Academic institutions form the backbone of any society. A nation’s progress is directly proportional to the quality and extent of people’s education. They are unique entities for more than one reason, particularly from a management perspective: complex and difficult to manage.
The challenges
Most academic institutions are very poorly managed. This is partly due to the incapability on the part of those assuming leadership positions, and partly due to the attitude or mindset.
The challenges are too many.
Complex affair
First off, running an educational institution is a complex affair. It has too many constituents, with varying needs — the student community, the alumni, the prospective students and their parents, the community at large, and the government. This is not to say that typical business organisations are free of multitudes of stakeholders. It is just that the expectations these constituents have from educational institutions are higher than from a corporate organisation.
Multiple bottom lines
Educational institutions also operate with, and are guided by, multiple bottom lines. It is relatively easy for the CEO in a business organisation to accept or reject a decision, based solely on profits. But the head of an educational institution doesn’t have such a luxury, even in a privately funded set-up.
The media, the public, as well as government will haul them over the coals if they see the educational institution making surplus, or worse, pursuing economic objectives. They are expected to deliver based only on social objectives, capitation fees that private institutions thrive on notwithstanding.
This leads to educational leaders often being confused about pursuing economic objectives; many end up looking at surplus as a bad word or a sin. They fail to realise that every organisational entity has an economic aspect to it, irrespective of it being a ‘for profit’ or ‘not for profit’ organisation. And that it is the first duty of the leadership to ensure efficient and effective use of resources to achieve the objectives. Ensuring a surplus simply means taking care of today’s as well as tomorrow’s needs. This is somehow lost on most of the ‘not for profit’ entities.
Non-conformists
While the context itself is complex and difficult, it gets accentuated by the fact that academic institutions and academicians do not conform to general organisational and business theories. Academic institutes work on a collegial format. Hierarchy exists but mostly on paper — in the day-to-day business, everyone is a teacher and hence equal.
They live in the world of ideas, thoughts and intellect, and hence, tend to be less practical, but at the same time, can be very egoistic and insecure. This makes them a different kettle of fish from an organisational management perspective; and makes academicians and academic institutions more political. As Henry Kissinger famously said, “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”
Academicians are more wedded to their field of study than to their organisations or institutions. They don’t adhere to norms and rules as easily as their counterparts in the industry do, and are less driven by monetary considerations and incentives. This makes the task of a leader trying to bring them together to achieve organisational goals, a formidable challenge.
The students
The students are the other main constituent, who are a floating population with concomitant implications of managing them. They are consumers, customers and the product, all at once! This makes things tricky, having seized academic leaders for quite sometime.
Additionally, in traditional societies like ours, the hangover of Guru-Shishya Parampara is still strong, creating conflicting expectations and dissonance on the part of administrators, teachers, students and parents.
Academic leaders
To complicate this picture further, in most instances, leadership positions in academic institutions are occupied by individuals whose path to the chair is built on excellence in academic roles. Eminent academicians rise to the top. This can pose a serious issue. What happens if Bell Laboratory makes the most brilliant scientist the CEO? Leadership positions in academic institutions require, in my view, the following attributes:
Academic eminence.
Ability to conceive, design and deliver new innovative academic programmes.
Ability to deal with people and build organisations.
Have administrative, leadership and strategic capabilities.
Have a strong sense of economic performance and understanding of finance.
People with such abilities in the educational field are rare, and hence there is a huge shortage of leadership material in the academic world.
Recently, an academic colleague mentioned that a leading private business school in the country is willing to offer anywhere between ₹3 and ₹5 crore for the Director’s position.
While this does sound astronomical for an ‘Indian’ business school, it is true that remuneration packages for leadership positions in academic institutions are going north at a rapid pace. Despite this, it doesn’t look like this supply-demand gap in academic leadership is going to close any time soon.
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