Redesigning collegiate leadership

by Estela Mara Bensimon

Most organizational theorists use the athletic team as a metaphor for the effective work group - specific players motivated to give their best performance in pursuit of a common goal. Redesigning Collegiate Leadership offers a different model, focusing instead on the complex ways that members of a leadership team interact, wield power, use language, and create meaning. Estela Mara Bensimon and Anna Neumann describe the team as a culture and argue that effective team leadership depends on expecting, understanding, and appreciating the differences among individuals. Using interviews with members of administrative teams on fifteen campuses - including research universities, public colleges, private colleges, and community colleges - the authors examine teamwork as an essentially human activity. They consider how and why people on leadership teams think and act as they do, how they learn and communicate (or neglect to do so), and how they bring their deepest values, beliefs, and aspiration