Leadership, Vision, and Values in a Time of Change and Crisis
This chapter analyses the principles and practices of effective leadership and management in times of complex change. It presents an illustrative case study of a UK research-intensive university's strategic response to global and national changes in the higher education sector as they intersected with a profound and unexpected crisis – the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter explores emergent possibilities for practising leadership that respects the culture(s) of the academic and professional collective of a research-intensive university, while considering some of the lived contradictions and kinds of emotional labour experienced during this time of great pressure. The authors propose a new cross-cutting articulation of ‘leadership in academia' based on seven key principles as a means of bringing faculty members and professional staff into new collaborative spaces. Their conclusion highlights the importance of establishing a culture of consent to cooperation to enable institutions to navigate disagreements over policy decisions.