As a university president for 16 years and a provost for nine, I witnessed time and again how the right leader can animate an academic program, financial office, athletic department, or medical center. In fact, I have never seen significant progress made in any part of a campus without a transformative leader. As the retired CEO and writer Lawrence A. Bossidy once said, “At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies.”
Yet you need strategies to find those talented senior administrators. I have long thought that hiring people better than myself was the key to good presidential leadership. But the task is anything but routine — it requires a lot of creative and unconventional strategies. Here are some that I’ve seen work:
- Modify the position. What if the right senior leader comes along but the person doesn’t quite fit the position you’ve advertised? Rather than lose the leader, alter the position to match the candidate.
- Give it everything you’ve got. Sometimes finding the best talent means going beyond what search committees or search firms can do and throwing yourself and all your energies into recruiting. That may mean extensive travel, going the second mile to find spousal employment, and brainstorming how the candidate might fit into a new community. In one instance, we spent a weekend persuading a candidate’s teenaged children to make a move.
- Pay attention to their dreams. Allow candidates to think expansively about the promise of a new role. Understand their hopes and dreams — and the ways they might be frustrated in their current positions. (And of course, once they’re hired, give them the appropriate autonomy and money to achieve their goals.)
- Break the conventions of the hiring process. That’s particularly the case when your top candidate is in a high-profile position at another campus. In several cases, I had to convince a search committee to “act sequentially” — meaning pursue a top candidate without requiring that person to “stand” publicly with other finalists, in order to protect the favored candidate’s confidentiality. The very best leaders most often will not publicly compete for a given position, which can only damage them if they are not selected. Sometimes as provost and president, I also had to debate long and hard (in one case, well past midnight!) with search committees to find agreement on the best candidate. Part of an executive’s role is to educate faculty committees on what it takes to be an effective leader. It is not the same as being the most highly acclaimed scholar or teacher.
- Hire for talent’s sake. Sometimes you just see such talent that you commit to hiring a person without a clear sense of exactly what they might do.
- Build long-term relationships. The best networking and recruiting happens over time. In one hire, I knew the top candidate for more than a decade before the right position came along.
- Be purposeful about diversity. At a time when competition for talented women and people of color has never been greater, active pursuit of talent is essential. All of these strategies I’ve listed here are especially important when diversifying the leadership of your institution.
- Develop in-house expertise. The search for talented leadership also means being an active talent developer on your own campus. Sometimes that means removing barriers that thwart the potential of an emerging leader. Pay attention if internal leaders come to you angry about a lack of respect and resources in their department or office. They may well be right and in helping you fix the inequity can show themselves to be leaders worth promoting internally.
- Empower faculty dreams. Sometimes the dreams of a single faculty member with a bold idea for a new program can become institutionally transformative. Take a chance on their vision. People with a passion for their field, and the drive to build a pool of similar academic talent, will end up benefiting the entire institution.
The trouble is, most leaders — despite what they profess — do not strive to hire people better than themselves. Instead they follow hiring conventions and seem content to fill senior positions with good, but not particularly transformative, leaders. In one unfortunate case I recall: A struggling vice president refused the advice of his peers to hire a splendid candidate who would have been a perfect complement to his own gifts. Within a year, that vice president was forced out.
Why do leaders fail to follow through on the promise of hiring superb talent? I see four distinct reasons.
The fear of talent. Some senior administrators are threatened by a top recruit’s talent, and surmise, without ever admitting it, that their own leadership would be jeopardized. This is possibly the most understandable reason, since bringing a major planet into any solar system affects all the gravitational forces. Yet my own experience is that leaders who are willing to surround themselves with talent — particularly when it complements their own gifts — actually enhance their own leadership potential.
Individual overconfidence. This is the reverse situation: Some leaders are so confident in their abilities that they think their own force field can power the entire organization. They don’t need to be surrounded by other strong and independent leaders — just people willing to carry out the energy directed their way. A top-down approach can be effective in the short run but fails to work in large and complex organizations, which flourish when leadership comes not just from the CEO’s office but from multiple points throughout the campus. Surrounding yourself with talent takes a blend of self-confidence and humility, knowing where your own strengths lie and where you need help. It requires a commitment to distributive authority.
Institutional inertia. A third reason for conventional hiring is implicit trust in the misguided notion that institutions are self-generating and succeed by their own momentum. Some of this belief stems from a lack of understanding of how organizations advance. They are not static — they are formed by people, some of whom make a huge difference in how the organization prospers. In addition, some administrators rely on conventional hiring because they don’t have firsthand experience in what inspirational leadership is or can do. They assume that the natural momentum of an organization is all that is needed. They have never witnessed the uplift that a gifted leader can offer.
Faith in the search process itself. A final reason that a quest for talent often falls short is that we place too much trust in the search process itself. Every college or university has established appropriate rules and conventions for hiring: Engage a search consultant, write positions descriptions, place advertisements, organize committees, review applications, schedule interviews. Great faith comes to be placed in the process itself: Follow the plan, and the right leader will emerge.
Searches do carry their own relentless momentum. No one — committee chair, committee members, search consultants — desires anything but a successful conclusion after all the effort that has been invested. No one wants the stigma of a “failed search.” And would a second round go any better?
Yet reflecting on my own experience, I wish at times that I’d had the courage at the end of the process to admit: We simply have not found the right leader.
Leadership in higher education today has never been more challenging. This volatility stems from a variety of sources: severe financial strains, complicated issues of faculty governance, racial tension, debates about free speech and inclusion, competitive enrollment pressures, and a social-media environment in which any incident can explode into a public-relations firestorm. All of these pressures have been compounded by the Covid-19 crisis and its aftermath.
We need exceptional leaders — ones who break the mold — to face the storms that are buffeting higher education today. Finding tomorrow’s leaders will require today’s presidents and provosts to hire people more gifted than themselves.
