Implementation: From Strategic Leadership to Strategic Management

Implementation: From Strategic Leadership to Strategic Management

The popular literature on leadership sends the message that management is mundane and blind to change, while leadership is noble and visionary. Practitioners, however, know that the relationship between the two is much more complex. In describing strategic leadership, I have tried to fill the managerial frames of strategy with new images of leadership. Yet I have sought as well to show that a leadership vision must create a clear picture of the tasks of enactment. In sum, leadership without execution creates an empty vision, while management without leadership is nearsighted.

For strategic leadership and management to work reciprocally, the first task is to analyze the resources, practices, structures, and culture of an organization to find vehicles for the implementation of the strategy. The key to strategic effectiveness is new intentionality that continuously seeks ways to incorporate a strategic orientation into the workings of the institution. Practically every facet of college and university operations presents itself as a possibility for reconceptualization and reformulation. In discussing a diverse series of successful steps to move the plan off the shelf and into action at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Kathleen A. Paris notes: “For the plan to be taken seriously, faculty, staff, and students must see it as infused throughout the organization. It must be part of routine academic life” (2004, 124). Her thoughts parallel other recent motifs in the literature on a strategy that emphasizes the importance of linking institutional research with initiatives to improve quality, plans with budgets, goals with teams responsible for attaining them, and strategies with control systems. An emphasis on the translation of strategic thinking and planning into action has come to characterize contemporary strategy programs (Dooris, Kelley, and Trainer 2004).

In the sections that follow, we provide analyses that illustrate the way that several critical contexts, activities, and relationships can become resources for the implementation of strategic leadership. There are countless opportunities on each campus besides these, but they are significant ones that often appear in the literature on the execution of strategy (Alfred et al. 2006; Bryson 1995; Keller 1997; Rowley, Lujan, and Dolence 1997; Sevier 2000). We shall focus on:

•     Communication about strategy

•     Strategy and organizational culture: Norms, stories, rituals, and ceremonies

•     Authority: Leadership, management, and control systems

•     Strategy and accreditation

•     Strategic assessment

•     Strategic program reviews

•     The governing board and the implementation of strategy

•     Strategic integration and momentum

COMMUNICATION ABOUT STRATEGY

Most theories of leadership give a central place to the importance of communication to engage and motivate constituents. Ultimately, strategic leader-ship becomes influential in the intentions and actions of individuals and groups through effective communication. Narrative leadership is successful because it reaches people at the level of their personal and cultural identities and thus is tied to their values and actions. Communication is the critical link in forging these connections.

Goals for Communication in Strategic Leadership

As we consider the role of communication, several familiar themes will reappear. It will become apparent that to serve a process of strategic leadership, communication must meet a series of tests. Both during and after a strategy process, communication will show itself to be characterized by:

•     Reciprocity: Most of the values and strategies developed in the process come from the campus community itself and are given back to it, perhaps in new forms, in the final vision and goals of the plan.

•     Participation: There are ample opportunities for people to be heard and for genuine give-and-take in the development of the strategy.

•     Urgency: Effective communication gains attention, shows that strategy matters, and summons effort and commitment to succeed in the face of obstacles.

•     Learning: In an effective strategy process, everyone learns about the institution and how it really works, as well as about the challenges it faces in the environment.

•     Narrative: The strategy uses the story and the narrative voice to embody the institution’s identity, capture its spirit, resolve conflicts, and create a sense of the connection between the past and the future.

•     Validation: Invitations to experts on and off campus to speak and write about the plan can both clarify and verify their claims.

•     Motivation: Leadership is always about motivation and inspiration, and communication is one of the primary vehicles through which it is achieved.

•     Repetition: The periodic and consistent communication of the key messages of the strategy in a variety of contexts is a necessity.

Not surprisingly, various guidebooks and studies of strategic planning consistently emphasize the centrality of effective communication (Alfred et al. 2006; Keller 1997; Sevier 2000). Echoing that theme, one of higher education’s most influential voices in matters strategic, George Keller, frequently affirms the need for effective and repeated communication in developing strategy: “The communication must be effective and continued, from the inception of planning through the several years of its implementation” (1997, 165). He advises us to communicate and then to do so again, and again. This communication has several goals, including the creation of a sense of urgency to respond to tough external pressures, and to seize the attention of busy academics who are preoccupied with the many other claims on them. As March puts it, decisions “depend on the ecology of attention: who attends to what and when” (quoted in Keller 1997, 165). If strategic issues are to engage an academic community, they must be communicated skillfully and persistently and, at times, movingly.

Forms of Communication

Both before and during an intensive cycle of strategic planning, there should be a variety of forms of communication. Institutions should use the vehicles that best fit their cultures to build awareness about strategic planning, from Web sites to newsletters, from large public meetings to smaller gatherings, from informal conversations to major speeches, and from the agendas of regular meetings to special presentations. There should be good opportunities in these contexts, and many others, to present and elicit ideas and reactions to the strategy project, both as to its methods and content. The efforts to inform and to establish a sense of importance for the process should themselves be considered strategic objectives.

As the strategy process gets underway, the SPC will have gathered a set of articles and documents for its own use. Information about the collection can be made widely available, and some articles and reports should be provided on a Web site. At various moments in the process, people across campus will be invited to offer opinions on surveys and questionnaires or to attend meetings, roundtables, or workshops to offer ideas or to respond to a task force or council draft. As the process moves forward, a draft document of the SPC’s final report should be circulated for comment or should be made the subject of formal or less formal discussions or open meetings. To increase participation at these events, personal invitations should be sent from the chairperson of the SPC, the president, or the relevant dean or director. As a result of these interactions, a good cross-section of the campus will feel informed and involved in the main issues under consideration. The reciprocity of a process of leadership will have been achieved.

