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Tips on How Leaders Can Transform Their Campuses

Dr. Venita Kelley

Transformational leaders offer a higher purpose and get others to share it. Dr. Venita Kelley spoke on women’s transformational leadership at the Wisconsin Women in Higher Education Leadership state conference in October.

Transformational leadership stands in contrast to transactional leadership, which emphasizes means over ends. Transactional leaders cherish bargaining, negotiation and efficiency. Their top values are about how: honesty, responsibility, fairness and honoring commitments. They stay inside the box.

Values such as liberty, justice, and equality power a transformational leader. They are about what. Her enthusiasm is for transcendent goals—ways to transform the world.

Based on a 1947 model by Weber, Kelley plotted leadership styles on two axes, transactional/transformation and power/service. Will to power implies an iron fist in a velvet glove. These leaders rule from the top down, controlling others and resisting initiatives by their followers. People don’t matter; they’re easy to replace.

Machiavelli’s prince or an autocratic boss would fall in the transactional/will-to-power quadrant. A leader in the transformational/will-to-power quadrant is a lone superwoman or superman to the rescue.

Will to serve implies enthusiasm for people and their relationships, feelings, thoughts and concerns. Women get in trouble when they move too far out on this axis to articulate their needs. “We want to help people move to another place. Women get pushed into the same box all the time,” she said, “until they have no identity or purpose.”

Bureaucrats fall in the transactional/will-to-serve quadrant. Leaders in the transformational/will-to-serve quadrant are selfless heroes.

What is your leadership style? Which values fit your beliefs? “Men tend to be more transactional because they talk about moral leadership but hold on to what they already know,” she said. Women leaders learn to negotiate a transactional structure on their way to transformation.

Leading students

“What do you do every day that has an impact on other people?” she asked. That’s your leadership role. If you’re leading on campus, your role as a leader involves helping students to grow. Starting in the 1970s, student affairs folks began looking at students as unique, whole people rather than as disembodied brains. Traditional-age college students are just emerging from adolescence. Every part of their environment affects their personal and social development.

Arthur Chickering (1969) lists ways students learn:

1. Developing competence. Students learn skills in using their minds to understand, analyze and broaden their perspective. They also learn physical and social skills, selfdiscipline and cooperation.

2. Managing emotions. The part of the brain that controls impulses and manages emotions is the last to develop. Students grapple with anger, fear, anxiety and depression. They must learn to recognize the emotions and then find appropriate ways to release them before they explode.

3. Developing autonomy. Many students are away from parents for the first time. They can get a credit card just by filling in a form, with the risk of falling thousands of dollars in debt. They need to learn to set personal goals and take responsibility for pursuing them.

4. Establishing identity. Students of color get mixed messages: fit into stereotypes but leave your culture behind. A Barnard professor embarrassed an African American student by assuming she was being silenced, based on her race. A Vietnamese student who began the semester going by “Dave” reclaimed his Vietnamese name by the end of the term. “I give people back to themselves,” she said.

Gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class all complicate identity. Blond, blue-eyed Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio grew up in a steelworker’s family in the mountains of southern Ohio, one of nine children. He had to integrate his working-class identity with an unexpected chance to go to college. Committed to closing the achievement gap for students at risk, he appointed Dr. Kelley as his special representative to lead the initiative.

5. Freeing interpersonal relationships. Most teens are still narcissists; some never outgrow it. Healthy relationships require an appreciation of differences and a capacity for intimacy. Leaders can help students to learn tolerance as they strengthen their ability to choose and nurture relationships.

6. Developing purpose. Many students want to do something good in the world but they don’t know what or how. They need help to clarify and integrate their goals and figure out how to make those goals a reality.

7. Developing integrity. Students bring unconscious assumptions to campus. College invites them to clarify and examine those values, choosing which to keep or revise.

“This will become a reference point for you as a leader with students,” Kelley said. How does your leadership role connect with the seven vectors of student development? Does awareness of students’ higher-order needs affect your work with them? If so, how? If not, why not?

Leaders and followers

“Transformational leaders lead with something beyond what’s there,” she said. They may take various roles in creating transformation, according to Burns (1978).

Intellectuals draw a conscious purpose from their values and hold up the transforming moral power of ideas. Out of step with their time, they see beyond the status quo. “They have a vision that can transform society by raising social consciousness,” she said.

Reformers lead movements to transform society in pursuit of moral principles. To do this they need allies, whose goals don’t always match theirs. African American women get caught between white women’s feminist ideology and an African American community that questions women as leaders. “There’s a real battle in black society about the power of women in the culture,” she said.

Revolutionaries create a new ideology and raise a movement with zeal to overthrow the status quo. They may create new structures of government, economy or education. Change won’t happen through student leadership classes taught by old-school faculty who think leading means managing a bureaucracy.

Transformational leadership has aspects the old boys overlook:

• Charisma. The leader is a role model the follower idealizes and identifies with. Charismatic leaders take clear stands and appeal to their followers emotionally.

• Inspiration. The leader articulates a vision that motivates others, challenging them with high standards and optimism about reaching their goals.

• Intellectual stimulation. The leader solicits her followers’ ideas and encourages them to think creatively.

• Individualized consideration. The leader gives attention to each follower’s needs, acting as a mentor or coach. She celebrates team diversity and each follower’s contribution.

Followership is the other side of the coin. “People decide if your leadership is worth following,” she said. Whom do you follow and why? What do you do as a follower?

Followers are smart, courageous, loyal and capable. They have a strong sense of ethics and skills of analysis and judgment. They’re willing to take a risk. Followers have great power, for they’re the ones who empower the leader.

To lead is to develop followers who share a common purpose. Followers enrich the mission and offer constructive critique. To follow is to contribute in important and creative ways. It can also be a significant part of one’s evolution to leadership.

Claim your value

All sorts of societal messages tell you not to aim for leadership. Some act as if women should be supportive and stay in the background. Forget it! Accept that you want to be a leader and take steps in that direction.

• Recognize your value. Believe you’re worth it and make sure others can see your worth.

• Make your values visible. Write down your idea with your name and date; date any revisions too. Otherwise someone can steal it.

• Withdraw strategically when your value isn’t acknowledged. It may upset those who take you for granted. “Sit back and let them stew,” Kelley said.

• Enlist support to bolster your value. Others can get you into the meeting and acknowledge your contributions.

• Neutralize statements that diminish your value. Use your sense of humor to twist putdowns into compliments. • Build your value into your job. Keep a portfolio of your accomplishments. Share it and ask for feedback.

• Claim your value in a strategic campaign. If you know your value and others don’t, make an action plan to educate them in a way they can understand.

Every position is an opportunity to grow. If you have a mentor, great! If you don’t, develop yourself. Avoid the traps that pit one woman against another. Build a support team and network, and find someone you can talk to in confi dence. “Know that vision and action can change the world,” she said.

Dr. Venita Kelley is founder and CEO of Kelley Communications and Consulting Contact her at
Venita.Kelley@ode.state.oh.us
404.694.3018

Cook, Sarah Gibbard. (2009, December). Tips on How Leaders Can Transform Their Campuses. Women in Higher Education, 18(12), p. 1-2.