Leadership, Management, & Study Abroad
This is the eleventh in a series of “food for thought” pieces from CIEE. The themes vary but all deal with study abroad for U.S. undergraduates. We present our ideas not as the only viable ones but rather to stimulate discourse in furtherance of the study abroad enterprise. Previous topics include:
– How Are We Doing?
– Standards
– A CIEE Eye for the Study Abroad Guy...or Girl
– Parents, Pills, & Pandering
– A Research Agenda for Study Abroad
– What’s It All About?
– Numbers
– Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
– Down With America
– Beware the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
We welcome your comments and requests for additional copies at any time to editor@ciee.org.
We’ve never been fans of popular books on management. We’re sure Jack Welch was a brilliant leader at General Electric, but his personal staff was probably bigger than most organizations we come in contact with and his discretionary budget equal to the size of the GDP of a small country. While his ideas and theories might hold some validity in that corporate world, for all intents and purposes he’s writing about life in another dimension. We much prefer reading about the recently deposed President of Harvard University. It isn’t that we’re anti-Harvard and/or anti-Larry Summers; quite the contrary. His case is a great study in what not to do and how not to do it. For all his good ideas, his execution was a failure. He refused—or his ego wouldn’t allow him—to take into account the needs of the governed, in this case, the very capable and powerful faculty of the University. These lessons ring closer to home.
Those of us involved in leadership and management often think about the challenges of management: defining strategy, getting teams to work together, handling difficult employee issues, finding capable staff, putting together budgets that facilitate operations, and the myriad of other tasks that fall to management in most organizations. We also think about leadership issues: getting people motivated to do great work, influencing our institutions to provide support for those things that require their blessings, and building lasting programs and processes so that our work will be sustained over time. We muse and wonder and worry about success and failure. It’s only natural. With rare exception, most of us that manage want to do a good job although the measures of “outstanding performance” vary widely from person to person.
At CIEE we think a lot about the issues of management. Like all participants in the study abroad enterprise, we have a long-term stake in the health and welfare of the enterprise. We believe that management is a critical dimension of success or failure. The CIEE Management Institute and related publications evolved from discussions with those in the field similarly concerned. One doesn’t have to attend many meetings to know that we’re going through a generational change in leadership in the field of study abroad. We’ve seen a number of retirements in recent years of heads of major study abroad offices; of people who have long been leaders in the field. More retirements will come in the next five to ten years. There is nothing unusual or bad about this; it is the way of the world. These changes in leadership present opportunities and potential pitfalls. The next generation of those who lead and manage study abroad—and the skill with which they exercise those responsibilities—will be important to us all.
Many of today’s study abroad executives started working in study abroad in the late 60s and early 70s. For the most part, they were academically trained, although there were a few who “grew up” inside the field or in the administrative structure of their universities and landed at some point in the study abroad office. They were multi-lingual, often multi-national. Their education was in philosophy, art history, languages, and the like. They didn’t know how to use spreadsheets and they didn’t think of themselves as running a business. They were a service and support extension of the university or college where they worked, a resource regarding overseas programming and programs for students and/or faculty. Study abroad was often not a conscious career choice but rather, as it turned out for many, a happy accident of time, events, personal history, and interests.
Like Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation,” these study abroad leaders and managers were perfect for the task they faced. They had the trust of their faculty colleagues; experience around the world; and knew what their colleges wanted to have happen abroad—how to weave what was doable overseas with what was desirable at home. The overall number of students abroad was very small, with the preponderance of programs either led by faculty in the summer or integrated with a host institution for a full year of study, a true “Junior Year Abroad.” While clearly there was interest in study abroad, the size and scope of the activity at most schools was very small. Many study abroad offices were actually run by faculty on course relief and/or similar part time efforts.
By the mid 1970s, this had started to change, and by the early 1980s, study abroad had picked up real steam. It had grown from its white glove and somewhat elite origins to a more central part of the study options at many schools. The consortium model expanded as a way of spreading the risks and problems of running geographically remote programs among a number of institutions. Some schools expanded beyond their own campus’s interests, seeing study abroad as a form of continuing education that could lead to profit and an expanded scope of activities. Study centers were opened in cities around the world and issues such as extra-territorial rights and employee contracts and rights in non-U.S. jurisdictions became the challenges of management. Opening programs, it was discovered, was sometimes a whole lot easier than keeping them open and running effectively. The issues were not strategic and educational as much as leadership and management-oriented. People became managers of study abroad not because they wanted to be managers but because they had to manage to fulfill their goals.
