Why do academic leaders fail?

Academic leadership is gaining definitive traction with the growing influx of self-financed institutions, where financial sustainability is crucial to survival and success, as important as it is to an organization competing in the industry. Academic leadership is grappling with the often asked question - How does my school gain a competitive advantage and add value to a customer?

What this has done is to pitchfork, academicians to positions of corporate leadership, without many, having the skill or competence. Most are brilliant as academics, teachers and researchers, thought leaders and policymakers but fail when they need to lead. In leadership positions, these may be misplaced skills.

Why does this happen? Well, by definition most people expect leaders in a generic sense, to turn up, grasp issues at hand - both short and long term - and provide workable solutions. This works when the said leader has to deal with a 'technical' problem, like a shortage of classrooms. However, some problems are more complex, such as improving the research record of a school or building consulting capability. The problem here is more 'adaptive' in nature and calls for multifaceted collaborative skills where the Dean/Principal needs to motivate his or her colleagues to publish. If you notice, this has taken the academic leader into the realm of change management, an area where he or she is not prepared at all or the school does not have the requisite capacity. Also, change brings with it varying levels of distress, which needs to be recognized by the leader. In many instances, the leader just does not know what to do but refuses to ask for assistance. Why? Well, because he is the leader!

This bundling of leadership challenges is what causes issues for most academic leaders. Adaptive challenges need an intervention, where capacity is built. Dealing with them, as they deal with technical issues, leads to inevitable failure. Many problems can be solved only by building capacity and the required capabilities in the team and has little to do with leadership. Unfortunately, a great many academicians shy away from asking for resources or develop change management strategies and hence fail in building the required capacity to accomplish a strategical goal.

Eventually, a good leader diagnoses the problem, frames a narrative, and then chooses a course of action which is quite different from the point of view of a technical problem and an adaptive one. A brute force approach in dealing with all challenges alike is going to fail. The most important task for leaders in the face of challenges is mobilizing people throughout their school/department to do adaptive work and the prevailing notion that leadership consists of having a vision and aligning people with it is passe; this approach ignores the fact that many work situations are adaptive rather than technical in a world that is turning increasingly complex. Many schools failed their students over the last couple of years, not because the leader was bad, but because the capacity for online education or its understanding did not exist. The challenge needed a new culture and construct of capacity, without which dissemination of information online was doomed. Leaders need to maintain disciplined attention among their colleagues as well as give the work back to them, letting employees take the initiative in defining and solving problems and maybe recognizing the fact that people in the frontline recognize challenges before those in the top echelons of the hierarchy.