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The Leadership Continuum

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By Dennis M. Barden

The past and the future rushed past one another within minutes. My PDA buzzed with the news that Frank P. Piskor, president of St. Lawrence University while I was a student and when I began my professional life in higher education, had died at the enviable age of 90. Then a second buzz produced a report that a former colleague, Bob Zimmer, had been named the next president of the University of Chicago. That those two items broke within minutes led me to reflect on the two men and the job each was hired to do.

There are obvious differences between the two institutions -- St. Lawrence is a liberal-arts college in a small, rural, East Coast community and Chicago is an internationally renowned research university in the Midwest's largest city.

Much about higher education and the role of the president has changed since Piskor's ascendancy to the St. Lawrence presidency in 1969 from the provostship at Syracuse University. Zimmer, the provost at Brown University for the last four years after a long tenure on the faculty at Chicago, inherits an institution of far greater complexity, with assets and challenges not imagined by the St. Lawrence of the 1970s.

What, then, can be learned by search committees and boards looking at those two presidents? Their differences are obvious. But what are their commonalities?

Piskor became president of St. Lawrence just a year before the fatal shootings, in May 1970, of four students at Kent State University. He came into an institution -- and an industry -- on the brink of crisis, with students, faculty members, and trustees viewing the future of the academy and the nation with real concern. His job was to reweave the fabric of the university community while reasserting the primary educational mission of the institution.

Zimmer becomes the president of the University of Chicago during another period of change both on that campus and within higher education generally. In Zimmer's case, the change is occasioned not by tragic events but by the rapid evolution of higher education as a business. His job will be to continue to steer the university through that change, to provide the resources necessary to maintain and to enhance its quality, and, as Harvard and Lawrence Summers learned the hard way, to do all of that in ways that keep the institution's key constituencies happy.

That each of those men was chosen as the right leader not only for the specific institution but also for the specific moment in history is instructive as search committees and boards work to identify future leaders for their institutions.

Search committees, boards, and campus groups often fail to realize that presidencies exist within a historical continuum. Search consultants see that when we question key constituents at the outset of a search. Almost without exception, people start their description of the ideal candidate with some variant of "I want someone exactly like [the incumbent]" or "I want someone entirely different from [the incumbent]."

Many times we hear both of those sentiments expressed by different people or constituencies about the same person, but neither of those descriptions is ever quite right. What the institution actually needs is the person who best dovetails with the incumbent, who is capable of building on the progress the incumbent made (and/or overcoming his or her mistakes) to catalyze a new and different type of progress.

The challenge for search committees and boards is to describe, to identify, and to anoint a leader who can address the institution's current problems and who, at the same time, has the vision and imagination to see around the corner. That can be exceedingly hard to do.

In many cases, boards and hiring committees make the search harder by not recognizing three fundamental dynamics.

• Problems do not go away. When a college fails to resolve a problem, there are only two possible outcomes: It will inflate to the point where it absorbs all of the institution's energy and resources; or, worse, it will become an ingrained part of the institutional culture. Problems must be solved, and turning those problems into opportunities must be the institution's top priority.

• Only some of tomorrow's problems are predictable. True, there will always be fewer resources than you need and too many constituencies to please, but there will also be new and unforeseen issues that arise completely without warning. Just ask the CEO of any institution in New Orleans. You are not predicting the future with your choice of a president; you are seeking brains, courage, judgment, fortitude, decisiveness, perspective, and integrity -- in short, your search is about leadership.

• Your leader is going to serve for a relatively brief slice of your institutional history. He or she is going to have the time and resources necessary to solve some problems, to undertake some initiatives, and to make some progress. To paraphrase a well-known adage, when your leader steps down his or her inbox will not be empty.

When we help our clients draft descriptions of the ideal candidates for various leadership positions, the results invariably include the metaphorical equivalent of blue tights, a cape, and a capital S. The board or the committee also wants to find someone who will stay for at least a decade lest those involved have to undertake a search again in their lifetime.

While much of that description is good natured and quixotic, too much of it reflects the actual thinking of the board or the search committee. They really believe that the leaders they seek must be giants of super-human ability who will always be there, ever vigilant, to slay the dragons that lurk in the shadowy future.

Few and far between are the candidates who fill that bill.

Search committees and boards have to begin to think not just about hiring a leader who is capable of addressing the problems of this day and the next few but about selecting someone to fit into a continuum of leadership.

Presidential tenures are getting shorter whether institutions like it or not; boards would be extremely well-advised to build those shorter tenures into their thinking. That will allow them to act more strategically in selecting leaders who best suit the challenges of the day and the future and to be more pragmatic, if still aspirational, in describing that person at the outset of the search.

Frank Piskor served as St. Lawrence's president for 12 years. He succeeded in assuaging the tensions of the era on his own campus. He built a lasting legacy in the form of an institutional culture that values interconnectedness. He championed the liberal arts and placed faculty members at the core of the institutional culture. He was the right person for his time in the same way that his successor (twice removed), Daniel F. Sullivan, is the right person for his. Sullivan is building on Piskor's legacy and strengthening it by taking up arms against his presidential generation's greatest burden -- financing the enterprise. Piskor would not have thrived as a president in this environment; Sullivan could not thrive without the work that he inherited from his predecessor.

Zimmer inherits the benefits of difficult but important decisions made by his two immediate predecessors, both of whom themselves built on a distinguished foundation. How Zimmer will fare is history yet to be written.

The important thing for boards to remember as they pursue their own institutions' future leadership is that that history is but one new chapter in a long, long book.