Larger campuses will have a harder time than smaller ones in building an effective communication system, but modern information technologies make the goal a realistic one. In large institutions, each academic unit or subdivision becomes an important spoke in the wheel of communication. Success will depend on the ways that deans of schools and colleges are drawn into the strategy process and then communicate on its progress and results. The chairperson and the staff of the SPC should monitor and encourage that process, calling on the authority of the president or chief academic officer as needed.

The Strategy Report

The leaders of every strategy process have an important decision to make about the nature of the reports or documents that will issue from the project. Often one hears that it is the process itself, far more than the resulting document, that matters. People claim that reports have a short shelf life, and no one has time to read them. For these reasons and others, some writers suggest that a final strategy document should be no more than twenty to twenty-five pages (Rowley, Lujan, and Dolence 1997).

There is no easy rule of thumb for the appropriate length or nature of a final strategy document. The character and length of the document is a consequence of the goals that each institution sets for the process and the uses that it intends for the report. It ordinarily should appear in several different forms and lengths to accomplish its purposes. Although the report is not an end in itself, it can be an influential means to achieve a variety of critical goals.

Consistent with our emphasis on the tasks of leadership, it is important for the report to be a primary source for teaching and learning about the strategic future of the institution. As such, a strong case can be made for making the final report a longer and more elegant document of fifty to seventy-five pages of text, plus charts and data. Carefully crafted language can serve a variety of purposes, many relating to the themes of leadership. The most important issues should be treated in clear and exacting prose, although some sections can use bullet points and summaries. In presenting strategic initiatives relating to the use of resources, or involving conflict and change, there should be a premium on well-reasoned and documented argumentation rather than extreme brevity. Much of the document’s persuasiveness is achieved by drawing on the institution’s story in building its case and using the narrative form to reach the audience as participants or stakeholders in the process.

The capacity of a report to inform and inspire those who have not been close to the planning process is often at stake, so the document carries an important burden. The report teaches. What do we mean when we seek national status? What is the balance between legacy and change? What does it suggest to be the best in our class? What is the specific content of diversity? What is the re-source picture for the future? Why were these and not other construction or renovation projects chosen? Why are we being asked to establish priorities and to cut expenses yet again? The final report becomes one means to create a sense of urgency and significance, which is essential to drive the plan to realization.

Tactics to Communicate the Strategy

A final report does not, of course, stand-alone as the product of a strategy process. It functions as the source for a large variety of other communications and for a set of emphases and actions that, in effect, comprise the tactics to communicate the strategy. It is much easier to accomplish these steps if the final report has a suggestive name that describes its major themes, rather than the generic “Strategic Plan, 2005–2010.” Centre College entitled one of its plans “Education as Empowerment,” a theme that captured some of the goals of transformative liberal education.

The steps in a communications plan can include:

•  The preparation of attractive summary reports being circulated to special audiences, like advisory groups and the press, and to be included in alumni publications, perhaps as a pullout section

•    The development of articles to be used in faculty, staff, and alumni publications, often as a series

•    The development of stories and features based on the analysis of proposed programs and facilities, to be used by the admissions and development offices

•   The creation of Web sites that provide the plan, progress reports on its implementation, and coverage that may have appeared in press releases, stories, and articles

Based on the communications and effort is the systematic distribution of the full report to the campus itself. In the hands of many key decision-makers, it becomes a coherent set of directions and goals for their own priorities and plans, as we shall see. If it is clear that budget decisions will be made in terms of the priorities of the strategy, it will get everyone’s attention. A good final report also prompts admissions directors, development vice presidents, and communications directors to underline key ideas and narratives in the report. It offers them a coherent story to tell about the institution’s direction for the future. The ideas and even the language of the plan come to shape the way these key divisions communicate with a wide variety of the constituencies of the university. As a result, the organization’s identity and its messages become much clearer and more coherent.

Brown University Web Site

Brown University has created a superb Web site to communicate its “Plan for Academic Enrichment.” In addition to the plan, it includes several backup reports on the campus master plan, financial resources, and other strategic issues. Some features of the site are distinctive and effective. Among these are links that take the viewer to recent developments in each of the university’s ten strategic initiatives. The excellent graphics and photographs, press releases and stories, announcements of grants (including $100 million from one donor for financial aid), and descriptions of new academic programs give the reader a vibrant sense of the content and progress of the plan.

STRATEGY AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE: NORMS, STORIES, RITUALS, AND CEREMONIES

A central theme of our analysis is that collegiate organizations function as cultures as well as formal organizations. Campus communities live by norms and beliefs, customs and rituals, and stories and traditions that suggest what people should know and do to fit into the organization. As we have seen, the power of organizational culture has a strong influence on the effectiveness of leadership both as an engaging process of influence and as a formal position. The implementation of strategy depends on knowing the folkways, pathways, and leverage points to get things done within the culture. Strategic leadership is always looking for ways to read the meaning of these lived realities to embed strategy with the grain of the organization’s understanding of itself and its ways of doing business. In doing so, it brings a systematic and focused approach to the cultural tasks of leadership.

