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What Motivates Women to Become Higher Ed Leaders?

Dr. Kelline Cox

Women are posed to shape American values publicly on a scale to which they have never before had access. Much is riding on whether and how they choose to lead. Constance H. Buchanan Choosing to Lead: Women and the Crisis of American Values (1996)

What factors lead to success for women who make it? Cox, who directs the office of planning and analysis at Kansas State University in Manhattan KS, explored motivation in a qualitative study for her dissertation. She spoke at the University of Nebraska’s Women in Educational Leadership Conference in Lincoln in October.

Earlier studies focused on external barriers. It used to be that too few women had doctorates; now they earn more than half the U.S. doctorates awarded to U.S. citizens. More and more women have suitable experience to rise in college administration. The old excuses no longer hold true.

Glass ceilings and chilly climates still exist and they’re still important to address institutionally. But individual women can’t do much about them. So she looked instead through the interior lens of choice and motivation.

Land grant universities have 6% fewer women in upper leadership (president, chancellor, VP or provost) than higher education overall. And they’ve made slower progress (10% increase from 1987 to 2001). Of the 50 land grant schools—one per state—she found 37 with at least one woman in upper administration. Then she narrowed the list to those who’d been in their positions at least three years, sent out invitations and wound up with 18 participants.

They were all VPs or provosts, with the majority in student affairs. She interviewed them about their experiences and motives in relation to three interactive factors as described by Albert Bandura (1997):

• Beliefs
• Behaviors
• Environment

One participant described confidence, skills and outside influences as three knobs that a leader is constantly turning:

You turn them up or turn them down depending on what’s happening with the other knob. Your self-confidence is up or down depending upon what’s happening in your leadership role and how hard you want to push a committee… I think the success of a leader is the ability to understand the ratio with which each of those must interact at any one time and to be willing to adapt and change.

Beliefs: ‘I can do it’

All the participants were guided by a strong belief that they could do it. To use Bandura’s term, their self-efficacy is very high.

That doesn’t mean they’d always aimed to become VPs. Their early careers just happened, job after job, without much pattern or planning. Career goals emerged when personal confidence met up with individuals who modeled the possibilities.

One realized as a master’s degree student that she was as smart as her professors, and the idea of getting a PhD began to dawn on her. Another met with the chief student affairs officer, who had earlier hired her for a job on campus:

And I looked at her and said, “I can do your job,” and she looked back at me and said, “Of course you can.” And that’s when I really started looking at becoming a VP of student affairs.

Success breeds confidence and confidence breeds success. But everyone makes mistakes and anyone willing to take risks will sometimes fail. One distinguishing mark of a leader is the resilience to recover and learn from the mistakes. One told her:

It’s a question of how do I get to where I want to go, knowing that the road might have many failures and successes. But, if you chart your course and are good about analyzing and assessing why things work and why things don’t work, every piece of the journey is a learning experience.

Confidence also grew from interaction with others doing similar jobs, i.e. networking. They learned how others handled similar challenges and they saw that their difficulties were common, not the unique result of their mishandling.

Personal support from family and friends helped too. Everyone needs cheerleaders and a safe place to vent.

Finally, confidence grew as they saw worthwhile goals achieved. “They knew they could do the job. They also found that by helping others, that built their confidence even further,” Cox said.

One counted her victories throughout the year, from talking a kid off a roof to improving the Greek system and reworking the code of conduct.

 Behavior: Knowledge and skills

Confidence allowed them to build the knowledge and skills they’d need on the job. One explained that she doesn’t know everything but by talking to people or using other resources, she trusts that she can figure it out.

They advised women to prepare for opportunities that may arise. Earning a terminal degree is important. So is developing an understanding of money and budgets. It’s helpful to understand how the larger institution works and how the parts fit into the whole. People skills and problem solving skills are critical.

Her participants had plenty of experience and knew how to handle themselves professionally. Several described experimenting with different styles before finding what worked for them. They discovered that being aggressive didn’t get the results they wanted; they needed to collaborate, not just give orders. “Let’s make sure we get the right people around the table. Let’s get the discussion going,” Cox heard them say.

They spoke of the importance of setting goals for their units, to provide direction and measure achievement. This contrasts with their general lack of personal goal-setting for their careers. Two-thirds had not planned to enter upper administration. One explained:

I never predicted that this would be my pathway. It just seemed that more and more administrative tasks were asked of me and I seemed to do them well enough, so even more would be asked of me and I enjoyed them.

