Conclusion 263
people to address issues of consequence and to seek new opportunities, and in so
doing it builds trust. A good strategy process penetrates and gives a new form to
the political frame.
But strategy transcends political considerations because it defines the contours
of the future in terms of the enduring commitments of the organization. Without
fidelity to core values, politics becomes blind. As both our national and campus
political lives teach us, it can degenerate into systematic distortions, an ugly con-
test of egos, and character assassination. These weapons are in evidence on some
campuses, as much as in the capital. For its practices to remain responsible, politics
has to be redeemed by purpose, and purpose has to reflect fundamental values.
When politics are integrated into strategic leadership it functions within a process
bounded by a legacy, oriented to a vision, and infused with substantive values.
Strategic Leadership and Administrative, Collegial,
and Symbolic Leadership
As we touch on the other leadership frames or styles—the administrative, the
collegial, and the symbolic—we find similar patterns of relationship with strate-
gic leadership. The other forms provide necessary conditions and resources that
are refashioned and reoriented when they are drawn into the larger dialectic of
integration that strategic leadership provides.
To pursue another example, without a good administrative infrastructure,
strategy will go nowhere. Good data are needed, effective staff support is required,
administrative control systems must be adequate, and the organizational capacities
have to be in place to implement goals. At one level, strategy itself is simply a set
of administrative practices and methods. Yet administrative effectiveness is clearly
not sufficient for the motivation and engagement that are required in strategic
leadership. It does not always welcome or understand change, cannot overcome the
structural conflict to which it is a party, and easily falls prey to routine. More than
administrative expertise and good management are required to serve the evolving
needs and possibilities of academic organizations. Under the impress of stra-
tegic leadership the management frame refashions its sense of the world, gains
a purchase on change, and finds more motivating and integrated tools with which
to do its work.
The other two frames of leadership, the collegial and the symbolic, are also
essential. As we have seen repeatedly, strategy has to satisfy the norms and secure
the benefits of shared governance to be effective and legitimate, so collegiality
is an important condition of the process. Academic expertise in teaching, learn-
ing, and scholarship has to drive the organization. Our argument has stressed
emphatically that strategic leadership is rooted in the power of symbolic leader-
ship, especially in its use of institutional narratives and in its congruence with
organizational cultures.
Each of these dimensions is present within strategic leadership, but as part of a
larger process of decision making and meaning that changes them in the process.
Whereas strategic leadership gives purpose to political and administrative styles