Tag: recognise

  • Universities struggle to recognise leadership beyond the academic template

    Universities struggle to recognise leadership beyond the academic template

    In the shifting terrain of higher education, the figure of the “pracademic” has become increasingly prominent.

    Straddling the worlds of theory and practice, pracademics bring external insight into the academy along with a restlessness about how knowledge is produced, shared, and valued.

    They offer universities the opportunity to widen their epistemic horizons, but in doing so, they expose the inherent tensions in how academic leadership is defined and performed.

    The rise of the pracademic

    Pracademics rarely fit the established leadership templates; instead, they model heterodox approaches, navigating ambiguity, drawing from diverse methodologies, and unsettling conventional hierarchies. Arguably, this is not an accidental disruption, but a generative one. Pracademics challenge the orthodoxy of university life, and in doing so, they invite us to rethink the paradoxes that shape leadership in higher education.

    As institutions seek to embrace diversity and interdisciplinarity, many still struggle to accommodate those whose career paths have not followed the traditional orthodox academic trajectory.

    For second-career academics and pracademics, leadership can feel like swimming against the tide. Their experience and outlook can enrich higher education, but too often their value is under-recognised and under-leveraged. To lead in a heterodox community of contradictions, we must not only tolerate difference but structure our systems to nurture and embed it.

    This leads to the question: are today’s universities ready for leaders who do not fit the mould? As Jill Dickinson and colleagues noted in a Wonkhe article, some academics are seen as more proper than others.

    Not fitting the mould

    University ecosystems are not tidy places. They are heterodox ecosystems populated by the idiosyncratic, the idealistic, the quietly radical, the wildly inconsistent. This is perhaps their greatest strength, but also perhaps their greatest challenge.

    For those of us asked to lead within these environments, the traditional managerial playbook may not suffice. Our colleagues are not staff in the conventional sense. They are academics and professionals, each with their own epistemologies, rhythms, and values.

    It may be tempting to assume there are defined academic personalities. A shorthand often emerges: the aloof theorist, the star researcher, the endlessly enthusiastic educator. But these caricatures are too narrow. In reality, we work alongside colleagues who are motivated by very different things. Autonomy, impact, status, security, social justice, or simply the deep and personal satisfaction of learning. Some are collaborative; others prefer to work in isolation. Some want to change the world; others just want to understand it. To lead effectively in this landscape is not to standardise, but to navigate. Thoughtfully, deliberately, and with care.

    Increasingly we share this space with those whose paths into academia were far from linear. As a self-identified pracademic, I followed that linear progression, culminating in a PhD in entrepreneurship in my mid twenties before taking a right turn and transitioning into a career in industry and consultancy. Re-entering the academy many years later, I found myself in an environment which confused, frustrated and excited in equal measure. A world that both welcomed and resisted difference. As a pracademic I sought to blend my experience of industry with my academic credentials and apply this to teaching and scholarship. I thought this would be a straightforward career move, but it has been less than easy. I am not alone in this. I have several colleagues who have travelled similar paths. This is not a new phenomenon, and is highlighted in a previous Wonkhe article by Jacqueline Baxter.

    Where do pracademics fit?

    The academy is not against us; it simply does not yet know how to include us. And at times, we are not sure how to include ourselves. Recruitment, induction and promotion systems often presume conventional trajectories and narrow definitions of success. CVs weighted towards delivery, leadership and impact can sit awkwardly alongside expectations for peer-reviewed outputs and theoretical depth.

    The result is unease.

    Heterodox colleagues from non-traditional backgrounds are welcomed for their distinctiveness but expected to assimilate. Over time, they become weary; their fresh perspective blunted by institutional habits. And so we risk losing them. Or worse, we fail to attract pracademics in the first place.

    This would represent not only a loss of individual talent, but arguably it is a structural failure to evolve. In an era that prizes engagement, interdisciplinarity and real-world relevance, universities cannot afford to cling to a single model of academic identity. Heterodox colleagues are not silver bullets, but they are essential to the richness and resilience of the sector.