The culture of a community also has a more visible way of enacting itself through the formal and informal rituals and ceremonies by which it celebrates its history and identity. Traditions and rituals are plentiful on many campuses, less so on others. But virtually every institution has ceremonial moments when it opens and closes the academic year, celebrates a founder’s day, provides students and faculty with awards, and welcomes new members of the community. At the University of Kansas, entering students participate in a powerful initiation into campus lore and culture as they celebrate Traditions Night and learn songs and chants and hear stories about the Jayhawk, a mythical bird that represents the struggles of the early Kansas settlers (Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, Whitt, et al. 2005; cf. Toma, Dubrow, and Hartley 2005). All such occasions become ways for aspects of the institution’s narrative to be presented and celebrated. Rituals and traditions connect faculty, staff, and students with a lived expression of the community’s heritage and purposes, reinforcing and deepening the formal definitions of identity and vision found in a planning document. Strategic leadership draws respect-fully on these resources to relate its goals to the interwoven cultural dimensions of the community.

AUTHORITY: LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT,

AND CONTROL SYSTEMS

More than communication and cultural resonance are necessary to implement a strategic plan. Required as well as a sense of the legitimacy of the total process and effective use of authority to accomplish designated goals (cf. Bornstein 2003). Unless hindered by adversarial hostility, faculty and staff will be inclined to accept and own a strategic agenda that has been developed collaboratively and legitimately. With appropriate forms of consultation and interaction, opportunities to contribute and be heard, and responsiveness to any signals of discontent about the process, the strategy agenda gains legitimate authority in the academic sphere. If the leaders of the strategy the process has exposed the academic issues in the report to open faculty debate and consideration, it will be seen as conforming to the expectations of shared governance.

If legitimacy is essential in the academic sphere, both ownership and authority are vital in the administrative arena. Strategic leadership captures the best ideas and professional aspirations of the staff as well as the faculty. Many of the primary champions of the process and the products of strategic planning will have to come from the highest ranks of the organization, and others will be found at all its levels (Keller 1997). The designation of named academic and administrative positions and offices in the context of goals and accountabilities will establish public expectations for the enactment of the strategies.

Yet the daily work of the implementation of goals also depends upon the authority of those who hold leadership positions. Although reciprocal leadership is not defined by authority, the full and consistent institutionalization of strategy depends on it. In the words of Jean Monnet, one of the architects of the European Economic Community, “Nothing is possible without individuals; nothing is lasting without institutions” (quoted in H. Gardner 1995, 15).

The Role of the President and Other Executives

The authority and commitment of the president and other senior officers are necessary conditions for the successful implementation of strategic initiatives and goals. Whatever role the president may play in leading the strategy process itself, there is no doubt about the central responsibility of the president in implementing the results. In analyzing eight case studies of successful strategy programs at widely diverse institutions, Douglas Steeples notes: “Successful strategic planning requires . . . presidential leadership of the highest order” (1988, 103).

For strategic leadership to take hold, far more is required than formal presidential assent. Other senior officers and members of the faculty will know from the start whether the president values the strategy process and has the skills and inclination to use it as a form of interactive leadership. They will take their cues from the president’s actions and expectations, giving greater or less weight to the goals of the strategy as they read the president’s intentions. If the president is truly committed to strategic leadership and strategic management, the strategy process will be continuous and its goals will be in evidence in the way that conversations take place, speeches are given, priorities are set, resources are allocated, and decisions are made. It will be equally clear if the president only pays it lip service and prefers to handle issues politically or through a strict chain of managerial control.

Commitment by the highest officer in each unit that undertakes the process is also critical for successful implementation. The top officer can use the tools of authority to embed the strategy in the everyday decisions of the organization. Individuals in authority can command attention, control resources, reward and punish, control systems of communication, and hold people to account even in the world of autonomous knowledge professionals. These capacities are the mechanisms of authority exercised by position. They provide a framework within which the work of leadership as reciprocity can be given form and continuity.

To be sure, the tasks of implementation become far more difficult or impossible if the members of the organization are not invested in the ideas and strategies of the plan. Especially in the academic sphere, but throughout the organization, there will be minimal compliance, grudging acceptance, or all the intricate tactics of resistance, avoidance, and delay where commitment is lacking. Authority over others has to be transformed into authority with and for others in the development and implementation of a strategic plan.

Control Systems to Monitor Results

The commitment to strategic management will also become evident in the way the president and other officers use and create control systems to monitor the implementation of the strategy. Strategic goals take primacy over operational objectives, which are gradually reorganized to implement the strategy. One basic but effective way for the top administration, including the academic deans, to achieve one aspect of this task is to construct the annual planning and operational cycle explicitly around the goals of the strategy. As a result, each senior officer’s and division head’s annual report and the budget plan would give central emphasis to the status of each strategic goal. Commentary on problems and successes in reaching the goals would be expected, along with reports on steps to overcome obstacles. If circumstances merit revisions in goals, the annual report is one of the places to propose them. Since many of the vice presidents and their staff will carry explicit responsibility for implementing goals, the report connects to existing public expectations. The annual review can also be made a part of the individual’s own performance evaluation and be one of the factors determining compensation. In a strategic context, the annual report is not just paperwork, but a tool of leadership that can link operations with strategy.

There is also merit in making an annual report to the campus on the institution’s progress in meeting the plan’s goals. The report can be presented orally in the annual opening faculty meeting, in other campus presentations, in written summaries, in analyses and materials posted on Web sites, and, as we shall see, in reports to the governing board. If there have been changes in the goals, these adjustments and the reasons for them can be explained as well. Whether simple or complex, the reporting process itself communicates the message that strategy matters, as do those whose ideas have shaped it.

