including something as simple as which faculty members happen to be in the room at the time.
Whether academic leaders realize it or not, they are continually making choices about how to see and interpret their world – and their choices are fateful. If, for example, Nancy Turner focuses her energies on recruiting a new chief academic officer while faculty morale continues to plummet – and news of the growing dissatisfaction bombards sympathetic board members – she may find herself in a deep hole before she can benefit from a stronger top leadership team.
A central mistake for leaders in any context is to lock into limited or flawed views of their world. If what you're doing is not producing the results you want, it is time to reflect on your sensemaking. Reframing – the conceptual core of the book – can serve as a powerful antidote. Reframing is the deliberate process of looking at a situation carefully and from multiple perspectives, choosing to be more mindful by considering alternative views and explanations. Turner's colleagues each framed her situation differently, and each identified a piece of a larger puzzle. Each bit of advice expressed the personal frame, the mental map, of its maker – and that is the beauty and utility in strategies that seek feedback from diverse others. Each colleague stretched Turner's original views of her campus and of her leadership options. Together they offered Turner a larger understanding of her challenges than any one alone might have. In the language of this book, they helped Turner to reframe.
Research shows that leaders often miss significant data or elements in decoding the situations and opportunities that they face (e.g., Bolman & Deal, 2008b; Weick, 1995). They will nonetheless press forward. The risk is that they'll do what Ann Dodge's early doctors did – focus on selected cues and fit what they see into a familiar pattern, even if it isn't quite right for the situation. Like Ann's doctors, they may insist that their answer is correct and that there's no need for further input or investigation – even if the diagnosis leads to options that don't work. In those cases, they will often conclude that someone else is at fault, just as Ann Dodge's doctors blamed her for not following their advice rather than wondering if their advice was flawed. Academic administrators may do no physical harm when they frame a situation incorrectly, but they can still damage their credibility, their careers, their constituents, and their institutions. We all get in trouble when our sensemaking fails us.
Learning for Effective Action
From the outside, it may seem that effective leaders have an uncanny ability to read situations quickly. Many do, but they weren't born that way. They acquired their capacity from practice and experience. Effective leaders have learned thought processes that enable them to register what is going on, reflect on it, assemble it quickly into a conscious pattern, and see the big picture. What Malcolm Gladwell (2005) calls the blink phenomenon is a learned form of rapid cognition. Kahneman and Klein (2009) remind us that there is no shortcut to developing this kind of quick judgment – it takes effort, time, practice, and feedback.
Academic leaders can develop their skills in reframing – train themselves to see their role, work, and institution more broadly and from different perspectives. By learning how to think and act in such diverse roles as institutional architect, politician, servant, coach, prophet, artist, and diplomat, academic leaders can expand their mental maps and cognitive frameworks. The images build on more than a century of theorizing about organizations and about human behavior in them, and capture much of what we know about organizations as rational systems, human enterprises, political arenas, and theaters of worklife (Bolman & Deal, 2021).
Paradoxically, learning to make quick and accurate situational diagnoses requires slowing down. When you are feeling overwhelmed by everything coming at you, slowing down is counterintuitive and hard to do. But it is vital. The next time that happens, stop and ask yourself some questions. What's happening here structurally – how do institutional rules, roles, and policies contribute? What are the people issues at play? What are the political dynamics, and who are the key constituents to consider and reach? What's the meaning of this situation and of the options to me and to significant others? With practice, the process of reframing takes on the characteristics of any well‐learned skill: quick, automatic, and largely tacit. Such skills emerge from active learning and from practice. Five strategies can help the process along. None is rocket science, but all are easier to espouse than to do well and consistently.
To build your reframing skills …
1 Embrace the life of a reflective practitioner.
2 Be aggressive in seeking growth opportunities.
3 Actively and regularly solicit input from others.
4 Anticipate and practice the future through data gathering and scenario building.
5 Step outside your comfort zones and “break frame.”
Embrace the Life of a Reflective Practitioner
A consistent research finding on professional effectiveness is that those who learn best, lead best. “Leadership and learning,” according to John F. Kennedy, “are indispensable to each other” (Kennedy, 1963). Publicly modeling engagement in learning as a daily professional imperative is a mode of leadership in and of itself (Preskill & Brookfield, 2009). For higher education administrators, this suggests developing skills as a reflective practitioner (Schön, 1983). No one can anticipate and prepare for all that might arise on a college campus, but we can all get better at learning from our experiences. Skillful academic leadership depends on reflection‐in‐action (Schön, 1987): the capacity for leaders to think deeply before taking action, to reflect on how things are going as they act, to stay flexible and open to change, and to continue learning throughout their professional careers. Over time, reflecting on what we do also teaches us about our preferences, comfort zones, routine responses, and trigger points. It's easier to break habits when we know what they are.
Be Aggressive in Seeking Growth Opportunities
One of the best ways to learn is to take on new challenges and to be deliberate in determining how you will use these opportunities to build leadership capacities. Leadership is as much a performing art as a science. Like artists, leaders can enhance their skills by regularly practicing their craft and honing their talents. A key quality among successful executives is a dogged tenacity in learning about themselves as leaders and managers and in seeking rich and varied opportunities for professional development (McCall, Lombardo, & Morrison, 1988). “Learning is not attained by chance,” reminds Abigail Adams (1780), “it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.” Don't be afraid to experiment – stretching oneself broadens life and work skills. It can be risky: you may not learn as quickly as needed, and you can find yourself in over your head. Think carefully before you leap, and then keep an open mind. We learn from failure as well as success, and sometimes learning is even easier when the going is rough (Dotlich, Noel, & Walker, 2008).
Actively and Regularly Solicit Input from Others
We are all human and limited in our understanding of the world around us. But that need not derail our leadership. Constituents can teach us a lot about ourselves, about leading, and about our organizations, if we encourage them. They can offer alternative ways to view situations and help to identify our frame gaps and tendencies. Skillful leaders routinely seek information and advice from diverse others. They thank them for their honesty through nondefensive listening, and they acknowledge constituent contributions to successful outcomes. Such conversations will also broaden our appreciation of those around us. We learn about their preferences and talents and strengthen our capacities to work with them. Respecting others and seeking their participation
