Research demonstrates that new tensions to traditional models of leadership exist. Technologies are catalyzing faster change and the marketplace is now a global one. And, our workforce is becoming more team-centric, diverse, and younger and older at the same time. As a result, an urgent challenge of the 21st century is the definition of leadership, the value of leadership, and what fundamental skills, capabilities, and dispositions are critical to fostering nimble leaders.
The word “leader” implies followers and traditional models of leadership have buckled under the weight of this implication. Access to real-time information has stripped traditional leaders of implied “authority”. Diversity has pushed against the notion of the “suit”, replacing it with people from every demographic profile.
In higher education, hierarchical models of leadership have relied historically on the positional leader – coordinator, director, chair, dean, provost, president, chancellor, and others. Given the demand for novel leadership approaches, positional leaders must rely on distributed models of leadership.
In other words, our role as positional leaders is to build leadership competencies in all people, ensuring institutional capacity for change as well as robust succession planning in all facets of the academy. My gazelle focus is to spawn new faculty leaders in teaching and learning, in scholarship, research and creative inquiry, and in citizenship, thereby ensuring a healthy, nimble, and viable learning organization now and in the future.
Meet the Blogger
Rosalie A. Richards, Ph.D. is associate provost for faculty development and professor of chemistry and education at Stetson University. Her interest in distributed leadership—how the work of leadership takes place among the people and in context of a complex organization—aims at making excellence in higher education inclusive.
Adapted from Stetson Magazine article, What is Leadership?, October 2016