A longtime fund raiser at a small liberal-arts college recounted the following forlorn story: He traveled frequently with the university’s president. They were on one such trip when, out of the blue, the older gentleman — who had been a dean, a provost, or a president for almost half of his life — remarked that the development officer was “really my only friend.”
In this series, David D. Perlmutter writes about pursuing a career in academic administration and about surviving and thriving as a leader:
That president has since passed away (which is why I feel I can share the comment). But the situation is not an anomaly. “It’s lonely at the top” is a commonplace in many industries, and higher ed is no exception. Often as you ascend the administrative ladder, the increasing isolation you experience goes unexpressed, except in rare private moments like the one I described.
Which raises multiple questions for current and future leaders:
- Can you actually make friends and maintain those relationships as you move up the ranks on a campus?
- Are they real friendships — in a mutually supportive, altruistic way — like the ones you formed in graduate school or in your department as a faculty member?
- Or is it, instead, more realistic to classify a leader’s “friends” as temporary work allies at best or, at worst, as sycophants, climbers-on, minions, and stepping stones in your career climb?
In short, is it just the nature of the job that the friendships you make as a senior leader are going to be different from the ones you forged as a faculty or staff member? I’m going to offer some answers to those questions in this month’s Admin 101 column, which has focused lately on administrator anxiety, and all of the stresses of the work that have so accelerated the turnover rate of higher-ed leaders in recent years.
Certainly, if you ask people — be they plumbers, accountants, or postdocs — to name what keeps them going at a tough job or in a toxic workplace, their answer will most often be: “my friends at work.” But I have never heard that said by administrators, whether they are chairs, deans, vice presidents, or otherwise. In fact, I’ve heard the reverse regularly. More than one leader has exclaimed they want to “quit the hot seat” to get away from troublesome and irksome humans.
So do we have a major friend gap in academic administration? Can we do anything about it? And should we? The issue is sufficiently complicated that I will devote this column to outlining the problems, and a follow-up to offering practical, hopeful, and politically astute solutions.
Let’s start with the major challenges and misperceptions that affect the quality and quantity of friends you make in campus administration.
Wary of people’s motives, you resist making friends on the job. The common assumption about what happens to administrators who step down or are forced out: Their phones stop ringing. They had numerous campus acquaintances — some of whom they socialized with and believed to be genuine friends — but most went silent as soon as the leader no longer held a position of power. The former administrator was no longer useful to these so-called friends, so they gave up the pretense of friendship.
The “dead phone” narrative — even if it is not universally true, is exaggerated, or is influenced by extenuating circumstances — nonetheless affects many administrators on the job. It’s in the back of your mind when you interact with people and can foster a sense of wariness regarding friendships. You begin to question whether a friendly individual is being authentic or merely seeking access to influence.
Plenty of administrators shake off or hide friendships with lower-ranked administrators or with faculty members out of fear that it might “look bad.”
One reason that some administrators refrain from forming friendships at work is because they see potential comrades as insincere and doubt the relationships will endure beyond the leader’s tenure in authority. The “dead phone” narrative becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You limit your work friendships because you’ve been burned by opportunists. Workplace friendships can be a comfort or a liability — it all depends on your own ethics and those of your “friends.”
A case in point: The head of a science department at a big state university related how he had come up through the faculty ranks and earned full professor before becoming chair. Over the decades in the department he had developed close friendships, most of which continued after he became chair because both parties had the integrity not to let their friendship affect (or be affected by) his new role as chair. They did not expect to be treated differently just because he was now in charge of, say, allocating research assistants and curriculum scheduling. One friend, however, viewed a pal being in a position of power as a personal windfall and took great offense when his increasingly out-of-line requests for money and perks were rejected by the chair.
The friendship ended. The professional relationship deteriorated as well with the chair’s now former friend — who himself felt betrayed — leading the “disloyal opposition.”
Again, this is not a universal condition, but it happens often enough to make some administrators wary of creating new friendships and uneasy about how to maintain their pre-existing ones.
Maybe you’re the “baddie” who has abused work friends. So far, I’ve described situations in which the honest administrator is our hero, let down by false friends. But of course, the reverse scenario is just as possible.
Academe is rife with stories of administrators who treat people as useful allies and minions more than as colleagues — a chair who pressures friends in the department to “vote my way” on a contentious issue, a dean who lines up friends as allies against the pet project of another dean, a provost who pressures “old buddies” to speak up for the leader at the faculty senate.
Such scenarios are clearly problematic. Lower-level administrators who serve at the pleasure of a bully may feel that it’s part of the job to follow orders, over their better judgment. Faculty members are independent actors and agents, and can’t be ordered to take stands, but they certainly might be manipulated with threats of program cuts or tenure denial.
It should go without saying but you should never pressure friends to do anything that you wouldn’t want to be asked to do in their position. Don’t put them in situations in which they feel forced to choose between your friendship and their own personal integrity. If you use a relationship to gain political favors, then you can’t expect anyone to necessarily think of you as a true friend.
You brush off a potential friendship because of how it might look. A dean I know at a community college discovered that she shared a hobby with one of her staff members. They started going to lunch regularly to chat about it, and even traveled together to a national convention for the hobby. Their interactions were entirely unrelated to their day jobs. However, the staff member ended up backing out of any future engagements, and the friendship, because she was getting continual comments from her coworkers about “kissing up” to the boss.
I’ve written before about the importance of brand image and reputation as an administrator. Part of the job is to uphold the appearance of propriety, not just to practice it. Plenty of administrators shake off or hide friendships with lower-ranked administrators or with faculty members out of fear that it might “look bad.” I know of administrators who go to great lengths to downplay their internal friendships, and won’t even be seen having lunch together near the campus.
Good workplace friends don’t have to be toadies or co-conspirators.
That might seem extreme until you’re accused of favoring somebody on the campus because of a personal connection. Even if it’s not true, the perception that you help your friends can hurt you politically. Just the possibility of that happening makes many administrators shy away from pursuing workplace friendships.
It’s also damaging to be perceived as a “friendless” leader. All of the factors I’ve outlined so far can make administration an isolating gig. If you lack the normal bonds of human kinship, not only can your morale as an administrator sink, but that can also hurt your professional performance and institutional outcomes. My father, who was a professor of business management for some 50 years, actually discussed this with some company executives who had been invited to our house when I was still a teenager. They agreed that a leader without real friends on the job was working at diminished capacity and potentially flying blind.
Good workplace friends don’t have to be toadies or co-conspirators. They could be the ones who will tell you when you’re screwing up, going too far, or doing something that is just not working — preferably in private. Now that’s a true pal.
The “friend gap” in higher-education administrative culture is real. It doesn’t manifest itself the same way for everyone, everywhere. But it is common enough and serious enough to be one of the contributors to leadership turnover. Next month, I will offer some practical (and I hope politically aware and feasible) suggestions to embrace the value and joy of having friends while administrating.
