Deans in the Middle: Key Competencies to Thrive in a Tough Leadership Terrain.

In contemporary American higher education our Deans have rather huge boulders in their backpacks. At the same time as they are characterized in graduate education degree programs as enduring visionaries, the casualty rates along the way are proliferating. It’s tough being in the middle.

Over the years in our various colleges and universities, Deans have been the catalysts for new programming, the architects of powerful new delivery approaches, and incubators for little ideas which become big ideas. They continuously assess goals, set new ones, and attempt to motivate their colleagues and students to push ahead toward the larger picture. Among their many duties, they have had to focus for long periods of time on converting goals into specifics and more than once have to watch programs contract or cash flows converge uncomfortably close to risky spots along the Department of Education’s composite ratio continuum. Through tough times and good, nevertheless, they have found and led staff to maintain the necessary flow of processes, whether it is the creation of curriculum, the paying of bills, the creation of library collections, the design and implementation of LMS capacity, making sure the doors get opened in the morning, or launching new methodologies to deliver rapidly metamorphosing curriculum.  And, they have done these things using a particular set of competencies. What competencies do our Deans need today and are they different than what we have needed all along?

 

         Whatever approach to academic management our college and university Deans or Academic administrators adopted over the years, they knew that the education machine had to keep chugging along, with their own careers in tow.  Many had no choice but to learn on the job, either emerging into teaching quite deliberately or finding a way on to the full time roster through the adjunct faculty pathway. Some chose to shift into teaching and administration after time in teaching. Some came from the public sector, bringing career experience from that higher education sector, inevitably molding their institution’s programs into that framework. Whatever the scenario, the need for strong academic leadership competencies, derived from whatever source, has never been stronger. 

So, it may be helpful to describe certain conceptual competencies which scholars in the academic leadership field consider effective.  Underpinning the conception of a managerial culture are the assumptions that the higher education institution can be directed, and that change can be planned, managed and realized, sometimes with 'alacrity'.

 The transforming post-secondary and post-graduate college/university universe is a complex landscape where many factors continuously influence the competencies the leader needs to be able to steer safely. For one thing, our educational institutions are subject to accreditation and assessment backstories. These tasks alone, the skills for accomplishing which our Deans have got to have in hand from day one of a new appointment, assume very specialized knowledge about the higher education sector, its standards and its processes. Secondly, there are so many stakeholders to consult. This takes patience. It requires our Deans to see well ahead. Most stakeholders do not take too kindly to autocratic processes and top-down decision-making, inside or outside the the institution. Thus, as Dennison has pointed out, “a strictly managerial approach is unlikely to be compatible with a collegial environment” [Baldrige et al. 1977; Cohen 1990; Raisman 1990]. Deans have been known to push back against the top, the bottom, the middle and sideways when they feel their institution’s primary mission might be challenged or misunderstood.  Deans know that their colleges or universities are places where all kinds of learning approaches are flying, including practicum pieces, assessment obligations, and, inevitably, placement of graduates. 

Operating, then, as a kind of defining gestalt in this environment, there are general characteristics impacting on our key academic leaders, whatever their level of experience and confidence. Those leaders must not only develop and have handy very specific competencies, but those very competencies themselves are also shifting and sometimes are even reeling as we absorb the riptides of public policy and the gyrations of the economy. Omnipresent too are recurrent issues such as governance [Dennison, 1994; Dennison and Gallagher, 1996; Baldridge, Curtis, Ecker, and Riley, 1986]; funding [Hough, 1992]; responsibility and accountability [Hufner, 1991], currency and effective visioning [Tierney, 1993].  

Some say that rapid transformation within such a landscape has from time to time encouraged habits of short term crisis management, stimulating the development and refining of certain competencies over others.   Periods of growth require competencies which are different from those needed to navigate through periods of contraction. Along with the growth phases, for example, come all the challenges of staff recruitment, capital investment and branding, not to mention the parallel challenge of state accountability, notably in public sector institutions, and accountability to fiduciary boards in the non-profit sector. Whatever the climate, though, Deans are expected to be agile all the time. They face Monday mornings at 8 a.m. with certain “flashpoints of controversy” as Michael Skolnik describes them [Skolnik, 1987] likely to flare before 9 o’clock most days.  

An example of such a flashpoint is the need whether a program is growing or shrinking for professional level competency in curriculum design, measurement and evaluation (assessment) and finance function, including fundraising. Indeed, questions of funding limitations gnaw at the average Dean daily. Such pressures exacerbate the need for competencies to be crisp, practiced and reliable among our Deans whose shoulders are expected to carry whatever immutable ill is blowing in the next fiscal period. 

At the gates of their institutions, our Deans have their binoculars peeled for usurping competitive providers. In this terrain, running a collegial ship to maximize resources and to embrace a future replete with constant, unforgiving change are daily realities.  

