82 Strategic Leadership
roles. Yet they cannot easily find ways to change the situation, except through
the commitment of more time and energy, which they are reluctant to make.
The changing world has taken much of the university away from them (Burgan,
Weisbuch, and Lowry 1999; Hamilton 1999).
STRATEGIC GOVERNANCE
The frustrations that that exist on both sides of the administrative and aca-
demic divide cannot be resolved simply with ever-more precise clarifications of
the responsibilities of shared governance. The need is for new ways of thinking
and new mechanisms of decision making. I have suggested some elements of an
integrated conceptual framework for strategic leadership and now intend to offer
ideas for new forms of strategic governance.
Over the past several decades, it has become increasingly clear that organizational
decision making occurs in three fundamental forms, all intertwined in practice.
We can differentiate these levels as governance, management, and strategy. The
role of governance is to define and delegate formal responsibility and authority
within the organization, which are derived from the legal powers and fiduciary
responsibilities vested in the governing board. Yet the formal governance system
can only work through the multiple systems of decision making and management
that are delegated to the administrative and academic operating systems of the
institution. In turn, however, the operational and governance systems cannot
function effectively unless there is a strategic link between them. The strategy
system, whether formal or tacit, sets goals and priorities and allocates resources in
the name of an overall direction for the future. At all three levels, leadership is
currently understood largely in terms of the authority vested in positions and the
knowledge and skills required to exercise formal responsibilities. Leadership as an
engaging relational process of mobilizing meaning and commitment to common
purposes is not a defining characteristic of the formal academic decision-making
system.
In making campus visits for accreditation, visiting teams conclude that important
strategic decisions about programs, policies, facilities, and budgets are usually
dominated by whatever component of the governance system is most influential
in the local institutional culture. In research universities and small colleges, one or
more faculty committees or advisory councils sometimes tacitly take up pieces of
the strategy portfolio, working in various ways with administrative leaders. They
often do so by tradition as much as by formal delegation of authority. Or, most
commonly, as at Flagship, there is no ongoing integrative strategic process of lead-
ership or governance to respond to problems that cut across several domains—
which is precisely the nature of most organizational problems. Although strategic
decision making appears in a variety of forms in higher education, it is not a
central, defining, and structural feature of the system of shared governance.
Given these broad challenges, the development of closer and clearer connec-
tions among strategic governance, strategic leadership, and strategic management