I’ve recently attended a training workshop for academics, assistant profs transitioning from early to mid-career, about leadership in academia. It reminded me of similar theories I saw in other workshops – I’ve done several of these training before – and of some ideas that circulate informally when people are hired at our university. I keep running into these ideas about leadership and management, it’s like a worldview endorsed by our university which is just taken as granted. No room for discussing it. I thin this worldview has some problems, and by making these explicit, my aim is to challenge it. There is this hidden assumption about what leadership styles can do, and how much skill you have to gain to deal with nasty situation. Theories are not innocent; they have certain values embedded in them. Theories of leadership are not just value-laden; they have a certain worldview about how the human mind works and how people hired at universities should work.
Situational Leadership – the framework
The leadership seminars I and my colleagues attended used a framework called Situational Leadership (originally developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard in 1969). As far as I understand it, the theory refuses to judge whether you are a good leader or not, it’s stating rather that you have to be the right leader that the situation requires (sidetrack: not the hero we want, but the hero we deserve…). If the situation requires you to be more directive and prescriptive, you should be that, but there are situations that require coaching or guiding or delegating, and that’s fine as long as you are able to detect what’s needed in the moment. The theory also assumes that, the more you practice, the more you will be able to be attuned to the situation, respond to it, and become the right kind of leader for that situation. The main issue seems to be that you, the leader, don’t dectect fast enough what kind of situation is at hand and you don’t adapt to it.
This is a very empowering framework, at first sight. It says that everybody can be a leader, and there are just different leadership styles. Some people are more comfortable giving direction; some people are more comfortable coaching or guiding or delegating, and that is perfectly fine. However, situational leadership assumes that you should be able to go through all four styles and just adapt to the situation. It’s not you, it’s the situation at hand.
I alsways felt there was something off about this theory, but could not quite put my finger on it. Most of my colleagues who take these trainings, while they acknowledge the usefulness of the tricks and trips learned thre, dislike these trainings. My colleagues are philosophers, of course. My hypothesis is that we tend to resist leadership theory that looks uncannily like neoliberal ideology. Let me explain what is ideological here: if something is a failure, is because you 🫵 (finger pointing emoji) did not do (enough of) the work: either you did not put in enough effort, energy, time, resources. If you had just given a little more…
Further unpacking the mistique of this ideology, as I see it: some workplace situations are just toxic. What if you find yourself in such as situation where there is no solution that belongs to switching between these leadership styles? What if you just need to get out of this situation or put an end to it? We are not told these things in situational leadership; they are brushed off in these seminars which all share a kind of positive mindset and outlook: most situations should be able to be dealt with by you gaining more skills – training with coaches, with actors, just more training, more skills, and you will do it. We trust you, we empower you. You were lacking some skills, that’s why it felt disempowering and nasty. It’s just your framing. “We’re sorry that you feel this way” – which is what they told a former employee at Aerospace who accused the university of sexist standards and discrimination. We’re sorry you felt that way = it’s all in your head, baby.
It’s great to be positive, sometimes unconditionally positive, but some workplace situations are just toxic, and we shouldn’t try to situationally leadership our way out of them. This relates directly to the social safety discussions at our university. Some situations should be ended without discussions. Which ones? I see at least two kinds.
Two Types of Leadership Failures
There are two ends of a spectrum of social safety issues triggered around and by leadership.
First, some people are toxic bosses and they shouldn’t be allowed to lead others because they will use their power for doing evil. They just can’t help it. When these incidents are reported, nothing happens – they just get a slap on the wrist, Dam Harmann mentioned in a Delta editorial. The university leadership’s answer seems to be procedural: let’s have better procedures to deal with these things. But it never occurs to them that the best way to deal with these things is not asking these people with proven track record of toxicity to be leaders in the first place. It just never occurs to them because of this mindset that’s so positive, so empowering: everybody can be a leader, you can do it, you can learn to be a better boss, let’s give you one more chance!
