Leadership Skills for New Academic Administrators

As new academic administrators begin and advance in their academic careers, they will need new skills and strategies for leading complex initiatives, programs, and tasks. New academic administrators will be expected to guide their higher education institutions through change and ensure continued focus on related vision, mission, and goals. They will also face unprecedented challenges as the higher education environment adopts new technologies and pedagogies, adapts to decreased state funding, and shifts offerings in response to changing demographics. New academic administrators will require
“Institutions of higher education have the responsibility to invest in developing leadership programs that prepare young or early-stage faculty to become leaders, as well as to become more purposeful contributors to the broader university strategic goals.” (Coll, 2016)
As budgets tighten in the face of decreased enrollments, changing demographics, philanthropy fatigue, and student demands for nicer and more extensive facilities, it is tempting to reduce investment in leadership development at the same time that academic leaders need to be more skilled, thoughtful, adaptable, and astute than ever. There is ample evidence of the need for increased attention to the cultivation of aspiring leaders in higher education (Ashe & TenHuisen, 2018; Coll, 2016). Employees need tailored and individualized options that resonate with their experiences and provide tools that they can apply immediately (Wilks et al., 2018).
Not only do employees need focused professional development, they also need it delivered in a convenient, self-paced, accessible format that permits interaction with others but does not require expensive and time-consuming travel (Ruben et al., 2018). Virtual and asynchronous options also allow faculty to balance professional development with personal obligations, which potentially addresses class, race, ethnic, and gender disparities in access to leadership development opportunities. Excellent leadership programs will also ensure coverage of topical, timely content and reliable data to support leaders in creating budgets that reflect their values, focusing on increasing enrollment, and dealing with entirely unpredictable conditions such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
A key challenge for new administrators is understanding what they don’t know, what they need to know, and how to transform knowledge into action. As faculty members, we learn to collect data, be attentive to nuance, provide deep and comprehensive analysis, and develop expertise in specific content areas. These academic skills are helpful in that they allow leaders to be thoughtful, thorough, and deliberate. They are also a liability in that they can slow decision making, allow leaders to seek information that does not necessarily assist in making a decision, and keep attention on a narrow issue when the problem is broad and overlaps multiple areas. Most faculty are accustomed to working alone, with almost complete control over their scholarly and pedagogical decisions. The perfectionism that we seek in our scholarship can be an obstacle to managing an administrative workload. Some work requires swift action, some must be delegated, and some must be done despite uncertainty that it will work or disagreement with the direction set at a higher level or necessitated by external pressures.
To make this critical transition, there are skills that new academic administrators must develop and access. New administrators will need to be able to
New academic administrators can prepare for their roles through deliberate and focused professional development. As early as possible upon assuming a leadership role, a new academic administrator should do the following:
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Sara Zeigler, PhD, serves as founding dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences at Eastern Kentucky University. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Political Science, Feminist Formations, and the Journal of Political Science Education, among others. She is incoming provost at Eastern Kentucky University.
Russell Carpenter, PhD, is assistant provost and professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University. Carpenter serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Faculty Development. Recent books include Engaging Millennial Faculty, Studio-Based Approaches for Multimodal Projects, and Sustainable Learning Spaces.