If you asked ten academics from your faculty where the faculty will be in five years, how similar would their answers be? Would they describe a shared direction and a common ambition, or would their answers focus on the next curriculum review, the next committee meeting or the next compliance deadline? The answer to that question says more about leadership than it might first appear.
Universities are intricate institutions requiring efficient management. This involves managing budgets, implementing policies, ensuring quality, and reviewing courses—tasks that are essential and unavoidable. They are crucial for a faculty’s success and require considerable time and focus from leaders. The real concern isn’t the importance of these activities but what occurs when they become the main way academics perceive their leaders.
Facilitating visibility into the future is a key role of faculty leadership. While leadership is commonly assessed by organisational outcomes, governance, and decision-making, its lasting impact lies in guiding people to understand the faculty’s direction and how current efforts align with future goals. Without this clarity, daily tasks may become detached from a larger purpose, leaving academics busy yet less confident about their shared objectives.
When Leadership Becomes Management
Speak to academics from various institutions and a consistent picture begins to emerge. Their interactions with faculty leadership mainly focus on operational tasks like updating curriculum documents, responding to policy updates, preparing committee reports, participating in course evaluations, completing quality assurance processes, and managing workloads. These tasks are essential to maintaining standards, supporting accountability, and helping universities operate effectively amid growing complexity.
Over time, these operational interactions can overshadow overall leadership, as academics clearly identify immediate tasks but are less certain about long-term goals. Conversations tend to focus on short-term priorities rather than future direction, and success is often judged by task completion rather than how those tasks align with broader ambitions.
This is not a critique of management. Effective management is crucial, and strong abilities rely on it. Yet, management and leadership are different. Management establishes structure, consistency, and accountability, while leadership offers direction, purpose, and meaning. When one consistently dominates the other, academics may continue to work hard, but they can start to forget why their efforts matter beyond meeting the next deadline.
Phantom Leadership
This is what might be described as phantom leadership. Leadership is not absent. In many respects, leaders are highly visible, as academics regularly experience their decisions through meetings, governance processes, workload allocations, budget discussions and institutional initiatives. The faculty continues to operate effectively, decisions continue to be made, and organisational priorities continue to be implemented. Yet despite this constant interaction, leadership itself can become surprisingly difficult to see.
The paradox is that academics recognise leadership through its practical impact they see daily, yet they rarely articulate a clear vision for the future that links these actions into a meaningful story. They know their next steps but are less clear about the faculty’s ultimate goals. As a result, leadership is often seen in management activities but becomes less visible in the realm of vision.
A faculty can have leaders without academics genuinely experiencing leadership. While the difference is subtle, it is significant. Leadership goes beyond merely making decisions or overseeing processes. It becomes authentic when people grasp the reasons behind those decisions, see how unrelated activities contribute to a common goal, and understand the future that these collective efforts are striving to create.
Movement Without Momentum
This might be why many academics feel stuck on the so-called “mouse wheel”. Their frustration usually doesn’t come from the work itself. Most academics recognise the significance of tasks like teaching, grading, moderation, curriculum review, student support, committee duties, and quality assurance. These responsibilities have long been a standard part of academic duties and are accepted as professional commitments.
Frustration arises when these activities seem detached from a larger purpose. Teaching results in marking, which leads to moderation. Moderation then prompts curriculum review, followed by committee meetings. These meetings lead to planning for the next teaching period, creating a cycle. While each task has its own worth, together they can resemble motion without progress, as the ultimate goal becomes unclear.
This might also clarify why academics sometimes call their tasks “busy work.” Usually, this isn’t a comment on the task’s worth. Instead, it indicates a lack of clarity about how those individual activities contribute to a larger goal. Operational work seems like busy work only when the future it supports isn’t visible.
Making Leadership Visible Again
Faculty leadership’s key role involves not just managing current operations but also ensuring they align with future goals. This doesn’t mean repeating strategic plans every meeting or starting every talk with a vision statement. Instead, it focuses on guiding faculty to see how current choices shape future success. When curriculum updates reflect a unique educational purpose, they go beyond mere compliance. Investment choices become more impactful when clearly tied to the faculty’s future skills. Even routine governance tasks gain importance when stakeholders understand the overall direction they are supporting, rather than just completing a process.
Leadership, in this context, lends purpose to management by creating a narrative that links individual choices to collective progress. It turns routine operational tasks into meaningful work. While universities will always need strong management, and leaders’ responsibilities will likely grow more complex, there’s a risk that academics will see meetings only as instructions on what to do next, reducing leadership to mere administration. When faculty leave with a clear sense of the institution’s goals and how their roles fit into that vision, leadership reasserts its presence and impact.
Perhaps the question every faculty leader should consider is whether, after a meeting, committee discussion, or governance process, faculty members have a clearer understanding of the direction we’re heading. If the answer is no, the issue might not be management but leadership.