I’m drawing here from Adam Mastroianni’s work and his insight that “changing people is surprisingly hard”:
“This myth of the easily-malleable human is so widespread and so deeply believed that it borders on delusion. Once you see it, though, it can make sense of some things that otherwise seem psychotic. For example, in the US, anybody who does academic research on humans or animals has to undergo ethics training first. That sounds reasonable, until you realize the “training” is just PowerPoint slides that you click through as fast as you can, and then you get asked questions like (…) If you fail the exam, you just retake it until you pass. So this “ethics” test is actually a test of whether you can read at a sixth-grade level. Most workplace trainings look like this.” – Adam Mastroianni
Mastroianni makes an interesting point, that does not apply just to Dutch technical universities: the way we deal with human evil in workplaces and institutions is to assume more training will fix it. The standard assumption is that people need more skills, more education, more talking to, and they will eventually see the right way. Mastroianni calls these kinds of trainings “ass-covering” – we just try to cover our assess in case something blows up, at least we did a training to prevent this….
But it never occurs to us the simple solution of not putting people who are prone to vicious behaviors in positions of power, vetting them in some way before they get there – all because of this positivistic mindset: it’s just the situation to blame and your not adapting to it. Let’s add more training, throw in a personal coach as well.
Second, there’s an entireley different kind of leadership mishap, also with visible effects in the social safety realm. Standard academics – you can call this a caricature or trope – are people who are introverted, sensitive, deeply passionate, not with a lot of social skills, and possibly neurodivergent. (Given that a lot of people are on the autistic spectrum, and given that academia allows and rewards people who engage deeply in passionate research, a narrow topic to explore ad nauseam, it’s no wonder that academia has a lot of people on the autistic spectrum, more than one would find on average in a random population…) These neurodivergent academics have to engage in masking in order to be socially successful, and masking in autism is highly energy-consuming and leads ultimately to burnout. These people without social skills, introverts, highly sensitive, perhaps neurovdivergent as well, become academics and have to lead others – train, supervise, teach, lead teams. They are like fish out of water.
Then they get the leadership trainings I mentioned and all should be solved. Yet they do still come across as brusque, unskilled, unsocial, and some people who work with them might feel offended by this lack of social grace. For these type of academics, the leardership trainings are akin to gaslighting: don’t be who you are, it’s just how you come across as a leader, did you try a different style of talking? In this second category of cases, the social unsafety is for the one placed in a situation of leadership while their personality, their entire embodied being, rejects it. But they are supposed to power through this, ignore their gut feeling, and just deal with it. Because that’s the optimistic mindset of anyone can be a leader, the red-wire through all these university trainings. What a perfect recipe for burnout.
The HR department: adding gas to the optimism fire?
The HR department both hires and commissions these kinds of leadership workshops, and they also have their own worldview which they want to come across in the trainingts. Most people working in HR are usually those kinds of people who like working with other people – usually extroverts, people who have no issue expressing themselves and communicating. That’s a particular kind of personality. HR hires academics – it’s part of the committee and the decision – and it hires the trainers to train these academics in situational leadership. So HR has two distinct ways to impose this very particular worldview on others. Yet many academics come from a different kind of personality trait group (not all, there are extraverted academics, stars, master networkers, naturally leaders). Many academics are recruited from the nerdy corpus: people obsessed with things, with details, content-oriented, not people oriented. They see academia as a safe haven where they can delve deep into their life time obsession.
When they get hired as academics and then asked to take these leadership trainings and seminars, HR assumes that these people are just like them—they like communicating, they’re just a bit more shy, and they just need to be trained out of this. There’s a seminar for everything! But there’s a blind spot here: not all people are like HR assumes them to be. HR staff knows psychology and communication theories, but theory is not enough to really understand what it is like to be someone who is shy, introverted, highly sensitive, neurodivergent, deeply passionate about their topic, who now suddenly has to be a leader because otherwise there’s no way to progress and advance in academia. This kind of raw experience of being a completely different personality is lost on HR and the trainers they hire to hammer in the situational leadership.
