Leadership from the RanksAUSTIN PEAY STATE UNIVERSITY

SPRING 2016 FACULTY LEADERSHIP PROGRAM

Faculty Leadership Program

Often leaders accomplish more from the ranks. They create networks, raise awareness, collaborate, harness vision, empower others, and mobilize people to bring about positive changes.

INTRODUCTION

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Change Is Coming

FACULTY LEADERSHIP PROGRAM

! President Hall oversaw a faculty-led over-haul of the university that supported student, fac-ulty, and institutional success in the face of un-precedented challenges.

! This achievement required a series of smaller changes for actualization. To create a budgetary surplus, the previous administration

had centralized decision-making and discour-aged faculty initiatives. Rather than accept a cam-pus culture in which academic managers de-ferred decisions to their superiors, President Hall cultivated an inclusive and collaborative strategy and pushed agency down through the ranks.

! But the latter required tactics.

TACTICAL OBJECTIVES

1. create networks2. raise awareness3. collaborate4. harness vision5. empower others6. mobilize champions

Strategy provides a map. Tactics enable you to use it.

Institutionally Prepared for Success

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! As Adrianna J. Kezar and Jaime Lester (2011) warn about the educational strategy itself, strategy without tactics can become “a purely intellectual exercise where change is discussed (vision devel-oped and consciousness raised) but not enacted” (p. 107). For each potential action, someone has to identify, organize, and mobilize the necessary change agents. Instead of leading, an administrator can manage changes by calling the key players and ordering spe-cific actions. Managerialism always plays a role, but by itself, it doesn’t foster an intrinsically motivated, proactive, or innovative organization. To achieve more than bureaucratic changes, leaders have to utilize the tactics of creating networks, raising awareness, collaborating, harnessing vision, empowering others, and mobiliz-ing champions (pp. 100-18).

! When President Hall and later Provost Denley arrived, many appreciated the inclusive and collaborative dialogue but waited for the two to solve problems managerially. Although some changes necessitated managerial expedition, the president and provost also created avenues for faculty agency.

! With the help of the Title III grant that funded the Center for Teaching and Learning, one-time federal stimulus funding, and the budgetary surplus inherited from the previous administration, Aca-demic Affairs provided incentives for faculty collaborations. Those collaborative opportunities opened channels for faculty network-ing. Equally importantly, they encouraged innovations, proactive attitudes, and collective problem-solving. Instead of reinforcing ex-isting practices, the resulting grants and programs asked their par-ticipants to push the limits. The president and provost utilized the Center for Teaching and Learning to broker changes in culture and practice, with diverse venues for faculty to develop new interpre-

tive frameworks while acquiring knowledge about forthcoming ini-tiatives.

! To change the campus culture, Academic Affairs facilitated diverse initiatives. With one-time funds, the provost provided fac-ulty with the start-up capital to spearhead their ideas.

! In April of 2013, Public Agenda visited Austin Peay to study the implementation of Degree Compass, only to shift its focus to the climate that so strikingly distinguishes Austin Peay from the other universities. The investigatory team discovered an enthusias-tic, collaborative culture that readily explores and supports innova-tive student-success efforts beyond comfortable, conventional prac-tices (Kadlec, Immerwahr, & Currie, 2013, p. 1).

! Public Agenda wasn’t the only external organization to iden-tify something special at Austin Peay. By Summer 2013, Austin Peay had made the Honor Roll for the second consecutive year in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Great Colleges to Work For,” in part for its collaborative governance, faculty and staff confidence in senior leadership, and its professional-development programs. In Fall 2013, President Hall was invited to testify before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions for the hear-ing on “Attaining a Quality Degree: Innovations to Improve Stu-dent Success.” In Summer 2014, even after the departure of both President Hall and Provost Denley, Austin Peay remained on Chronicle’s Honor Roll for “Great Colleges to Work For.” Austin Peay also continues to lead the TBR system in student-retention and -success efforts. Teams from other universities and colleges routinely visit under the pretense of investigating one campus inno-vation, only to want to learn more about the others before leaving.