 

         The competencies our educational leaders need are influenced by the following factors:

• the impact of public governance especially in the form of accreditation standards and our challenge of sustaining them;
• the implications of shared governance pressures and aspirations toward collegiality;
•  the vagaries of funding and understanding post-secondary financing;
•  the dual edged sword of responsibility and accountability, and
• the imperative of understanding the needs of mixed demographic surges of learners who are wired to the world and have Return on Investment ideas which the generation before them didn’t think as noisily about. 

         The impact of thoughtful governance is an enduring characteristic of the post-secondary and post-graduate education environments inasmuch as our colleges and universities seek state degree and regional institutional confirmation of standards, quality and track record. Public members who join our Boards from the worlds of higher education, finance, law, insurance, other non-profits, business and industry look to the senior, front line leaders (that is, our Deans) not only to inform them on demand often, but to guide their fiduciary deliberations with data, recommendations and locally applicable insight. The Dean has to be savvy about everything from governance variables such policy, vision and finances, to the minutiae of emergent rival programming. And, lest we forget, there is the huge expectation that Deans will be more and more involved in ambitious capital campaigns.

Extrapolating from Birnbaum’s analysis in How Colleges Work [Birnbaum, 1988], it becomes clear that this competency also includes an understanding of the political history and current political reality of non-university post-secondary institutions [NUPSI].  Being up on the roles of government endorsed entities such as accreditation bodies or offices of degree authorization, whose impact on “accountability” and on “student funding” is immediate and demanding, is very central to our leaders’ skill base.

Added to this recipe is the American imperative [often identified with California] of shared governance [Owen, 1995].  The origins, current manifestations of such faculty associations, unions and collective agreements are very much part of the history lesson which moves about in the higher education sector and with which new and seasoned Deans need to be familiar as they grow their careers. Thus, the leader in search of conceptual competencies to tool up for a march through a decade or three of leading and managing in higher education may also want to know about tried and true negotiation techniques [although his work is from a few decades back, Ury, 1981 and 1991 is a fine platform to begin with], how organizational models can best be deployed to bring about success with college or university goals (despite the defining limitations of collective agreements and the persistent amnesia of some public sector institutions about their origins and real mission) as similar tensions about workload arrangements and job security recur season after season [Cohen, Brawer & Associates, 1994].

 

That same leader will want to flesh out his or her growing familiarity with possible organizational models by studying ethics and jurisprudence as these relate to higher education, by reviewing government policy related to employment standards, and in the case of Deans of medical programs, by being intimately familiar with medical ethics ideas and principles impacting on teaching and learning, particularly as these translate out into the doctor/patient relationship. The leader will want to tie all of these into a disciplined, ongoing review of best human resources practices.  

As well, understanding how to choreograph effective non-profit Boards to support ethical, compliant policies and practices in the changing higher education sector is another key competency for Deans [Carver, 1997; Piland, 1994; Andrews, 1994]. Non-profit Boards have an enormous policy impact on the operational detail of human resource deployment and management, on advancement, and on the degree of deference paid to government policy related to employment standards and institutional development. Learning organizations depend on a foundation of clear, integrated policy in order for practices to be helpful in achieving the mission which each Dean embraces when s/he joins the team. 

 

Learning organizations are, though, as Senge and DePree often point out, dependent on participation as the basis for that learning. Thus, a skill such as consensus and team-building acumen is an important competency for the effective leader. The development of staff is intentional in colleges which seek to thrive. That development, however, needs to be aligned with mission and goals, which in turn are synchronized with available resources. Thus, the leader will want to know a great deal about human resource development in terms of how to operationalize a development plan within particular time frames. Further, identifying priorities in development can issue smoothly from operational reviews which should be intrinsic to the college’s multi-year plans. Experience with the design, implementation and full evaluation of an operational review process is a key competency for every Dean.  That's a lot.

 

Yet another competency area is all about funding. The financing of higher education is affected by the constant pressure to have user bear more of the cost [Hough, 1992; Rhoades, 1998]. That reality is changing. In the State of New York, for example, what do the non-profit, privates do in the face of public sector free undergraduate tuition competition? Once again, Deans into the fray.

In the world of private sector, non-profit education, the academic leader has a somewhat unclear challenge ahead these days. He or she wants to reduce the pressure which comes from disproportionate tuition dependence, but until state and federal initiatives about underwriting undergraduate tuition, and until the larger organizations make decisions about how much endowment money to flow to this purpose. the smaller colleges will have to be vigilant. If Brown (in Rhode Island) actually does redirect hundreds of millions to this purpose, there are others in the queue almost certainly. The college leader needs to understand not only the funding formulae and practices for his or her respective program or college, for example, but also to understand the share her program has and why, of the total post-secondary pie in that institution. Being savvy about the political and fiscal priorities of the institution in which that program lives is essential.

Further, understanding the wider range of financing variables has to be part of this particular competency about finances, embracing an awareness of how student financial assistance works in practice as well as an awareness of costing models for successfully mounting single programs, program clusters and entire campuses. The sophistication of the knowledge needed about finance function cannot be emphasized enough since strategic decisions are best made when the leader understands weighting formulas, projected revenues, fixed and variable costs, discretionary expenditure ratios, and confident grounding in the sound fiscal management of one-off projects. Aspects of this competency include a precise understanding of how elements work such as revenue, operating income, cash flow, and asset utilization. 

