The Glass Cliff in Higher Education—Challenges Faced by Women University Presidents:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 245 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Lori Varlotta

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed® podcast 245 – with guest Dr. Lori Varlotta

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

David: Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:20] Introduction and Guest Welcome

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

My guest today is Dr. Lori Varlotta, former president at Hiram University and Cal Lutheran University. Lori has had a distinguished career in higher ed, taking on some of the greatest challenges a president can face. But in addition to being a change agent and top-notch president, Lori is also an academic researcher, and she joins us today to talk about her latest research, a phenomenon which is called the “glass cliff”, a situation in which boards unwittingly set up a new president to fail, and what can hiring committees and candidates do to ensure that this doesn’t happen?

Lori, welcome back to the program. It’s so good to see you again.

Lori Varlotta: Thanks, Drumm. I’m really glad to be back for my second podcast with Change Leader.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, I am looking forward to this. Your message, what we’re going to talk about today is “the glass cliff”, little different from the glass ceiling, but it’s something that’s coming across far more than it used to, and it’s affecting so many higher ed institutions and prospective presidents and other areas too.

[00:01:28] Lori Varlotta’s Career Journey

Drumm McNaughton: But before we get into the glass cliff, how have you been? It’s been a few years.

Lori Varlotta: It has been. I’ve been doing well. The last time we spoke, I was in my first presidency at Hiram College in Ohio. I spent six and a half years there doing some really interesting and highly successful turnaround work. And then at the height of the pandemic, I was recruited to go to California Lutheran University, another small liberal arts institution in Southern California at the height of the pandemic and was called to make some extraordinary changes related to admissions, an enrollment decline, et cetera.

So it’s been a while. You might remember from my first podcast, prior to these two presidencies, I had 37 years of higher education experience at big schools and small schools, public and private, system embedded and stand alone. So I’d like to think I’m bringing to your podcast a wealth of information over four decades, which will serve me well. I stepped down from my presidency at Cal Lutheran just a few months ago and I’ve been invited to serve as their only distinguished professor of higher education leadership.

[00:02:44] Research Sabbatical and Glass Cliff Introduction

Lori Varlotta: So, I’m on my first sabbatical in 40 years, first research leave, and one of the topics that I have been researching is the one you mentioned, the glass cliff. And I’m hoping to share that research with my students when I start as the distinguished professor at Cal Lutheran this fall.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, that should be wonderful for them. But just an FYI, I spoke to your successor at Hiram, Dave Haney, really good guy, really enjoyed my conversation with him.

Lori Varlotta: Very good. Dave has also moved on to do some research and Hiram has another new president in place, but it seems like a lot of Midwest tuition driven institutions that they’re plugging along, and I wish Hiram all of the best.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. And I did know that Dave had stepped down. Don’t know who the new president is, but I’m sure he or she will do a wonderful job.

Lori Varlotta: That’s my hope. Hiram is a very special place.

Drumm McNaughton: It really is. So let’s get to you. Research. What’s it feel like to have a research sabbatical?

Lori Varlotta: Like I said, I started my career in 1985. I don’t know where the time has gone, Drumm, but 40 years later, this is my first research leave.

Drumm McNaughton: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Did you start in higher ed when you were 13?

Lori Varlotta: I would like to say so. So, I hope that my long distance running and skiing has kept me in some kind of shape, but I’m celebrating my 40th year, and just saying it out loud gives me pause. And this is my first research sabbatical and I have thoroughly enjoyed it.

[00:04:16] Exploring the Glass Cliff Phenomenon

Lori Varlotta: These first few months of my research has been spent interviewing women, oftentimes first time, female presidents.

When I went to Hiram, I joined Hiram in its 165th year and I was the first female at Hiram. I was the first female president at Cal Lutheran as well. So I’ve been interviewing women like myself who are the first time, again, the first women holding the post and this notion of the glass cliff has emerged through the interviews. It’s not something that I, went in thinking I would discover, but have discovered it very clearly, and spent the last, I guess, four or five months now doing some pretty intense research on the topic.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, it’s interesting that you’re going and doing the research. When I do research, it’s qual, it’s not quant. I mean, you’ve got liars, you’ve got damn liars, and then you’ve got statisticians. But I probably shouldn’t say that, but I did. Oh, well, and it’s amazing what can come out of qualitative interviews. So what attracted you to this topic? How did you get onto this?