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! Within this context, the Faculty Leadership Program (FLP) fosters campus interactions that can lead to student, faculty, and institutional success. Unlike other universities’ leadership-development opportunities, the FLP doesn’t cater to administra-tors. It doesn’t support “leadership” as an official position. Nor does it promote campus success as a managerial responsibility.

! Instead, the FLP promotes leadership from the ranks. Kezar (2001) reminds us that anyone, regardless of position, can serve as a change agent (p. 7). Through wide and deep personal networks, any individual can draw from diverse resources and knowledge to solve problems and develop campus innovations (Eddy, 2010, p. 29). At very least, a person can serve as a “node to connect dispa-rate networks” (p. 64) in problem-solving and innovation.

! Wide and deep personal networks expand personal aware-ness and influence. Diverse relationships enhance a person’s “cog-nitive flexibility” in an academically and operationally complex en-vironment (p. 30). Close relationships improve that person’s influ-ence in leveraging changes. A campus of change agents has the power to transform and strengthen the university, but it demands heightened faculty awareness and interconnectivity.

! The FLP is not leadership training. It doesn’t deposit leader-ship knowledge in its participants. On the contrary, the FLP is an opportunity for self-development.

! However, certain programmatic features structurally facilitate campus awareness and interconnectivity. An array of staff, faculty, and administrators will share their insights on a variety of different topics, most notably during participants’ shadowing experiences. Each participant will spend a workday with a campus leader nor-

mally outside his or her purview. This Shadow Day provides an op-portunity to ask questions and garner insights into the day-to-day functioning of the university. Additionally, a host of other campus colleagues will join the FLP to share their knowledge, experiences, and perspectives. The Spring 2013 FLP, for example, had over forty campus contributors. As a campus-led program, the FLP offers di-verse information-gathering opportunities to expand awareness and personal networks.

! The entire campus contributes, but you, the FLP’s partici-pants, provide the program’s substance. With different ranks, from various academic departments and colleges, with diverse profes-sional goals, you the participants will engage each other’s critical-thinking skills, impose demands on each other’s capacities for perspective-taking, improve cross-campus transfers of informa-tion, and broaden the range of problem-solving techniques. This is truly your program. If even one member were to change, so too would your entire experience.

! Conflicts might arise. Fierce conversations about difficult top-ics, particularly while combined with the stress from your stretched time-management skills, can lead to uncomfortable dis-agreements and prolonged agitations. Participants might misattrib-ute their frustrations from a sensitive topic to the people convers-ing with them about it. Developing stress-management skills for productive confrontation is an inherent part of leadership. If con-flicts arise, consider them learning opportunities. Work through them and develop healthy, productive interactions with even diffi-cult people. That’s what leaders do.

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! The program will stretch your time-management abilities and elevate your stress. The FLP is an immersion program that requires you to relegate all other campus responsibilities to the rest of the week. This is not a programmatic flaw, but rather a deliberate fea-ture in the program’s design. By developing your time- and stress-management skills, many of you will improve your efficiency and cultivate a new normal in your productivity levels that can accom-modate future ventures.

! As an immersion program, the FLP provides an irreplaceable networking opportunity. Some attribute only negative connota-tions to the word “networking,” as if it referenced the quantity of relationships without necessitating quality, but FLP participants de-velop close ties. One cohort continues to meet regularly. Other par-ticipants actively share articles in a Facebook group or catch-up fre-quently for coffee. Through the FLP, you’re building relationships that can facilitate future collaborations, joint ventures, resource sharing, brainstorming sessions, political alliances .... You’re build-ing broad and deep channels into the university that can enhance your abilities to mediate, identify opportunities, and influence changes. You’re also making potentially very close friends.