The “Get Out of Your Comfort Zone” mantra
Academics, the very people who don’t have strong social skills, are now asked to take leadership seminars and try out new techniques. The mantra is: “get out of your comfort zone. You’re just too comfortable with being introverted, sensitive, shy, withdrawn – you’re too much in your topic. You should be more communicative, more outward-going.” Be less yourself, OK?
But this is the wrong approach. There are so many personalities out there (16 types MBTi, 9 enneagram types, combinations of the big 5 traits), and their diversity and distinctiveness is too glaring to ignore. There are some people who are really managerial and like to lead; others who like to take orders and execute them perfectly, making execution an art; others who really like to be independent and do their own things and just be left alone; and then there are people who are team players, who need a structure and community to work with, who will cheer and go with the team to the end of the world. Not all these people can be great leaders, even with the theory of situational leadership behind them.
It’s not about a comfort zone – it’s about the discomfort zone that can lead to burnout. If you ask someone who is neurodivergent, or highly sensitive to keep pushing themselves and get out of their comfort zone and talk more, change their voice, their gesture, to get to impose their perspective, this is a recipe for burnout. It’s not just that they don’t want to do it, some do; but it takes them a huge amount of effort, energy and mental space to do something that for someone else comes as natural and easy. It’s a different kind of masking, but still masking it is.
What should change
I’m not saying let’s not do leadership trainings and seminars at Dutch technical universities. I’m saying let’s not assume that these are the solution to everything. You don’t just need more skills, more practice, get out of your comfort zone, try to occupy more space or leave space for others. These can work up to a point, but then you also need a way that is institutionally, structurally embedded in which you can get out of situations that are not good for you.
This also means dealing with the mental health of others. Why does the university leadership assume that all academics are able to handle the instability that comes with mental health issues from others? If you’re in a situation of leadership where the other person has mental health issues, why should you have to deal with this? We are not trained for this, and this is just burnout waiting to happen. This is socially unsafe for the managers and leaders, in the first place, and for the other as well.
This is not to say that if you’re neurodivergent or if you have mental health issues you shouldn’t work in university or shouldn’t study. The idea is that some people are really just more talented for working with others and they’re more comfortable with it, and we shouldn’t assume that this discomfort can just be trained away. We shouldn’t ask for it – not in promotion, not in daily tasks. We should tailor everybody’s academic profile based on what they can do without exerting themselves too much such that they get into the burnout zone.
The very idea that every academic has to be good at research, teaching, and admin equally assumes they can do all of them well. But why don’t we have tenured postdocs? Why don’t we have tenured lecturers? Some people are great at teaching. Some people are great at research but they can’t do teaching. Some people are great at supervision but not at teaching. Why not, instead of pushing them to adapt to the situation as a way of getting out of their comfort zone, accept these limitations and work with them?
Take-away: there is vulnerability of academics, even in leadership positions
Our university came to be very worried about social safety for people in vulnerable positions, such as students and those supervised, temporary workers, and rightly so. But people who are put in leadership positions and expected to perform – because leadership is just a skill you learn and you haven’t practiced enough, which is the assumption of all these trainings – face a recipe for disaster. Academics will feel tremendous burden to act and to perform in certain ways, to keep on trying. If they fail, they just didn’t try enough.
The way we train for leadership and the theories we use are not innocent. There are certain worldviews about what someone needs to be in order to be an academic: a jack-of-all-trades. This creates a perfect storm for people who joined academia because they just wanted to research, who just wanted a quiet corner in which they could do their stuff really well. But now, because they did their stuff really well, they have to train others and lead others and lead teams. This is unfair.
there’s something very deeply rooted in Dutch academia that says you have to lead others if you reach a certain threshold in your career – otherwise you’re not a good academic. I highly doubt that. And we should openly resist that idea. It’s pure ideology. Yes, there are various leadership styles, but also scopes of leadership. Sometimes, the best way to be a leader is to lead yourself and keep others out of this.
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