I have to confess that during the nearly 20 years that I served as a college president at three institutions during the 1980s and 1990s, presidential evaluation was neither high on my agenda, nor a burning issue for other presidents in my professional circles.
In one presidency, I had an episodic annual assessment for a few years, but I can't recall anything that came of it. Another time I was informed during contract-renewal discussions that all the trustees and vice presidents had been polled, and that everyone except two board members expressed ready confidence in my leadership. There was no feedback about my achievements or shortcomings or methods of leadership, nor did I expect or ask for any.
No reproach of others is intended in my description of these circumstances because, in those days, the idea of evaluation translated into criticism and judgment. It made everyone uneasy, especially the president. While I enjoyed strong support and close ties with three different boards and their leaders, neither I nor the boards assumed that formal evaluation was a necessary part of the relationship. I should have known better, but I expect that my experience was closer to the presidential norm than the exception.
In the intervening years, however, evaluations--especially annual evaluations based on presidents' self-assessments--have become much more prevalent, as part of accreditors' expectations for institutional accountability and for many other reasons. More recently, some experts, including the Association of Governing Boards, have been making the case for a comprehensive presidential evaluation at set multi-year intervals, drawing on the results of annual evaluations.
Indeed, in a 2006 publication, The Leadership Imperative, AGB recommended periodic comprehensive assessment of the president as a separate process from an annual evaluation. As part of the board's responsibility for evaluating "a president's performance based on clearly defined, mutually agreed-upon performance goals," the report said that a board can help "ensure the institution's continued vitality by conducting annual assessments and providing feedback on the president's performance. In addition, boards should conduct more comprehensive presidential evaluations every three to four years. These evaluations should be based in part on the quality of the executive leadership team as well as on the president's ability to engage the support of faculty and other stakeholders in defining and pursuing a strategic vision."
In retrospect, I see how I could have addressed some of the periodic frustrations of the presidency more adeptly, and how my work might have been both more satisfying and effective if my boards and I had engaged in systematic evaluations of my performance. Experience now has shown that a periodic evaluation of the president can become a decisive opportunity for a board itself to reach higher levels of performance. Indeed, presidential assessment provides the occasion for the board to deepen its understanding of the president and the organization, to connect and integrate elements of its own responsibilities, to intensify its engagement with the institution, and to broaden its influence in shared leadership.
An evaluation of the president takes the board inside each of the critical leverage points within the institution. In evaluating critical performance areas such as finance, fundraising, and enrollment, and in reviewing critical processes including strategy and collegial decision-making, the board has the chance to gain an integrated view of the president's work as a central part of an integral leadership process. The board should come away from the evaluation with a sharper sense of its own agency in shaping the future through its support of the president's efforts to improve the work of the office and the institution.
Evaluations Increasing
A survey of higher-education governance conducted by AGB in 2008 found that approximately 90 percent of those queried conduct an annual assessment of presidential performance. Just a decade before, only 50 percent of the responding private colleges and 66 percent of the public institutions had developed policies on presidential assessment. Undoubtedly, the figures mask a wide variety of practices and protocols, influencing the formality and the effectiveness of the process. Nonetheless, it is safe to assume that virtually every college or university now uses more or less systematic methods to evaluate presidential leadership annually.
The comprehensive periodic evaluation of the president, involving an assessment every several years by both the governing board and a cross-section of faculty, staff, students, and other stakeholders, is less clearly in evidence. The 2008 AGB governance survey showed that 61 percent of private and 53 percent of public institutions use comprehensive assessment.
Several forces have increased the importance of evaluating presidential effectiveness. One is governmental regulation. higher education is deeply and systematically regulated by every level and form of government. In public institutions, presidential evaluation may even be required by statute or by the administrative requirements of central university offices or of state government. And just as in public institutions, the independent sector also must comply with regulations and standards set by regional and specialized accrediting bodies. The regional accreditors define presidential assessment as a responsibility of the governing board, or include it within their expectation that all administrative and educational programs must demonstrate how they measure their effectiveness. The form and frequency of presidential evaluation are not defined, but in most cases boards and presidents have to answer for it and document its completion.
