Dive Brief:
- A growing number of retirements and resignations from college presidencies is increasing the urgency for institutions to identify respective pipelines for leadership.
- Presidential transition committees are essential to learning the business, political and community culture which surrounds institutions, and determines the tenor of most presidential administrations in the first six months.
- Consistent performance evaluations are a helpful tool in gauging and defining the role of the presidents and the metrics which must be met by the office.
Dive Insight:
Several presidents would take issue with the advice that regular evaluations make a difference, when politics in states like Kentucky and Florida have influenced presidential hiring and firing independent of performance. For presidents, finding the metrics of greatest importance and communicating with boards to determine the priority of meeting those metrics, are keys to building presidential tenure.
Training potential successors, or even presidential talent which may go out to other campuses, involves looking at non-traditional leadership roles, like chief information officers who will lead campus transitions in technology and security infrastructure, and business officers who will have to determine strategy for investment and revenue creation and who recognize the volatile nature of the college industry. As the higher education marketplace becomes more volatile, the talent pool of academicians who normally would have considered presidencies will continue to dramatically shrink.