Are good leaders born or made? Is it nature or nurture? That’s a particularly important question for higher education, given that most campus administrators are promoted from within and take office with little or no leadership training or experience.
Some people do seem to be born with innate abilities or traits — empathy, organizational skills, public-speaking prowess — that serve them well in leadership roles. Yet all of us possess those qualities to some degree, and with a little hard work we can usually improve in the areas in which we’re deficient. In fact, effective leadership requires such steady improvement. We don’t have any control over which talents we were born with, but we can certainly develop them and cultivate new ones — and we shouldn’t have to do it alone.
Unfortunately, would-be administrators in higher education don’t have easy access to management training. So leadership-development experts often find themselves helping people to acquire the skills they need after they’ve already joined the administrative ranks — in some cases, years after.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Institutions should be far more proactive, offering training opportunities early in people’s administrative careers or even while they’re still exploring that path. I’ve been on both sides of that exchange, as a former campus administrator and now as a leadership-training consultant with the Academy for Advancing Leadership. As N. Karl Haden, the academy’s president, and I wrote in our 2015 book, The 9 Virtues of Exceptional Leaders, “Everyone has leadership potential.”
Institutions can develop that potential in three ways: by sending people off campus for training, by bringing outside experts to the campus, or by organizing it in-house. As someone who has been involved in all three as both a participant and a facilitator, I’d like to explore the pros and cons of each. My purpose is not to promote one model over the others, but rather to help you better understand all of the options so you can decide which one is best for your institution.
Option No. 1: Off-site training. This usually involves sending people “off-site” — literally or virtually — for three to five days, where they mingle with peers from across the country and attend a series of workshops. Many of those programs, often marketed by for-profit companies using a proprietary curriculum, are generally of very high quality. Turns out there are advantages to having professional development as your full-time business: notably, the time and resources you can devote to creating the best possible experience for attendees.
Having worked for one such company myself, as both a curriculum designer and a workshop facilitator, I can attest that the expectations are high, the quality controls stringent. That’s why the programs are so good. I was also involved in off-site programs as a participant, back when I was an administrator and learned a tremendous amount about leadership.
The agenda at these multi-day programs typically includes some sort of leadership assessment for each participant. Multiple workshops touch on work-related topics (communication, conflict resolution, change management, faculty and staff evaluation) and on how to cultivate leadership qualities such as trustworthiness, courage, and integrity. In addition, there are usually team-building exercises, group discussions, and other opportunities for participants to bond.
Manya Whitaker, an associate professor and department chair of education at Colorado College, recently wrote in The Chronicle about attending (in her case, virtually) a similar “boot camp” for department chairs. She admitted she was skeptical of these programs: “I receive email solicitations promoting all kinds of professional-development workshops. To be honest, they always felt like a hoax to me. For $4,000, I would get the pleasure of sitting in a room full of strangers, while someone with no familiarity with my institution told me how to lead my department.” But she ended up a convert, she wrote, after completing “a four-week, virtual boot camp for department chairs that, to my surprise, proved highly useful.”
Besides the quality of instruction, these programs offer other advantages for in-person participants, including the opportunity to spend several days in a new city (when pandemic restrictions allow), meet new people at a similar point in their careers as you, and cultivate friendships that may last a lifetime. As I wrote several years ago in an essay on becoming a department chair, once you step onto the first rung of the administrative ladder, you need to find a new set of friends — a new support system. The folks you get to know at a leadership-development program can certainly fill that role.
The biggest drawback? Cost. Typically, off-site programs can cost $3,000 to $5,000 a person for a four- or five-day program. That fee usually doesn’t include each participant’s travel, meal, and lodging expenses. As a practical matter, that means an institution can afford to send only a limited number of people — and the holders of the purse strings might not be willing to invest at all in a faculty member who is only thinking about moving into administration.
Option No. 2: Hire outside experts to do on-campus training. Here, a college contracts with an expert to work with a group of administrators on the campus. This option can be fairly expensive, too — perhaps $10,000 or more for four or five days of training — but the advantage is that the institution can enroll as many people as it wants. (Typically, that is a point of negotiation with the provider: $X for a certain number of participants, plus $Y for each additional one.)
The three main advantages:
- People on your leadership team can be trained together using a consistent approach.
- Administrators from various disciplines or areas of the college can benefit from one another’s experiences, in addition to becoming good friends.
- The group can also include aspiring leaders, such as faculty and staff members looking to move up.
The biggest disadvantage of on-campus training is that participants don’t get to meet and exchange ideas with a wide range of people from other institutions. That is offset to some degree by the outside facilitators but there’s not as many new faces and perspectives as there would be in an off-campus setting.
And of course staying on the campus is just not quite as much fun as going to Denver, Chicago, or San Francisco for a week. But there’s no question it’s a viable, comparatively cost-effective solution.
Option No. 3: Do it yourself. Not surprisingly, this is the most affordable option — an important criteria in times of budget cuts. The college designs and implements the entire program in-house, using its own people working as volunteers or perhaps in exchange for release time or some other form of compensation. After all, every institution has its own “experts,” those who have been in leadership roles for many years and have learned (the hard way) how to navigate the system. Some institutions even have their own leadership-training professionals in the human-resources or faculty-development offices.
One potential obstacle is that internal experts might not have as much cachet as the external kind. A few years ago, when I was at another institution running an Option. No. 2 program, my host introduced me as a “leadership expert.” During a break, I told her that I didn’t really consider myself an expert. “Where I come from,” she replied, “an expert is anyone who lives more than 50 miles away and carries a briefcase.” I had only a messenger bag, but I guess that qualified.
The key to offering fruitful DIY. training is to use a team, not just one person. I recently had the opportunity to create a program for my college aimed specifically at faculty members looking to move into administration. We called it the “FELOs Program,” or Faculty Exploring Leadership Opportunities — a name I brazenly plagiarized from a similar program I had the pleasure to be involved with a few years ago at Marquette University.
One of the first things I did was identify experts from across the institution who could speak authoritatively on management skills such as budgeting or faculty evaluation. I also put together panels of current department chairs and other administrators on our campus to candidly discuss issues like diversity and answer faculty questions about moving up the ranks. Based on the program evaluations, I would say participants got more out of those panel discussions than anything else we did.
One thing I didn’t do, but might if I’m asked to lead such an effort again, is to see if I can identify someone at our college who is certified to administer a leadership-assessment tool such as DISC (which stands for four personality types: dominance, influence, steadiness, conscientiousness). That’s one of the advantages that consultants bring to the table: They typically have people who do that sort of testing. And if no one is available in-house, it would be worth it to find the money to hire someone for that purpose. Gaining a deeper understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses as a leader is often the first step on the road to improvement.
Because, of course, these three options are not mutually exclusive. You can send more experienced administrators “away” to a virtual or off-site program like the ones Manya Whitaker and I attended while at the same time developing your own in-house curriculum for new and aspiring administrators. Or you could staff a campus program mostly with home-grown talent while also bringing in paid guest speakers — say, a well-known leadership expert, a psychometrician to do individual leadership testing, or an author of a management book you’re asking participants to read.
But whether you outsource, contract, or DIY, you need to offer some sort of professional development — especially for the new and aspiring leaders. If you don’t, many will flounder, and you will probably see more turnover than is healthy for any institution. When you provide the necessary training and support, you are building a stockpile of locally sourced leaders who will serve your college, and higher education in general, for many years to come.
