Leadership Challenge for Indian Universities

In common with most of the public services during the last fifty years, higher education has felt enormous pressure on collective and individual morale, and suffered above average incidence of the impact of low morale (in, for example, extremely high – or extremely low – rates of turnover, and in the rates of stress-related illnesses). The objective causes of such problems are fairly easy to determine, and most can be traced to the effect of underfunded expansion multiplied by increased external scrutiny and accountability. Similarly, critics wishing to lay the cause of increased stress on management practice often ignore the evidence of stressors that start outside the workplace – or those that are, at least in this era, shared by other major employment sectors (such as reduced compensation - even in parity with civil services). None the less, morale is a key component of internal culture in higher education, and hence needs to be carefully analysed.

Maintaining the correct balance between quality research and learning/teaching, while the unit of resource continues to decline inexorably, is one of the key issues facing us all. The way around is the quality of leadership of the University. Management is about survival and ensuring the status quo. Leadership is about growth.

Management versus Leadership

There is an important difference between these two concepts. Stephen Covey, who has made a fortune out of his books revealing the habits of successful people, put it well when he said: “Management works in the system, leadership works on the system”.

Higher Education is a collaborative and structured dialogical encounter across asymmetries of authority. It is based on candid conversation that does not coincide with structures of power. How could educators be subordinated subjects of an educational system and yet become authoritative agents of educational leadership?

The key function of a Vice-Chancellor is to lead the University: to harness the social forces within it, to shape and guide its values, to build a management team, and to inspire it and others working in the university to take initiatives around a shared vision and a strategy to implement it. A Vice-Chancellor’s job involves both management and leadership, but the latter is more important than the former. A Vice-Chancellor should be an influencer and an enabler rather than a regulator and a controller.

Leadership and Change

Universities are not about ‘change’ – they are temples of knowledge tended by middle-aged men in crushed trousers who understand the laws of the universe. Universities aren’t part of society, reflecting the needs of the population – the sun-splashed ivory towers stand today as they always will. If we close our eyes, it will always be 1947 or 2017!

At the core of such cynicism is the issue of loyalty. Traditional academics do not regard themselves so much as working for a university as working in it. Asked for information about identity with various causes, they are likely to express greatest solidarity with the interests of a discipline, a slightly lower sense of fellow feeling with the (academic) members of a department, and only then a glimmer of ‘membership’ of the college or university. This value hierarchy is being assaulted over the past decades from a variety of fronts: from the changing map of knowledge, with its corrosion of disciplinary boundaries; from the emerging inter-professionalism of the academic enterprise – teaching as well as research.

Environment at the University needs to be one that fosters action to achieve excellence. All actions should be guided by a set of principle values. Values would ensure ethical actions. Actions without guiding values run the risk of trampling over the human and social good even if they produce the outcomes sought. There would need to be two sets of values – one that guides human collegial interactions and the other that would guide decisions and actions.

Principal values that the University needs to uphold in its interactions would be –

• Love (and not poverty of intimacy)
• Service of others (and not poverty of spirit)
• Joy (and not poverty of loneliness)
• Peace (and not poverty of sanctity of life)
• Critical openness to reality (not illusions)
• Strength (of morals and integrity)
• Courage (of soul and character)
• Faith and Trust (in us or we and not me or I because we is collective me only)
• Tolerance (to Cross-cultural differences)

The key values that the university would need to uphold in all its work would be –

·         Integrity: Everyone is in favour of integrity, but it is often forgotten that integrity is simply another word for wholeness.  Most professional ethics problems arise not from a calculated design to act contrary to law, but through the inability to recognize boundaries and cope with unexpected stresses and pressures. 

·         Equity: is about equality of opportunities. The university should be able to create an environment that provides equal opportunities to all its constituents – equal opportunities to learners to benefit from what is on offer, equal opportunities to its academics to perform their jobs and grow professionally and personally, equal opportunities to all stakeholders to guide and shape the course of evolution of the university.

·         Fair play: is abidance to the established standards of decency, honesty, rules, customs and law in conduct of affairs. The university should be fair and gracious in actions and responses directed towards all its benefactors, customers and competitors.

Crafting an Enabling Environment

A supportive environment (soft infrastructure) is composed of four key elements: the managerial team; systems of decision making; systems for communicating; and systems for appraising and rewarding staff.

·         Managerial Team: If the Vice-Chancellor is going to spend most of his time leading, then he needs to recruit others to do the managing. He needs to put together a group of managers who have sufficient coherence to work together as a team, and sufficient competence and power to manage the change. And having appointed these people, he must delegate as much of the problem solving, committee chairing and other work to them as possible,

• Systems of Decision Making: To lead change successfully, one needs a decision-making structure that can respond rapidly to internal and external initiatives and pressures. This invariably means making the decision making structures less hierarchal and complex. One needs to delayer, decentralise, and devolve,
• Systems for Communicating: Many change initiatives fail because the vision and the strategy are not adequately communicated to the staff whose commitment and support are crucial to their success. Normal methods of communication – internal newspapers, meetings with heads of school – are important, but the “informal” – management-by-walking-about – are the most important. As John le Carré has observed, “a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world”,
• Systems for Appraising and Rewarding Staff: Academics cannot manage by “exhortation”. One needs to change their behaviour – and, ultimately, attitudes and values – so that they support, rather than undermine, the vision and the strategy. Having appraised individuals and units, they need to be motivated by recognising and rewarding achievement not only by thanks, praise and status but also by money. Hence some resources need to be allocated – which will always be scarce – to units and to individuals on a performance-related basis.

Management of Growth

All Vice-Chancellors need to manage:

·         Federalism: Impress upon the Government that not all its universities can provide same kinds of outcomes and outputs and that there would be differential rates of growth amongst different universities towards realisation of national vision. Persuade the Government to permit a shortage on the monetary surpluses if the need be, until new recruitment and development initiatives have begun to yield dividends,

·         Faculty: Enhance the academics’ current ability to deliver on the vision of the university. Attract talent from all across the world and simultaneously invest in ‘growing your own’. The faculty needs to infuse a lot of fresh blood from across the world and become a visible player in the global labour market for academic talent,

·         Freshers: Recruit students who are attracted to the vision of the University; without compromising with the need to serve the local community, recruit the best from all over the world, and

·         Funds: Persuade benefactors of university to provide financial support, both to reduce the pressure on bottom-line in the short run and to replace tuition as the primary source of operating revenue.

In Conclusion:

Excellence is the state or quality of excelling that earns honour and respect from people. Moments of excellence can happen by default when the rest fail and only one succeeds. That is not sustainable excellence or excellence achieved but only a stray episode coming through a stroke of luck. The university should strive for sustained excellence at all times rather than some moments of excellence coming through by chance.

Making change work takes several years because successful change is sustainable change. Changes do not become sustainable until they are anchored in the culture – the core values – of the institution, and this does not occur until the changes have been demonstrated to work and to be superior to the old approaches and methods. Cultural change comes at the end, not the beginning, of transformation processes.

But past is where one comes from. It is the future that one lives in. Rather than wait for the future to unfold, the academic institutions need to focus on inventing the future.

-------

This is Part-4 of the series: Leadership and Management of Institutions of Higher Education

Part-5 of the series follows soon

-------

Already published-

Part-1: Setting Priorities for Indian Universities

Part-2: A Quick System Check for Indian Universities

Part-3: Designing Growth for Indian Universities

-------