Emerging Leadership Skill Sets

On almost every university campus, stately buildings and manicured quadrangles signal both stability and immutability. Inside those grand buildings, however, savvy leaders are not so sanguine. 

Changing demographics, constricted finances, shifts in public funding models, competition from the private sector, eroding public confidence, and accelerated technology are just a few of the factors that are causing higher education’s tectonic plates to shift in a pronounced way. Forget about preserving the status quo—for some institutions, the challenge today is simply to survive.

If international educators accept the premise that higher education is changing dramatically, it stands to reason that the leadership skills and strategies that brought the field to its current state may be inadequate to address emerging challenges and lead into the future. Successful higher education leadership over the coming decade may hinge on leaders’ abilities to increase their organization’s repertoire with emerging skill sets needed to succeed. Adding to their toolbox may be the central test for leaders.

Cascading Decline

University presidents today are largely preoccupied with issues of financial stability, observes consultant Susan Resnick Pierce, president emerita of the University of Puget Sound. One persistent challenge has been what she calls the “cascading decline” in enrollment that higher education has seen since 2011–12. Pierce says college leaders, overall, are concerned about the resulting decline their institutions are seeing in net tuition revenue.

A diminished image is also top of mind for universities around the world. Pierce says university leaders are wary of public perception “that the value colleges provide is not worth the cost.” An emerging concern, she says, is about “how the world of work is going to change and how we prepare students for that” in the face of growing public doubt and distrust. Enrollment and financial numbers are impacted by this cascade of decline.

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William Brustein, vice president for global strategies and international affairs at West Virginia University (WVU), agrees with Pierce on the growing concern surrounding budgetary issues and enrollment trends. Citing a steady stream of news stories about travel bans and evolving policies for things like optional practice training (OPT), SEVIS, and H-1B visas, Brustein says, “if anything would keep me awake, it would be what’s coming down from Washington or from the state” that might affect how WVU recruits, retains, and integrates international students.

Expanding Roles

Sonja Knutson, director of the Internationalization Office at Memorial University of Newfoundland, faces a challenge unlike that of her colleagues in the United States. While the “birth dearth” has decreased the pool of potential students at her institution, Knutson’s mandate is to recruit students to pay tuition and meet enrollment targets, as well as find individuals who will stay in Canada’s remote eastern provinces after they graduate.

When Knutson first took the job, she says, her main task was to advise international students. But around 2007, the focus shifted to “attracting international students to be immigrants” by providing more long-term, post-tertiary advising and resources as incentives to remain in the country following graduation, she says. “Suddenly, we had to start thinking about how to provide career and entrepreneurship advising. The skill set changed, and the composition of the offices changed. It’s quite a different model.”

The upshot, Knutson says, is that while she has to keep her technical skills sharp—continuing to advise students and their spouses and working with an increasingly diverse international student body—she has also had to hone what might be called “higher-order” skills. For example, Knutson has had to learn how to work more regularly with provincial authorities who have oversight for university appropriations, as well as with officials in countries that send students to her school. It is “definitely a much higher level of government relations,” she says.

In response to changing trends, her role on campus has also evolved to meet the needs of today’s increasingly interconnected environment. “It used to be that we were thought of as the sort of nicey-nice people that help international students,” she says. “But now I think we’re being looked at more by deans to help them to make important decisions, such as offering programs in other countries. Our office is being looked at more for guidance and leadership and being expected to provide relevant data and information even more proactively.” Knutson says trends like those have meant she has had to hone her skills in relationship building.

Leadership Tests

As Knutson’s experiences suggest, the nature of university leadership work is evolving. As a result, leadership strategies that worked in the past likely won’t fully ensure success going forward. Leaders need to add to their skill sets. But what does that look like?

Key Factors in a Changing Environment

The labels—disruption, tsunami, perfect storm—have become so familiar that they are now clichés, but change on a grand scale has come to define higher education today. Significant shifts in the landscape have become routine. Among many others, these six factors alone are more than enough to keep university leaders on edge.

