Leadership in business versus community college.

Abstract

It has become popular to compare the management of community colleges to business management. Given the proclivity recently to describe the community college in terms of a business, is the business enterprise model of leadership an appropriate one for the community college? Are the characteristics of business enterprise leadership the same as those of community college leadership? Community college leadership is fundamentally different from leadership in business organizations.

Introduction

Gumport (2001) explores the management of higher education and business management in her work comparing higher education as a social institution to higher education as an industry. When viewed as an industry higher education is seen as needing to respond to "market forces" by rapidly adjusting academic programs to workforce demands and responding to customer needs and being, by the definition of the nature of markets, competitive. This distinction of social institution versus industry has profound effects on the application of management and leadership within the organization. What vision is to be pursued and what goals and objectives are to be realized? Profits, market share, and return on owners' capital, or societal values, individual learning, and human capital? Anecdotally, we hear the vocabulary of commerce creeping into the language of the community college: students are customers, customer service, serving the needs of customers, colleges need to be entrepreneurial, colleges need to react to the market. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article is a good illustration of this trend:

   In some respects the emergence of enrollment management is simply
   one small indicator of the ascendancy of capitalism and the extent
   to which the market metaphor has taken hold.... Increasingly,
   observers of trends in higher education are using terms like
   'marketization' and 'commodification' to describe trends in public
   and institutional policy that are influencing colleges. (Hossler,
   2004, p. B3)

My hypothesis is that leadership is fundamentally different between business and community college organizations and that the business model is not appropriate for the community college. The business organization exists to maximize financial return to owners. The community college exists to serve the education and training needs of the individual student and local community. Businesses are measured by objective financial measures but community colleges are measured by such subjective measures as meeting student educational goals, program diversity, and transfer and employment rates.

Management versus Leadership

Organizations are in need of both leadership and management. Using the briefest of definitions, management is the coordination of resources to achieve goals; leadership is developing a strategic vision and guiding the organization through a changing environment. Given the proclivity recently to describe the community college in terms of a business, is the business enterprise model of leadership an appropriate one for the community college? Are the characteristics of business enterprise leadership the same as those of community college leadership? This paper will compare and contrast characteristics of both, as well as leadership in the abstract.

Management is not leadership, but they are complementary. Kotter (1995) explores the distinctions between the two. Management, as any elementary business management text will tell you, is concerned with the acquisition and application of resources to meet business goals-establish and define a target, then set out the detailed steps to get there by planning and organizing people and material. Kotter's leadership analogies to the management functions are, setting a direction, or vision of the future, and aligning people by motivating and inspiring them to make and accept change to move in the direction of the organizational vision. Every organization needs management. Kotter's premise, in terms of the business enterprise, is that management brings order to the complexities of technology, regulations, competition, financing, etc. These are all functions that need to be performed in an orderly fashion in order to meet organizational goals. Leadership, by contrast, involves recognizing and coping with change.

While management may help an organization efficiently organize resources, leadership is necessary to recognize environmental shifts and orient the management tasks toward a vision inclusive of all constituencies-customers, stockholders, and employees. As illustrated by Haeckel (2003), knowing why actions are taken (in the context of strategic leadership) is more important than knowing how to do things. When change is occurring, perfect execution of plans (management) does not benefit the organization when the environment has changed but the organization has not reoriented (with strategic vision) to the changing landscape. This is not to imply that with leadership alone an organization will prosper. As Nohria, Joyce and Roberson (2003) report "companies that outperformed their industry peers excelled at what we call the four primary management practices--strategy, execution, culture, and structure" (p. 43) and "disciplined attention to operations is what really counts" (p. 46). It is noteworthy, however, that one of their four primary practices, strategy, is fundamental to leadership. What they say about strategy, "be clear about what your strategy is and consistently communicate it to customers, employees, and shareholders" (p .45) states the same constituencies as Kotter does in describing the constituencies to whom the vision is communicated. In essence, Nohria, Joyce, and Roberson advocate "disciplined attention" to leadership. Management and leadership are each necessary but not sufficient conditions for organizational success. As Kotter says, "once companies understand the fundamental difference between leadership and management, they can begin to groom their top people to provide both" (p. 115).

