When a Vice-Chancellor, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Dean, Head of School or another senior leader with a similar title leaves, universities will begin the process of finding a replacement. There will be discussions about the qualities required, a job description will be written, search consultants may be appointed and internal and external candidates will be considered.
Eventually, somebody new will take up the position and everybody will breathe a sigh of relief. But perhaps there is a more important question that should have been asked several years earlier: who was preparing the people who might eventually be capable of doing the job?
The fact that so many senior leadership roles are advertised externally suggests to me that succession planning does not feature as prominently as it should.
Replacement is not succession planning
There is an important distinction between replacing somebody and planning for succession. If a senior leader announces that they are leaving and the university then starts thinking about who might replace them, that is not succession planning. It is recruitment. In my experience, some leaders see succession planning as planning to put themselves out of a job. My response to that is that we never know when that proverbial bus might strike, so we are not just planning in case somebody leaves.
Genuine succession planning should happen regularly. It involves asking which people might have the potential to take on more substantial leadership responsibilities in three, five or perhaps ten years, and then thinking seriously about what they would need to learn and experience before they are ready.
Universities are generally very good at developing academic expertise. We understand reasonably well how somebody develops from an early career researcher into an established scholar, with progressively greater expectations around research, teaching, supervision and contribution to the academic community.
The path into leadership is often much less systematic. People frequently arrive in substantial leadership positions because they were successful academics, they happened to take on an administrative responsibility or were encouraged to apply for a vacancy. Sometimes that works extremely well, but “taking a chance” is not a particularly convincing leadership-development strategy.
Academic success is not the same as leadership potential
One of the difficulties is that universities naturally recognise the things they know how to measure. We can count publications, citations, research income, PhD completions and teaching achievements. These measures influence promotion and reputation, and they help determine who becomes visible within an institution.
Being an excellent academic does not necessarily mean that they will be an excellent Dean. I don’t have any statistics, but it is likely the case that most academics would not make good Deans. That is not a criticism. They are still excellent academics but the step up to Dean calls upon an entirely different skill set.
Senior academic leaders have to make difficult decisions, manage budgets, deal with conflicting priorities, handle sensitive personnel matters and communicate with many different audiences. They also have to make decisions that may be unpopular, while taking responsibility for the consequences.
Leadership requires judgement as much as knowledge. It increasingly involves creating the conditions in which other people can succeed, rather than continuing to demonstrate your own individual achievements. You should be prepared to bask in reflected glory rather than take all the credit yourself, even when you played a significant part in the success.
None of this diminishes the importance of academic credibility. I would be uncomfortable with the idea that senior university leaders do not need to understand universities as academic organisations. It is important that they do, so that they have an understanding of the challenges that their colleagues are experiencing. But academic achievement alone is not sufficient preparation for leadership.
If universities identify future leaders largely by looking at who has been most successful under traditional academic measures, they may be looking in the wrong places.
Leadership needs to be practised
Leadership cannot be learned entirely from a course. Leadership programmes certainly have their place, and formal development can introduce ideas, frameworks and examples that help people think differently about organisations and about their own behaviour. But there is no substitute for actually having responsibility.
Future leaders need opportunities to manage budgets, chair difficult meetings, lead projects, deal with competing interests and take responsibility for outcomes. They need to experience situations where the answer is not obvious and where reasonable people may disagree about what should be done.
Perhaps most importantly, they need to discover that making a decision is sometimes easier than living with its consequences.
Universities may already have opportunities to provide this experience. Acting positions can expose people to responsibilities beyond their normal roles. Major institutional projects can give academics experience of working across organisational boundaries, while committee leadership, secondments and cross-university responsibilities can all provide experience that is difficult to acquire through formal training.
We should not see these simply as tasks that somebody needs to undertake. They can also be deliberately designed as opportunities to develop future leaders. Importantly, this strategy must be explained and discussed with the person undertaking the role.
Give people responsibility before giving them the title
There is a danger in waiting until somebody has been promoted before allowing them to acquire the experience needed for the job. A newly appointed Dean should not be encountering a significant budget for the first time, just as a new Deputy Vice-Chancellor should not be discovering institutional strategy only after taking up the position.
Likewise, somebody being considered for the most senior university roles should already have some understanding of governance, institutional finances, people management and the relationship between the executive and the governing body. These things are much easier to understand when somebody has encountered them progressively rather than suddenly being responsible for all of them.
This requires input from existing leaders. They have to be willing to delegate meaningful responsibility and accept that somebody else may approach a problem differently. The person being developed may make mistakes, but they may also demonstrate that they are better at something than the person who gave them the opportunity.
