Academic and professional books and articles on leadership are plentiful. Each attempts to articulate successfully effective leadership.
Economists and business leaders often describe the importance of leading through a results-oriented perspective. They approach leadership largely through a lens that promotes client relationships, prioritizing shareholder profit, and achieving certain “bottom lines” that effectively maximize outcomes. In contrast, psychologists analyze leadership through a cognitive perspective of considering how people think, feel, and act. Historians and political scientists assess leadership on the basis of how one mobilizes people to support certain virtues, values, and ethics—and sometimes on how they promote moral principles. Often, successful leaders will be viewed as those who were catalysts for change or were facile at facilitating the dialogue that promotes change. Writers on education often articulate the need for leaders to create and implement a compelling vision.
All of these characteristics are important. In various ways and times, an effective leader must consider each. Many would agree that the ultimate and most important attribute is that of moral leadership, as illustrated by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt during their challenging presidential terms.
As I conclude 30 years of higher education administration, including the last seven as the president of the University of Vermont, I have found that the most foundational attribute for leadership is “relational leadership”: the ability of a leader to establish positive, personal relationships within and without a specific organization that inspire others to form relationships that ultimately rest on trust, credibility, integrity, candor, and empathy. Leaders who build such trust and credible relationships will see a more effective path to implementing a vision, promoting certain values, and achieving desired results.
In short, success can’t be built without genuine relationships, beyond the transactional, throughout all of the relevant constituencies. Learning through a trans-action-oriented perspective will achieve only limited success. Believing in authentic, transforming relationships and practicing traits that result in true relationships are essential for success in any administration—political, business, or educational.
Growing up in a political family, I was, from an early age, able to watch political leaders obtain challenging successes one constituency at a time. I watched the Daleys in Chicago successfully practice relational leadership for nearly 43 years. Later, practicing law in Washington, D.C., and New York City, I saw firsthand the power of building relationships to form coalitions, whether in law or on Capitol Hill. As former Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill famously opined: “All politics is local”—building relationships one at a time. Watching how success, one relationship at a time, could be achieved in the political arena and communities, was informative to my own path through higher education administration. As an administrator in four nationally prominent research universities, both public and private, and having been a visiting faculty member in four other distinguished universities, it became clear to me that with-out those transparent relationships, I would not be able to take credit for changes that have been undertaken under my watch.
Whether it is completing successful comprehensive campaigns, building large endowments, winning appropriation requests, hiring faculty, recruiting students, or building the relevant campus for 21st century learning, discovery, and scholar-ship, little of lasting importance can be accomplished without close, trusting, personal relationships.
One might say that having good relationships as the key to success in higher education leadership is not novel or surprising. However, we all can recall heads of institutions or organizations who seemed to have all of the paper credentials to lead and manage successfully, but have been unable to do so. Often, in practice, real talent is shown mostly through success that is people and relationship centric.
The same is true in raising money in large comprehensive campaigns on university campuses or reaching compromises in faculty senates. Some might think this is old fashioned, but in reality, we all might be challenged to name a successful leader who did not authentically believe in and practice “relational leadership” or to think that he or she could accomplish much on one’s own ability.
Tom Sullivan is the former president of the University of Vermont. He stepped out of the presidency this past summer after seven years; he continues his service to the university as a professor. He is currently on a research sabbatical at Cambridge University.
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