All of this is a generalization. There were, of course, differences between and among campuses. For every rule, there was an exception; for every prototype, another version or approach. What was clear was that people who didn’t think of themselves as managers—or envision careers as managers—needed to be managers of what was becoming an increasingly large and complex study abroad landscape. Things international on most campuses were also growing in other ways. In addition to outbound programming there was concomitant interest, concern, and focus on inbound foreign students and scholars and internationalization of curriculum. At many institutions, these efforts were being melded together. Various departments within schools were starting to lose individual prerogatives in terms of study abroad, and budgetary pressure forced them to be part of academy-wide activities. Study abroad was and still is part of a larger drive to internationalization.
The present generation of managers learned to manage by being managers. They learned on the job—and learned effectively—or at least most did. This is no different than any other profession. However, as we think about the next generation of managers in study abroad, we might ask ourselves whether the model for management selection that was appropriate during the 60s and 70s is appropriate for the future. Our answer to that is “not exactly.”
At a recent large session of study abroad professionals, we heard someone lamenting the lack of leadership for the next generation of the field. We couldn’t disagree more. We think there are both leadership and management for the future. These people, however, are not and should not be like the leaders of the past. They should not learn on the job. They need not be academics (more about this follows). The world in which we live and work has changed and therefore the leadership and management needs to change and grow with it. So, what do we think is required?
First and foremost, we think the running of study abroad offices is about management. With growing enrollments, declining staff, and expanded offerings, the task of selecting, advising, and matriculating students is very different than it was years ago. How to interface local information technology with university-wide systems; how to administer large numbers of programs and students; and how to select from varied offerings is a management challenge. Schools recruiting for registrar, admission, and similar administrative areas of the university wouldn’t think of hiring anyone but an experienced manager in the field. Study abroad is no different.
Second, study abroad offices need to be managed by people with “technical” knowledge of the field. There is now a large body of knowledge related to study abroad; some of this is legal, some operational, and some cultural. The days when people needed to learn on the job are truly over. People will always learn new things as they work, or hopefully they will. But today, as with other areas of the academy, there is a body of knowledge possessed by those with experience in study abroad that should be captured and rewarded in management recruitment and promotion.
Third, we need more people with solid business skills populating the field. At CIEE, we always enjoy someone telling us they run a study abroad program for $4,500/per student per semester. Of course, they don’t count their salary, office rent, marketing costs, and a myriad of indirect expenses that go into the finances of study abroad. The field needs people who are computer literate, know the difference between direct and indirect and variable and non-variable costs, and don’t quake in their shoes when someone trots out FERPA. This knowledge is often acquired through schooling, experience, and specialized professional education. Heresy though it might be, a few more MBAs and a few less Ph.D.s would serve us all well.
Next, we need people that want to lead and manage. This usually means taking risks, doing things that are a bit “out of the box,” and conceptualizing and re-conceptualizing problems and opportunities in new ways. These sorts of entrepreneurial skills are harder to teach and acquire. Study abroad advanced because people were willing to go to new places, try new programs, and fight internally and externally for those things in which they believed. Passion and perseverance are a great combination for future leaders. Our contact with the study abroad world says there is a good deal of this leadership around waiting to be tapped. But this leadership won’t necessarily be discovered in the same places it was found 25 or more years ago.
Finally, today’s study abroad director needs to relate to faculty and administrators who expect him or her to have a very good understanding of the realities of working and teaching in a whole range of departments and disciplines and whose standards and needs can differ dramatically across colleges and schools. They want the study abroad director to function competently as a sort of academic generalist, someone akin to an associate dean. The difference being that the study abroad director must contribute intelligently across colleges and schools in committee discussions about academic standards and credit, accreditation issues, or even about the weight to give internationally-focused work in considering faculty tenure and advancement.
Does this mean that the person has to have a Ph.D.? We view this issue in the context of a similar situation in hospitals. For many years, it was believed the only person who could run a hospital was a physician, an MD. After all, they reasoned, who better understood the work of the hospital? Overall, this approach to hospital management was a disaster. The commitment, training, and discipline required to be a physician has very little to do with running a large and complex institution. While some MDs acquire and develop these skills, for the most part the running of hospitals is now done by professional managers with MBA/MHA and similar backgrounds and education. While it takes sensitivity and skill to engage the physician staff—just like it will take sensitivity and skill for study abroad directors to engage faculty and administration—it works. The issue is not about degree and educational background, it’s about competence and knowledge. Requiring a Ph.D. as a litmus test of qualification for the study abroad director position doesn’t make sense to us. It won’t guarantee respect from faculty and deans. Only performance and skill in delivery will achieve that outcome.
Every situation is different. Every school has its own quirks and every job its particular history, challenges, and needs. Not every boat moves up and down quite the same on the tide. The tide of study abroad has very much increased in its size, scope of operations, and complexity of challenges; more people, more money, and more markets. In that sea, we think management skills should be the primary emphasis in developing and selecting the next generation of leaders.