Lori Varlotta: I got onto this topic because in both of my presidencies, I was called in by two different kinds of boards to do turnaround work. And, in this moment in time, higher education, as we know, is at an inflection point, and the inflection point is coming at the same time that higher ed is really trying to diversify its leadership. So as more women, and what we still call occupational minorities, that is folks that come from traditionally underrepresented pathways, are taking the helm, it’s at the very time where higher ed is going through some inflection points.

So, I’m interested in talking primarily with women who are presidents, and my next round of research will be with other occupational minorities, i.e. men. and women of color. But I’m starting with women, white women and women of color, to talk about what it’s like to do turnaround work. And in four out of the five cases, the women have Five out of the five cases, the women have told me that they were hired at a time of institutional failure. That they knew that on some level, they were coming into the institution at a time of great vulnerability and precariousness. Some of them knew the extent pretty well and some of them didn’t know the extent. And I’m doing research on what happens when you come in at a time of great position vulnerability. What increases and decreases the women CEO’s chance of success and the institution’s chance for success. And you won’t be at all surprised to hear it’s largely indicated by the amount of board support and campus constituency support that the new leader has to make the kinds of changes that in this case she was called to make.

[00:07:07] Position Vulnerability: Challenges Faced by Female Leaders

Drumm McNaughton: Well, tell me what you mean by position vulnerability.

Lori Varlotta: Yes. So if I may, let me just differentiate quickly the two related concepts at play here, the glass ceiling, as you and your listeners know, has long referred to the invisible barriers that impede, in this case, a woman’s opportunities to fully ascend the career ladder, and land her at the CEO or C suite executive position. So, it’s the barriers that impede progress. Conversely, the glass cliff is a phenomenon that women are hired in the CEO position and or the C suite executive position, at the very time of institutional vulnerability. In the for profit or corporate world, that means when stock prices are plummeting, when the board on some levels thinks that the institution or the corporation is in such dire need that it might need to go through an acquisition, an M& A. When there is stakeholder, in this case, stockholder, dissatisfaction.

In higher ed, the state of vulnerability typically has to do with enrollment declines, with decreasing net tuition revenue, with inability to bring in grants, and or with cultural crises, either lawsuits or, disgruntled constituents, et cetera.

Drumm McNaughton: Well that makes a lot of sense and I would bet that the glass cliff and glass ceiling really applies to the occupational minorities as well it’s not just women.

Lori Varlotta: It is indeed. And I want to be very clear that both warrant study, but since this is my first sabbatical, I’m focusing mine on women first. But indeed, the glass cliff is a phenomenon that is now being applied in the literature to get what scholars are calling occupational minorities. So women of all races and men, of what has traditionally been underrepresented, racial and ethnic, and perhaps even national origin underrepresentation. So the concept will apply to both women and occupational minorities. You might hear me use the pronoun she throughout because my has started with women.

Drumm McNaughton: Well let’s dig down into this because many times, and I’m going to bet at this point listeners are going okay why is this important to me, but. with higher ed being in the challenging times that it is, you talked about it as an inflection point. I will frequently refer to it, we’re in a mature to declining market where capacity is far greater than the number of students that we have. And it’s going to get worse because of the demographic cliff etc. Universities hire if they’re in a turnaround situation, which is something you and i are both very familiar with. You know we’ve done a number of turnarounds, as you have as well. You typically say you want something different than what you’ve had before. You want the person, they look different, you know the value system is important but is that not a potential cliff.

Lori Varlotta: It’s a disruption, right?

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, exactly. And so talk about that a little bit if you would.

Lori Varlotta: Yeah. At this moment in time, more than ever, boards are interested in bringing in leaders to catalyze and organize and implement change.

[00:10:51] Board Support and Institutional Change

Lori Varlotta: But for those of us that are called to the post, we know that, that change readiness on the campus is often nowhere near the level of perceived readiness of the board.