Shrinking pool of potential students. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) projects that after 15 years of steady growth in the number of high school graduates, higher education faces stagnation in the pool of traditional students. Compared with 2013, a peak year, WICHE finds that U.S. high schools will graduate fewer students every year between 2014 and 2023. One key reason is the decline in births after the Great Recession. Schools in the Northeast and Midwest regions of the United States will be particularly challenged.

More diverse students with different needs. WICHE projects that the number of white students will decline, while colleges will see more Hispanics and Asian/Pacific Islanders. That’s in addition to trends that show more adult and first-generation college students on the path to higher education. This trend suggests that some universities may need to allocate additional and different resources to matriculation and degree completion in the future.

Reduced state financial support. According to one study, state appropriations for higher education dropped some 30 percent from 1970 to the early 2000s. That trend has put pressure on institutions to raise tuition fees to cover the difference. The squeeze on tuition revenues has pushed many universities to pursue new revenue streams, including developing commercial properties and enhancing fundraising.

Evolving federal policies. The current administration has introduced policies that are restricting the flow of international students to U.S. institutions. Congress, meanwhile, is considering updates to the Higher Education Act that could constrict federal financial aid for students and, potentially, federal support for university research.

Explosion in technology. Evolving technologies are transforming pedagogy, with implications for space planning, facilities design, and learning methodologies. The rapid expansion of online learning is bolstering enrollment for many institutions, but also creates new competitive tensions between institutions and with vendors in the private sector.

Eroding public trust. Recent surveys and polls of public opinion across the United States show that higher education is held in lower esteem than it once enjoyed. Students, parents, legislators, and other key stakeholders are more skeptical today about the value of college and its return on investment. 

Relevant ideas might come from emerging scholarship on leadership. Some experts advocate, for example, for what has come to be called “adaptive leadership.” In their book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky frame an approach to change-focused leadership that builds on past experiences but emphasizes the ways that organizations can experiment to adapt to tough challenges. One goal is intentional “displacement” of an organization’s old DNA. The idea is to build an organization’s capacity for generating “new norms” that enable it to address evolving challenges and capitalize on emerging opportunities.

Similarly, the report The Skills Future Higher-Ed Leaders Need to Succeed, published by Academic Impressions, outlines questions to guide new leadership practices that have been developed from more than a decade of leadership development programming for university administrators and faculty. “How do you lead when there is no map? When the territory is unknown?” the report asks. “What different skills are needed?”

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“Historically, higher education has underinvested in developing its people, and specifically developing [its] leadership capacity,” says Amit Mrig, president of Academic Impressions and one of the report’s authors. Citing a distinction that the report’s coauthor, Patrick Sanaghan, makes between “smartship” and “leadership,” Mrig adds that people “sometimes confuse those two things. Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you can lead.”

The Academic Impressions report recommends taking a deep look at trends, issues, and opportunities that are on the horizon for a given institution and for higher education at large. Leaders should then consider what skills and qualities they will need to successfully meet those challenges. “The things that come up have to do with creativity, taking risks, building bridges, more collaboration, more time thinking about the future, and being strategic,” Mrig says.

Synthesizing insights from thousands of administrators and faculty members, the report suggests that higher education needs future leaders with five key qualities: they are “anticipatory thinkers”; they tolerate risk and support creativity and innovation; they are “effective conveners/brokers/facilitators”; they are “courageous decision-makers”; and they have the resiliency to “bounce forward” after a crisis or setback.

Anticipatory Thinking

Mrig argues that planning in higher education tends to default to narrow and short-term thinking because there are so many significant crises to tackle on a day-to-day basis. “We’re conditioned for a number of reasons to think narrowly and to think small,” he says. “You tend to hunker down and make cuts rather than think about how you can change and create a very different kind of reality for the institution.” Another pitfall: Too many leaders seem to think their university will come unscathed through storms that are battering other institutions—if only enrollment managers or fundraisers stepped up their game.

