Why researchers could be great leaders, but aren’t

Successful leaders are like successful researchers. They are creative, they build and use teams, they make contacts across traditional barriers, they motivate others to develop their vision further, and they easily assimilate critique of their ideas and actions.

Researchers who make the jump to leadership positions should, in light of these parallels, be particularly adept at handling the challenges a leader faces.

This contrasts with the corporate world, where a common slogan recited to those newly arrived in leadership positions is: what got you here, won’t get you there.

If honing one’s skills as a researcher is good preparation for leadership, and if mastery of entry level positions in the private sector is not, we might expect universities to be bastions of excellent leadership.

There are of course many examples of preeminent leaders among university presidents — Charles M. Vest at MIT, Mary Sue Coleman at the University of Michigan, Jeffrey Sean Lehman at Cornell, France A. Córdova at Purdue, to mention four who deserve our careful study.

Yet when we read research and anecdotes about leadership, universities are almost never mentioned.

The Harvard Business Review blog site is full of inspirational stories about innovation, discovery, creativity, and leadership; yet essentially none come from universities.

Jim Collins’ Good to Great has brightened the burden of travel for years, with dozens of cheery red copies visible in airport bookstores to anyone who sprints by.

But when your layover is finally long enough to buy the book, you’ll see that Good to Great — brimming with lessons relevant for many domains — leaves the topic of leading a university untouched.

Good to Great has nearly 1000 reviews on amazon.com, while the rare book on university leadership tends to have about none.

Samual Jay Keyser’s delightful Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows has one review. Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring’s The Innovative University is a bestseller, but Christensen’s wildly popular disruptive innovation theory on which the book is based gets it only a couple dozen reviews.

Why haven’t universities been discovered? Why aren’t we there, among the case studies of good leadership?

There are two important reasons that we are absent and at least one of them is a cause for concern.

The less dramatic part of the explanation is that storytellers want pecuniary quantification of their claims. Jim Collins and the bloggers at Harvard Business Review tell stories about companies that have changed their performance as measured in profitability. This particular measure is largely irrelevant for universities. Our stock is not publicly traded and we therefore aren’t good cases to study from a fiscal perspective.

The other reason is much more fundamental.

We may not have worse leadership at universities than in the corporate world, but we think of it differently. That makes it difficult to compare universities to other organizations, and it also is hinders the development of good leadership throughout universities.

Fifteen years ago, I asked a fellow professor who his boss was. He replied that he didn’t have a boss and he meant it. Today, most professors would at least point to a specific person as their nominal boss, but few would expect feedback, much less guidance from that person.

Leadership is recognized neither as a normal activity nor as an acceptable career path in academia. No one gets a PhD because they want to become the chair of a department. No one takes a post doc because they hope one day to become a dean.

For most faculty members, however, it would be laughable to imagine an MBA running their university. We can only accept peers in leadership positions; researchers must be led by researchers. But we nonetheless collaborate to stigmatize researchers who are willing and qualified to lead.

Researchers choose their work because of their passion for new knowledge. For many great researchers, university life is about keeping other things out of the way, so that they can focus on research.

If one chooses to go into a leadership position, it’s legitimate only out of an idealistic sense of sharing the burden. It’s a commitment lasting a few years, before one can re-immerse oneself in research. How many difficult strategic choices is a leader going to make when s/he will return to the real business of being a researcher in a couple of years?

There are other structural matters that inhibit great researchers from exercising great leadership, too. It’s still common in academia to be elected by one’s peers to serve as department chair or dean. In Norway, our university presidents are even elected.

Where does your loyalty lie as an elected leader? Is it to the leadership at the next level up in the organization? Or is it to the electorate, those who voted you in? Institutions that don’t explicitly resolve this dilemma quickly find themselves paralyzed.

The skills researchers develop could easily make them successful leaders. The main impediments are cultural. We have to have more legitimate career options at universities, creating circumstances for some individual researchers to use their skills not only doing research but also taking responsibility for the conditions under which other researchers work. The frontiers of knowledge are moved by those walking along the edge, but also by those who hold them up.

When more individuals see the potential for tackling interesting challenges by using their skills in new ways, and when more groups of researchers see the potential for improving their own situation by encouraging some colleagues to take responsibility for leadership, then we may begin to see universities shine as examples of great leadership.

We may even begin to see more researchers who not only could be great leaders, but who in fact are.