That can be uncomfortable. Yet if senior leaders retain all the important work themselves, they may make the institution increasingly dependent on them while simultaneously preventing anybody else from developing.
There is an irony here: the leader who appears indispensable may also be the leader who has failed to prepare anybody to succeed them.
Mentoring is valuable. Opportunity may be even more valuable.
Mentoring is often presented as an important part of leadership development, and rightly so. Having somebody experienced to talk to can help future leaders understand situations they have not encountered before, think through difficult choices and learn from mistakes without being defined by them.
But mentoring alone is not enough. Someone can receive excellent advice for years and still never be given the opportunity to lead anything substantial.
This is where sponsorship matters. A sponsor does more than provide advice. They create opportunities, suggest somebody for an important committee, ask them to lead a project, encourage them to apply for a role and introduce them to people they would not otherwise meet.
In effect, they are prepared to say, “I think this person is capable of more.”
Universities should ask not only whether aspiring leaders have access to mentors, but whether existing leaders are actively creating opportunities for others. Development requires both advice and the chance to put that advice into practice.
Are leadership roles attractive enough?
There is another problem that is discussed much less frequently. What if some of the people who would make excellent university leaders do not want the role?
A talented academic may look at a senior leadership position and see longer working hours, difficult personnel problems, relentless meetings, less time for research, greater public scrutiny and significantly more responsibility. They may also see experienced university leaders receiving criticism from every direction while having relatively little freedom to explain why particular decisions were made.
It would not be unreasonable for somebody to look at all of that and ask, “Why would I want to do that?”
Universities need to think not only about developing potential leaders but also about whether leadership remains an attractive proposition. If the most capable people consistently decide that senior leadership is not worth pursuing, the quality of the leadership pipeline will inevitably deteriorate.
This does not mean making leadership comfortable. Senior roles carry substantial responsibility, and it is only right that they do so. But institutions should ask whether those positions have become so administratively overloaded, politically exposed or detached from academic life that talented people deliberately avoid them.
Internal development and external recruitment
None of this means that universities should always appoint leaders internally. External appointments can bring new thinking, different experiences and perspectives that an institution badly needs, and sometimes an organisation genuinely needs somebody who is not part of its existing culture.
But there is a difference between choosing to appoint externally and having no credible internal candidates.
If a university often finds that it needs to fill a senior vacancy and concludes that nobody within the institution could realistically perform the role, that should prompt some uncomfortable questions. Why has nobody been developed? Why have talented people not been given wider responsibilities? Why has knowledge remained concentrated among a small number of senior individuals? Why did the institution only begin thinking about succession once the vacancy appeared?
A healthy organisation should not necessarily know who its next Vice-Chancellor will be. But it should probably have several people in mind who are becoming capable of taking on increasingly demanding leadership positions, whether at that university or somewhere else.
What if we develop them and they leave?
There is an obvious objection to investing heavily in leadership development. What if the people you develop leave?
That will happen. Indeed, one sign of a successful leadership-development culture may be that other organisations want to recruit the people you have developed. Universities should perhaps regard that as evidence of success rather than as a reason not to invest in them.
The alternative is considerably worse. An institution can avoid investing in people because they might leave, only to discover that those who stay have not been prepared for the responsibilities that eventually arrive. You run the risk of having your best people leave, as they lack opportunity, and your less capable people rise through the organisation, becoming its leaders.
Universities already educate students knowing that most will leave them. They develop researchers knowing that many will pursue careers elsewhere. Leadership development should be viewed in a similar way, as part of an institution’s contribution not only to itself but also to the wider higher education sector.
Who are you developing now?
Succession planning should not begin with a vacancy. It should begin much earlier by identifying people with potential and considering what experiences they need if that potential is to develop.
Senior leaders might therefore ask who in their institution should be given experience beyond their current area, who could take responsibility for something that genuinely matters, who would benefit from mentoring and who needs somebody senior to sponsor them. They might also ask whether there are people with considerable leadership potential who have simply not been noticed because traditional academic measures do not reveal it.
These are not only questions for Human Resources departments or leadership-development programmes. They are questions for every senior leader because developing the next generation of leaders is itself an important part of leadership.
Perhaps one of the tests of a leader is not simply what happened while they were in office, but what they left behind when they departed. Did they leave an organisation that depended on them, or did they leave people who were better prepared to lead than they themselves had been when they started?
Universities will always need new leaders. The more important question is whether we are doing enough today to develop the people who will be ready to lead them tomorrow.
About the author
Professor Graham Kendall has held senior leadership positions in higher education, including Vice-Chancellor, Provost/CEO, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Vice-Provost roles. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham and has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers.
His interests include university leadership and governance, research strategy, artificial intelligence and research integrity.
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