 

The strong college leader will also seek conceptual competence in accountability [Hufner wrote a lot about this way back in 1991] and responsibility paradigms as these manifest in higher education. In addition to seeing clearly the way the wind is blowing with respect to accountability instruments such as key performance indicators, the leader will want to generate exceptional competence in reporting outcomes to key stakeholders [advisory committees, Boards of Directors, central government agencies, and so on]. Rapid, reliable and focused communication with funding authorities, program approval teams, local governance groups such as advisory committees and standing committees of the Board of Directors implies a political sensitivity to what needs to be reported as well as a strong commitment to accuracy and documentation. The leader must know which categories are relevant and timely, and which need to be quantified and to what extent [Price-Waterhouse, 1995].

 

 Choosing process performance measures [and not just results measures] is an important skill for the leader’s backpack too. As well, good process performance measures build enthusiasm. In the end, the effective leader will have a conceptual competence in using performance measures to link what people do well daily to what the college’s overall objectives are. The difficulty of measuring performance is well known in the higher education sector, largely because most public sector institutions most pay attention to a cost line, which does not reflect the accruing hard-to-measure equity of successful graduates and community goodwill. All too true and sometimes bruising for Deans to face, eager attention to allocated budget amounts often does not reward entrepreneurial leaders who may well have a business plan for new activity which spans more than a single fiscal period.

 

A Dean will definitely want to develop conceptual competencies as a change agent [Price-Waterhouse, 1995]. The transformation of post-secondary education is unrelenting. At one extreme there are those who would proclaim that discontinuous thinking which would keep outdated rules and fundamental assumptions driving the agenda is impossible to dislodge. At the other extreme there are those, fearing the college’s mission can be relegated to dusting furniture in Pompeii [to awkwardly cite Hammer and Champy from their early work on re-engineering corporations], there are those who would have the leader move rapidly in an all-or-nothing mode which could perpetuate ineffective, outdated ways of producing learning. The leader must, then, assimilate competencies for initiating, conducting and making sure that transformative practices are understood, implemented and fine-tuned. This complex competency involves the transforming of processes which rapidly evolve new responsibilities and tasks, from narrow and task-oriented activity to more multidimensional work, particularly in the delivery of education and training. Our schools can be conservative places, otherwise where “we always have done it this way” becomes a rationale for avoiding risk and reward approaches.

 

The happiest Deans I’ve met describe what they are doing as running a “going concern” [a phrase widely used in the corporate world]. That feeling or attitude brings with it, I have observed, a greater degree of flexibility because it supports an operations approach to strategic planning. The “policy and entitlement orientation” which affects so much of the public sector college’s operational framework, is less entrenched in non-profit private sector colleges and universities even though they also have to comply with state and federal labor legislation in as positive a spirit as they can. Even if a Dean doesn’t have operational instruments such as collective agreements or the need to seek central approval from a government body for funding for new programs, there still exist functional rivalries, operational redundancies, and contrary imperatives frequently present in state systems which are less likely to daunt the leader who becomes increasingly skilled in transformative practices.

 

Finally, the effective college leader will want to master numerous competencies under the “learner-centred” umbrella [McCombs, 1992; O’Banion, 1997; Tinto, V., Love G., and Russo, P., 1994] often talked about in higher education. S/he will need to have skill in curriculum and program design, assessment, measurement and evaluation, and Information Technology applications to teaching and learning. Becoming familiar with how adult learners learn and focusing on what are the most effective designs for value-added learning will greatly enhance the competency portfolio of that leader.

 

Coupled with these pragmatic competencies must be a deeper understanding of theories of knowledge. Gathering awareness from approaches such as constructivism [Cherryholmes, 1994] will act as a catalyst for the leader because learning itself is transformational rather than additive. Building on developmentalist and constructivist approaches, the Dean will want to be sure to have a grasp of the dominant learning theory of the day. Further, the leader will want to understand the metamorphosing nature of the learners turning to his or her college for help. Those learners are, for example, are younger than they were even a decade ago, and demanding of quick, electronically mediated, high quality delivery and currency. Thus, our Deans will want to be committed to keeping abreast of higher education theory and practice. If they choose to stay in an administrative role, they will make it a priority to stay on top of theories of knowledge and the related theories about how contemporary students learn. The old notion of time-place bound learning, supervised by a “sage on the stage” is not the case these days, as every Dean knows, despite many of our program accreditation standards still being predicated on that model. 

 

Parallel with all these competencies must be the constant gathering and utilization of factual information. The leader must know how to find reliable community demographics with windows on diversity, access and futurism. Further, student demographic data and profiles are essential for the Dean to plan.  Stored in the larder, too, should be information about the history and evolution of naturopathic medicine as an heterodox medical system, labor market trends and inter-institutional relationships. Understanding conceptually, for example, differentiation and diversity among post-secondary institutions can greatly assist in the leader’s being able to build a more ideal system for the achievement of academic balance and diversity, as well as sustainability.

 

References

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