    The compliance trap

    Despite the diversity of perspectives and epistemologies, our systems often reward sameness; uniformity in careers, outputs and leadership behaviours. Interdisciplinarity is celebrated rhetorically but stifled procedurally. Innovation is encouraged but only when it conforms to measurable outcomes. Leadership frameworks borrowed from corporate life bring useful tools, but they are not neutral.

    These models often fail to accommodate heterodox approaches, undervaluing forms of leadership that thrive on difference, improvisation, and autonomy. Performance metrics and standardised objectives often marginalise the creative, the hybrid and the experimental.

    If we value diversity and heterodoxy, we must accept that excellence takes many forms: some measurable, others intuitive; some harmonious, others deliberately disruptive. We need frameworks that flex, processes that adapt, and cultures that embrace the very contradictions they generate.

    Herein lies the paradox: universities demand diversity to survive, yet they reward conformity to preserve reputation. They seek innovation but measure it through established norms. This tension is not a flaw, rather it is the condition of the heterodox university. The question is whether our leadership structures are capable of holding that contradiction.

    This reflects the recent call for a new leadership framework in HE, to address the shifting landscape, the advancements in technology, social and regulatory change. Leadership “is now a crucial component in the higher education sector’s efforts to successfully navigate current challenges”.

    Leading with empathy

    So what might leadership look like in this context? It means creating the conditions in which individuals can flourish. It is stewardship not control. It involves being comfortable with ambiguity and openness to challenge. It involves intellectual empathy: understanding how colleagues think, not only what they do and recognising the inherent value in other academics. It is about creating the conditions in which others can flourish, even when their values or methods differ from our own.

    University leadership can carry a heavy emotional load. The balance of advocacy with accountability; innovation with institutional demands; scholarship with scheduling. We were not trained for this; we stepped in because we care. We want to fix what frustrates us; to create space for ideas; to support people we believe in. Through listening we discover a form of leadership that builds a shared capacity and nurtures potential even in those who are manifestly different from ourselves.

    Permission to lead differently

    In spite of all the challenges, there is real opportunity. The best leaders I have worked with were not necessarily the most strategic or the most visible. They were the ones who listened well; who noticed when someone was struggling; who quietly, or even loudly, championed a good idea even when it wasn’t their own. They had the confidence to admit when they did not know the answer to something, and the humility to let others shine.

    Leadership of this kind may be less celebrated in glossy strategy documents, but it is deeply generative.

    We need, perhaps, to give ourselves permission to lead differently. To resist the false dichotomies. To stop trying to fix people and instead start asking what might enable them. To see conflict and contrast not as a threat, but as evidence of a living, thinking, thriving, modern institution. Above all, we must remind ourselves that leadership is not something done to others, it is something enacted with them.

    This is not leadership as compliance. It is leadership as contribution. And it is time we gave ourselves permission to practise it.

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  • We need to recognise the importance of maintenance too

    We need to recognise the importance of maintenance too

    The most obvious way that a university expresses what it values is what it chooses to pay for.

    At an institution level this might be about which kinds of jobs in which kinds of areas are funded. At a more personal level value is made clear by how people get in and get on in an institution.

    Promotion

    In reviewing promotion criteria of a number of universities, where it is not behind a login of some kind, one theme comes out time and time again. Promotion isn’t solely based on being consistently good at one thing. Promotion is about being able to be good at lots of things at once.

    Whether this is the hope that academics can be good researchers, teachers, and administrators all at once. The desire to find managers that can manage people as well as projects. And the forever quest for professional services that have innovative approaches of some kind.

    It isn’t fair to single out specific institutions as this is a sector wide phenomena but consider some of the language in the follow promotion criteria:

    • For a Grade 7 Assistant Professor “Evidence will be required of the ability to innovate and plan, and to execute plans competently”
    • For a Grade 9 lecturer role “Contributes to the planning, design and development of objectives and material, identifying areas for improvement and innovation.”
    • For a Grade 6 professional services role “You are involved in decisions that have an ongoing impact beyond your immediate team”
    • The job evaluation criteria for professional service staff “Will the role holder play an active part of any networks (connecting regularly with groups outside their team)? If so, please outline what these networks are, whether the role holder would be expected to establish the network, and the input they are expected to have”

    The thread between these criteria is the implication that doing a defined job to an agreed standard isn’t enough. Promotions, particularly to high grades, depend on creating new practices, integrating with other teams, and making an impact beyond the confines of a role. It is the things which aren’t in the job description, because the nature of innovation means they cannot be, that are as valuable as the actual job description.

