Getting Up to Speed as a New President

Running a college has become one of the most challenging leadership jobs in the country, and it’s only getting tougher. The people who take it on have typically spent a lifetime in academe, and yet many find themselves unprepared for the job’s complexity and its demands.

Aspiring leaders, and the boards of trustees that hire them, want to know, how can candidates prepare? And how can new leaders master the steep learning curve and navigate the decisions that can make or break their tenures?

Idea Lab: New Presidents

Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz

The top job has grown more demanding. Several college leaders offer their experience-based advice.

Today’s new presidents face greater pressures than their predecessors from the very first day. Funding and enrollment challenges have helped make the job tougher, and the rise of social media has both increased presidential headaches and provided a megaphone for their critics. “Now, success is not enough,” says Stanley C. Preczewski, president of Georgia Gwinnett College. “You have to thrive.”

As daunting as that task may sound, presidents who are new to the job do have help. Many higher-education organizations offer programs designed to teach rising administrators how to prepare for top office. Other programs provide training for fledgling presidents to help them turn their first year or two in office into a success. Some focus on leaders of a specific type of institution, such as community colleges. Others cut across all types of institutions. Many new presidents will have participated in several different programs by their third year on the job.

Speaking to the people who run those presidential-development programs, as well as those who’ve been through them, teased out some shared threads in what they have to impart to trainees:

They need to consider whether they should be presidents in the first place.

President is the top job in academe, but it’s not for everyone. Administrators who excel in their work as provosts or deans may not be compatible with juggling the president’s myriad duties, challenges, and public roles. While some presidential-development programs are designed to groom administrators for higher office, others ask potential candidates to weigh their own readiness, and what they really want — for their own good, and for the good of the institutions they might serve.

About a decade ago, the leaders of the Council of Independent Colleges noticed that some of the presidents who had passed through its programs for new leaders had flamed out within a few years. That observation led to the Presidential Vocation and Institutional Mission seminar, which is designed to ensure that administrators from member colleges get an opportunity to think hard about whether they are truly ready for a presidency, and, if so, what kind of institution might be a good match. “There is no generic set of skills that makes you a good president in every setting,” says Richard Ekman, president of the organization. “Being a successful president is very much a matter of fit between the individual and the institution.”

Marion A. Terenzio was the vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty at Bloomfield College, in New Jersey, and wasn’t sure she wanted to be a president until the seminar “threw me for a loop, wonderfully.” The readings and discussions allowed her to see that being a college president meant managing a complex academic organization, but it also meant being “a spiritual leader, though not in a religious way,” she says. “Not just through words, but your actions, your demeanor, setting the tone of the culture.” The idea of the job as a vocation inspired her. She became president of the State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill in 2015.

Jeffery Aper took a different message from the seminar. The program, which he attended as Blackburn College’s provost about 10 years ago, helped crystalize for him that ultimately he wasn’t interested in a presidency. Presidents now spend so much time on external relations, and his own thinking has always tended to focus on student learning and development, and on working with the faculty: “That seems like what really clicks for me.” He is now provost at Millikin University.

Aspiring presidents shouldn’t aspire to be the president of just any college, according to Walter M. Kimbrough, president of Dillard University and a graduate of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ Millennium Leadership Initiative. A would-be president who takes the first job offer that comes along without carefully considering the fit between leader and institution may be derailing his or her career before it gets started.

“I’ve seen people with a community-college background go to a small, private, residential liberal-arts institution and not want to be around after 5 o’clock or on the weekends,” Mr. Kimbrough says. “You can’t do that at a place where people say, ‘We need you to come to these events.’ That’s a bad fit for you.”

They need to know about everything.

In addition to worrying about the academic enterprise, enrollment, facilities, and other established cornerstones, today’s presidents must raise more money, and keep an eye on volatile social media. Even talented senior administrators don’t know all the things they don’t know about the top job, according to Mr. Preczewski of Georgia Gwinnett, a graduate of the Harvard Seminar for New Presidents and the American Council on Education’s ACE Fellows Program. “You cannot possibly be prepared enough to be a president these days,” he says.

Many presidential-development programs brief participants on the range of issues they’ll need to tackle but focus on giving them a grounding in a few critical areas — particularly dealing with money and dealing with boards.

Institutional finance is, in some ways, a familiar subject for new presidents, many of whom have experience running a unit of a college. “The good news is that most of these folks have had budgets,” says Kent J. Chabotar, president emeritus of Guilford College and an instructor on finance at the Harvard seminar for more than 25 years. But most fledgling presidents aren’t well versed in all aspects of college revenues and expenditures. Big-dollar fund raising, in particular, is a new experience for many. “Some folks know exactly what a capital campaign is, they know what a feasibility study is, they know how to set the goal,” Mr. Chabotar says. “Other people are just clueless.”