Some presidents and administrators choose to make the monitoring of strategic goals a continuous and structured administrative process. A midyear retreat to review the progress of the strategy, including intensive review sessions with each of the vice presidents, and in turn with their direct reports are one way to exercise controls. Another option, more bureaucratic requires top officers or their subordinates to report in writing on progress in meeting goals quarterly, typically on matrices that cross-reference issues and goals with deadlines and costs. Being strategic in scope, the goals may be difficult to measure quarterly, but the method produces an acute sense of responsibility and ensures that the control system is strategically oriented (cf. various articles on control systems in two collections on strategic planning, e.g., Dooris, Kelley, and Trainer 2004; Steeples 1988).

Strategic Goals and a Steering Core

There are other ways to link the strategic goals of the whole institution with the goals of academic and administrative units. In large and complex universities, the strategic initiatives themselves will have to be defined thematically and broadly to encompass the responsibilities and interests of the various academic and administrative subunits. If that is done effectively, then each college, school, or administrative area can be expected to carry out its own strategy work in ways that reflect the larger educational and strategic commitments of the whole institution. The strategy process can make clear that the viability and success of each element of the university ultimately depend on the reputation and strengths of the others. Turbulence in the wider world may be so daunting that it requires responses that no one unit can make alone.

We may have reached the logical organizational point of diminishing returns in radically decentralized patterns of institutional decision making. Duplication in academic programs becomes rampant, inefficiencies in administration and staffing multiply, common dangers go unattended, commercialism takes hold in some programs, and donors complain of being constantly solicited by multiple units of the same organization. Burton Clark writes: “One university after another finds that a strengthened, steering core is needed, one central body or several inter-locked central groups of administrators and academic staff who can legitimately and effectively assist the interests of the university as a whole” (1997, xiv).

An example of educational leadership at the core of a large, complex and celebrated research university can be found in the efforts of the University of Wisconsin at Madison to focus its energies on improving undergraduate education.

Based on the recommendations of its 1989 North Central Association self-study for reaccreditation, the university provost decided to do something bold—to actually implement a plan developed for accreditation. Among other priorities, the effort involved investing resources in undergraduate education, making it a thematic strategic focus that was relevant across virtually the entire institution. It produced new initiatives in advising, an effort to transform residences into learn-ing communities with close ties to faculty, and enlarged opportunities in both classroom and community learning (Paris 2004).

Strategy and Human Resources

Another critical contribution of strategic leadership is its influence on a college or university’s human resource program, including its system of faculty appointment and tenure. A sharpened sense of identity and vision translates into clearer profiles of the people needed to enact the strategy and helps to define and refine criteria and expectations for performance, including that of the president. The tasks of recruiting, retaining, evaluating, and developing people become more intentional. Programs of faculty and staff orientation and of management and leadership development become more differentiated and purposeful. The inner workings of the strategy system itself can become a worthwhile subject of study and a focus on leadership development. Many of its methods can be taught and learned and embedded in decision-making processes throughout the organization. Without the right people with the right skills to give it life, a strategy will become dormant and ineffective.

STRATEGY AND ACCREDITATION

In the academic sphere, many strategic goals will be directed to specific committees or departments for follow-up and eventual action. Others will have a more general impact across many academic programs. As examples, one frequently finds that strategic plans include initiatives to implement international and multicultural studies, to expand interdisciplinary work, to encourage the uses of technology in teaching, to develop new pedagogies, to revise the general education program, to make advising a more effective process, and to create effective methods for the assessment of learning. These strategies cannot be reduced to the work of one or two faculty committees. Broad academic initiatives like these need to be related to the ongoing work of academic programs and departments. The connections are usually difficult to make, and academic administrators are often frustrated in trying to create them. The specialized focus of the department and the pressures of everyday responsibilities work against the time and energy required for new ventures. If the push for change comes from the top in the wrong form, resistance and resentment immediately rise to the surface.

In dealing with the challenges of this kind, strategic leadership always looks for existing methods and processes to help accomplish its work. Cross-cutting academic initiatives can, for example, be tied to program review, to self-study for reaffirmation of accreditation, and to the ongoing work of assessment. These suggestions will grate on many ears since each of these processes is scorned by a hefty percentage of the faculty, and not without good reason. Much of accreditation has consisted of busywork necessary to comply with regulations, program reviews have been scripted and perfunctory, and assessment has never engaged the imagination or interest of the faculty. Nonetheless, there are opportunities for strategic change in each activity.

More recently the accrediting processes of both specialized and regional associations have allowed or required institutions to become more expansive in their self-studies and to focus on the quality of student learning. Jon Wergin (2003) documents the recent emergence of the strong emphasis on student learning in the seven regional accrediting bodies. In a parallel way, Ann Dodd (2004) analyzes the increasing focus in accreditation on the self-assessment of educational quality, curriculum development, and leadership. The emphasis is on encouraging institutions to relate their ongoing strategy processes to the tasks of a self-study. The approach makes eminent sense for several reasons. One is that it gives priority in accreditation reviews to issues that have strategic significance across the institution; another is that it focuses energy on a substantive set of responsibilities that must be fulfilled by the entire campus.

The 2002 guidelines of the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges emphasize precisely these points. Each institution undergoing review is expected to develop a quality enhancement plan and to demonstrate that it is part of a continuous process of planning and evaluation. “Engaging the wider academic community, the quality enhancement plan is based upon a comprehensive and thorough analysis of the effectiveness of the learning environment for supporting student achievement and accomplishing the mission of the institution . . . with special attention to student learning” (Commission on Colleges 2002, 5).

