(College Planning and Management, April 2012 - by Scott D. Miller and Marylouise Fennell)
Inevitable and accelerating change places a
premium on proactive leaders in higher education. Such executives anticipate change
and lead effectively by planning strategically and articulating a convincing vision for the future.
Persuasion has been defined as motivating people to do what they know
they need to do, but do not always want to do. Transformational leaders not only articulate a
compelling, bold and proactive vision; they also persuasively advocate for
needed change while honoring institutional values.
“Having a clear set of
values and being true to them is more complicated than it looks,” says Andrew
Wicks, professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden
School of Business. In summer 2004, in
clear violation of the corporation’s privacy policy, Yahoo divulged the name of
a Chinese internet user, poet and journalist Shi Tao. He was placed on trial and sentenced to ten
years in prison. Yahoo “was assailed with fierce public and global criticism,”
Wick notes. “The lesson: Yahoo got into trouble not because it took time to
think about what its values were, but because it didn’t live up to its values
in a defining moment for the company.”
In her book Mothers of Invention, historian
Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University, notes that despite its
inevitability, “change is frightening” to most people. Yet transformative
presidents must be active agents of change on their campuses. The challenge, then, as Faust puts it, is to
“lead people along this path” despite their
misgivings.
“I’ve found if you tell people that in order
to have the things they most want and that most matter to them, they have to
change certain other things…that makes those changes seem not just desirable,
but imperative,” Faust notes.
Acclaimed American architect and urban
planner Daniel Hudson Burnham, who designed the Flatiron Building and Union
Station and played a leading role in creating master plans for both Chicago and
Washington, DC, exhorted his contemporaries to “Make no little plans, for they
have no power to stir the soul.”
Bold plans, however, may sometimes require
the courage to downsize, cut or consolidate course offerings and programs. Writing in the January 2011 McKinsey
Quarterly, authors Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt and Sven Smit emphasize, “Ultimately,
strategy is a way of thinking, not a procedural exercise or a set of
frameworks.” To stimulate that thinking
and the dialogue that goes along with it, McKinsey’s firm has developed a set
of tests aimed at helping executives assess the strength of their strategies.
Test 1: Will your strategy
beat the market?
Test 2: Does your strategy
tap a true source of advantage?
Test 3: Is your strategy
granular about where to compete?
Test 4: Does your strategy put
you ahead of trends?
Test 5: Does your strategy
rest on privileged insights?
Test 6: Does your strategy
embrace uncertainty?
Test 7: Does your strategy
balance commitment and flexibility?
Test 8: Is your strategy
contaminated by bias?
Test 9: Is there conviction to act on your strategy?
Test 10: Have you translated
your strategy into an action plan?
On
the final point, we strongly recommend that presidents commission an objective,
independent, comprehensive institutional review to inform long-term master plans. A team widely experienced in higher education
and not having any present association with the college or university should
review its general condition and provide a completely objective assessment that
includes relevant issues, a tentative
agenda for the immediate future and specific and realistic expectations,
followed by a public report on the
results.
# # #
Dr. Scott D. Miller is
President of the College and M.M. Cochran Professor of Leadership Studies at
Bethany College in West Virginia. Now in his third college presidency, he
has served as a CEO for 22 years.
Dr. Marylouise Fennell, RSM, a former president of Carlow
University in Pittsburgh, PA, is senior counsel for the Council of Independent
Colleges (CIC) and a partner
in Hyatt-Fennell an executive search firm.
They have collaborated on
eight books, including “President to President: Views on Technology in
Higher Education” (2010) and “Presidential Perspectives: Economics Prosperity
in the Next Decade” (2011.) Both serve as consultants to college
presidents and boards.
