Like all leaders in higher education, rural-serving community college leaders must deal with disruptions in today’s higher education landscape. Fostering innovation in rural-serving areas is especially critical as colleges in these locales are often the only choice for students as a point of access to higher education. Local and regional businesses rely on the career and technical education available at community colleges to meet their need for skilled labor.
The Belk Center for Community College Leadership serves as a convenor of leaders in North Carolina and provides resources to leaders across the country to support leadership development, tools to apply on community college campuses and models to catalyze change. Importantly, the Belk Center supports a Rural College Leaders Program to help rural-serving community college leaders support change on their campuses. At the heart of change is innovation.
Innovation requires a particular mindset and ways to tap into key competencies for leaders. A recent survey of college presidents identified a set of seven important competencies for leading: trust-building, demonstrating resilience, communication savvy, crafting a cabinet and team building, emotional intelligence, leading with courage, data acumen and resource management. Our recent work at looking at innovation in rural-serving community colleges shows a great deal of intersection with these competencies and highlights a set of practices leaders can use to jump-start innovation.
Setting the stage for innovation
Innovative leaders possess a set of skills that allow them leverage for change. The starting point for innovation begins with questioning the status quo and having the courage to ask hard questions, making difficult decisions and taking risks. Successful leaders can do this hard work when a climate of trust exists. Without trust, the work of innovation becomes difficult. With trust, campus members are more willing to engage in change. High-trust work settings allow leaders to take risks as campus members are willing to give the benefit of the doubt in the face of unknown outcomes. Courageous leaders are resilient and are willing to develop strategies to address long-standing challenges, and they do so by seeking feedback that questions new ideas.
Successful innovators all have a set of observable behaviors, which others can develop through learning and applying to their own practice. The discovery-oriented skills of innovative leaders include the ability to ask questions, the use of observation, engagement in networking, and experimentation and testing of the ideas in practice. Supporting the questioning of the status quo is the use of an inquiry-mindset. Practical steps to enhance a leader’s skill in discovery ultimately result in building the foundation for innovation.
Innovative leaders approach problem-solving differently as they synthesize novel inputs and make connections between seemingly disparate disciplines, fields, programs and ideas to generate new insights and creative solutions. Instead of coming up with immediate solutions to try to address an issue, they start by asking questions. It is through questioning and inquiry that new ways of problem-solving emerge.
Key to raising questions is the need to interrogate the assumptions one brings to the situation and what campus members assume based on past practices. Developing one’s observational skill taps into the concepts of emotional intelligence. The use of observation of situations, contexts and the way people engage requires leaders to see situations without their own personal perspective and feelings clouding how they read the room.
Observation includes conducting environmental scans, benchmarking and looking at what stories the gathered data tell. Long-held assumptions are challenged when looking at data that offer a different story. Leaders then share narratives about their colleges across their networks. Networking provides leaders who are boundary spanners, both inside the college and with external stakeholders, access to different connections that enhance their own network and spread information about their college. Strong networks help build strong teams. Innovative leaders test out new ideas and experiment with different approaches to challenges.
Practices for developing innovative leaders
Based on a study by Zack Barricklow (a co-author of this article) of 17 rural-serving community college presidents, the following practices point to actionable ways to incorporate innovation into practice that can be applied across contexts. The following list of practices provides a set of leadership strategies and approaches that cultivate innovation. These practices include monitoring the external environment, continuous scanning and experimentation of new models, and ways to develop innovation in leaders.
Practice #1: Leaders monitor the external environment.
Rural-serving community college leaders with above average student outcomes who participated in the study on leading innovation identified five dimensions that served them in monitoring the external environment. These broad categories included regular reading, engaging the data, cultivating and activating a diverse network, pursuing professional development, and observing industry. Natural overlap exists between these categories, which allows for the leveraging of complementary practices.
Practice #2: Leaders continuously scan and experiment with new ideas.
Innovative leaders engage in constant scanning across sectors for ideas. Environmental scanning often occurs in strategic planning and is cultivated as a nearly continuous habit within innovative organizational cultures. Experimentation of new ideas may include connecting students with remote technology jobs, providing a subscription-based pricing model for prison inmates, or offering virtual reality labs where students can step into immersive learning environments. Strategic agility via experimentation informs expanded approaches to strategic planning.
Practice #3: Presidents develop innovative thinking in other leaders.
Leaders seeking to develop their skill at supporting innovations or to develop these skills in other leaders focus on several areas. First, they seek to fine tune the aptitudes required for a discovery orientation to leading (e.g., asking questions, networking, engaging in professional development, experimenting). Innovative leaders understand the need to communicate new ideas well and help others make sense of ongoing change. Second, they must practice sifting through a range of solutions to determine the best application for a given circumstance. Implementation of new ideas requires building a safe environment for discovery and experimentation, which helps foster innovation and increases the willingness of others to take risks. Next, when leaders are able to read a room or take the temperature on how ideas are received, they have a better means to understand any resistance to innovation. Leaders who develop high associational thinking skills can synthesize a range of ideas that they can then translate to others. Finally, understanding organizational culture and the levers for changing culture are critical in developing innovative leaders. Leaders who are successful innovators understand which ideas will work within their own context.
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Zachary Barricklow serves as associate vice president for strategy and rural innovation at the North Carolina Community College System and the liaison for rural engagement and research at the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research at North Carolina State University.
Pamela L. Eddy is associate provost for faculty affairs and development and professor of higher education at William & Mary and is a faculty affiliate at the Belk Center for Community College Leadership & Research at North Carolina State University
Audrey. J. “A.J.” Jaeger, Ph.D., is the W. Dallas Herring professor of community college education and executive director of the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research at North Carolina State University.