To fulfill these requirements, institutions obviously need to have an ongoing strategy program. Existing or contemplated strategic initiatives provide the content and the context necessary for charting the development of a quality enhancement plan. That plan may, as suggested, be one or more of the topics already on the institution’s strategic agenda. If a topic is chosen that cuts across the curriculum and teaching and learning, it will have to be considered at the departmental level and translated into plans and actions that become part of the institution’s formal responsibilities. The goals of each department are perforce connected to the larger educational and strategic objectives of the institution, which are ultimately approved by the governing board. The obligations of accreditation can be transformed into an opportunity for integrative decision making.

STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT

We have already seen that strategic indicators are an important part of institutional self-definition. Those same indicators often provide the basis for measuring and monitoring an institution’s achievement of its strategic goals, especially if they are easily subject to quantification, such as goals relating to admissions, enrollment, finances, and fund-raising. The implementation of goals is strengthened by effective forms of quality assessment that open lines of inquiry into the institution’s performance.

Performance measured by strategic indicators offers a wealth of critical information. It prompts important inquiries about the meaning of the data and the achievement of strategic goals that specify the vision. Where have the goals been achieved or exceeded? Where have they fallen short? For what reasons? What actions are underway to reach the goals? What do we do to improve our performance? Are there unanticipated results? What do the data tell us about where we stand with the competition? Are the data a reliable indicator of the institution’s achievements? What follow-up studies are required to probe important findings and glean new insights? Do the goals of the measures need to be revised?

Similarly, each major administrative service and the program should assess its own performance periodically through surveys and interviews and relate its evaluations to its own and the institution’s strategic objectives. The ability to make continuous progress in reaching ever-higher levels of service and achievement depends on knowing how well the organization is performing its work in all spheres, which is one dimension of what it means to be a learning organization. Quality is of a piece. The effort to enhance quality across the campus contributes to a spirit of pride and achievement that builds on itself and creates momentum. Recent studies, including ones on projects at the University of Iowa and Rutgers, focus on the importance of strategic orientation to measurement and goal setting (Coleman 2004; Lawrence and Cermak 2004).

The Assessment of Student Learning

Typically the assessment of academic and student learning goals will depend on evaluations that do not lend themselves easily to quantifiable results, or trends that can be simply reduced to numbers. The desire to reduce students’ intellectual development to a simple set of comparative metrics or the results of high-stakes tests is a misconception that blocks coherent thought about the kinds of assessments that are possible. To look for simple answers, one would have to displace the larger and most important goals of liberal education—a passion for learning, critical judgment, moral purposefulness, civic responsibility, and a resilient imagination—because they are not directly quantifiable.

Student learning is best assessed with a variety of methods, many of which are useful, if not purely scientific. They can provide proxies and indicators of achievement that have meaning in the context of the inquiry and as a way to probe the issues in an institutional framework (cf. Bok 2006; Burke 2005; Ewell 2006). Institutions, for example, do and should gather data through interviews and questionnaires about student and alumni interpretations of their campus and academic experiences. A wealth of data is available in the results of teaching evaluations, in the patterns of students’ course selections and grades, in retention data, and in many other sources that are part of the everyday life of most institutions. Useful information is often collected about alumni achievements in the workplace and graduate school. The data can be mined for significance through various analytical and quantitative techniques (Kuh 2005). With the right disposition and processes, all this information can be used to build a culture of evidence about student learning.

Institutions may also choose to participate in important projects such as the National Survey of Student Engagement, which, as we have seen, seeks to determine the level of active student involvement in learning. It collects and analyzes data from thousands of students at hundreds of institutions and offers a variety of quantitative analyses and institutional comparisons of the various dimensions of student engagement in learning. Carefully interpreted, findings from these kinds of inquiries can assess broad strategic initiatives and goals concerning important aspects of the quality of student learning, as opposed to subject matter recall (Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, Whitt, et al. 2005).

A variety of newer methods of assessment are especially appropriate in a strategic context as well. The growing practice of using student learning portfolios, often created electronically to function as an elaborate transcript of student experiences, achievements, and abilities, is promising for several reasons. They can be the basis for student, peer, and faculty assessment of a student’s intellectual skills and competencies, as demonstrated through a wide range of experiences and accomplishments in and out of the classroom, or they can contribute decisively to student self-awareness and purposefulness in setting and achieving educational goals that reflect the institution’s special strengths.

In terms of strategic issues, the gold standard for assessment is the ability to determine the value that a particular educational program adds to the student’s intellectual development. Students come to college with such different levels of motivation, talent, and preparation that absolute measures of student achievement provide only a partial indication of the educational power of a given program or institution. Were we able to measure the degree of a student’s progress, however, educators would have ways to improve their teaching and programs in response to assessments of learning. They might also find critical evidence in support of their claims about their distinctive achievements and ways of creating educational value. The ability that strategic assessment offers to create, reinforce, and promote authentic comparative advantages and core competencies should motivate the work of value-added assessment. The findings should reflect and authenticate the institutional narrative and become embedded in the ongoing work of strategy.