Leadership Development

The "administrative cadre" as described by Altbach (2001, p.24) is a phenomenon where a "career-based higher education administrator" trained in the field of higher education administration is developed. This contrasts with the tradition of administrators rising from the professoriate to administrative leadership positions. The preparation for the career administrator includes graduate level work in management, administration, and leadership in higher education. Duvall (2003) also explores this leadership development process. As community colleges grow as comprehensive institutions the management functions span many complexities. Leaders must be comfortable with looking forward, being responsive to change, and being able to deal with ambiguities. Formal graduate education teaches leaders to be forward looking rather than relying on past experience. According to Gumport (2001), the professionalization of the management function encourages the perception of higher education as an industry. Academic managers are responsible for functions indistinguishable from their business counterparts: planning for, organizing, directing, and controlling resources; awareness of the operating environments; compliance to various external rules and regulations; and a forward looking view of the organization. Professional organizations provide a necessary supplement to graduate education. Laden (1996) details leadership development programs from organizations such as the League for Innovation and American Association of Community Colleges.

Leadership development programs in business organizations tend to follow a different philosophy from the community college. Conger and Fulmer (2003) describe a "best practices" system of leadership development that emphasizes development, i.e. identify strengths and weaknesses in employees who have leadership potential and work to correct weaknesses for the betterment of company and employee. Also, place the employee in positions in the company that will provide them an opportunity to broaden their understanding of the company and experience growth in a variety of leadership roles. Community colleges don't often have the opportunity to direct that process from within; the individual would have to move to several different colleges to get that type of experience. Also, the business organization does not put as much emphasis on degrees other than the MBA, and even that is not considered a minimum qualification, as is a graduate degree in the higher education institution-a doctorate is required or preferred for many if not most senior community college leadership positions. (VCCS, section 3.2.1d).

Leadership in the Literature

Keyword searches using "community college leadership", "higher education leadership", "leadership", "community college and entrepreneurial" in library full-text databases for education, business, and psychology did not reveal any papers from refereed journals on the topic of comparing leadership between business enterprises and higher education. With only one exception the references discovered exclude any mention of or comparison to leadership in the business world. The exception is Anderson's (1997) suggestion that "educators may want to examine some of the corporate models of leadership training". This is in the context of developing leaders from within the organization because they are "steeped in the organizational culture". We see here that even though a corporate model is suggested it refers to the fact, like the rest of the literature suggests, there is a need for leaders to know the unique characteristics of the organization they are leading.

The topic of leadership is well represented in community college literature. One of the themes found in the literature is that of the complex and social nature of the community college as an organization, and the leadership qualities needed to lead such organizations. Bolman and Deal's (1991) structural, human resource, political, and symbolic frames and Bimbaum's (1988) bureaucratic, collegial, political, and symbolic frames are cited in Bensimon (1994) as examples of those leadership qualities. In comparing the frames leadership theories and traditional trait and power-and-influence theories, which explain leadership in terms of personal characteristics of leaders or the power relationship between leader and followers, Bensimon argues that the latter are too leader centered and are based on the belief that organizations are objective and rational. In her view community colleges are too dynamic and subject to "so much flux, conflict, and uncertainty" (p. 33) to be well led by subscribing to such theories. A collective, feminist view of leadership, less individualistic, is more appropriate for social organizations such as a community college. This "drawing others into the center" (p. 34) is also present in Bolman and Deal (2003) in describing Helgeson's web of inclusion and women's leadership characteristics.