It is especially important for new presidents to get off on the right foot with boards. ACE surveys participants in its Institute for New Presidents about topics of particular interest to them, and while some mention external relations or strategic planning, “all of them will talk about working with boards,” says Lynn M. Gangone, vice president for leadership programs at ACE. “Until you’re in that president’s seat, you really don’t know what it’s like to work directly with a board of trustees, and how to manage those relationships.”

Logan Hampton, president of Lane College, credits the CIC’s New Presidents Program for revolutionizing his relationship with the board of trustees at his institution. Mr. Hampton says that his first board meetings after he took office, in 2014, were straightforward affairs where he provided the information that he knew the board expected and little else. After he attended the two-day academy, he says, he came back better prepared to engage the board on big-picture ideas at each meeting. “It’s a much different conversation now,” he says. “It’s more strategic, it’s much more future-focused.”

As important as finances and board relations are, a handful of sessions on a few key topics can’t fully prepare a new or aspiring president. At the CIC’s program, the focus is on “those things that the new president needs to know right away,” says Mr. Ekman. “If you screw up on dealing with the staff you inherited, or if you make a disastrous decision about enrollment strategy, that doesn’t go away in six months.”

But there aren’t many aspects of running a college that a new president can afford not to worry about, Mr. Preczewski says, “because the one you don’t worry about is the one that’s going to grab you like an alligator and pull you under.”

They need to get hands-on.

Presidents, like the students whose educations they oversee, often learn best when their learning is more interactive. Most presidential-development programs not only introduce leaders to the many challenges of the office, they try to get them some experience handling those challenges — if sometimes only on paper.

The ACE Fellows program offers perhaps the most extensive hands-on experience of any presidential-development program. In addition to the briefings and discussions about finance and governance over the course of a year, participants are assigned to shadow the leadership at another institution, so that they can be in the room as a president meets challenges and makes decisions.

The experience can take participants far beyond the executive suite. Mr. Preczewski spent part of his ACE Fellows year embedded at Wake Forest University, where he did a midnight ride-along with campus police and even helped replace a broken toilet. “If you’re paying $50,000 a year, you expect the toilet to work,” he says.

Hypothetical exercises can benefit new presidents as well. On the first day of the Harvard seminar, participants take part in an “in-basket exercise,” according to Mr. Chabotar, an instructor. They are given letters, memos, and phone calls that represent the types of issues a president fields, and then are asked to decide how to respond. A participant might get a phone message from an unfamiliar person, with no title or other information attached, only to discover that the caller is the hypothetical college’s largest donor. One email might be about a Title IX issue, while a letter might complain about the performance of a top administrator. “Do you fob it off to somebody else, or do you do it yourself? And if you do it yourself, what’s your message?” Mr. Chabotar says. “There’s no answer sheet for these things.”

Ms. Terenzio, of SUNY-Cobleskill, says that she’s glad that one of the exercises at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ New Presidents Academy involved making a 100-day plan and a 500-day plan for her new presidency. It gave her a template for how she would start to share her vision for the campus in her first months, while she was still absorbing the campus community’s own vision for itself. “I have gone back to my AASCU notes at least 10 times in the last 18 months,” she says.

They need to know other presidents.

Past participants cite many benefits of presidential-development programs, but none more often than the chance to meet and connect with other leaders. “The greatest asset of all those different programs was connecting with some peers who could be sounding boards,” says Kevin F.F. Quigley, president of Marlboro College and a veteran of CIC’s New Presidents Program and several regional programs for new college leaders. He found getting a chance to talk to other presidents about the challenges they face “really incredibly important,” he says — more so than the actual content of many of the sessions, he adds.

The connections made between presidents new and established outlast the programs that forge them. Mr. Hampton says that he has gained a number of unofficial mentors through the programs he’s attended, in addition to the official mentors assigned by program organizers. And the conversations between leaders continue, at conferences and online. “Each of those programs that are specifically for presidents, they have a very active Listserv,” says Mr. Quigley. “If you’re stumped with an issue, you can get some great advice about best practices or resources, and that’s extremely helpful.”

While collaboration with a solid senior-leadership team is critical to any president’s success, presidents are “in a position where they are the only person at that position” at an institution, says Judith B. McLaughlin, educational chair of the Harvard Seminar for New Presidents. When new presidents come together for the seminar, “There is an understanding of the commonality and complexity of the role,” she says. “They come in as individuals and leave as a group of colleagues and peers, and that’s huge for people.”

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.