Elected University Boards vs. Appointed Boards: Leadership Needed

It is interesting that the Republican and Democratic Michigan Conventions this weekend both have floor fights over their slate of candidates this Fall for the U of M and MSU Boards. What a joke. The leadership of both parties ought to have positions that say they want to eliminate the constitutional provision that calls for the election of the Boards for U of M, MSU and Wayne State. All the other 10 state universities have boards appointed by the Governor with advice and consent of the State Senate.

With appointed boards there is more transparency in the process and candidates. Governors can do a better job of analyzing what each universityt board needs in an individual trustee and what is the proper balance in skill sets for the entire boards. A governor can also make sure that a board is not held captive by special interest groups like alumni organizations, business or labor groups, etc., etc.. Interesting to note that the three universities with elected boards have almost exclusively their alumni on their boards and that is not appropriate for many, many different reasons. Often these elected board members bring their partisan political views and bosses to the board deliberations which is usually harmful to the university and inappropriate.

Now it is true that sometimes the appointive process does not work well. Goodness knows that sometimes we see an occasional appointee who has been convicted of drunk driving, ethical lapses or is just a partisan hack, but by and large over the long term the universities get a higher quality, more effective board members in the Michigan appointive process. Some governors pay more attention to the appointment process and screening than others, but again, by and large over the past 50 plus years we have been doing the appointive system we have in Michigan we have gotten a higher quality board members who brings more effective governance to our state's wonderful universities .

Time for the candidates for Governor, State Senate and House to show some real leadership and work toward reforming the elected trustee process--they should lead the effort to build a constituency for amending our constitution. That is what leadership is really about--leading, taking risks and doing what is right for everyone, not just a select few.

While they are at it they should amend the constitution that allows our State Supreme Court to go thru the same political convention nomination and election. More on that later.

Leadership in the Public and Private Sector: Thoughts of a Pioneer in Leadership

This article is from The Economist.  Good read for public administrators and business administrators.  Very important reading for all those who want to be LEADERS.   Warren Bennis is a huge intellectual and practitioner in the field of leadership.  All of his books are worth reading.  

Leading light

The man who invented the study of corporate leadership, Warren Bennis, died on July 31st aged 89

Aug 9th 2014 | Business Schumpeter

ECONOMIST

WARREN BENNIS was the world’s most important thinker on the subject that business leaders care about more than any other: themselves. When he started writing about leadership in the 1950s the subject was a back road. When he died on July 31st it was an eight-lane highway crowded with superstar professors whizzing along in multi-million-dollar muscle cars.

Mr Bennis produced about 30 books on leadership. Some of them are classics, such as “On Becoming a Leader” (1989). All are surprisingly readable, stuffed with anecdotes, examples and literary references. He offered advice to leaders from all walks of life. Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks, regarded him as a mentor. Presidents from both sides of the aisle—John Kennedy and Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan—sought his advice. If Peter Drucker was the man who invented management (as a book about him claimed), then Warren Bennis was the man who invented leadership as a business idea.

Central to his thinking was a distinction between managers and leaders. Managers are people who like to do things right, he argued. Leaders are people who do the right thing. Managers have their eye on the bottom line. Leaders have their eye on the horizon. Managers help you to get to where you want to go. Leaders tell you what it is you want. He chastised business schools for focusing on the first at the expense of the second. He argued that “failing organisations are usually over-managed and under-led”.

What constitutes good leadership changes over time. Mr Bennis was convinced that an egalitarian age required a new style. Leaders could no longer crack the whip and expect people to jump through hoops. They needed to be more like mentors and coaches than old-fashioned sergeant-majors. Top-down leadership not only risked alienating employees. It threatened to squander the organisation’s most important resource: knowledge. There is no point in employing knowledge workers if you are not going to allow them to use their knowledge creatively.Mr Bennis believed leaders are made, not born. He taught that leadership is a skill—or, rather, a set of skills—that can be learned through hard work. He likened it to a performance. Leaders must inhabit their roles, as actors do. This means more than just learning to see yourself as others see you, though that matters, too. It means self-discovery. “The process of becoming a leader is similar, if not identical, to becoming a fully integrated human being,” he said in 2009. Mr Bennis knew whereof he spoke: he spent a small fortune on psychoanalysis as a graduate student, dabbled in “channelling” and astrology while a tenured professor and wrote a wonderful memoir, “Still Surprised”.

The last quarter of the 20th century often saw Mr Bennis in despair. He loathed the Masters of the Universe who boasted about how many jobs they had nuked and how much money they had made. “On Becoming a Leader” is full of prophetic warnings about corporate corruption, extravagant executive rewards and short-termism. He also lamented the quality of leadership in Washington, DC.

But he became more optimistic in his last few years, at least about the corporate world. The Enron, WorldCom and Lehman disasters taught businesses the danger of hubris. And a new generation of CEOs, whom he dubbed “the crucible generation” and compared to his own second-world-war generation, were more impressive than their immediate predecessors, characterised not merely by tolerance of other people, but respect for them.

Mr Bennis’s work on leadership was shaped by three different experiences. The first was the Great Depression: in 1932 his father was fired from his job as a shipping clerk without explanation and managed to put food on the table only by helping the mafia transport bootleg alcohol. The next was the second world war: he led a platoon into battle at the age of 19 and won a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. The third was more cheerful: the big expansion of American universities during the post-war boom.