So what happens, more often than not, in this inflection point in the declining demographics, the board is often, at least intellectually ready for change, they go out to recruit a change leader. If you read any of the profiles that are being, posted by the search firms and the campuses themselves, you’ll see things like, “we’re looking for direct and transformational leaders, bold, daring”, but yet the campus constituents aren’t ready to have that change impact themselves.

Often then when you couple the need for change with what the board thinks is necessary, they’re looking to hire someone that’s different than what they’ve had in the past or looking for a change leader that might look and act, maybe talk, different than the leaders that they’ve had for the last few decades. Hence, according to the ACE latest presidential survey, women now make up about, 33 percent of women presidencies. That’s better than it’s been in the past, but often it’s the first time a woman is being brought into the post. When you couple a first time leader, who’s different than anybody in the past, and charge that new leader with making these changes, if the changes don’t go well the campus might erroneously associate the change with, “oh, the woman did that”, or, “oh, the leader of color did that”, as opposed to, “the leader did that”. In other words, if we’re the first time, as the presidency diversifies, and we’re being asked to make changes there’s a double cliff, if you will. If the changes don’t go well, the generalizations might be, and often are, according to the literature based on our gender or racial and ethnic identity versus the difficulty of the change at hand.

Drumm McNaughton: I want to key in on something that you just said that really struck a chord with me. When you bring in a woman leader or a new leader, there is a growth period that person needs to go through. I mean, think back to your first time as a president at Hiram. Generally, when a new president comes in, they’re really good at the external stuff or they’re really good at the internal stuff and they don’t have both skill sets. A president needs to have those skill sets.

So to me it’s incumbent on the board to make sure that new president has the support that they need and the coaching that they need so that they can get up to speed on either side. Does that make sense?

Lori Varlotta: It makes sense, but it doesn’t always happen.

Drumm McNaughton: Really?

Lori Varlotta: Yes. So a couple of things that I want to say about the glass cliff phenomenon. Number one, again, the glass cliff phenomenon happens when a woman or an occupational minority is hired at a time of position vulnerability. The glass cliff phenomenon is exacerbated by two causes according to the literature. And this really, I think, gets to your point. The first cause or factor in the glass cliff is that the hiring body, oftentimes the board, might have some biases that they’re not even aware of.

Drumm McNaughton: Unconscious bias.

Lori Varlotta: Implicit bias so that they may indeed think,” okay, we’re in a crisis and what we really need is somebody different than the past”. Oftentimes crisis management, according to the coiners of the term glass cliff, Ryan and Haslam, and I have this in the outline. I hope we’ll link to their, fundamental argument, one of their first arguments. They claim that there’s evidence in hiring practices that what boards think a leader needs when things are going smoothly is very different than what boards need when things are going poorly.

So boards are more likely to hire somebody that is quote understanding, and they’re more likely to hire somebody that is more understanding. Empathetic, intuitive, and relationship oriented when things are going poorly. Our society suggests that those stereotypes, for better and worse, are associated with women. So it’s not unusual that boards may look to women in times of crises, not necessarily for good or ill, because there’s some type of implicit bias that women are better at dealing with these kinds of things, frankly, than male leaders. That’s number one. Implicit biases, according to the literature, is one reason that women are appointed in times of crises.

Some of the other scholars are a little less optimistic. And they claim that the second reason that women are appointed in times of crises due to the system being rigged. R. I. G. G. E. D. Rigged. Where there is again an unconscious sexism where people think that women are more expendable than male leaders and that we can bring a woman in, to do the hard work and then replace her with a man. I’d like to think that is not the case because the research is still burgeoning, but it is indeed one of the findings that the system is rigged because there’s a perception that female CEOs are more expendable than men CEOs. I have not made that conclusion myself, but it is in the literature.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. I’d have to say that one. Of course I tend to be a little Pollyannish at times and I’d have to, push back on that one until I could see more evidence, we’ll go there for now.

Lori Varlotta: Well, again, that’s what they’re saying. And the interesting thing about burgeoning research is it’s going to hopefully catalyze more research. So I hope that one’s false. I hope that hypothesis is proven false.

Drumm McNaughton: Me too but there’s other things in play here.