The trend toward documented accountability is propelled by many other regulatory authorities and influences, several of which have sharp teeth. for example, IRS regulations stipulate the need for systematic compensation practices for "highly compensated" (above $100,000 in 2008) officers and others involved in the governance of tax-exempt organizations. the IRS generally expects governing boards to compare the chief executive's salary and benefits with those of leaders in a comparable group of institutions and to make the decision deliberatively. Although formal presidential evaluation is not explicitly required, a systematic approach to evaluation and compensation clearly satisfies the regulation. The IRS can levy "intermediate sanctions" of tax penalties against a president and members of a board for serious violations or manipulations of reasonable standards of decision-making.
Many other political and legal realities are driving a broad and deep social concern for evaluation and transparency about executive compensation and other issues. Congressional investigations and hearings have been held in the past several years on the compensation of college presidents, the accuracy of financial reporting on the use of federal research funds, and on university tuition pricing and endowment spending patterns. And hardly a week passes without the higher-education press or local and national media reporting on the forced resignation or the abrupt termination of a college president, frequently in a swirl of public controversy. further, through the anonymity and accessibility of blogs, issues can be kept boiling for months and sharp, even defamatory, personal attacks can become standard fare. In hostile public controversies about presidents, the good name of the institution suffers, disaffection grows among alumni and friends, battle lines form on campus, and future presidential searches may be damaged.
Boards also have to deal with cases in which a faculty or staff organization passes a vote of no-confidence in the president. the motives, circumstances, and influence of no-confidence resolutions vary widely, but they represent a decisive test of the nature of the board's support and evaluation of the president.
Though not a general pattern, some of the high-profile cases of termination and resignation reveal that a governing board's methods for evaluating and compensating the president have been flawed, confused, or unsystematic. With a solid process in place--including formal policies and practices concerning annual and periodic evaluation of the president--the governing board is in a much better position to anticipate problems in the president's leadership that may be emerging, and to assure the campus and other constituencies that systematic methods exist to consider issues and problems.
Most of the crises and challenges to presidential leadership turn on the president's methods of leadership and the expectations created by the organization's traditions and culture of decision-making. If the president were to receive clear and explicit feedback about these expectations early in his or her term, there is a realistic chance that it could make the difference in creating a productive presidency. At the first sign of a serious problem, it is important for the board to focus its annual or periodic evaluation processes on the troublesome issues and to provide the president with the mentoring or leadership-development opportunities that might be decisive in making improvements. Well before a crisis occurs, trustees could decide to initiate a comprehensive review that would give the board access to the opinions and the judgments of a cross-section of the campus community in a fair and systematic way.
Early evaluation cannot prevent all clashes, but the more the board knows, the more able it will be to transform the problem over time or, if ultimately necessary, to deal with the president's departure deliberately, keeping everyone's dignity intact and avoiding damage to the institution.
In both private and public institutions, documented presidential assessment has come to be seen as one of the central aspects of board accountability--a prudent means of demonstrating compliance with a variety of legal, social, political, and campus expectations concerning presidential leadership. Precisely how the process should be undertaken--by whom, when, using what methods, relying on what information, and to what end--remains a critical question. happily, new ideas about leadership and ways of conducting assessments have emerged in recent years, which set the stage for effective and rewarding approaches to presidential evaluation and professional development. (A guide to assessing presidential leadership and effectiveness, to be published by AGB early this year, will contain examples of assessment instruments, procedures, protocols, and best practices.)
In 2001, AGB issued a useful booklet on annual presidential assessment called Annual Presidential Performance Reviews. The author, Merrill Schwartz, AGB's director of research, recommends a series of principles and practices to define the various steps in presidential evaluation. The core is a written self-assessment by the president that is then reviewed by the board or a board committee and discussed with the president. annual assessment is typically understood to be a board responsibility that does not involve direct participation by other constituencies.
