Outside Chance for Insiders

A CHRONICLE SURVEY: WHAT PRESIDENTS THINK

Unlike most leading businesses, colleges favor external candidates for their top jobs

For all the talk about how higher education is becoming more like business, some of the most admired attributes of corporate culture are not catching on within the academy.

Studies consistently show that the most successful companies hire their chief executives from within and that they spend a lot of money and energy grooming senior-level officials to fill those corner offices. Most colleges don’t do much of either.

Fewer than one out of five current presidents — about 19 percent of respondents in the Chronicle survey — were selected for their presidency from a post at their own institution.

What’s more, barely 41 percent of the respondents said they felt “very well prepared” for their first presidency — a feeling that came through even more clearly in some of the comments offered anonymously by presidents. “Based on current events and my consulting, we are probably not preparing individuals well enough for the presidency, and we should probably do a better job in linking individuals to the right presidency,” said one male president of a bachelor’s-level religious college.

Higher education’s greatest failing “is the failure to grow the potential leadership from within the institution,” acknowledges Richard T. Ingram, president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, an organization for trustees.

“We do a terrible job preparing presidents to be presidents,” he adds. “We really ought to be ashamed of ourselves.”

Colleges could learn from some studies of the nation’s top companies, he and others say.

This year Hewitt Associates, a personnel-consulting company, looked at leadership-development practices of 373 major public and private companies and found that 85 percent of the 20 most successful companies had promoted their current chief executive from within. For the 353 others it looked at, the figure was 68 percent. The top companies, which included 3M and Johnson & Johnson, were also distinctive for the ways they groomed their best talent, with higher compensation, special training, and exposure to senior leadership.

Similarly, Jim Collins, a management consultant who writes and lectures on the factors that make companies and other organizations go from “good to great,” and whose work is gaining currency outside of industry circles, says his studies have repeatedly found that great companies are those that have an insider at the top.

Institutions, whether for-profit or nonprofit, become great when the best people are in the jobs for which they are best suited, he argues. And an insider “knows who the best people in the institution are.”

The Chronicle’s survey also found that “insider presidents” tended to serve longer. Over all, the percentage of presidents in the survey who had been in their jobs for more than 10 years was 27 percent; for presidents chosen from the inside, the percentage was 37 percent. Such longevity can bring stability to an institution, although, as several experts note, it alone may not be a perfect measure of success.

Mary Patterson McPherson, vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and formerly president of Bryn Mawr College for 19 years, says hiring from the outside is often the right choice for an institution. “A lot of places need the refreshment,” she says.

But Ms. McPherson, who herself was an inside president, says too many institutions overlook talent within their ranks.

Blame It on the Search?

So why are colleges so reluctant to hire from within? Many observers cite the psychology of selection.

“The search for a president is a search for iconic prestige,” says Richard P. Chait, a professor of higher education at Harvard University. All too often, he says, institutions of higher education think they have to “marry up the ladder” by recruiting a leader from a higher-ranked institution to be considered successful. “It’s our version of a reality-TV show.”

Trustees may share responsibility for that. Boards “can be easily dazzled,” says Ms. McPherson.

And sometimes, says Mr. Ingram, search consultants add to the pressure to choose an outsider by warning boards not to appear too accommodating to internal candidates because that could scare off others who need to be convinced that a search is “not wired.”

Shelly Weiss Storbeck, an executive recruiter at A.T. Kearney, says it’s not the boards who tend to oppose internal candidates. Often, she says, they “would love to have somebody they know.”

But internal candidates are often at a disadvantage because faculty members and administrators from within the institution who serve on the search committee reject them before they reach the finalist stage. Shared governance is a treasured feature of higher education, Ms. Storbeck notes, but an internal candidate who has worked under such a system “has 20 years of decision making to have aggravated people with.”

John D. Wiley, who was named to the top post at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2000 after first serving as associate dean in engineering, dean of the graduate school, and then provost, says it is true that internal candidates must overcome some baggage to get the top job.

But he says that in his case, which was not necessarily typical, he had a chance to work closely with board members in his other jobs before they named him chancellor. “I think it helped,” he says. That familiarity has also helped him keep the confidence of the board during some difficult periods of his presidency, he says.

Yet Mr. Wiley says he recognizes that an outsider will sometimes have an easier time making changes. Internal presidents have longtime, trusted colleagues, he says, and “if they tell you it can’t be done, it takes a lot of nerve to just order them to do it anyway.”

Wanted: More Mentoring

The problem of better preparing people for college presidencies continues to loom large. Ms. McPherson, of Mellon, says that when she was at Bryn Mawr, she made a point of training others there for leadership posts, and many went on to presidencies elsewhere. But she worries that other institutions don’t do enough of that. She also encourages new presidents to find fellow presidents to be mentors, as she did.

To help meet that need, the American Council on Education is considering creating a “mentor phone bank” that presidents could use to get confidential advice. The governing boards’ association has also just convened a group, headed by a former Virginia governor, Gerald L. Baliles, which will spend the next year looking at ways for boards to provide more support for their presidents.

The preparation issue is particularly acute for higher education, says Mr. Wiley, because so many college leaders land in their jobs almost accidentally, as he did, after working for years as scholars and teachers. “I don’t think any kid wakes up at age eight and says, Gee, I want to be an academic administrator.”

http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 52, Issue 11, Page A28