[00:16:50] Case Studies and Real-World Examples

Drumm McNaughton: And when i take a look at high tech i take a look at Marissa Mayer from Yahoo brought in. Personally i thought she had some great ideas but she wasn’t given the amount of time to turn things around and what i think many boards forget is it can frequently take years to get into a situation like this. And in higher ed, pretty much any place, but especially in higher ed, turnarounds don’t happen overnight. It is a long, it’s a drawn out process, shared governance comes into play. Your president isn’t a dictator, can’t really say, “we’re going this way troops”. They can try and do that, but it doesn’t always work.

Lori Varlotta: Thanks so much for bringing up the tech world because you won’t be surprised to hear that a lot of the examples regarding the glass cliff are coming out of the tech industry. And Marissa Mayer has been one of the earliest female CEOs for whom the glass cliff was applied. So just quickly, she was appointed in 2012, but at the very time that Yahoo was losing significant market share to Google.

So they bring her in to try to turn, again it had been a fairly long decline or a fairly long decline of market share. Google was. Eating their lunch, so to speak, and they wanted this female CEO to turn things around. Again, I did a little research and it’s in one of my other papers on Marissa Meyer and she’s described in the Daily Beast, but the scholars that were studying Marissa Meyer at the time, and I’m going to quote here, I think I have it in my mind. They described her as, quote, “headed towards a savage plunge off the glass cliff”. This is the time of her appointment. And the interviewer in the Daily Beast said, recent history shows that women are recruited to lead companies more often than not in times of crises. And Nancy Haas in that same article says,, “The deck is stacked against them”.

I want to make one other really important comment about Marissa Meyers that has to do with this phenomenon. And again, I hope your listeners will look into this. Meyer was one of the early glass cliff appointees that went on record talking about gender charged reporting. This is very time sensitive.

Drumm McNaughton: You mean like congressional hearings?

Lori Varlotta: We’re going to get to that. Like, I mean, like Hillary Clinton’s pantsuit and Kamala Harris’s nonverbals.

Marissa Meyer said,” it’s hard enough to be a female CEO, but when you’re being reported on in genderized ways”, and she’s on quote saying, “we see things that plague women leaders like articles on appearance. Hillary Clinton was often described by the pantsuit she was wearing”.

So again, I think it’s really important that listeners who are interested in looking at gender charged reporting can take a look at one of the websites that I’ve posted. There’s some really interesting documents up there about a case study that they may want to consider if they’re a woman in higher education and looking at gendered charged reporting. And Marissa Meyer was one of the first to draw that to attention from the tech world.

Drumm McNaughton: So female, women executives get graded on, not only their performance but how they dress, their makeup their hair etc. That doesn’t seem particularly nice or fair.

Lori Varlotta: It’s neither nice nor fair. The other information I’ve gotten from the five interviews I’ve done and the vast majority of the readings I’ve done, Is that women who are on the glass cliff are much more likely to get vicious emails, death threats, hate mail, unbelievably public and, numerous postings to social media site. So there does seem to be a different kind of attack when the leader is a woman, according to my interviews and the literature I’m reading, then when the leader is a man.

Drumm McNaughton: And that does not surprise me at all. It’s not right, but, sometimes these situations bring out the absolute worst in people.

Lori Varlotta: That has been the experience that I’m hearing in these interviews that I’ve been conducting during my research.

Drumm McNaughton: And the other thing is, I would bet that boards really don’t understand what’s going on inside the institution. They see it from a broader perspective that the boards, let’s face it, the boards come together maybe four times a year and they don’t get deep dives down into what’s actually going on. So that needs to change, especially from a support perspective for these female presidents.

Lori Varlotta: Exactly right, Drumm. Again, I’ve been in the field for 40 years. I’ve been an executive for the last 20. And my own life has confirmed that boards are almost always constituted by very well meaning, well intentioned, volunteers. And again, volunteers is key. They’re dedicating their time and their treasure, their money, to an institution. But it’s not often the case that boards are populated by other executives who’ve managed complex organizations, who understand the intricacies of change. So while they are well intended, they’re often alums, and again, they’re dedicating time and resources, so we need to appreciate that. Many of them do lack the training in terms of what a change management process is going to entail.