Community College Leadership

The leadership of community colleges is often couched in terms of the dynamic and diverse nature of the community college organization, and the resulting leadership challenges. How can the leader, when faced with such diversity of organizational characteristics, effectively perform leadership functions? The need for community college leaders and the alleged peculiar nature of the organization has created a field of study-community college leadership. Duvall (2003) takes the position that the traditional career path of the discipline expert who rises from faculty through the ranks to senior leadership does not provide a diverse enough background for effective community college leadership. In Duvall's description of university doctoral programs in community college leadership the emphasis is on how those programs should prepare future leaders by encouraging problem solving, investigation, and preparation for ambiguity. Such programs are narrowly focused on the unique organizational and social characteristics of community colleges. Anderson (1997) and Bragg (2000) similarly described formal leadership preparation through graduate education for community college leaders, i.e. focus on the organization; if the leader thoroughly understands the nature of the organization the leader can lead it. The interrelationships of such diverse activities as budgeting, strategic planning, program management, student learning, etc. must be mastered to be effective leaders. Lee's (1997) annotated bibliography follows the theme of the unique character of the community college as an organization and the resultant "collective" or "situational" leadership. The complexities of the organization, governance, the involvement (or lack thereof) of faculty, external constituents like boards, budgets, changing educational needs and the like create unique leadership challenges for the community college leader.

Business Enterprise Leadership

Much leadership literature presumes an application of leadership in a corporate environment. In 64 articles from as many different authors in Wren's (1995) book the examples of leadership frequently describe leadership in terms of the business executive or politician, but not educators. Perhaps this is why we hear the business enterprise vocabulary in the community college lexicon--we are just acculturated to use it.

The business and higher educational institutions face fundamentally different purposes. Leadership applied to meet their respective objectives could be expected to be different. Haeckel (2003) describes what it takes in terms of leadership in order to make the business responsive in an "on demand" business environment. The leader must see the structural components of the business and customers as a system and be poised to act immediately and decisively. In a comprehensive study of 160 CEOs over twelve months Farkas and Wetlaufer (1996) concluded that CEOs adopt a leadership approach that meets the needs of the business regardless of the CEO's personality. Those business needs include an awareness of competitors, capital and human assets, and competitive advantage. These "approaches" are not at all similar to Bolman and Deal's (2003) frames but rather emphasize the relationship the CEO has with the rest of the organization and the image he or she projects in order to achieve organizational goals.

Leadership

Leadership is a concept that has many contexts. A study of leadership must include the situation in which it is applied, the people involved, the organization (that is to say the formal definition of the relationship of the individuals, e.g. a business, a college, a government, etc.), and the greater society in which all these are placed (Wren & Swatez 1995). Every organization at a given place and time of course exists in the same macro-contextual model-social, economic, and political forces and the contemporary set of social and cultural norms. What sets the exercise of leadership apart then, by Wren and Swatez's model, is the immediate organizational context.

How is this explanation of the contexts of leadership translated into practice? Zaccaro and Horn (2003) argue that there has been little attempt to integrate the theoretical exploration and explanation of leadership by the applied psychology community to the practice of leadership in the real world by the respective groups involved. The psychologists develop explanations and descriptions of leadership without regard to real world practice, and the practitioners are more enamored of the popular media's anecdotes and common sense then grounded theories of research. Zaccaro and Horn argue for a closer relationship between researcher and practitioner to get closer to the practical application or development of leadership theories in the organizational setting. By extension I am arguing that the organizational contexts of commerce versus higher education, and the discovery and explanation of leadership in each organization, renders the community college-as-a-business model inappropriate.

Conclusion

The proposed hypothesis, that community college leadership is fundamentally different from leadership in business organizations is supported by the literature. However, the underlying cause of that is not because leadership is defined differently for the different organizations but because the organizations are fundamentally different. "Leadership is leadership" but how it is applied is different. The objective of the business organization is to maximize value or financial return to ownership--a concept that has no meaning to a publicly financed government institution. The evaluation measures of success of a business are objective and quantifiable--financial returns (profit, returns on equity, etc.), market share, etc. The community college measures of success are less quantifiable and subjective--number of graduates; program diversity; rates of transfer to four-year institutions; employment rates of graduates. And, they are not universally agreed upon (Cohen & Brawer 2003, Burd 2004). The community college as a social organization has the mission to serve the education and training needs of the local community. Frequently that means working closely with business partners but it does not make the community college one of them.

References

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Interim Dean, School of Information Systems, Business, and Public Safety