A distinguished academic leader once remarked to me that there was more rubbish talked about leadership than about any other subject. I can’t agree completely, bearing in mind the kinds of nonsense talked about wine and art, for example, but there is an important point. The answers to the question of what makes a good leader are shifting and elusive and depend on circumstances – including, of course, the nature of the followers.
However, another distinguished person, this time a scientist, made a much less compelling point about leadership. He told me that any academic worth his salt (I’m pretty sure he said “worth his salt”) would want to run his own department. Well, not me, mate: I never looked at the heads of the colleges and departments I was in and thought, “I want to be like that – I could do it well”.
I was lucky enough to have been taught by people who had written books that were read all over the world, some of whom were also good teachers. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be left alone to write books and articles and devise courses. In sporting terms, I wanted to be a player, not a coach or a manager.
Many people in my generation felt the same. When my institution, the University of Warwick, democratised in 1970 after a series of demonstrations and occupations, the position of head of department became an elected one. Several departments struggled to find anyone to do it. They were staffed by relatively young people whose ambitions lay in different directions. It seemed that nobody wanted to do that which everyone worth their salt should want to do.
The natural sciences are different, of course, because they often have multi-person research projects, casting the concept of being “left alone” in a slightly different light. There is no escape at least from managing your own research group.
Also, there is a basic game theory?that applies to leadership. In semi-anarchic conditions – in which formal authority structures exist but do not prevent scholars from getting on with their work – it can be rational to avoid leadership roles. But where there is a power structure that prevents people from doing their jobs it becomes rational to want power.
The original department I joined was semi-anarchic even before democratisation because the elderly chairman regarded his role as being to ensure the smooth running of teaching and research and the keeping down of costs. He had no interest in whether members of his department published or not and privately opined that too much was being written these days and most of it was stuff that nobody in their right mind would want to read.
In retrospect, he saw an academic institution as akin to a modern food hall (the one in the old market in Florence, for example). The various stalls sell different foods; they are to some extent in competition with each other, but they are also much better off under the same roof and do have to make some collective decisions. As it happens, the deputy chairman took a very different view: he was a man of the future who talked about “research strategies” and took an active interest in the publishing achievements of his colleagues.
When comparing the two approaches, I would always resort to the core doctrine of a book I had read at an early age – Harold Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics (1930). I can’t call it a classic because Lasswell’s neo-Freudian approach to politics had little influence on the development of the subject and he himself did not pursue it, but I still find it persuasive. It argues that the “normal”, mentally healthy state of humans is to seek autonomy. But there is a deviant type which, because of early and fundamental deprivations, craves power over other people. Of course, people who want power over others say they want it to do good. They would, wouldn’t they?
At this point, as someone who has been a president, a director, a captain and numerous chairmen, I have to defend myself from a potential accusation of hypocrisy. The point about all those positions is that they were with voluntary organisations, which anyone could walk away from at any time without disciplinary proceedings or loss of income. That’s the way I liked it. Even the Warwick Centre for the Study of Sport in Society, of which I was director, was a club consisting of equal members from several different departments. Nobody was paid extra and nobody’s career depended on my approval. All that brought us together was having sport as one of our academic interests.
Indeed, sport – in which I have a lot of personal experience – is one of the contexts in which leadership fascinates me – the other being war, where I have no experience. For all my preference for semi-anarchic arrangements, I am not an anarchist: I recognise that leadership and authority are necessary in most circumstances.
There are many interesting broad questions: Are there “natural leaders”? Are there any general precepts that leaders should observe? Was Machiavelli right to claim that fear is a much more reliable foundation for leadership than love?
From sport, there is a remarkable insight to be gained from a recent phenomenon in football (by which I mean something that has become more noticeable in the past decade): the hero-to-zero manager. I won’t list the details – football fans will know them anyway – but there are several instances of managers being extremely successful and then very unsuccessful when they change leagues or divisions.
People often say that “You don’t become a bad manager overnight”, but actually you do. As a Burnley fan, it was amazing how good Vincent Kompany seemed in the Championship and how stubborn and foolish he seemed in the Premier League, sticking to his previously successful style even when it patently wasn’t working. The general lesson is that what works in one context may well fail in another.
