Random Thought About Higher Ed Leadership

Before coming to higher education, I worked for two successful tech start ups. One thing I learned from both of those companies is that when your organization enters a challenging financial cycle, you need to double-down on the staff who are actually capable of innovating and producing. Over my 25+ plus years in higher education (and particularly the last decade), I've seen too many universities do the exact opposite and hire administrative types who have a paper trail that makes them look like they're good fixing things, but lack the ability or track record of actually fixing or producing anything. 

I've seen this insidiousness most glaringly in higher ed's drunken dependency on consultants. Raise your hand if you've seen a university start losing enrollment, then watch their first decision to hire a consultant. After hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of interviewing the people within the university who actually know what wrong and how to best address the challenges, you get a report with a lot of quadrants in it. Every time, without fail, the report recommends things you already knew. And then it's truly bizarre when these universities, apparently delighted by the experience of paying for advice they could have gotten from their own hallways, decide the logical next step is to hire the consultant full time. The quadrant-maker becomes the SVP of Somethingfancysoundign, which is always a title and position that never existed before, but is somehow desperately needed. 

What follows is entirely predictable. Tired, stale and uninspiring vocabulary, and a remarkable talent for scheduling meetings in which they talk. Just talk. And it's the talking that turns out to be the only performance review that matters. They speak fluently in frameworks. They're so comfortable with uncertainty, which is consultant-speak for not being accountable for outcomes. Meanwhile the people who actually understand the university (the staff who've watched the same problems compound for decades), are asked to align with a pile of gobbledygook passed off as a vision. It's not just that these hires don't fix anything, it's that their presence actively displaces the institutional knowledge and relational trust that real recovery depends on. 

Today, it seems like the years spend hiring people with scant ability to actually lead is most detrimental to mid-tier tuition dependent private universities reeling from enrollment declines and spiraling deficits. Of course, there's not a lot to be done, but a good place to start is to stop rewarding activity and start demanding outcomes. This means putting enrollment trends, retention rates, net tuition revenue, and student completion data on the table alongside a direct conversation about whether current leadership is actually moving those numbers. A lot of people are capable of talking about how they "plan" to move them. Few (it seems) are capable of actually moving them. If the plans these universities have bought into aren't tracking after two or three years, they have a leadership problem, not an execution problem. The mid-tier privates that survive the next decade won't be the ones that hired the impressive-sounding salesman or commissioned the glossy strategic plan. They'll be the ones whose senior leadership and boards finally start asking if the individuals they hired to address the headwinds and exigencies are genuinely capable of leading an educational institution, or are they just very good at PowerPoint and talking?