Beyond leadership mantras

Walk into any leadership seminar on a university campus today, and you will probably hear echoes of Harvard Business Review case studies or corporate turnaround stories. You’ll find academic leaders quoting Simon Sinek’s golden circle, Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence matrix, or John Kotter’s eight-step change model. There’s talk of “disruption,” “scaling impact,” and “agile innovation.”

Close your eyes, and you might mistake the gathering for a management conclave rather than a convocation of educators. The problem is not the presence of leadership theory - many of them are insightful - but the overdependence on them.

The real danger lies in adopting these corporate mantras wholesale and applying them to educational institutions that are far more complex, socially embedded, and ethically driven than any business operation.

Leadership theories are seductive. They package complexity into elegant diagrams, offer step-by-step guides, and promise control in the face of chaos.

Take Goleman’s emotional intelligence framework, for instance, which is widely cited and immensely influential. It tells us that self-awareness, empathy, and social skills make effective leaders.

But what happens when this is deployed within an academic institution where systemic inequities, underfunding, and politicised governance structures obstruct even the most emotionally attuned leader? Or consider Kotter’s much-celebrated change model: urgency, coalition, vision, and quick wins. Great in theory. But how many vice-chancellors, especially in public universities in India, have the autonomy, the political backing, or the fiscal freedom to implement such a model meaningfully?

The truth is, many of these leadership theories buckle at the point of practice. They were born in the world of business, where success is measured in market share and shareholder value, and leadership can often be a top-down affair.

However, higher education doesn’t operate in the same universe. It is pluralistic, slow, democratic by design, and fundamentally rooted in knowledge, not commerce. Universities are not factories or startups. They are spaces of contestation and care, tradition and transformation. They must accommodate diverse epistemologies, serve the public good, and grapple with questions that often lack clear answers.

And yet, the managerial turn in universities has been relentless. Strategic plans often mimic corporate blueprints. Institutional dashboards track productivity like assembly lines. Vice-chancellors are branded as institutional CEOs, and students are referred to as customers. All this in pursuit of rankings, visibility, and performance metrics that often sideline the deeper purposes of education.

This corporatisation of academia, especially in countries like India, where global recognition is seen as a quality benchmark, has made leadership theories from business schools the de facto operational toolkit of university governance.

But why this easy acceptance of corporate wisdom? Perhaps because humanities or social sciences theories don’t lend themselves to PowerPoint slides and performance reviews. They are messier, more philosophical, and require interpretive patience. Yet, they offer far richer resources for understanding the complex realities of educational institutions.

Foucault helps us understand how power shapes bureaucracies; Bourdieu demonstrates how institutions subtly reinforce privilege. Sen and Nussbaum reimagine education as a form of human development, not just economic output. Sociology highlights deep-rooted inequalities, while anthropology reminds us of the local cultures and hidden norms that define institutions. Even literature, often overlooked, fosters the empathy and imagination vital to ethical leadership.

These are not abstract ideas—they’re essential tools for understanding, confronting, and guiding institutions with clarity and conscience. The problem with many leadership theories is not that they are wrong but that they are applied uncritically, without attention to academia’s specific moral, political, and cultural contexts. Education leadership is not just about driving change; it’s about sustaining values. It’s not just about agility but about accountability. It’s not just about vision but about voice, and whose voices are heard.

To be fair, some institutions have benefited from strategic, corporate-style reforms. For instance, certain private universities in India have used structured planning and professional management to improve infrastructure, student support, and global visibility.

However, in emulating the corporate model too closely, others have created hyper-competitive, market-driven campuses where faculty precarity, administrative opacity, and student anxiety are growing concerns. The lessons are mixed. The key is not to reject all leadership theory, but to use it judiciously and supplement it with the intellectual depth that the humanities and social sciences can provide.

What higher education needs today is not just a new management model, but a different moral imagination. One that understands leadership not as a performance but as a practice of care. One that draws as much from sociology as from strategy, as much from ethics as from efficiency.

What kind of leaders do we need? Not just those who can quote the latest management trend, but those who can read context, reckon with history, and lead with humility and hope. Perhaps it’s time to stop chasing the next corporate playbook and start listening again to the quiet, profound wisdom of the humanities.

(The author is a former head of a private university in Bengaluru)