The demobbed war hero went to Antioch College, where he was taken up by its president, Douglas McGregor, a social psychologist who subsequently made his name distinguishing between two approaches to running organisations, theory X (scientific management) and theory Y (humanist management). McGregor pulled strings to get Mr Bennis into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study for a PhD in economics. Despite a frosty reception—one of his professors, Charles Kindleberger, told him to his face that “We didn’t exactly throw our hats in the air when we saw your application”—he got a job teaching in the new field of organisational behaviour. The young scholar took full advantage of the intellectual cacophony of Cambridge, absorbing ideas from sociology to psychology, and eventually he tried his hand at leadership itself. He spent 11 years as an academic administrator at a time when universities were being torn apart by student protests, first as provost of the University at Buffalo and then as president of the University of Cincinnati.

Contrasting counterweights

When Drucker came to a party at Mr Bennis’s post-modern house on Santa Monica beach in California, in the late 1990s, the two men were a study in contrasts: Mr Bennis, thin, tanned and dressed in a light suit; Drucker paunchy, pale and encased in black. Mr Bennis talked animatedly about leadership. Drucker growled that what mattered was followership. But in fact the men were brothers under the skin and worthy counterweights to each other: big thinkers who took subjects too often synonymous with platitudes and gobbledygook, and, by dint of a lot of hard twisting, wrung some sense out of them.

Leadership in Diversity

This story is a good example of why a leader in every organization must be keenly aware of diversity issues:  why diversity is important, how to implement diversity policies and programs, how to measure effectiveness and how to make diversity an integral part of our organization and our community.  

 

The Monitor's View

America’s rainbow schools

The most diverse group of students ever will enter public schools this fall. With help from adults, they will shine.

By the Monitor's Editorial Board AUGUST 19, 2014

  • Matt Rourke/AP/File
    View Caption

America will pass a demographic milestone this fall when, for the first time, the majority of its public school students are expected to be nonwhite.

The percentage of white students, 63.4 percent as recently as 1997, is predicted to drop to 49.7 percent this school year.

While the percentage of black students has remained fairly constant in this period, schools have seen a big increase in Asian students and especially in Hispanic students, who now make up about one-quarter of the total.

Recommended: Are you as well-read as a 10th grader? Take our quiz.

Growing diversity in schools brings with it new challenges. More bilingual teachers are needed. Today, 83 percent of the nation’s 3.3 million public school teachers are white, with only 8 percent Hispanic, 7 percent African-American, and 2 percent Asian. While teaching positions should be filled based on performance, not racial quotas, school districts that bring more minorities into the ranks of their teachers will benefit.

Although America’s new student body is more diverse, it is also overwhelmingly home grown: From 1997 to 2013, for example, the number of US-born Hispanic children of school age leapt 98 percent, while the number of Hispanic immigrant children of school age declined 26 percent.

This new, more diverse school population is also a harbinger of 2043, when non-Hispanic whites are expected to become a minority of the US population as a whole.

America is already blessed with outstanding individuals from Hispanic, Asian, black, and other minority communities who have become leaders in every field from education, the sciences, and business to law and high political office. They represent only a first wave of the diverse talent and industry that will drive American progress throughout this century.

As America’s children head off to school, all adults need to invest in their futures – not only through their tax dollars but with their time and personal involvement, serving as caring parents, grandparents, teachers, administrators, volunteers, and mentors.

This investment will pay off for everyone: As well-educated, productive adult workers, today’s schoolchildren will be the taxpayers funding the Social Security and Medicare costs of tomorrow’s retirees.

But more important, these young learners will be writing the ongoing story of the American experiment, a story in which national unity is not based on ethnic or racial backgrounds but is forged from a common love of freedom, democracy, and mutual respect.

President George H.W. Bush has spoken of America as “brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light.”

Investing in a good education is a way to make sure those lights come on and shine in all their glorious American diversity.

Be Solid. Be Steady.

I have been reading/ listening to the media posts on the most recent crisis in the Middle East--the beheading of our American journalist by the terrorists.  Separate from all the partisan political chatter the President's White House speech on this issue reminded me of how important it is for public square leaders to be solid.  To be steady.

We often in this media 24 hour news cycle look for our leaders to be the greatest, the best,  forceful,  partisan, loud, extreme, etc., etc.. 

What we should really want from public square leaders in crisis situations is for them to be solid and steady.  In crisis we do not need all those other modifiers/adjectives.  We need them to be solid and steady.  To use critical thinking skills, to analyze, to think and to not make sudden and extreme moves. 

In crisis:  Solid.  Steady. 

Know Where You Are Going

There is an African proverb that says:  "If you want to go fast go alone.  If you want to go far get together".

 

A good leader is always going to build a team of strong and big thinking people.   This team will know where it is going because a leader will be a "destination leader"--telling the team where we are headed and how together we will get there.  They will have shared common vision of the destination.

 

The difference between a good leader and a great leaders is that a great leader will attract "big" people who are smarter than him/her and will be allowed to innovate and to make mistakes--but always staying on the course to the destination. 

Mentoring and Helping

I just read a quote by actor Kevin Spacey:  "If you are lucky enough to do well, it's your responsibility to send the elevator back down."

So true and something in the public sector we do not do enough of in our work environments.  Too often we leave it up to our colleagues and employees to figure out how to get help and mentoring.  We need to develop programs that are part of our work environments.  We need to be what Warren Bennis called "social architects" who help shape the culture of work. 

We need to make sure that our work cultures include opportunities for mentoring and partnering.  We need to make sure that it is okay to ask for guidance, to ask for guidance in innovating and know that it is part of the work culture.