Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
Note: Thank you so much. I'm really happy to have the opportunity to talk with you and the rest of the folks on this panel about a few ideas that I've been working on recently. I'm going to start today with a quotation:
I really believe that the model of the single leader who carries everything themselves, who is heroic-seeming and so on, is super toxic, and outdated, and not working.
Note: This clear articulation of an idea that I’d spent months fumbling my way toward was presented to me by one of the folks who responded to a call I disseminated for interviews about academic leadership. This respondent, who chose to remain anonymous, is by any estimation a leader within the higher education universe, but one who has spent a great deal of time and energy and influence trying to create an alternative to that model of the singular individual steering the ship. That respondent is far from alone, either in their assessment of the toxicity of what we understand leadership to be within colleges and universities today, or in their determination to find a better way. But we can all look around at our institutions — not to mention the broader culture in which they are embedded — and recognize how ingrained the individualist model of leadership is, and how hard it will be to change.
Note: Our campuses and our fields, however, are experiencing a series of crises that are bound up in that failed model of leadership. And all of us who care about the future of our colleges and universities need to reconsider that model and our role in it. We need to find new ways of imagining what leadership on campus could look like, and new ways of cultivating and empowering new kinds of leaders, if we want the missions of our institutions — the projects of knowledge creation and dissemination, of research and education in service to a better world — to thrive.
Note: The project I'm currently engaged in is thus working to counter several pieces of conventional wisdom about leadership — not least that toxic model described by my respondent: the leader as singularly powerful individual, setting the institution’s course from atop the org chart. That model is damaging not just to the institution, which lies at the mercy of such an individual’s successful navigation of an increasingly complex economic, cultural, and political landscape, but also to the person in that role, who must convincingly appear omniscient and invulnerable, and who can only inevitably fail. What I hope to inspire instead is a way of understanding leadership as collective and collaborative rather than individual, and therefore potentially originating anywhere within the org chart where someone has ideas about how to make things better and a willingness to build the coalitions necessary to make change. If we can come to appreciate and authorize the collective potential that exists within our institutions, we can begin to create institutions that are not only more generous but also more resilient.
Note: A commitment to working together, in fact, is the key to undoing the toxic model of singular leadership. That model is entirely focused on the power of the individual, and the assumption that the individual’s reach becomes greater as you climb the org chart. Of course, power does grow in that direction: with the elevation produced by a new job title comes an expansion in sphere of influence and institutional authority. But the other thing that often happens is that the connections available to the position narrow, until you find yourself at the pinnacle of the institution: you’re at the center of power, but you’re teetering there alone. Success in such a leadership role — in any leadership role, really, whether one labeled such by the institution or one emerging from a grassroots project — requires developing the relationships that can sustain the work, not least by ensuring that the vision you hold for the future of the institution or the project is not yours alone, but is instead shared.
Note: That collective vision is one key to institutional transformation, but of course there’s an enormous amount of work involved in bringing together the people required to develop such a collective vision, much less to work together toward it. The process may not come naturally for leaders who’ve been steeped in conventional hierarchies and workflows, but a new generation of leaders is emerging today and bringing with them what Helen Berry described to me as a new style of what she called “multinuclear leadership.” Berry noted that she has seen it in use in community organizations, and that it has often been adopted by women leaders within the academy. This leadership style works to empower the entire community that will be affected by a decision, not by creating a single forum or feedback session in which the loudest voices can dominate, but rather by organizing that community into working groups charged with particular tasks, and then sharing the work done by each group with the community as a whole. A process like this used in the context of strategic planning, for instance, has the potential to create a form of communal ownership of the outcomes, but this kind of facilitative, bottom-up process must be accompanied by a positional leader willing to step out of the center and allow collective leadership to emerge from multiple points within the community.
Note: This mode of multinuclear leadership is a form of sharing power. And a big part of why I'm talking about this today is that building an engaged community requires empowering that community, especially at a moment when their disengagement has been exacerbated by conditions that leave them feeling deeply disempowered. That disengagement may lead many to assume that any attempt to create the working groups necessary to multinuclear leadership will go nowhere — that it will be busy work, with no appreciable positive outcomes. And this is where real transformation asks the most of you: in building the trust, the relationships, the coalitions that will encourage others to get involved. In building the solidarity that makes clear that we have one another's backs, even (or perhaps especially) when we're standing up for one another's causes rather than our own. Building that solidarity is crucial, because institutional transformation is a heavy lift — but we can lift far more together than any of us can alone.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
Note: Many thanks.