Let’s face it, men and women join boards because they find them to be satisfying, they’re collegial opportunities, they’re time to contribute back. They don’t necessarily want to go to a board meeting and have to make excruciatingly difficult decisions about budget gaps, about hiring freezes, about demographic cliffs. So they charge the CEO, and they should charge the CEO, with making those decisions, and often they’re removed from the day to day volatility and anger and upset that occurs when the CEO is charged to do that. So there has to be on the one level of realization that change is difficult and it’s not necessarily going to be harmonious and the board may need training and development to figure out how to get through it. There’s going to be bumps in the roads at most colleges when they’re going through a change. So boards really need to bring in third party advisors, like you and me or others that do this kind of work to get them prepared for the kinds of very possible bumps that they’re going to hit.

Drumm McNaughton: And those bumps are so critical, especially when I think about public institutions. The majority of the public institutions, board members, are appointed by the governor or the legislature. They have almost zero background in higher education. I mean right now, Western New Mexico University, the governor called for all five of the regents to step down because they awarded a failing president three, four times the severance package that they had for an annual salary, it was ridiculous. But, they don’t have the understanding that the CEO really is the CEO or a mayor of a small city and all that entails.

Lori Varlotta: Right. And because you and I both work in higher ed, there is that other added dynamic of shared governance. So a board can charge a president with making change and any president worth his or her salt is going to evoke, elicit the shared governance system at play at the campus, and that adds another level of complexity and decision making and input gathering that can significantly slow the process.

I’m hearing from a lot of folks with whom I’m doing these interviews that they’re saying, my board wants to give me, two or three months to do this work. And when work in a company, you can maybe institute change in two or three months, but it’s very difficult to institute change in a single semester, let alone two or three months.

And that’s one of the experiences I had at Cal Lutheran. I arrived at the height of the pandemic. It was the first time in, 10 years that we had an enrollment decline. The day I got to campus was September 1st of 2020. The class had already come in, it was 20 percent lower than the class before, and we had a 23 million deficit on a 120 million budget that the board wanted me to fix by their next meeting. And it was in six weeks. So this is where, when you work at a corporation, you may be able to do a shortfall in revenue in a month and a half. But to ask a brand new president, “do everything you can to mitigate a 23 million shortfall by our meeting in October”. And it’s not because boards are, again, it’s not because they’re bad people or that they are mean spirited. Many board members come from a whole different world than academe and the expectations are different and having that kind of board development, board awareness is really important because they mean well and they want the best for the institution. But sometimes they just don’t have the awareness or the background to easily get there.

Drumm McNaughton: And I’ll contrast that to when you came on board at Hiram and you did change management there. We talked about this on the podcast. You had 18 months to work with the faculty to figure out what programs were going to be let go. And they came to the decision working like that. It’s not two or three months. It was 18 months, but the process was so clean and it worked well for everybody.

Lori Varlotta: Yeah, thanks for bringing it up because I’ve been asked to lead the same kind of changes on two campuses and you’re right at Hiram I had the 18 months I knew I needed. And more than that, I was able to build relationships at Hiram prior to the change. Building relationships is key.

I had 40 board members at Hiram and 40 of them voted in every direction that I recommended. And my recommendations were aligned with the faculty, one of the faculty committees of the faculty Senate. So to have uniform agreement with the president and the faculty committee and 40 board members was unbelievable.

At Hiram, the board not only supported the changes via their vote, but they increased their annual board giving by three times. The average gift for board of trustee member at Hiram was $75,000 a year. A year. So that’s when you have a school like that, where the board is involved, the board work with me behind the scenes in a small committee to understand the changes we were going to make to the curriculum. They supported that. We had the time, the luxury of time and relationship building that when you are appointed to a campus at the height of the pandemic and asked to make decisions via zoom, literally in the middle of a pandemic, a new president just doesn’t have at her fingertips the kinds of relationship for board support, no one would because the time is so pressing and, the pandemic shortened the runway for all of us. So again, I don’t necessarily blame Cal Lutheran or the board. The timing was so precarious and the situation was just so unusual that it would have been virtually impossible for any president to come in anew and mitigate a 23 million deficit. While the institution was being sued by its own softball team and was facing another lawsuit with a former Congressman, and had a 23 million deficit. Oh, and was on notice by WASC,

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, just minor stuff,

Lori Varlotta: make it very difficult to implement change in a harmonious way.

