Last winter, a commentary in The Chronicle on midlevel administrators in higher education asked some cogent and important questions. The authors — Pamela L. Eddy, Regina Garza Mitchell, and Marilyn J. Amey — acknowledged that the managers of financial aid, student affairs, IT infrastructure, and physical plants are the glue that holds our campus communities together. Why, then, they asked, do we pay so little attention to their professional development? Why do most institutions fail to build leadership pipelines that allow these professionals to broaden their experience and thus ascend to executive positions?
Their research on the subject continues; however, their tentative conclusion is that midlevel administrators do not see themselves on a ladder to advancement.
Depending on the market for their particular skills, these managers may negotiate for more favorable working conditions and/or higher pay. But mostly they do not pursue executive roles. The culture of their institutions simply does not encourage them to do so.
I found these insights troubling. I had been under the impression that in the past 20 years, colleges had begun to pay serious attention to leadership pipelines, that they embraced — albeit to a limited extent — the principles and practice of succession planning widely used in other organizations.
My introduction to the term and the meaning of “succession planning” occurred in the mid-1990s, after I had served for a decade in higher-education leadership roles. I joined a corporate board whose chief executive was approaching retirement age. Upon learning that the board envisioned a transition to another long-term insider, I rose in righteous (academic) indignation. Did the board not care about finding “the best person” for the job? Did my colleagues not appreciate the need to cast our recruiting net as widely and deeply as possible?
Fortunately for the enterprise we oversaw, my fellow trustees listened to me patiently, then proceeded with their plans. Two years later, we celebrated a smooth changing of the guard in the executive suite.
This experience motivated me to read the research literature on succession planning and also to understand why such planning was uncommon, indeed unwelcome, at academic institutions.
It was impossible to ignore the ironic contradictions. The theoretical frameworks and practical instruments (such as surveys) supporting succession planning were the handiwork of professors and graduate students at elite business schools and social-science departments. So academic researchers were earning recognition and lucrative contracts as succession-planning and succession-management consultants, while in academe itself, practice lagged well behind theory.
There were a few notable exceptions. Guilford Technical Community College, in North Carolina, made the news when the board chair and the college president together developed a succession plan after realizing, in 1996, that if the president left, there was no Plan B. For these leaders, the issue was not how to prepare for emergencies but how to protect the institution’s effectiveness and stability during future presidential transitions.
Starting around 2000, more and more nonprofit organizations began adapting corporate models of succession planning to their particular circumstances. In 2008 the Annie E. Casey Foundation reported on this trend for nonprofit organizations in general. The executive search firm Witt/Kieffer disseminated a similar report for higher-education institutions.
Writing in the The Chronicle in 2009, Dennis Barden, a senior vice president at Witt/Kieffer, noted that succession planning was taking hold in academe, but the transition to new ways of identifying and preparing future leaders was slow. Faculty members questioned whether the adaptation of corporate models was appropriate at all and compatible with academic traditions of shared governance. Succession planning was also difficult to reconcile with a culture that generally discourages ambitious people and doubts the value of full-time, long-term leaders/managers.
Since the publication of those reports, colleges have moved in a different direction from the nonprofit sector as a whole. Researchers at doctoral programs, specialized institutes, and professional associations designed a variety of leadership-development programs for academic administrators. Like the Fellows Program of the American Council on Education, the new programs accepted applicants from various professional backgrounds. Yet the primary emphasis was and remains on preparing future provosts and presidents.
I am now exploring connections between succession planning, as practiced at nonacademic institutions, and leadership development, as practiced at various levels within the academy.
Research indicates that leadership-development programs have helped individuals and institutions overcome traditional biases and fears associated with transitions from teacher/scholar roles to management roles. But it is less clear how much such programs alleviate anxieties about threats to traditions of academic shared governance.
The history of established programs, especially the ACE Fellows Program, also suggests that leadership-development experiences become stepping stones to external advancement opportunities rather than preparation for successor roles within the participants’ home institutions.
Whatever their value to higher education, leadership-development programs are not a substitute for or even an adaptation of succession planning. Pretending that they are just leads to confusion. Thus, for example, a recent project of ACE’s Institutional Capacity Initiative advocates for leadership preparation and succession planning at academic institutions. Gailda Pitre Davis, interim director of ACE leadership programs, explains in terms that are still less than familiar in academic circles. She writes that succession planning “is a process; it is leadership preparation; it is inclusive; it is intentional; it is forecasting.”
Succession planning is all of these things, yet it is quite different, in both process and desired outcomes, from the intrinsically worthy goal of developing “a diverse cadre of emerging leaders who will, in fact, change the face of higher education.”
Succession planning is an internal process involving choices over long periods of time. The choices may involve numerous potential successors who have been thoroughly tested and vetted or it may involve just one or two. The desired outcome is successors who will make a positive difference in their particular economic, social, or cultural environments.
Academic institutions, the incubators of ideas and practices that support succession planning, would benefit from doing more of what they are teaching other organizations to do.
A systematic approach to building leadership pipelines, including testing and vetting talented people at all levels within our institutions, will nurture strong performance and loyalty. It might also slow down the perennially revolving door, especially among sitting and aspiring college presidents, that undermines the stability and effectiveness of too many institutions.
Clara M. Lovett is president emerita of Northern Arizona University.