! Additionally, you will have an opportunity to develop your teamwork, collaborative leadership, and political skills through a group project. The group project has changed significantly over the years. All cohorts have had to work in teams, investigate a press-ing problem, and propose a specific solution. Without determining that problem for themselves, however, a couple of previous cohorts couldn’t take enough ownership over their ideas to fully discuss or explore the execution process. People cared enough to want the ad-ministration to consider their ideas for managerial execution, but

not enough to collaborate with essential stakeholders, harness vi-sion, or empower and mobilize people who might champion their ideas for them. In other words, they missed the learning opportu-nity that comes with seeing a project to completion. That lost op-portunity was not their fault; it was a flaw in the project’s design.

! In the Spring 2013 FLP, that programmatic flaw worked itself out. The faculty were charged with merely devising, coordinating, and assessing their own learning opportunity. While they dis-cussed what they wanted to learn, the conversation shifted to prob-lems they personally experienced that negatively impacted stu-dents.

! In large part because of how it fit into the current political cli-mate and trajectory of higher education, one problem rose above others: faculty had to write grants to fund career fairs for students, an inefficient process to say the least. Just as higher education had shifted its focus from student access to completion, it likely will shift again from completion to employment, and Austin Peay was unprepared for this likely next step.

! The participants investigated the institutional history behind this inefficiency. Through interviews with key stakeholders, they learned that, although Enrollment Management housed Career Services, the office once resided under Student Affairs. Thanks to Shadow Day and other engagements, many had noted Student Af-fairs’ larger pool of financial resources for student programs. Using a technique called “benchmarking,” the faculty compared the budget, professional staffing, and organizational location of Career Services at Austin Peay with those at peer institutions. They learned that not only did Career Services have a larger budget and

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more professional staff at comparable TBR institutions, but also it resided under Student Affairs.

! The faculty’s personal frustrations guided their learning proc-ess until learning ceased to be their goal. At their own initiative, they wrote a white paper outlining the problem. They prepared a presentation for the president and provost. But most importantly, their investigations had raised the awareness and harnessed the vi-sion of other key stakeholders. Behind the scenes, one of those stakeholders championed the cause by priming the president. Be-fore the FLP participants officially presented their findings, their proposed solution already had momentum. Even after the pro-gram’s close, certain participants continued to check-in with the president to prevent that momentum from waning. Most impor-tantly, they seized the learning opportunity that comes with seeing a project to completion.

! The participants freely and collaboratively chose a personal frustration to investigate. That personal inconvenience also nega-tively impacted student success on a level that, per the current po-litical climate and trajectory of higher education, could damage the greater institution.

! That last point differentiates their chosen topic of investiga-tion from its runner-up: APSU 1000. Both Career Services and APSU 1000 frustrated them -- some, APSU 1000 more than Career Services. The participants saw neither as maximizing potential for student success. Compared with Career Services, however, APSU 1000 is low on the list of administrative priorities for strengthening the institution. Without a strong, data-driven argument to the con-trary, even significant changes to APSU 1000 appear to minimally

improve student retention and graduation rates, let alone generate alumni support or bolster the university’s preparedness to meet fu-ture goals for higher education. In order to minimize frustrations and maximize effectiveness, change agents have to at least compre-hend if not leverage institutional prioritization.

! In Spring 2013, the faculty chose to investigate a personal frus-tration that both negatively impacted student success and was a high priority for strengthening the institution. Consequently, they fully experienced the value of identifying stakeholders, collaborat-ing with stakeholders, harnessing vision, and empowering, moti-vating, and mobilizing champions for their cause before cultivat-ing administrative support. They earned a sense of accomplish-ment from the project and, according to the assessments, benefited more from the program than had previous faculty cohorts.

! With this semester’s project, you’re going to try to match that experience. As a team, your charge is to investigate a personal frus-tration that

• negatively impacts student success and

• is a high priority for strengthening the institution.

Ideally, this charge will motivate your team to

• identify and raise the awareness of key stakeholders,

• collaborate with them,

• harness their vision, and

• empower, motivate, and mobilize champions for your cause.