Their goals were for the university rather than self advancement. One described reluctantly taking an interim position and then realizing how much she could accomplish in that job. In each position as she moved up, she was gratified to have more and more impact.

Another aspect of behavior is negotiating work/life balance. Participants varied in how they approached the tension between work and family. Some chose to forego children in order to focus on work. Others struggled to balance the two or wished they’d spent more time with their kids.

Whichever path they followed, it left little time for self-care. One loved running but couldn’t fi nd time to run. “They get so focused on their job and family, they forget to make time for self,” she said. She’d like to see more research on how high-pressure work affects women’s health. Men may have more heart attacks, but how about menopause?

Environment: Mentors matter

Presidents set the tone. Some participants found their administrations to be very supportive of women. For others, the old boys’ club was alive and well; older male leaders promoted secrecy and competition instead of the more open, collaborative style common to younger academics and women.

One participant said she was comfortable being the only woman in a meeting but some of the men seemed to feel awkward, as though they weren’t sure how to act around her:

They are not doing it deliberately to be mean spirited. They just have not had a lot of experience working with women in top levels. . . . I was advised that I should sit there and listen and not say much. And when I do that, I’m considered to be uncivil.

Several observed that the culture was uneven across campus, with some units more welcoming to women than others.

Mentors stood out among environmental influences on their motivation for leadership. Their mentors were mostly informal and mostly men, serving as role models and sources of moral support, contacts, sponsorship, information and coaching:

One mentor wanted to help me excel and he made sure I was connected with the right people. Another mentor taught me that it is the small things, the simple gifts, the things you do to care about people that are so important.

Mentors recognized their potential. When one was a master’s degree student, a faculty member suggested based on her GRE scores that she should go for a PhD. It was the first time anyone had told her they thought she could achieve at that level. She followed the advice.

Another described a time when her boss tried hard to make her feel bad about herself:

I will never forget one of my mentors. He took me to lunch, and he said of my boss, “Don’t you ever let him convince you that you are not competent, because you are.”

Some mentors pushed them in directions they might not have pushed themselves. One kept her nose to the grindstone when she was new on faculty. A colleague invited her to join a group for coffee in a building some distance away.

When she protested that she didn’t have time, he told her it was something she really needed to do. It began her socialization into the department. Later, as he became department head and then dean, he gave her committee assignments and other opportunities.

Measuring success Cox described their journeys as the Yellow Brick Road to success.

• Like the Tin Woodman in the Wizard of Oz, women leaders need a heart to seek out personal support and use their leadership to nurture others.

• Like the Scarecrow, they need a brain: the knowledge and skills for leadership and a commitment to keep learning.

• And like the Cowardly Lion, they need courage—to face calculated risks, to persist in the face of problems but most of all to hold fast to their values.

Ten of the 18 defined success as making a difference or influencing decisions. It wasn’t about positional status but about what they accomplished in that position.

“They needed to have a purpose for what they were doing,” Cox said. “Almost all talked a lot about how they can help others.” Their measure of achievement was to encourage the success of faculty, colleagues, staff and students. One told her:

There is no greater high and no greater sense of my success in this position than having a student with whom I have worked over a period of time have the epiphany of how they view themselves . . . and knowing I had something to do with that.

To another, how people on campus felt was most important:

If you can come to your office and have a small save every day, it really does add up. You know, so we can provide little miracles… that I think made a huge difference to how the campus feels, how we feel about our self and what we do.

Beyond helping individuals, the larger success was to influence the institution and its culture. Noting that career advisors say to think about where you want to be in five or ten years, one participant recommended thinking about where you want the university to be—and whether you’re helping it move toward that future or standing in the way.

Did they aspire to be a president, she asked? To her surprise, most said no. A land grant university presidency revolves around fundraising and public relations. It would take them away from the work that they love.

 Most have reached their goal and had no wish to go further, Cox said “You might think they’ve stalled out in their careers. I think they feel they’ve reached the position where they can do the most.”

Contact:

Dr. Kelline Cox at kellicox@ksu.edu or 785.532.5712

Cook, Sarah Gibbard. (2010, January). What Motivates Women to Become Higher Ed Leaders? Women in Higher Education, 19(1), 1-3.