[00:29:08] Strategies for Preventing the Glass Cliff

Drumm McNaughton: Stepping back just a bit, what do we do to make sure that we prevent a glass ceiling situation or mitigate it. When you look at the three stages of a presidency, search, the onboarding, and then the ongoing, what needs to happen in the search process to help prevent this type of thing.

Lori Varlotta: The candidates in the search process need to do a very thorough assessment of university finances and culture. And this is not always easy to do, because I’m sure you’ve had many people on your podcast that say they didn’t really know how bad the finances were until they got there. So my advice is that candidates talk to the chair of the finance committee of the board. Are able to talk, in the final stages of the interview, to the CFO. The CFO is not on the committee. And are able to talk to the external auditing firm to try to do the kind of due diligence that allows the candidate to get an assessment of finances.

One of our mutual colleagues, Skip Myers, who’s been doing this kind of consulting work for a long time, actually urges candidates to do a third party stress test. To say to the board, “Hey, if you really want me to come in, just let me work with somebody to look, give me a couple of financial documents to look at. And if I don’t feel like I can do it myself, can you support a consultant to walk me through some of these things”. Now that might go to the Nth degree, but that’s what it’s coming to, according to some folks in the field.

So assessment of finances, assessment of culture is really key. Candidates, particularly if you’re going to be the first or second woman president or the first or second occupational minority, look to see how the campus has treated those who came before you. Again, if you’re the second woman president or the first woman president, how has the campus treated other female executives, other executives, other leaders of color. Look at the press releases. If the institution was in a crisis, did the board support the leader? Was the board silent? Did the board, stand behind leaders that are making hard decisions? So do your due diligence on culture.

And then the third point in the search process is if you’re a woman negotiate. I was shocked to see in the literature that women are four times less likely to even enter into contract salary negotiations than men. So it’s really important to negotiate.

And again, this link will be in the, in the notes, but that was a stunning statistic. And when you’re negotiating, remind the board that it’s not just the size of the campus or the size of the budget that should shape the salary, but the kinds of changes that you need to make. In other words, if you’re going to a campus that has a $200 million budget, it may not be two times, harder than a campus that has a hundred million dollar budget, particularly if the campus of 200 million is asking you to cut programs and redo retirement and change benefits and add or delete majors. So the amount of change should be a factor in salary negotiations.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, absolutely. And, as you’re talking about these things, I’m thinking to myself, this isn’t just for women. This isn’t occupational minorities. This should be de rigueur for every president coming in or every search committee. They should be looking at all these things.

Lori Varlotta: I agree a hundred percent. It was just that statistic that women are four times less likely to negotiate salary. It just kind of hit me over the head. Like, “wow!” That was a stutter for me.

Drumm McNaughton: I, yeah, me too.

Lori Varlotta: But you asked about the onboarding stage.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. We talked a little bit about coaching, but there’s other things that should be happening with the onboarding to make that new president feel like they belong, one and two, to have the campus open their arms to say, Hey, we’ve got a new president. This is what we need to do to support him or her.

Lori Varlotta: Great, thank you. Yeah, the onboarding process is really the critical time where the board should introduce the new president to the campus and signal what the president was called to do. In other words, if this board brought the president in to make transformation change, that message should come from the board, not the brand new president who in the announcement says, “Hey, by the way, folks, I was called in to do one, two, three, and four.” The board’s announcement should say something like, “aren’t we so pleased to have President, Smith come in? And while we’re so excited about the history that President Smith is inheriting and all the good work that has come before her, we’ve asked President Smith to do the kinds of changes that are related to academic prioritization or program examination”. So you don’t want to get into the details, but you want to at least signal the kinds of changes that this new president has been called to do. That message should come from the board, Drumm, not from the mouth of the president.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. It’s called setting the expectations of what we are going to hold this new president accountable for, and the campus needs to understand. I mean, this is one of the advantages of bringing on an interim from an outside perspective, is because They can go in with a sledgehammer and make changes that need to happen. And then once the changes are going into place, et cetera, you can bring in a permanent who can be less confrontational. I mean, that’s pretty blunt, but that’s what a lot of them do.

