Want better university leaders? Stop focusing on the leaders

Universities have never invested more in developing academic leaders. Leadership institutes, fellowships, executive coaching and professional development programmes prepare faculty members to become department chairs, deans, provosts and other senior administrators. Yet our institutions continue to struggle with leadership turnover, burnout and mistrust. Perhaps we have been trying to solve the wrong problem.

We have treated leadership development primarily as a problem of preparing individuals. Find talented people. Equip them with the right skills. Help them become better communicators, decision-makers and strategists. Then put them into leadership roles and expect them to succeed.

When they do, we celebrate the person. When they don’t, we question their judgement, competence or leadership style. But what if leadership success depends just as much on what happens after someone enters the job?

Over the past year, I interviewed 25 current and former associate deans at universities in North America and Europe. I began the study wanting to understand the experience of leading from the middle management tier of academic organisations: why do some associate deans flourish while others become frustrated or overwhelmed?

Given the range of institutions, disciplines and professional backgrounds represented in my study, I expected considerable variation in the responses. Instead, one pattern emerged with remarkable consistency. Whether associate deans described their work as energising or exhausting, empowering or discouraging was shaped significantly by the leadership environment created by the dean or provost to whom they reported.

Associate deans who thrived described supervisors who clarified expectations, communicated regularly, welcomed disagreement and delegated authority, not simply tasks. The associate deans knew which decisions they could make independently, when consultation was expected and when their supervisor would step in. One participant captured the relationship in five words: “My dean had my back.”

Importantly, these supervisors were not undemanding. They challenged their associate deans, disagreed with them and expected a great deal from them. But they paired accountability with authority, challenge with support and delegation with trust.

The experiences of associate deans who struggled revealed the inverse. The most corrosive condition was responsibility without authority. Associate deans were expected to solve problems, manage conflict, oversee programmes and deliver institutional priorities without always having the information, decision-making authority or visible backing required to do so. Some described faculty bypassing them and appealing directly to the dean. Others watched decisions stall because nearly every significant issue required approval from above. Information arrived late. Priorities shifted unexpectedly. Conflict resolution was delegated downward while authority remained concentrated upward.

These scenarios are not the result of a leadership development problem. No amount of executive coaching can compensate for a role designed in such a way that its incumbents are accountable for outcomes they cannot fully control.

About halfway through the interviews, then, I realised that I was no longer simply studying associate deans. I was studying the systems surrounding leaders.

Who helps a new leader understand where their authority begins and ends? Who gives them room to make consequential decisions? Who ensures that others recognise their authority? Who shares the institutional knowledge necessary to navigate complicated problems? Who provides candid feedback when they get something wrong? And who stands beside them when a difficult but necessary decision generates resistance?

A leadership programme can prepare someone for those moments. It cannot create those conditions.

This distinction matters far beyond associate deans. Universities depend on department chairs, heads of school, programme directors, assistant and associate provosts and countless others who lead from the middle. This is where institutional strategy encounters organisational reality. The people occupying these roles translate priorities, manage competing expectations, resolve conflict and sustain relationships with faculty, staff and students.

Their effectiveness depends on their capabilities. But it also depends on whether the institution allows those capabilities to be exercised. And that suggests universities should reconsider how they evaluate senior leadership.

As well as judging deans, provosts and other senior leaders by what they themselves accomplish, we should also ask what happens during their tenure to the leadership capacity of the people beneath them in the hierarchy. Do they become more confident and capable of leading because of the supervision they received? Do they develop better judgement? Do they gain meaningful authority and institutional knowledge? Are they trusted with increasingly consequential decisions?

Such things are not as straightforwardly measured as budgets balanced, programmes launched, strategies implemented, funds raised and crises navigated. But that does not make them any less important, and it is surely not beyond the wit of academia to devise a way to take them judiciously into account.

The depletion of an institution’s future leadership capacity is too high a price to pay for impressive short-term results driven by one individual, however talented, who hoards power.

Besides, institutional success rarely works that way. Universities facing financial pressure, political scrutiny, demographic change and declining trust cannot afford to think about leadership as a succession of talented individuals moving through increasingly senior positions. They need leadership capacity distributed throughout the institution.

The question we should ask of senior leaders, then, should not simply be “What did you accomplish?” We should also ask: “Who became more capable of leading because you were here?”

Vicki L. Baker is associate dean for strategic partnerships and innovation, E. Maynard Aris endowed professor in economics and management and chair of the economics and management department at Albion College, Michigan.