The National Survey of Student Engagement, as we have seen, offers a promising line of inquiry about the culture and the form of student learning. Another variable in the learning equation has to do with the cognitive skills students develop and points toward the assessment of differences in intellectual growth. Working in cooperation with the Council for Financial Aid to Education, the Rand Corporation has developed a test to measure acquired intellectual capacities in communication and in critical, analytical, and integrative thinking, echoing the focus on cognitive skills we discussed in the preceding chapter. Called the College Learning Assessment, it gives students a real-life problem to analyze and resolve by drawing on different types of information and using various forms of reasoning. Instead of responding to multiple-choice questions, students write their analyses and proposed solutions to the problem in a complex prose argument. The test can be administered at the early and more advanced stages of a student’s career, so the patterns of value-added intellectual growth among students can be charted and compared. The results can also be correlated with other measures of student capability, such as test scores and college grades. The College Learning Assessment intends to measure cognitive capacities that most colleges and universities describe as one of the aims of liberal education (Erwin 2005; Ewell 2006; Rand Corporation / Council for Aid to Education 2004). Using predominantly multiple-choice questions, both the Educational Testing Service’s Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress and ACT’s Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency also offer tests that aim to measure academic skills, though the emphasis is not as clearly focused on real-life situations.

Embedded Assessment

If strategic leadership is to be successful, it matters whether or not specific academic and administrative goals are achieved. Yet the a most significant accomplishment of strategic leadership is to embed a system of productive self-evaluation and strategic decision making into the institution, one that continuously translates into efforts to raise the bar of academic and organizational achievement (cf. Banta 2002; Bok 2006; Ewell 2006). The strategic assessment then becomes a distinctive activity of a learning organization by determining whether educational goals are being met, and by using the results of the process to move to the next level of achievement. Data on student learning must migrate from the institutional research office into the self-assessment of academic programs and individual faculty members. Although this is no small task, it can be gradually achieved by establishing a strategic the context for disaggregating, considering, and using the data. The data can come to include the results of small-scale studies and experiments teachers themselves can perform to compare results on different types of assignments and classroom strategies. In Our Students’ Best Work, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (2004) provides ten recommendations for creating campus cultures of accountability and assessment, emphasizing liberal education as a standard of excellence, the need for the articulation of goals for learning in each department, the development of milestones of student achievement, and continuous assessment that includes external reviews and public transparency of student achievements.

Done effectively, assessment contributes to a culture of evidence that characterizes the work of strategic leadership. These issues ultimately go to the strategic question of providing evidence for educational quality. Whatever else it does, a college or university first needs to have meaningful information about whether or not it is fulfilling its mission to foster students’ intellectual growth and achievement. Then it needs to have mechanisms to give visibility to its findings and communicate them to programs, departments, and individuals. Finally, it must have strategic linkages to act on what it has learned about itself. As difficult and unpopular as an assessment is among many faculty members, institutions do not have the option to avoid the issue, especially from the perspective of strategic leadership. Unless it knows what it intends its intellectual signature to be and can assess the impact that it is has on students, it will not be able to create a focus for its aspirations to attain higher levels of educational quality. It may fall into the common strategic trap of wistfully claiming that all it needs are better students, rather than becoming passionate about ways it can make a greater difference in the education of the students it has.

STRATEGIC PROGRAM REVIEWS

We can illustrate some of the challenges and opportunities of institutionalizing a new strategic orientation to assessment by considering changes that have been made in the practice of academic program reviews. Especially in larger institutions, one of the primary forms of assessment involve the periodic review of each academic department and program, often concerning its separate graduate and undergraduate offerings. Most program reviews, not unlike accreditation, consist of a departmental self-study and a campus visit by a panel of two or three faculty members from another institution. When used to the greatest advantage, there is a a clear process for the review, active participation by the university’s academic leadership, and timely communication of the results back to the department (Mets 1997).

Not unexpectedly, the process and the results of program review are of uneven quality and usefulness. Most faculty members participate in the process with sentiments ranging from grudging acceptance to repugnance (Mets 1997; Wergin 2002). Yet if good information about the faculty, the students, and the program has been collected, and insightful consultants have been retained, the recommendations can be beneficial to the department’s self-understanding and its plans for the future.

For strategic self-assessment, the process represents an important opportunity at several levels, many of which have not always been characteristic of the practices of program reviews. First, it provides the occasion to connect the strategic vision of the institutional or unit-wide plan with the self-understanding and planning of each department. Additionally, it offers an ongoing process that can be oriented toward strategic thinking, goal setting, and continuing self-assessment, especially concerning the quality of student learning, a topic that is not traditionally the focus of the process. The link to strategy is not an illusion. In a helpful study of program reviews across 130 campuses, Wergin asked the provost of a research university with a model program on how he would introduce it into another institution. He replied: “First I’d take a measure of the institution and its vision for the future. . . . I would try to find ways of articulating a higher degree of aspiration; if there weren’t a strong appetite for this, then the program review would be doomed to failure” (quoted in Wergin 2002, 245–46).

Although some processes show these characteristics, there should be no illusion that these proposed strategic shifts in the perspective and purpose of program review will be easy to accomplish (Mets 1997). The culture of academic autonomy that makes leadership so difficult is in fullest flower at the departmental level. It is not surprising that proposals for academic change that do not originate in the department, such as reform in general education, are often perceived as a threat to departmental autonomy.

Program Reviews and Student Learning

One should not expect or even desire to change program reviews radically, for they are properly a creature of the judgments of professionals in their fields. Yet one can seek to alter the the process to make it fit more naturally into a process of strategic thinking and self-evaluation. This could mean that each program would be asked to focus on the quality of student learning (in addition to research, faculty productivity, and program content) with specific attention to the larger strategic goals of the university. Protocols and methods would be built into the process to achieve this orientation, giving space to the department to develop or modify assessment methods that it would find beneficial to improve its own work with students.