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These are not easy tasks or objectives, but the semester’s agenda should help you create networks and raise your overall campus awareness to accomplish the tasks. The readings and discussions can facilitate your meeting the objectives, should you choose to do so. Regardless, we’ll organize a venue for you to present your find-ings to the president.

! Hopefully, the FLP will enable you to make an immediate im-pact on the university. If not, at very least the semester will provide you with a series of rich learning opportunities.

! The institution and its students succeed through your suc-cess. In part, collaborative leadership from the ranks springs or-ganically from the nature of higher education. To manage experts who require relative autonomy for their effectiveness, higher-education administrators deploy a “weak authority system” (Bol-man & Gallos, 2011, p. 58). Some critics go so far as to characterize the system as “organized anarchy” (Kezar, Carducci, & Contreras-McGavin, 2006, p. 111). Such loose oversight and organizational structure enable not only academic freedoms (Bolman & Gallos, 2011, p. 59), but also the collaborations and innovations that can im-prove institutional, faculty, and student success.

! Collaborative leadership from the ranks evolves also from ne-cessity. Although retirement eligibility depends on a variety of fac-tors that are difficult to track, a very rough estimate puts the num-ber of faculty and staff currently eligible to retire from Austin Peay at 20% -- and growing. The university has to prepare future campus leaders for what otherwise might become, through a great retire-ment wave, a void of institutional memory and informed leader-ship. Well-informed faculty lynchpins can not only make-up for

the loss, but also further improve collective knowledge and institu-tional strength.

! Finally, leadership from the ranks also responds more effec-tively than administrative managerialism does to external calls for change. Faculty agency enables the “flexibility and adaptability that are particularly important in meeting external demands” (Kezar et al., 2006, p. 111), like those imposed by disruptive tech-nologies, changes to the state funding formula, rising tuition dur-ing an economic downturn, social calls for increased accountabil-ity, decreased availability of state and federal grants, and the in-creased role of private donors, the Bill and Melinda Gates Founda-tion, Educause, Complete College America, educational entrepre-neurs .... The current climate demands heightened individual awareness and collective adaptability.

! So long as state contributions fail to meet budgetary short-falls, let alone continue to shrink, the university will need dynamic faculty who can lead rapid changes in response to powerful exter-nal pressures, particularly those tied to monetary incentives. In an environment where only consistent, large-scale change initiatives can attract the funding for even essential university operations, strong faculty leadership can shield students from harmful trends while developing and implementing bold practices that truly lead to student success.

! President Hall’s oversight of a faculty-led overhaul of the uni-versity that supported student, faculty, and institutional success in-itself has transformed from a visionary response to telltale signs, to a simple necessity for fiscal survival. Today’s leadership must or-ganize change. Faculty leadership, however, can ward off external

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impositions by organizing internal changes that can benefit the uni-versity, themselves, and most importantly, their students. Your pro-ductive autonomy endows the university with productive auton-omy. It wards off threats and leads everyone to success.

Bibliography

Bolman, L. G. & Gallos, J. V. (2011). Reframing Academic Leadership. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

Eddy, P. L. (2010). Partnerships and Collaborations in Higher Educa-tion. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

Kadlec, Alison; Immerwahr, John; & Currie, Michelle. (November, 2013). Seven Practices of Enlightened Leadership in Higher Education: A Case Study of Austin Peay State University. Retrieved from www.publicagenda.org/files/SevenPracticesOfEnlightenedLeadershipInHigherEd_PublicAgenda_2013.pdf

Kezar, A. J. (2001). Understanding and Facilitating Organizational Change in the 21st Century: Recent Research and Conceptualizations. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Kezar, A. J.; Carducci, Rozana; & Contreras-McGavin, Melissa. (2006). Rethinking the “L” Word in Higher Education. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Kezar, A. J. & Lester, J. (2011). Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leader-ship: An Examination of Grassroots Leaders in Higher Education. Stan-ford, CA: Stanford UP.

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