Lori Varlotta: There’s such an accuracy in to whatever extent really hard decisions can be made before you bring in a permanent president, the better. To bring in a brand new president at the height of the pandemic. And many, if you look at the statistics, by the way, and I’m going to do some quantitative research on this, the statistics of presidents that started their presidential role in 2020 and their tenure, is unbelievably shorter than those that started in 2018 and 2022. Well, I mean, in the sense of we’re only in 2025, but the people that were hired in 2022 are still in their positions. Whereas those of us that came in 2020 and had these pressing decisions to make, and just weren’t set up for change. It was a really hard time to make the kinds of changes and have longevity in the position.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. One of my clients was a situation like that. Longterm president stepped down, brought a new fellow in, right as the pandemic was hitting, he lasted a year and he was considered to be a unicorn, which we’ve never seen it “a perfect fit”, “perfect culture”. Guess what? It wasn’t. That’s also one of the challenges of replacing a longtime president is the institution is so used to the culture that president brought in, you bring in somebody new that’s almost a recipe for failure in and of itself.

Lori Varlotta: It is. And I’m hoping that more and more colleges and boards will see the notion of interim president as a new norm in this inflection point. In other words, the interim president position should not only be used in times of crises. In the situation that you just described, Drumm, it might be the best and the new normal to say to the campus, “we’ve had somebody for 20 years”, or 10 years or 15 years. “We’re going to purposely hire an interim to help do a third party assessment. Tell us what we need, make some hard decisions so that when we bring in our permanent person, that person will have had more of the decks cleared and, or more of the hard decisions made, but we can’t expect to bring in another seven or 10 years serving president. If the new president’s going to be asked to make these five major changes”. So I guess what I’m saying is normalizing the interim president role, I believe is going to be part of the new normal in the mid 21st century higher education landscape.

Drumm McNaughton: I agree and more times than not, that president, that interim president will become the permanent president, but having the interim title can give them license to do what they need to do, and if the board likes them, the campus likes them, they can keep them on.

Lori Varlotta: That can sometimes happen. Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: So that’s the onboarding, setting goals, coaching, making sure that the new president is set up for success. But then there’s the ongoing piece with that as well, and you’ve got the dialogue that goes back and forth between the board, the president, the campus. The yearly retreat, so that we’re all on the same page. Talk to me a little bit about that, please.

Lori Varlotta: Yeah, I think the ongoing part, it’s critically important that presidential and board evaluations are integrated. In other words, it makes virtually no sense to me for a board to evaluate the president unless it’s evaluating itself in regards to the president. So, the president’s goals are largely a function of the support that the president gets from the board. So in other words, it’s really hard to have a highly successful president if the board’s not in sync.

Drumm McNaughton: I’m sorry. I’m laughing at this point to myself because, I’m going, “oh my gosh, truer words had never been spoken”. How many boards have we gone in and done assessments on? And you write up the presidential assessment, et cetera. And then you say to the board okay. Where’s your own personal assessments? Do you individually assess your own board members? Do you assess your board collectively?” No. Why should we do that? It’s like, come on folks.

Lori Varlotta: And I would argue that the board should do its assessment first, or at least in concert with the president’s assessment. If the board is out of sync or if the board can’t unilaterally or uniformly articulate what the goals are. How can they expect the president to follow through on them? If the board doesn’t know what the president has been charged to do, if it’s just the comp committee or two or three board members, it makes it very disparate. It makes it very disjointed. To have CEO leadership that’s disconnected from board leadership and board vision. So again, an integrated evaluation is key. I think ongoing board training is key from a third party. So to make sure that the board is up to date on the new norms, particularly post pandemic norms, I think it’s really important.

I think that the board must be critically aware of the kind of PR and crisis communication support the president has. In these times of institutional failure or institutional vulnerability, let’s face it, the press most likely likes to cover salacious issues or again, I hope that, that the readers really look at this notion of gender charged reporting, it’s so critical. And unless the president has access to top notch counsel with PR and crisis communication, he or she is going to be at a disadvantage, and that might mean hiring a consultant, even though it’s costly, boards need to support the president and these kinds of very necessary resources.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. Those are so critical. And I will say probably the most important of those is when you hire your president, you need to vocally backstop that president and support them from the day one until the day they leave.

