Styles and habits change, techniques and preferences shift, evolution occurs in everything from medical practice to women’s fashion to corporate and academic management style. When my first son was born in 1975, the obstetrician came to the assignment with nearly 50 years of previous deliveries. This was a time of dramatic changes in the delivery room: allowing fathers to be present, natural childbirth, and asking hospitals to provide a serene, quiet atmosphere for the birth — giving the child a gentle start in the world. Our physician’s comment was, “We’ll do it any way you want. I’m old enough to remember when it was considered best medical practice to quickly bathe the newborn in ice-cold water!”
Recently, The New York Times, in an article by Nelson Schwartz, reported that the business community is recruiting a new type of executive: the team builder. According to quotes by Warren Bennis, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, and others, the personality and professional style of corporate America has undergone a radical transformation in the past few years. The empire builders of the 90s were replaced, post-Sarbanes-Oxley, by the clean-up specialists, who in turn are now being replaced by individuals Bennis describes as people who “have not just the cognitive ability to run a major firm…but (have) the ability to make people feel like they’re working together.” (Emphasis added.)
It appears that the men with “public swagger and boardroom-size egos” — the Jack Welch/Sanford Weill/Michael Eisner types — are not as fashionable as they once were. Nor are the lower-key fixers of regulation noncompliance who succeeded them. Directors and investors are now looking for a kinder and gentler approach in their leaders, team-building specialists, huggers at the top. An example is the appointment of A.G. Lafley at Procter & Gamble, who succeeded Durk Jager — the former known for his highly energetic, forceful style and the later for a more conciliatory — dare one say, collegial — manner.
Having just finished 30 years as a university president, I wonder if this paradigm may reflect possibilities or parallels in academe, which has seen the average tenure of university presidents hover at about six to eight years. I think of John Silber, the longtime president of Boston University, who led BU by being commanding and forceful. I doubt anyone of equal intellect and equivalent personality would be appointed there today. Or recall the era of lawyers as president: Derek Bok at Harvard, Michael Sovern at Columbia, Robert Stevens at Haverford, Michael Hyman at Berkeley, Edwin Levi at Chicago, and yours truly at the University of Hartford — appointments made in part to help guide universities through the travails of campus unrest. Numerous search committees believed that the skills of an attorney in top management would add value to campus administration. As a trustee once said to me, “We wanted someone with an understanding of the criminal mind.”
It appears that the times are changing once again, and the call is going out for a new academic management style. One of the most visible examples is the case of Larry Summers, who came to grief as the president of Harvard after only five years. Aside from his highly publicized perceived gaffe of referring to differences of “intrinsic aptitude” between men and women, Summers had previously been considered confrontational and antagonistic with the faculty and senior staff members on several other occasions. That approach was tactless and tactically foolish since university presidents can do or change little without faculty cooperation and cannot compel obedience over the direction and personnel of the enterprise to the degree that CEO’s can in the private sector.
But if it is true that old-style business leaders who demanded obedience are giving way to more collaborative ones, then perhaps the academy has something to both teach and learn from the business world and is already preparing the lessons.
Consider the appointment of Drew Gilpin Faust to succeed Summers at Harvard. She is an eminent scholar and, from what I have heard (I do not know her), an engaging person. I imagine charm and warmth were critical in her being chosen to lead Harvard because her management experience, which many believe to be imperative for consideration as a university president, is less than one would have historically expected. While Summers had led Treasury and, before that, a large division at the World Bank, President Faust comes from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where an online check of staff reveals 83 names. Harvard University has a teaching and administrative staff of thousands and manages resources in the billions.
Observing President Faust, I am inclined to conclude that having a contemporary leadership personality trumped conventional leadership experience in this case — and this case being Harvard, it is significant. It suggests that the “right” personality — collaborative, friendly, even empathetic — is more important than the “right” curriculum vitæ, one showing steady progress climbing up the historic ladder of administrative responsibility and achievement.
If this speculation is accurate, it has broad and deep implications. We may be witnessing the end of the era of triumphant charisma. The value organizations of all kinds traditionally assigned to forceful individual leadership may or may not have been historically misplaced, but may now be in the process of being succeeded by, or perhaps being accompanied by, a different skill set. This consensus building is defined as collaboration with a leader rather than obedience to the leader — and ironically must be inspired by the leader. This further refines the “evolutionary” idea of leadership by closing the distance between leader and followers and making the relationship more intimate.
I am not proposing that a new age of democracy in organizations, of leaders redefined as first among equals, and of sweetness and light is about to arrive, en masse, any time soon. Someone has to have the last word, make the final decision, often without a consensus — and that is not democratic, equal, or sweet. But the parallels between Lafley’s succession of Jager at P&G and Faust’s of Summers at Harvard are provocative and, if replicated prominently in academe, may be a sign that the nature of the American university presidency and thus the personality of the university president, like the nature and personality of business leadership, are changing and quite possibly for the better. As always, we have to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
