260 Strategic Leadership
empowerment among both leaders and followers. Over time, the practices of
strategic leadership become embedded in patterns of initiative and systems of
responsibility throughout the organization.
This summary of the elements of strategic leadership also reveals a way to
integrate several of the major approaches to the study of leadership and decision
making in higher education. At various points, we have explored the insights
that can be drawn from studies of collegiate culture concerning the significance
of symbolism, narratives, and sense making. At other places we have reviewed
the findings and the counsel of those who see strategy as a set of manage-
ment practices. The literature on collegial governance and the empirical and
conceptual studies of presidential and other forms of leadership have also been a
focus of our attention. Our aim has been to integrate these diverse and valuable
threads of research, theory, and practice into a model of leadership as a reciprocal
process of sense making, sense giving, and enactment.
We can perhaps do no better to illustrate the potential integration of these
conceptual and practical motifs than by returning to Burton Clark’s (1998) study
of entrepreneurial universities. In these contexts, he notes how a powerful institu-
tional idea links up participants and spreads to practices and processes of decision
making that create enduring and distinctive beliefs, eventually creating a new cul-
ture. Strong cultures reinforce practices and create a unified identity, which can in
time become a saga, encapsulating the sense of distinctive organizational achieve-
ments. I see these administrative, conceptual, and cultural elements described
by Clark as components that can be integrated through a systematic method of
strategic leadership.
THE DIALECTICS OF LEADERSHIP
There are many perspectives from which this proposal for strategic leadership can
be questioned. Some will disagree with our approach because they do not resonate
with its conceptual framework and methods of argumentation. Others will be skep-
tical because they resist all forms of strategy, and yet others will await a large-scale
empirical study to support the usefulness of the approach—a complex and difficult
one, given the many variables involved (cf. Dooris, Kelley, and Trainer 2004). On
a more practical level, some will find that the recommendations for changes in gov-
ernance, the strategy process, and management systems are not possible or realistic,
at least in their circumstances. Others will continue to be most comfortable with
the way they have consistently used strategic planning to good effect as a tool of
management. For all these reasons and others, many decision makers might suggest
that various combinations of the political, symbolic, collegial, or administrative
models of leadership are most useful and effective. A number of leaders, including
many presidents, prefer to be more independent and spontaneous than is suggested
by the collaborative system required in a discipline of leadership.
One of the most persistent questions about strategic leadership will come in
response to the claim that an important dimension of leadership can be practiced