An important part of the self-study would be focused on questions that the program faculty would shape themselves and would find meaningful. Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy (2005) write of a fascinating project in academic quality assurance at the University of Missouri that can guide some of these questions and has inspired the following list: What are the goals of learning in the department? What do we want our students to learn and to be able to do? How do our goals reflect the distinctive mission and vision of the department and the institution? What should be the design of the curriculum? Is there a coherent logic for the relationship of courses in the program? How do the courses relate to the goals of learning? What are the department’s primary methods of teaching and learning? How do our students learn? Are teaching and learning active or passive, individually or group-oriented? How is the technology used? What types of assignments, learning experiences, and levels of expectation predominate? How do we know if students are reaching the department’s and the university’s goals for learning? How do we assess learning? Who is responsible for the evaluation—the faculty member, the department, the school, or the university? What validates a student’s choice of this program as a major? How do we use the results of our evaluations to improve the quality of student learning? Are the results actually being used effectively? What are our priorities in light of what we know about teaching, learning, and our program? What should change?

In an approach such as this, the department would go on to create a self-study that would provide external reviewers with samples of student work, such as papers, projects, and exams. Assessment data about student accomplishments and the results of exit interviews and alumni surveys would be provided. The visiting team would read much of this material in advance and spend considerable time on campus, interacting with students, perhaps hearing and seeing the results of student research. The effort to create a culture of evidence for student learning as a basis for program reviews would make the process more strategically effective and rewarding.

If the questions alone were to become a central concern of all program reviews, they would more clearly become strategic activities. The questions about other broad strategic goals of the university concerning graduate programs or research might be structured in similar ways. Whatever the focus, they would become vital links in the effort to connect the program’s goals with the strategic objectives of the larger institution and would build the strategic self-assessment into the ongoing work of the department. In systematically using the program review process to respond more nimbly to change and the university’s vision, departments would find themselves participating in the process and discipline of strategic leadership.

THE GOVERNING BOARD AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF STRATEGY

One indispensable but neglected resource for the task of implementation of a strategic plan is the governing board, whose role in strategic governance we explored in chapter 7 and can now supplement. At this stage of our study, it has become clear that the board’s acceptance of a strategic outlook is a critical dimension of its own work and one that involves many-sided opportunities and responsibilities. Its participation in a total process of strategic leadership takes it well beyond simply insisting that the institution develop a strategic plan as one activity alongside many others. Rather, the governing board serves as the ultimate guarantor that strategic leadership is empowered by strategic governance and translated into strategic management (cf. Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges 1996, 2006; Chait, Ryan, and Taylor 2005; Morrill 2002). In a strategic context, its responsibility to monitor, evaluate, and ensure accountability for the fulfillment of the institution’s purposes takes on a new pertinence.

Having examined the importance and the content of strategic visions, initiatives, and goals, we can more easily appreciate the centrality of the board’s role in the implementation of the plan. The governing board and each of its committees now have a rich set of issues to address through the content of the strategy and its measurable goals. The goals form a natural agenda for each board and committee meeting, giving trustees a coherent set of topics to keep under continuous review.

Monitoring Performance

In responding to strategic initiatives and goals, the board’s first responsibility is to raise pertinent questions. As it does so, it exercises far more influence over the university than it might otherwise expect. The strategic questions that are likely to come from board members trigger a sense of anticipatory responsibility that cascades through the decision-making chains of the institution. Administrators and faculty leaders who interact with the board in committees and other contexts become very conscious of whether or not the announced goals of the strategy are being satisfied. Since its campus interlocutors know that the board will be provided information about progress in reaching the goals, anticipatory actions will ordinarily be taken to respond effectively to expected board queries. Thus, the actual and anticipated interrogatories of the governing board are a potent factor in the implementation of strategic goals. Because the board is the legal guarantor of the mission of the institution, it can play a decisive symbolic and actual role in the exercise of its fiduciary and leadership responsibilities to ensure the institution’s future (Morrill 2002).

As the board receives assessments of the organization’s results, it can take an active stance in monitoring performance. If the assessments raise issues, the board’s monitoring becomes the basis for pressing for more information, and for seeking to know what is being done to resolve a problem or to reach a goal. Effective and active oversight depends on good systems of assessment, which in turn lead to questions about ways to improve performance to ensure results. The board does not intervene directly in a faculty or administrative responsibility, except in extremis. But its level of engagement increases if important goals continue to be delayed or missed. Its antennae go up if problems persist or are avoided. In keeping with its proper form of responsibility, it can take a variety of steps to ensure results, from asking for reports to adopting resolutions, creating task forces, and setting deadlines for action. The administrators and faculty members who inter-act directly with the governing board will feel the pressure of accountability to address strategic issues that the board has addressed. Ultimately, it is the president, the board’s primary executive partner, who will be held to account to answer for problems that are subject to resolution, but not resolved, and to attain attainable goals, but not yet attained (Morrill 2002). In its own assessment of the president, the board uses the goals of the strategy as a central benchmark of performance.

Renewing the Work of the Board

When boards see their role strategically, a new kind of vitality and purpose-fullness are released. They feel their own unique and ultimate responsibility for translating the institution’s narrative of identity into a narrative of aspiration. Their intentions find a new perspective through the methods of strategic leadership. Suddenly a course proposal is more than the arcane language of a professor, but a building blocks in the institution’s effort to create a distinctive program that creates a comparative educational advantage. Now plans for a new building are not just about cost and space but are as well part of a legacy of shared meaning and a new tool of education to reach strategic goals. The deliberations of the board and its committees display a new coherence, a clearer purpose, and a renewed level of commitment. That commitment in turn contributes to the board’s enhanced ability to ensure the implementation of the institution’s strategy as a way to guarantee its educational effectiveness and its viability in a world of change. Strategic momentum takes hold in the work of the board itself (Morrill 2002).

