Transformational Leadership as "Reframing"
By Susan Gotsch
Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty, Whittier College

When asked to write about women as transformational leaders, my first thought was, "Well, we're just doing our jobs." Perhaps we were departmental chairs or directors of programs and showed some administrative talent. No doubt we had visions for our institutions, wanted to make a difference, and had ideas about needed changes. But most importantly, we learned how to bring about institutional change. I firmly believe that transformational leaders must mentor the next generation--and so it is in that spirit that I offer my perspectives, from where I sit.

I would argue that there are three central principles to transformational leadership that are especially important for women, all of which tie back to the important lessons that the practice of "reframing" can teach. First, as transformational leaders we must develop the ability and agility to think from different perspectives, whether gendered, racial/ethnic, Myers-Briggs type, or ways of framing issues and solutions. In doing that, it is especially important to know and understand your audience. Second, we must always try to keep in mind the goals for our leadership even while dealing with day-to-day business. Finally, we must remember that as women with some power, we still work in institutions that are increasingly influenced by corporate male perspectives. Let me provide examples of these three principles.

But first, let me situate my own leadership style. I had already been a dean for a while when I attended a session led by Joseph P. Zolner, Director of the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For me the event was magical. Not only did I recognize others and myself in his descriptions, but the approaches he described had been at the core, albeit in different language, of my many years of teaching classical social theory. On Zolner's recommendation, I read Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership by Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal who laid out four major perspectives--structural, political, symbolic, and social psychological. All four had been central to my disciplinary education.

One of Bolman and Deal's most important insights is that "it can be enormously liberating for managers to realize there is always more than one way to respond to any organizational problem or dilemma. Managers are imprisoned only to the extent that their palette of ideas is impoverished." Like the impact our Myers-Briggs type may have on our work life, so each of us may have a preferred way of framing the issue, trying to solve the problem, or marshalling resources for change. While staying true to our principles, we need to be flexible in our approaches--especially as we think about audience.

Audience
Many good administrators refer to their management style as "management by walking around." What better way to get to know your internal audience and encourage communication! It allows you to interact with faculty in their settings, to chat informally and comfortably about an idea, to accomplish the "precinct work" that is essential for change, and perhaps to substitute a lengthy meeting with a quick chat. But for other audiences such as boards of trustees, which value efficiency and formality, you will need a totally different approach. The ability to know your audience, what they value, and how you will frame interactions are essential to transformational leadership.

Big Picture
Keeping your vision in focus is a second important element of leadership--or as one of my wise mentors said, "Don't let the urgent overpower the important." The daily roller-coaster ride of administrative work--details and crises--constantly demands our attention. You can try to internalize visionary goals so thoroughly that they become the fabric of your everyday activities, but this approach has obvious political and psychic costs. Or you can develop specific strategies to "keep your eyes on the prize." If you are a compulsive list-maker, put a list of your "big-picture" goals where you see it each time you look up from your work. You can use it as a point of reference as you set your priorities for the day; it can inspire you as you work on a tedious policy that will contribute to the goals; and it can serve as a measure of how your daily or weekly accomplishments have furthered these goals.

For example, if you are trying to transform your institution to one that is more family--and woman--friendly, think about how policy-development, searches, salary administration, and the like can contribute to this goal. Do your faculty personnel policies encourage shared positions for partners, allow a two-year "stop the clock" timetable without penalty for tenure candidates, and provide for partial leaves? Are there gender inequities in salary, especially those disguised as disciplinary differences? Do you get involved in each search to be sure the interview pool is diverse? Do you allow your staff flexibility in work schedules? And it goes without saying that as you communicate the issues, you should frame how each benefits men and women, as well as the institution as a whole. Reading the recent article "Job Sharing on the Tenure Track," I was thrilled to see that the Chronicle of Higher Education covered a policy of shared positions that I had worked on (as the unnamed college "official"). Work on policies can be transformative!

The Glass Ceiling
My final observation is that, in spite of women's transformational leadership, we still live and work within a masculine, corporate environment. Women account for less than a quarter of chief academic officers, most of them at liberal arts colleges. The higher a woman rises in positional rank, the more isolated from other women she becomes. At meetings, she is often the only woman or one of a few women. The rules, formal and informal, often reflect a dynamic in direct opposition to her own. And, as Judith Glazer-Raymo notes in Shattering the Myths: Women in Academe, "Boards of trustees enjoy a pivotal role in selecting presidents of college and universities. The relationship between the president and the board is critical to institutional harmony and financial well being, and composition is therefore central to the status of women administrators as well as women faculty." My personal experience illustrates this. Along the way in my administrative career, I found myself in an environment that challenged me as a woman leader in ways I had never experienced before. It was the classic dilemma of having to balance the softer, nurturing side of my leadership with the masculine frames of structure, position, and power. In the end, I found that I had nurtured and led faculty and staff in ways that were at odds with the corporate mentality of the institution's leadership, especially the Board of Trustees. While that collision of different expectations of leadership was irreconcilable, I fortunately landed in an institution where community, collaboration, and participation are core values across the institution.