What I’m Reading: ‘The End of Leadership’

Thinking on academic leadership is often dominated by the leader-centric approach: what makes a good or a bad leader, and how to teach the leadership craft. In her book The End of Leadership, Barbara Kellerman offers a critique of the leadership industry and concludes that as a result of the cultural and technological changes of the last 40 years, the balance of power has shifted decisively from leaders to followers. As followers become stronger, they “feel entitled to pry into their leaders’ lives — and to hold them accountable for what they do.”

If leadership is indeed an equilateral triangle made up of leaders, followers, and context, then the decline in shared governance at institutions of higher education, the surge in adjunct-faculty employment, and the changing landscape of education-delivery methods compel academic leadership to look for adaptive models for academic participation of faculty and staff members.

In a dean’s office we are not looking merely to deliver on enrollment and fund-raising targets. A robust leadership model at a school level needs to secure the buy-in of “the followership” by giving a voice to young faculty under pressure of tenure review and encouraging senior faculty to participate in the decision-making process and in the development of the long-term institutional strategy.