STRATEGIC INTEGRATION AND MOMENTUM

We have seen on numerous occasions that strategic leadership is an integrative discipline as well as a systemic process. Because it is rooted in the discovery and articulation of values, it always refers back to humans as agents and the choices that they make based on their underlying commitments. This pattern of seeking deeper connections defines the method at every turn. Strategic thinking finds the continuities between the past and the future by knowing and telling the institution’s story as the basis of its vision. A concern for meaning and values embraces the effort to create a culture of evidence that will collect and use data that have strategic significance. The need for resources articulated in the strategy is integrated with plans to obtain them. The goals of the various strategies are assessed by an embedded process of evaluation and frequently connect to one another in broad patterns of relationship. Goals and priorities always come with price tags, so plans have to be translated into operating budgets. As we have seen, processes of communication and systems of implementation are efforts to motivate and coordinate the translation of decisions into actions. Strategic evaluation transforms its findings into new goals to improve results continuously. In all these ways, strategic leadership is an integrative and systemic process of sense-making and sense giving.

To implement its goals, strategic leadership discerns multiple relation-ships and is ready to create permanent or temporary integrative mechanisms of decision making. Frequently, special committees or task forces are needed to address connected issues. These cross-departmental groups of faculty and staff draw together the members of departments and units, who must work cooperatively to implement strategies. They may become a continuing community of practice that develops self-consciousness and meets periodically. Because of their shared interest and expertise, they can contribute to one another’s knowledge and growth (Wenger and Snyder 2000). When student learning or other critical values move to the center of the strategic agenda, then the isolated points of view of separate departments and faculty committees have to give way to the unified perspectives of cross-disciplinary task forces and strategy councils. Strategic leadership creates supple, resilient, and coherent networks of collaborative practice and leadership, decision making, and implementation.

Strategic Momentum

As we have seen, there is no doubt that an environment of constrained or declining resources creates severe challenges to successful strategy and leadership. Violent swings in resources from year to year at both public and private institutions make the work of strategy immensely difficult and complex. Under some extreme conditions, crisis management may have to replace strategic leadership for a time. But in most cases, the future of the institution itself will depend on strategies to address the resource problem at its source. If the systematic restructuring of an institution’s programs proves to be necessary, or if contingency planning becomes a continuing requirement, it is far better to approach the task as a strategic challenge than simply a political or managerial problem.

Happily, colleges and universities do not ordinarily find themselves in a crippling or chaotic environment. Possibilities present themselves continually in many different forms, sometimes under the guise of challenges, at other times as ready opportunities. Strategic leadership should be prepared to seize the promise of these circumstances. Skilled strategists know that every plan should include some worthy and significant goals that are within reach and can be rapidly achieved. “What helps a strategic transformation succeed is a series of small wins” (Keller 1997, 168). When the designs of the strategy begin to take hold and possibilities are realized or threats are overcome, something quite remarkable begins to take hold in institutions. Energy and confidence that build a sense of momentum are released, creating a magnifying effect of achievements upon one another. In describing the experience of great companies, Collins uses the concept of “break-through” to denote that point when momentum takes hold and builds on itself: “Each piece of the system reinforces the other parts of the system to form an integrated whole that is much more powerful than the sum of the parts” (2001, 182). In describing turnaround situations at institutions with widely different missions, the contributors to Academic Turnarounds (MacTaggart 2007a) describe the ways that achieving financial stability, creating new self-images, and developing innovative academic initiatives intertwine and reinforce each other to achieve momentum.

Now the wisdom of establishing measurable goals that are demanding but attainable begins to be rewarded. Those responsible for the achievements feel a sense of control over their circumstances and are absorbed by their commitment to the tasks at hand. Intentions stated publicly and then fulfilled create credibility and trust in the strategy process and in those participating in it and leading it. Achievements in one sphere trigger accomplishments in others, as a synergy of success, takes hold. The cycle of success translates from resources to programs, to new plans, to enlarged support, to more opportunities for students and faculty, and to enhanced reputation in a virtuous circle driven by strategic leadership (Keller 1997; cf. Lawrence and Cermak 2004).

In studying examples of successful strategy programs, one finds that the participants in the process often seek to express the ways that leadership and momentum are rooted in incoherent and connected processes of strategic choice and action. As Dooris, Kelley, and Trainer reflect on these cases, they conclude: “Strategic planning—wisely used—can be a powerful tool to help an academic organization listen to its constituencies, encourage the emergence of good ideas from all levels, recognize opportunities, make decisions supported by evidence, strive toward a shared mission . . . and actualize the vision” (2004, 10). In a word, even though they do not use the term, a good strategy is leadership.

Strategic leadership depends on many individuals, so it is experienced as a collaborative and communal achievement. Problems and issues will still present themselves, sometimes as frustration that the pace of success is not even more accelerated. Yet it also becomes clear that the distrust and anxiety that often take hold when people do not know where the institution is headed largely disappear. People now see strategy as a valid enterprise because it delivers on its promises. It responds to several layers of human need by defining aspirations that are worth commitment, and by using an organized collaborative method to achieve them. Strategic leadership not only sets a direction for the future but also takes the organization toward its destination. In doing so, it embodies many of the capacities, satisfies the needs, and produces the benefits that describe the phenomenon of relational leadership.