one, were burning out as the policy research, writing and development process stretched on—the bulk of the work fell to a few of them, and the submission deadline loomed. They were ready to scrap the policy, change committee leadership and begin again from scratch, which I believed was an overcorrection based on my experience as an organizational development and leadership consultant.

The root issue here was not devious intentions or poor work but rather a gap in the committee members’ experience in leading high-level enterprisewide planning, policy development and change management processes. Over a series of consultative sessions, I helped the committee to:

1. Create a project plan with milestones, timelines and roles;
2. Conduct rapid benchmarking to review their draft plan against other institutions’ policies; and
3. Design a communications plan to socialize the policy’s purpose, scope, and updates and incorporate community feedback into the finalized plan.

Through no fault of their own, the committee members, like faculty members across various types and sizes of institutions, had been sent to do a big job for which they had only been partially equipped.

Like that committee—charged to develop a highly consequential, institutionwide policy in the context of complex equity, diversity and workforce concerns—higher education institutions today need faculty members to play a more complex role than ever before. Yet traditional faculty-development approaches primarily prepare faculty to do “faculty things,” like writing, teaching and grant acquisition. Meanwhile, today’s scholars crave more from their work and the academy: more impact and influence, clearer boundaries and promotion processes, and greater compensation. Faculty express feeling overwhelmed, stagnant and undervalued given their varied and weighty job demands, which is fueling faculty burnout and wholesale departures from the academy.

Against this backdrop, the public stands at the door of the ivory tower questioning the relevance, cost, and application of higher education in today’s volatile employment and technology landscapes. When faculty growth and institutional operational outcomes are stunted, ideas and interventions that have the potential to transform society remain locked in the ivory tower. Institutions must shift away from taking traditional faculty development approaches toward cultivating scholar leaders who possess the leadership and professional skills to flourish and make their mark both within and beyond academia.

The Six Pillars

Scholar leadership is defined by the leadership, professional and translational skills that equip faculty to:

• Contribute effectively to department and campus initiatives;
• Manage workplace relationships, collaboration and conflict;
• Establish a professional identity not exclusively tethered to the institution;
• Translate research and insights for public understanding and use; and
• Contribute to the strengthening and recognition of their institution among peer institutions and across the globe.

Fostering scholar leaders not only unlocks the full potential of faculty, but also serves as a crucial component in building an innovative and effective academy that makes a positive impact on society as a whole.

The six pillars of scholar-leadership are:

1. Communication: the need to cultivate an awareness of one’s own communication style and how to recognize and adapt to the styles of others for collegial interaction and optimal results. Faculty members must cultivate the ability to listen to, speak with and influence students/mentees, peers and supervisors who have different communication styles.

Ineffective communication shows up as the inability to give or receive feedback in a constructive manner, challenges with self-advocacy and finding one’s voice at the leadership table, unclear mentoring and supervisory instructions, and, in worst cases, microaggressions and expressed bias, whether intentional or not. Effective workplace communication, and its close companion, conflict resolution, are necessary competencies.

2. Conflict management and conflict resolution: the ability to identify and mitigate conflict, engage in difficult conversations and mediate differences. Gossipy backchanneling and secret confabs that arise spontaneously after a department’s formal meetings are prime examples of unresolved conflict and poor communication within a group. Faculty, like other professionals, normalize this behavior as part of workplace culture.

But poor conflict management leads to the formation of cliques, the personalization of conflict (“He is a misogynist” versus “That perspective is sexist and exclusionary”), lines drawn in the sand and the silencing of certain group members. Those workplace phenomena weaken the strength of the group and its ability to accomplish its organizational and operational objectives over time in a clear and inclusive manner.

