Leading in Times of Disruption: Reimagining Leadership and Repositioning Leaders

Peter Vaill’s evocative metaphor of “living in permanent whitewater” is very relevant to universities today. Leaders in our institutions (and elsewhere) are navigating unfamiliar territory—and they are doing so without a map. The demands and expectations placed on leaders can be extreme and is testing the abilities of our institutions’ leaders to the extreme. Leaders and leadership paradigms has been disrupted and the old model of fear and control do not work. However, the primary leadership challenge is not simply to develop a new leadership competency model—describing a group of behaviours we expect from our leadership. The deeper challenge is to develop a new mindset that anchors, informs, and advances these new behaviours. The ability to question your own deeply entrenched assumptions and well-established worldviews, habits and mindsets will be critical. When unpacking the case for change versus the capacity for change, this chapter surfaced, five kinds of shifts needed to lead in a world characterised by complexity, disruption and uncertainty. I have labelled these shifts as the Awareness shift, the Identity shift, the Mindset shift, the Paradigm shift and lastly the shift from Fear to psychological safety. Are these the only shifts that matter in the current state? I am sure not, we can add many more. But, I believe that these five shifts that demonstrate the complexities of the challenges facing higher education has the potential to reposition and reinvent our leadership for the future