    Innovation may be the goal but it comes at a cost.

    Consistency

    Every promotion criteria is a choice on what an institution values. The consistent message is that value is not purely about executing a single role consistently well. The choice that many universities have made is that there is value in working vertically, developing new practice within a role, and working horizontally, developing and sharing expertise across teams and departments.

    This choice means that there is less emphasis on maintenance and delivery. The slow grind of keeping the place running and doing a set of discreet things well over and over again.

    The result of this choice is that roles where there is less autonomy may be at a disadvantage. This is not to say there is not a role for innovation in all jobs but that innovation is structurally easier in some jobs than others. Take for example the jobs which are purely focussed on creating and interpreting new knowledge. In a previous role as a senior policy advisor I had great latitude to pursue institutional projects, look into problems and suggest new ways of working, and as a bonus my boss was the Vice Chancellor. It would have been an enormous failure of mine to have not been innovative.

    Conversely, the people our institutions rely on that work on the reception desks, maintain buildings, clean the offices, and do the things that actually make the entire place stay open clearly have less freedom to innovate in their work. They are managed on their ability to deliver a distinct service but promotion is often dependent on being able to move beyond maintaining performance. There therefore opens a gap in the possibility of getting promoted between those who work primarily in maintaining the institution and those who think about what the institution might do. This does not seem like an ideal incentive for institutions that rely on lots of people turning up, doing a defined role well, and being motivated to do so.

    Innovation for the sake of it

    The underpinning assumption is that innovation for its own sake is a good thing. There is even a league table for the most innovative universities in the world.

    This is because the university bureaucracy demands feeding with new ideas. It is a more machine. It needs more papers, more ideas, more meetings, more service innovation, more approaches, more evaluation, and ultimately more with less. The current more is innovating in service delivery with less resource to do it. It is rare to see a university with few ideas. It is much more common to see an institution with too few people to deliver them.

    The prizing of the new is tempting because it’s interesting but it’s a tool for a limited set of purposes. Innovation is the tool through which new ideas, services, processes, and products can emerge. Maintenance, the kind of reusing, fixing, and keeping things consistent, is the tool to ensure the good keeps going. They both have their place but one is not more inherently valuable than the other.

    In their influential essay on the topic Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel write that:

    Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there?

    To believe entirely in innovation as an unalloyed good is to fundamentally believe that newness is better. It is by extension a surrender of agency to say the promise of the future is better than the material of the present. Once the innovation happens more maintenance is needed. Once innovation overtakes maintenance, leaving no capacity to keep the new thing working,  the realm of innovation for innovation sake is entered.

    However, the alternative is not to go entirely the other way and focus on consolidation. As Russell and Vinsel point out in their own country

    What a shame it would be if American society matured to the point where the shallowness of the innovation concept became clear, but the most prominent response was an equally superficial fascination with golf balls, refrigerators, and remote controls.

    It is a question of balance and in a multi-layered bureaucracy like a university it requires balance across numerous domains.

    At a human level, there should be clear progression pathways for people that want to be experts and keeping things going. The reward does not have to be management responsibility (why make people who are good at delivering do less delivery?) but recognition of their domain specialisms.

    Culturally, it is about language that reflects the shared contribution of skills toward a common goal. And institutionally, it is a question of how maintenance becomes a key strategy component, and is therefore recognised. For example, the extent to which sustainability strategies are built on innovative idea vs the extent to which they are about keeping the old going.

    Our institutions depend on the people that literally keep the lights on, the machines working, and the services delivered. Let’s let the maintainers maintain and reward them for doing so. Let’s also keep innovating, maybe just not on everything all of the time.

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