Preparing interdisciplinary leadership for a sustainable future

Abstract

Urgent sustainability challenges require effective leadership for inter-and trans-disciplinary (ITD) institutions. Based on the diverse experiences of 20 ITD institutional leaders and specific case studies, this article distills key lessons learned from multiple pathways to building successful programs. The lessons reflect both the successes and failures our group has experienced, to suggest how to cultivate appropriate and effective leadership, and generate the resources necessary for leading ITD programs. We present two contrasting pathways toward ITD organizations: one is to establish a new organization and the other is to merge existing organizations. We illustrate how both benefit from a real-world focus, with multiple examples of trajectories of ITD organizations. Our diverse international experiences demonstrate ways to cultivate appropriate leadership qualities and skills, especially the ability to create and foster vision beyond the status quo; collaborative leadership and partnerships; shared culture; communications to multiple audiences; appropriate monitoring and evaluation; and perseverance. We identified five kinds of resources for success: (1) intellectual resources; (2) institutional policies; (3) financial resources; (4) physical infrastructure; and (5) governing boards. We provide illustrations based on our extensive experience in supporting success and learning from failure, and provide a framework that articulates the major facets of leadership in inter-and trans-disciplinary organizations: learning, supporting, sharing, and training.

Creating leadership collectives for sustainability transformations

“…Through this program, we have connected with international researchers in our academic cohort and since synthesised the opportunities, gaps and critical needs for our field going forward. Our experiences as a cohort have foregrounded the need for an alternative model of leadership, based on critical reflection, inclusivity and care, which focuses attention beyond forging individual leaders for sustainability science organisations (as per Gordon et al 2019 ; Boone et al 2020 ). We expand below on a broader, more holistic view of fostering leadership collectives to facilitate sustainability within academia and society.…”

Advancing a cultural change agenda in higher education: issues and values related to reimagining academic leadership

“…Leaders indeed are often selected for their commitment to enact traditional and/or transactional measures of assessing scholarly contribution and impact [ 1 ] and to pursue traditional measures of prestige and relative institutional standing [ 2 ]. Leaders frequently default to the perspective that we do not know how to deal with interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, or team-based efforts and scholarly outputs and, thus, become entrenched in assessment of individual work, attempts to calculate individual contributions to collaborative effort, and utilization of status quo or standing policies [ 19 , 20 ]. Ultimately, flawed key performance indicators can be used that represent poor alignment between process, policy and expected or perceived outcomes.…”

Teaching Resilience: Enabling Factors for Effective Responses to COVID-19

“…These three elements of social capital complement the more structural factors cited by Carpenter et al (2012) and demonstrate how the resilience of teaching systems is determined by a combination of structural enablers and staff agency. Our past experiences with collaboration in teaching and a culture of learning together, which Boone et al (2020) argue are critical characteristics of transdisciplinary organisations, enabled us to make the most of the structural advantages we had.…”