Leadership at post-secondary institutions in Canada: how much value does your institution place on the promotion of leadership?

Submitted by bhughes on Fri, 2010-05-14 15:17
Tweeted by Janet Symmons B.Ed

Introduction

I have been a student of leadership since I was a boy. I attended leadership conferences in high school, worked as a counsellor in the summer at a camp that focused on leadership development, and even took my undergraduate degree in Honours Outdoor Recreation, Parks, and Tourism. I have worked in management in the private sector, and now find myself working as an Orientation Officer who also oversees the student leadership program for our institution. I'm sharing some of my background because I wanted to be transparent in my bias of being in favour of leadership, both in our provision of leadership opportunities for students and the leadership within the various institutions across Canada.

Methodology

I wondered what priority other institutions across Canada placed upon leadership? My methodology for my informal blog research was fairly straightforward: visit the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) website and then go to each institution's web page and search for the mission statement, vision statement, or position piece of that institution. It is my belief that websites have become post-secondary institutions' primary form of communication. Once I found the statements I was looking for, I would copy and paste them into a document and then upon completion of my searches, I would search the document for the word "leadership" to see if it was even mentioned in the official statements of the institution. I would then report on how many actually used the words "leadership" or "leader" within their statement under the context of affording such an opportunity for students (not necessarily to be a leader in undergraduate research). Shortly after starting my research efforts, I noticed that discovering the mission and/or vision statements was not as easy as I thought they would be. So I began to rate the ease of successfully finding the mission and/or vision statement of a post-secondary institution, as I believe that as organizations we should be sharing our statements front and centre if they are to guide the organization and its members.

Findings

I reviewed the websites of 86 institutions. Twelve institutions espoused to provide their students with opportunities for leadership or preparation for leadership positions in the future. That's 14 per cent. Out of the 86 websites I searched looking for mission/vision statements, 42 (49 per cent) were easy to find, nine (10 per cent) were somewhat easy to find, 28 (33 per cent) were hard to find and seven (8 per cent) proved impossible to find. As an example of what I would consider "hard to find," if I had to perform an engine search on a website only to find the mission/vision statements in a fiscal review document buried on a governance website, I considered that to be "hard to find." How easy is your institution's mission and/or vision statement to find?

Delimitations

Since I was looking for either a mission statement and/or a vision statement, unless the institution was using this language, I might not have been able to find it. There were also two French institutions that didn't have every page translated in English. While my French is adequate, it's not as academically proficient as my sister's (she has her Masters in French from France).

Conclusions

While this was conceived to be a fairly easy scan of mission and vision statements that promoted the auspices of leadership qualities in Canadian post-secondary institutions' students, it ended up producing a 50-page summarizing document and take over twelve hours of web browsing and recording. My conclusion is that based upon the low frequency of Canadian post-secondary institutions promoting student leadership in their mission or vision statements, that as an educational outcome leadership doesn't seem to be valued as much as I would have predicted. I'm also surprised that only half of the institutions' websites that I searched made it easy to find such statements.

Future considerations

Should Canadian post-secondary institutions make their mission, or vision, or "whatever they choose to call them" more readily available to the public? If leadership is strongly valued in our society, should our mission statements not reflect that in the language we use? Strategic planning is on a continuous cycle at most institutions. How will your institution ensure transparency in the outcome of this type of process at key intervals? Some of you may be wondering how I rated your institution in my informal review. Understandably my goal was not to ridicule or promote any institution (my own included) in this review. Should you be so inclined, feel free to e-mail me (bdhughes@lakeheadu.ca) with your query and I'll do my best to respond in a timely fashion. Otherwise, I welcome your comments or questions suitable for a public blog such as this. Thank you.

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