Leadership, Incompetence, and Delegation (or Lack Thereof)

We don't know about you, but we are regularly enjoying G. Rendell's anonymous posts in the Getting to Green blog at Inside Higher Ed. The sustainability content is good, of course, he's a sustainability director and involved with his institution's ACUPCC planning. What we really love, though, is his regular observations on the struggle and the insights that come from engaging different parts of the campus in integrated planning efforts. Here, he describes why he is not particularly keen on senior faculty taking charge of change initiatives:

Where the skin does come off my nose is when some of these professors, very senior in their fields and thus likely to take a back seat to nobody, get themselves put in charge of campus events and projects. Some of these folk shouldn’t be charged with organizing a church bake sale. They apparently can think abstractly, but they can’t think concretely. And the concrete world is where things happen (or fail to).

Now I’ve worked in the corporate world, and I know that a lot of managers are in their respective positions because they’ve gotten promoted to the level at which their incompetence is unmistakeable. But in the business world, the organizational hierarchy gives the incompetent a survival tactic — they learn to delegate. (Some do it well, some do it badly, but even Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss does it.) Academe, of course, is famously non-hierarchical. My observation is that, probably as a result, the delegating skill is rarely learned. (Teaching assistants and academic secretaries might disagree in part, but they’ll certainly agree that skillful, effective delegation is extremely rare in academic departments.) Where there’s no delegation, there’s no management. And where there’s no management, projects tend to end badly.