Mrig asserts that university leaders need to be more brave, innovative, and comfortable with taking risks. “If the leadership isn’t thinking boldly and taking more control over the future of the institution,” he says, institutional change simply won’t happen. Institutions also need to do more to support creativity and bold, new ventures and learn to not penalize failure in the pursuit of innovation.

Acknowledging that it is “really hard to stretch your thinking out,” Mrig nonetheless believes that longer-term thinking is essential. “The notion of anticipatory thinking is especially relevant and powerful in international education,” he says, particularly given that sudden changes in policy can quickly shut down the flow of students from any given country.

Still, as higher education moves further into what is proving to be a greatly disrupted era, academe’s traditions around planning may need a reset. “I no longer believe in long-term strategic plans,” Pierce says. Rather, she believes universities should develop and focus on a list of just a few institutional strategic priorities that can evolve quickly as relevant factors change. She also cautions against tendencies to conduct “blue sky” planning that is not strongly tethered to financial realities.

Pierce argues that university leaders need to look beyond the narrow interests of their university to form a vision for the future that is fully informed by a deep understanding of external forces. Too many campuses, she says, “tend to be pretty much focused on themselves.” At the same time, she says, leaders need to develop an authentic narrative about what their institutions stand for and do well—one that goes beyond empty platitudes like “a graduate of university X will write well and speak eloquently.”

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Collaborative Leadership

Leaders of tomorrow’s institutions will need strong skills in collaboration and partnership building, with external partners and colleagues on campus.

“If [university leaders] are going to be successful in this kind of position, you need to have allies,” Brustein says. “You need to be able to make the case so that provosts, deans, and the other vice presidents see internationalization as helping them achieve their goals and strengthening the core missions of the university.” Brustein builds productive relationships with colleagues by first asking where their priorities lie.

It is just as crucial for leaders to have an “understanding [of] the importance of assessment of impact” and be able to prove results that extend beyond international education—including financial outcomes, which affect units across the institution. Brustein suggests that leaders take pains to show peers and superiors how funds allocated to the international office produce a demonstrable return on investment for the university. He also advocates for partnering with key colleagues, such as the development office, to engage in fundraising and “friend raising.” 

“We need to be entrepreneurial and innovative in creating new revenue streams for our programs,” he says. As part of that work, Brustein cultivates relationships with federal agencies and other entities that can support international activities.

Tomorrow’s leaders are going to have to be not just skilled tacticians, he says, but nimble strategists who can provide a vision for internationalization and coalesce many different forces to make that vision come to life. Strong team building skills are also essential. “You have to think [like] a CEO, because you can’t do it all yourself,” he says.

Emerging Future Skill Sets

Factors like changing demographics, constricted revenues, and inhospitable policies have created a tipping point for higher education, forcing many universities to confront a cascade of difficult and different challenges. Going forward, university leadership will need different skill sets to address these intractable issues. Adaptive leadership, innovation, risk-taking, and continuous learning will all have to be part of a university administrator’s toolbox.

Because today’s complex and changing environment is challenging international education so decidedly, to thrive and succeed, university leadership will have to be particularly intentional about honing their leadership skills.

“We live in an increasingly global and interconnected society. I see a lot of opportunity for folks in this arena to step up and really demonstrate leadership,” Mrig says. “What can we learn from international education that can be applied more broadly to the things that we’re talking about in higher education in terms of diversity, inclusivity, and student success? I see a lot of opportunity for international educators to demonstrate a kind of leadership from which the entire institution can truly benefit.”  •

Learning to Be the Change 

How can leaders in higher education learn and hone the skills they need to be successful over the next decade? Amit Mrig, president of Academic Impressions, suggests the following areas of development:

• Sharpen decisionmaking skills by reflecting on the quality and impact of past decisions and the processes that were used to make them.
• Seek out stretch assignments and new challenges to become more comfortable with different ways of thinking.
• Take advantage of professional development programs, conferences, and meetings, such as NAFSA’s Management Development Program and the International Education Leadership Knowledge Committee’s resources.
• Find and learn from new colleagues in the field.
• Read up on adaptive leadership, including the resources listed below.