The newer concept of comprehensive presidential assessment differs in that experts recommend that it incorporate the perspectives not only of the governing board, but also of staff, faculty, students, alumni, and other stakeholders. Ideally it builds on an annual process that includes a presidential self-assessment and a variety of strategic and operational goals. If recent self-assessments are not available--if, for example, they have been done orally or sporadically--a comprehensive periodic process lacks an adequate foundation. The board members involved will have to create their own evaluative framework, including a presidential self-assessment, and a series of relevant goals, expectations, and performance indicators. Done correctly, every comprehensive presidential review will include a clear focus on the relationship between the board and president, as well as a review of other academic and administrative mechanisms of decision-making. It may well lead to the board's own self-assessment or to a commitment to undertake a joint presidential and board review at a future date.
What to Ask?
Every question or comment about presidential performance reflects hidden presuppositions and underlying criteria. the questions reflect expectations for the role, the responsibilities of the position, and the competencies leadership is understood to include. The evaluation of presidential leadership also has to resonate with the specific mission and vision of each institution and what it means for the president (and other leaders) to fulfill the mission and vision.
The focus should not be narrowly on the president as a solitary individual but rather on the wider organizational and social context in which the president operates. In both annual and comprehensive reviews, the criteria for leadership should be grounded in the goals, expectations, and metrics that have been established jointly by the president and the board. These will have been expressed in operational and strategic plans, prior annual presidential assessments, reports, memoranda, and contracts. The goals and indicators will not have the same powerful simplicity as the financial bottom line of a corporation. Nevertheless, they will define aspirations and provide measure-able benchmarks that reflect presidential leadership and convey wider strategic possibilities for the organization. Both annual and comprehensive assessment provide the opportunity to assess goals and expectations from the past and to renew, recon-figure, and create goals for the future.
The Board's Responsibilities
The evaluation of the president is one of the critical means at the board's disposal to give form to its own effectiveness in defining, monitoring, evaluating, and assuring accountability for the mission, as well as improving the quality of the institution that it serves. A task that the board may at first approach with diffidence can become a way for it to be engaged in integral leadership without being intrusive and sliding into the role of management. In exercising one of its primary responsibilities, the board can find ways to renew and energize its own work and sense of purpose and to reach toward a higher level of performance.
Appraisal typically focuses on quite specific past achievements or failures, on goals met or not met, on actions taken or avoided. evaluations of both achievements and failures are essential for several reasons. The achievement of goals deserves recognition and rewards, and it provides motivation and confidence for people to aspire to yet higher levels of accomplishment. But failures, too, can offer deep lessons for leadership and can contribute substantially to the future success of both individuals and organizations. The lessons of failure have to be diagnosed without blame and fault-finding, though, to reveal analytically and dispassionately what went wrong and why. the point is to learn from mistakes and failures by encouraging people to debate them openly in a search for the answers.
This analysis needs to be tied to a focus on development that is forward-looking and that charts a set of possibilities to improve performance in the future. The point is to learn from the past to prepare for the future.
The difference between appraisal and leadership development often turns on the attitudes that people carry with them to the process of evaluation, however. To be sure, the notion of evaluation calls to mind rankings and scorecards, and some people will bring a judgmental rather than developmental attitude. Board members or other participants may harbor resentments towards the president or they may have personal agendas that distort their judgment. Even more likely, they may bring a strong friendship with the president into the process. Board members sometimes dismiss criticism because it creates potential complications for them, either leading to their personal discomfort or producing a drain on their time and energy if the problem is serious.
In these circumstances, a few board members may turn appraisal into faultfinding or praise-giving, with both negative and positive evaluations becoming a pretext for other motives. Neither criticism nor praise by itself describes a path forward; it doesn't delineate an issue to address, a process to improve, a goal to set, or a talent to develop.
There are, of course, no fail-safe ways for the evaluation process to ban faultfinding or reflexive praise. Nonetheless, a place to start is with the board's conscious commitment to the purposes of developmental assessment--in support of the effectiveness of the president and the success of the institution. Board members assume a formal responsibility to serve the best interests of the institution and to discharge a crucial fiduciary responsibility. Trustees who let personal interests or pretexts determine their evaluation of a university leader fall short of fulfilling the responsibilities they have accepted. In doing so, trustees forego invaluable opportunities to learn from the information they have received how to more effectively develop the capacities and effectiveness of the president. the power and possibility of presidential assessment resides in capturing and interpreting feedback in ways that make it a continuing source of improvement.