In academic terms, it would be very foolish to try to manage a bunch of upgraded training college lecturers as if they were all young thrusters from elite universities. But I have seen it attempted. The more specific reflection is that managing anything when you have more resources than your competitors is entirely different from the situation in which they are better equipped than you are.
The historical model for all hero-to-zero figures is, of course, Napoleon Bonaparte. The great general, the master of the coordination of all branches of an army, the epitome of boldness, the victor of the “battle of the nations” at Austerlitz in 1805 was also the perpetrator of one of the greatest military disasters in history – the 1812 invasion of Russia – and on the end of one of the most decisive defeats in history at Waterloo in 1815. His British opposite number, the Duke of Wellington, had never commanded an army even one-tenth the size of the French grande armée of 1812, but he learned to husband resources, to defend, to retreat and to avoid confrontations he might lose.
I am often chided for comparing both football managers and vice-chancellors?to Wellington and Napoleon, but I think the same psychological and structural dynamics are at work. Whatever the job, you should beware of the candidate who turns up preening themselves over their successes, priding themselves on their “method”, convinced of their infallibility. Russia is not Austria, Tottenham Hotspur is not Celtic and Central Lancashire is not Lancaster.
The real virtues of leadership are clarity about reality, flexibility and a degree of humility. There’s a certain manager of my acquaintance who likes to say, “It is what it is”. I’ve heard it said that this is a silly cliché, but at least it’s true, and its truth is forgotten surprisingly often.
Is there anything special about academic leadership given that academics (some of them, anyway) are clever? They can produce arguments for anything and against anything. The moves outlined in Francis Cornford’s 1908 book about academic politics, Microcosmographia Academica, are still used and still work.
Well, I think that Machiavelli was mainly right on sport and war. All serious football fans and military historians know that there are successful leaders who have succeeded with much fear and little love. But, even here, there are some areas where kindness – or, at least, a certain empathy – is necessary.
As a cricket captain for 30 years, for instance, I was very aware that you want to put people in roles that are suited to them and (not quite the same thing) that they believe to be suited to them. That was difficult, however, when I captained a team in which seven of the 11 players were best suited to opening the batting. Academic analogies are easily imagined.
Good management even in this very simple sense doesn’t always happen, and I’ve known people in every field who are not good at acknowledging what other people are good (or bad) at and even some who take an almost unconscious sadistic delight in casting people out of role.
That is particularly counter-productive in academia. Indeed, there?is a far higher proportion of academic circumstances in which kindness and compassion work better. And, anyway, these are good things in themselves.
As a young lecturer, I hugely valued the sense that my first department head was always on my side. His name was Wilfrid Harrison and he seemed like a very benign great-uncle – he was more than 40 years older than me. Actually, I think we all felt like that about him, and it made the conduct of business and the resolution of disputes much easier. Only later did I learn that such relationships are usually fouled by egos and hidden agendas and unspoken hostilities.
Wilfrid’s real achievement was not necessarily that the department became large and successful, because he was only around for the first of its six decades of existence. The real achievement is that the half-dozen surviving members of the department he recruited are all still good friends and in regular contact with each other half a century later.
Even before I met Wilfrid, I knew a master of academic leadership, a man who had manipulated presidents and prime ministers. As a 17-year-old undergraduate at University College, Oxford, I was walking across a quadrangle when I met the college’s silver-haired master Sir John Maud, coming the other way.
“Lincoln!” he exclaimed, in his cheerfully benign, patrician, smooth-as-silk manner. “How are you? Are you having a good time?”
The future Lord Redcliffe-Maud knew my name!
Of course, he then had to engage in a rather longer conversation than he had planned; he had, after all, asked me two questions. But he handled it well, as he handled everything.
He appeared to be the natural head of a deeply conservative institution, liked and respected in equal measure. But he was transforming it almost imperceptibly, easing out “dead wood” among the fellows, transforming admissions from nepotism to competition and even preparing for co-education while defending the virtues of a single-sex institution.
One story about him concerned an undergraduate “sent down” (expelled) for making no effort in the academic direction. George (we shall call him) put on his best bib and tucker and went to see John (as he insisted on being called) to plead for a last chance.
“George!” smiled John. “You’ve come to say goodbye! What a splendid gesture – I would have expected no less.”
They shook hands and George went on his way feeling strangely good about himself. That, as they say, is the iron hand in the velvet glove.
Lincoln Allison is emeritus reader in politics at the University of Warwick.
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