3. Project design, project management: the planning and organization skills to design, execute, monitor and recalibrate project milestones to achieve a target operational change. Ph.D.s are smart and resourceful and, as I described with the workload policy committee, will problem-solve to tackle any task at hand. But they often do so in helter-skelter ways that leave processes vulnerable to group conflict, member disengagement and constituent backlash. Project design and management are key functions of committees, task forces and other institutional initiatives and policy development.
4. Change management: the people side of project management. While a project is underway, leaders influence, engage, guide, build consensus and manage resistance among colleagues and constituents involved in or affected by the change process. Without foundational project- and change-management skills, and the awareness of their interplay, planning processes will be riddled with wasted time and resources—while unknowingly overlooking the participation of important constituents or community members at key project junctures. It also results in committee leads doing the lion’s share of the work without adequately engaging and tasking committee members in project execution, much like those who developed the well-meaning workload policy experienced.
5. Career planning and career transition management: the ability to set goals and develop relevant skills, competencies, relationships and experiences at each career stage to achieve those career goals. Faculty members should possess the adaptability to transition between career ranks—releasing, adopting and adapting activities as relevant to each career stage. They should also demonstrate nimbleness and focus to chart a new professional future and to manage expected and unexpected career changes.

Scholar leadership transcends the conventional approach to faculty roles. In this model, success is not solely defined by institutional objectives but also guided by each individual’s aspirations, vision and intention to set and reset the direction of their career. This resetting must also include a normalization of a faculty member’s decision to exit the professoriate for roles outside the academy. Recent faculty “quit lit” and my forthcoming book, Options for Success, show that faculty members’ career expectations and aspirations change over time, just as they do for all professionals, regardless of industry. As academia moves past the resistance to new and unexpected career directions, more faculty will transition with ease to employment and leadership options that provide work-life fulfillment as defined by their current and future needs rather than past goals.

6. Research translation and public engagement: the willingness and capability to share research and insights as a thought leader with the public, broadly defined as practitioners, decision-makers, community members and the news media. It requires engaging the public at a level and through a medium appropriate to each faculty member’s interests and goals, as well as the capacity and skills to leverage traditional and new media and public speaking opportunities.

Academics have been taught to develop ideas but not to have influence. In my leadership workshops and coaching over the last decade, I have witnessed faculty members who avoid engaging the media for fear of how their words may be misconstrued, because they do not desire to be a public intellectual, or because they are uncertain how to translate complex research into public-ready messaging. Rather than allowing important research and interventions to stay buried behind these barriers and fears, institutions should provide faculty with the technical assistance and skills for strategic, value-aligned translations of their scholarship and expertise to the public in the medium of their choice—be it media interviews, news or trade publication articles, community engagement, or strategic social media content creation.

Every faculty member need not be the next Brené Brown, Tressie McMillan Cottom or Adam Grant—though we laud those individuals’ translational dexterity—and engage their expertise in the public forum. Faculty research and perspectives have relevance and the capacity to shape public opinion, policy and human flourishing at many levels of intervention, from the neighborhood to the broader world.

These six scholar-leader pillars are foundational to faculty creating professional identities and obtaining careers through which they can grow personally and professionally, meet the challenges of advancing career roles and responsibilities, and achieve promotion whether internal or external to their institution. The term “faculty” implies academia’s ownership of or exclusive right to direct the activities of an individual, while “scholar leader” offers a lens of personhood, self-driven growth and career development, and relevance beyond a conferred job title or position.

Faculty deploy these scholar-leader pillars in varying degrees throughout their careers as relevant to their roles, responsibilities and aspirations. As such, these pillars must be acquired throughout the faculty life cycle, beginning in graduate school. Scholar-leadership development is for all faculty, regardless of race, gender or tenure.

Some of the interpersonal conflict and change-management challenges happening on campuses today are because faculty across the board are not well equipped with what’s needed to flourish and to lead in a dynamic environment. As the academic landscape continues to evolve and society demands a greater return on investment from higher education, the cultivation of scholar leaders becomes not just a pathway to individual success. It is also a critical component in building an innovative, sustainable, and effective academy that makes a lasting impact on society as a whole.