Lori Varlotta: You’re absolutely right, you must vocally support them, but you must, and I say you must support them in rhetoric and in behavior and in resources.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. Wow. I mean, I’m kind of breathless because this is one of those things. It’s not often in a podcast where I, my jaw drops, but hearing some of the stories that you’ve mentioned. Frankly, it’s very sad that we’ve done these things.

So with that, I’m going to say any parting remarks for the listeners.

Lori Varlotta: Yes.

[00:41:07] Key Takeaways for Prospective University Presidents and Boards

Lori Varlotta: Leaders, but particularly women and occupational minorities, have a hard job ahead when they’re put in charge of a campus at this moment in time. If you are in one of those categories, I really encourage you to think carefully about the match between your own personality and the kind of change that the campus needs.

Campuses often say that they want direct and transparent and bold and daring leaders, but really do the homework to make sure that’s what the campus wants. If you are a person like me or others, who have been successful in their career, if you go in and you really want to make change and they’re saying they want this, just do the due diligence and do as much conversation with the board prior to the hire to make sure that they’re going to back you, again, financially, in terms of resources, in terms of their behaviors and their words.

And make sure that you get these resources lined up before you get there. In other words, if change is going to be at hand in the coming years, make sure that the board is ready to have good PR people on staff and good crisis communication people on staff. And perhaps a small Committee of the board that’s willing to work with the president and the president’s cabinet to be the spokesperson to other colleagues so it’s not just the president being the relayer of the information, but the small committee.

And again, pay really close attention to this notion of gender charged reporting. You’d like to think, as Marissa Meyer said, and she said this in 2016, that gender shouldn’t matter in the ways that stories are told, but I can assure you that the way we look and dress and whether we’re smiling or if our eyebrows go up seem to matter a little more than the clothes and the physical and facial expressions of men that are sitting in similar seats. So this notion of gender charged reporting is going to become, I think, another very interesting concept that’s tied into the glass cliff and phenomena like it.

Drumm McNaughton: Very much so. Well, thank you so much, Lori. Those were great. And those really were our three takeaways. So you beat me to the punch on it, and thank you.

Next for you, more research, consulting, what are you going to

Lori Varlotta: I have another five months left of my research leave. I have two articles on the glass cliff that are going to come out. I just got a really exciting gig and I can’t announce it quite yet. We’re in the midst of signing the contract with the one female president that said she was hired into a glass cliff situation because of the timing, but her board and her campus have supported her exponentially, and she wants me to help make the kinds of changes that she’s been called to make. And I’d love, maybe in a year or so, Drumm, to come back with that president and tell the great stories of the changes that we’re about to conceptualize together and this fantastic president, a pretty young woman at that, is going to, I know, just lead the charge. And she’s in the middle of a fantastic turnaround, is going to do some really exciting work. So for the next four or five months, I’m doing that.

I’ve also been appointed as the presidential fellow of Chapman University in Orange, California, working with President Daniel Sturppa, his last year as president doing really exciting work. Thanks to his fellowship appointment on gender and leadership. I have five months of that fellowship left, and I’ve been doing some leadership advisory work with Kiefer. So I’ve been really busy. My husband said, I think you’re as busy now as you were when you were down in Thousand Oaks. So, it’s been a really busy research year and it’s just opened my eyes to a lot of possibilities. I look forward to sharing them with my graduate students in the fall and seeing what’s next on my plate.

Drumm McNaughton: So back into the classroom. Well, you’ll thoroughly enjoy it. My favorite parts of being an academe were teaching and seeing the transformation. So, Lori, thank you again for coming on the show. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and we will stay in touch.

Lori Varlotta: Thanks a lot. You have a good day.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special guest, Dr. Lori Varlotta, former president at Hiram University and Cal Lutheran University. Lori, thanks for a great conversation. I look forward to the next time our paths get to cross.

Thanks much again for listening. Look forward to seeing you next time.