Leading from the Middle

Leading from the middle is heroic but difficult work, and there will be moments when academic leaders wonder whether the personal and professional costs are too high. The daily demands make it easy to lose faith and perspective. But strategies for moving beyond the squeeze to make things happen in a pressure-filled world can keep leaders focused and on top of their game.

The leadership squeeze in higher education is a fascinating framing phenomenon. The same world can look very different through the eyes of a university administrator, a faculty member, and a community leader—and all can be right. The path to successful working relationships—and to successful academic leadership—requires bridging those frame gaps. Seeing systems helps—so does patience, tolerance, and a sense of humor. Academic leaders who recognize that their “simple request” to faculty can be seen as an intrusion on professional priorities, a hindrance to scholarly progress, and another example of “them doing it to us again” may devise better strategies for communication. Faculty who recognize the burden that their “simple request” might create for a stressed and overworked academic administrator may be more understanding about delays, dropped balls, or a response of “Sorry, but no.” Community leaders who understand how faculty governance works may adopt longer time horizons when partnering with a university. It is always easier to complain than to fix things: Fixing things takes energy, planning, and resources that are in short supply in most professional lives (Fukami, 1996). In higher education, we often need to complain less, talk more openly and directly, and cut each other more slack. Several strategies are helpful for managing that. Successful academic leaders in the middle (1) listen, understand, and respect differences; (2) look for mutual gains; and (3) stay alert to system dynamics and take new leadership stands.

It is tempting as a boundary spanner to distance from one constituent in order to move closer to another. We may see one party as more reasonable or better able to serve our needs. It is also comforting to spend time with others who confirm our views of the world. But taking sides is dangerous, and we can learn much from those who see things differently or make life tough for us. Good shuttle diplomacy requires the ability to hold and respect two or more conflicting perspectives at the same time and to live with the tensions. It may be easier to take one side or the other, but the leader’s job is to search for the possibilities at the intersection: to serve as a translator who puts each side’s message in a form the other can understand, a mediator who represents each side to the other, and a magician who conjures rabbits from seemingly empty hats.

For academic leaders in the middle, negotiating is a way of life—essential whenever two or more parties with some interests in common and others in conflict need to reach agreement. One of the most helpful and practical win-win approaches we know was developed by Roger Fisher and William Ury (1981) in their perennial bestseller Getting to Yes. The genius of their approach lies in a four-step strategy:

1. Separate the people from the problem.
2. Focus on interests, not positions.
3. Invent a variety of options before deciding what to do.
4. Insist on objective and mutually agreed-upon criteria to make the decision.

The four steps may seem straightforward, but it takes practice to get them right. The stress and tensions in conflict can easily escalate negotiations into anger and personal attacks as negotiators lock themselves into positions that can seem like their only options. Efforts to sustain a working relationship or gain approval can lead one side to “give in”—an equally unproductive strategy. Good negotiators stay focused on their larger goal, look for new options and possibilities that bring advantages to both sides, and engage in a joint search for objective criteria—standards of fairness for both substance and procedure—that can be used to make a mutually satisfying final decision.

We all like to think of ourselves as independent actors, and it’s often hard to remember that many of our actions and choices result from our roles and place in the chain of command. Universities are temples of knowledge but they are also human systems; and those who lead them experience the same role tensions found in other hierarchical organizations. Academic leaders may be squeezed in the middle, but there are ways for them to gain better control over their work life and their leadership.

College and university leaders face an important opportunity to use their positions in the middle of things to facilitate relationships and to bring the divergent needs of different parties together in support of institutional advancement. Life in the middle can be a squeeze. But academic administrators who understand the predictable system dynamics and pressures in the role are ahead of the game. Knowledge and the choice to take a different leadership stand will help. So will skills for working productively with differences and for conducting win-win negotiations.

Lee G. Bolman holds the Marion Bloch/Missouri Chair in Leadership at the Henry W. Bloch School of Business and Public Administration, and Joan V. Gallos is professor of Leadership, University of Missouri Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor, and director of the Executive MBA program at the Henry W. Bloch School of Business and Public Administration, both at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. This article is adapted from Chapter Nine of the authors’ book Reframing Academic Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2011). Email: bolmanl@umkc.edu, gallosj@umkc.edu

References

Fisher, R., & Ury, W. (1981). Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Fukami, C. V. (1996). Herding cats part deux: The hygiene factor. In P. J. Frost & M. S. Taylor (Eds.), Rhythms of academic life: Personal accounts of careers in academia (pp. 321–324). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Sales, M. J. (2008). Leadership and the power of position: Understanding structural dynamics in everyday organizational life. In J. V. Gallos (Ed.), Business leadership (2nd ed., pp. 180–198). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.