Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                       October 26, 2014

 Human alienation results from treating learning as a commodity, staff as “capital,” students as consumers, and economic rationality as the premier learning modality. An ahimsa-enhanced organization provides its people genuine opportunities for right livelihood, providing human relationships, work experiences, and learning moments that enrich the employee beyond competitive compensation and benefit packages. Right livelihood means more than achieving a fair wage; it means that one’s work does no violence to one’s being, deepening a sense of possibility, encouraging the creative spirit, and leading to private and public lives of integrity beyond institutional “brand identity.”

Ahimsa is no pathway for the frail. It requires dispassionate caring without advantage and ongoing, rigorous rectification of the mind-body-spirit of the person we are and are becoming with and on behalf of others. It requires an enormous act of the cognitive imagination that allows us to see the good, the beautiful and the true in diverse others, and as such, provides an antidote to organizational racism, sexism, sexual minority harassment, and all forms of misanthropy.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                        October 20, 2014

Within Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, ahimsa is a principle of nonviolence and fundamental respect for oneself and others. How might ahimsa be realized as a leadership principle and general platform for human interactions across an organization? As a principle of organizational leadership, it is to be understood by granting it a wide berth. Ideally, nonviolent interactions give rise to relationships that do no harm to one’s mind-body-spirit. Working within such cross-functional relationships, personnel are free from intimidation, harassment, bigotry, and sexual-minority discrimination.

When leadership communicates strategies, priorities, and duties in an organization committed to ahimsa, people understand standards of performance by which they will be evaluated. When an organization is liberated from the harmful view of employers merely in terms of a “return on investment,” employees can work together guided by policies and practices of mutual respect, tolerance, ecological consciousness, and self-development – as opposed to mindless conformity to custom, procedure, or policy.

Working with others in the living system that is an organization requires respectful engagement with others as extensions of one’s own health, safety, and inter-relational being. Ahimsa requires an aspect of emotional intelligence – minimally, the capacity to delay personal gratification and fulfillment on behalf of others and the common good. It calls for leaders to embody self-mastery and mental calmness. An organization that is guided by ahimsa develops leaders in place who make decisions close to the origin of problems, rather than looking to executives as exclusive sources of knowledge or solutions .

(To Be Continued)

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                             October 7, 2014

A college is a living system of interdependent parts wherein no one works, let alone thrives, in isolation. Institutional health is related to the quality of dialog at all levels of exchange. It is the duty of senior leadership to fashion multiple venues where people openly engage diverse intellectual and aesthetic views, forming linkages of caring and collaboration with which to leverage one another and their campus upward. Senior leaders must do more than simply announce decisions; they should present all major issues facing the campus, pointing to options and discussing important implications of choosing one path over another.

To support leadership-in-place, I strive to embody a thinking mind publicly at work, modeling strategy creation processes. In this way, our collective thinking about the why of what strategically matters get encoded in the organizational ethos, laying down tracks of future action. We need to leverage distributed capacities to learn on the job with and from one another. We must respectfully confront one another with the freedom to choose to co-create a desirable future for which we share responsibility, embracing diversity in style and approach. A leader of co-creators endeavors to provide faculty and staff ongoing occasions to engage this freedom, where creativity drives results and ideas are the core of strategic and competitive advantage.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                             October 1, 2014

I support a distributed model of leadership as a collective intelligence that invites constituents to lead from their respective positions, regardless of official status. A conventional model of heroic leadership that empowers but one person/party in ways that colleagues cannot bring different or new information forward is ineffective. I encourage faculty/staff to advise, mentor, and instruct one other, as acts of daily leadership, collegiality, and ethic of caring as a response to the question: “Who are we going to be at work?” Leadership in that form humanizes what is a high-stakes, end of year performance assessment and encourages sustainable self-improvement slowly over time.

Self-regulation is essential to multiple forms of leadership in the context of shared governance. Successful leadership results from what we do and how we do it, but also from tracking the impact our intentions and attention have on organizational relationships and outcomes. Leadership at all levels must be engaged in ongoing reflective practice, listening, and interior growth, tracking the effectiveness of how we show up in the job, aligning our personal development missions with the institutional mission. Successful shared governance presupposes a relational sense of self, and since one’s work is fundamentally with others the quality of one’s work is based on ideas and projects we create together.

By engaging in cross-functional relationship building, I learn of  strengths and aspirations of others, aligning them to strategic priorities and advocating their resourcing. To support faculty and staff development and retention and maintain a continuity of effective governance, I strive to build leadership and talent engines, matching human capacities to opportunities, present and emerging. Not to be aware of the inventory of people’s abilities and skills jeopardizes workforce health and institutional effectiveness. I support a meritocracy of ideas with the charge that everyone at the table comes as active participants, assuming responsibility for value creation and direction setting.

(To be continued)

part 4 (conclusion):

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                    September 19, 2014

Authority stems from a firm basis in knowing and acting. In the past, folk communities chose leaders for their virtues and wisdom displayed in organizing collective action. As such, the virtue of authority was an inner achievement and personal victory. The origin of power lies in culturally defined positions rooted in individual or group authority on which the community relied for resolution of questions of how to act wisely and effectively. True power means empowering others to act  with sagacious competence. Power of position without virtue of authority alienates members of a community, since people lack freedom to shape their lives.

 Academic freedom of voice and action is simultaneously constrained and empowered by “justice.” The just-ordering of personal aspirations and institutional obligations is required of a progressive leadership rooted in a firm basis of knowing and acting to mobilize collective action that serves essential truths, human development, and core institutional objectives. As such, leadership is an act of love and ethic of caring with a foundation in human relationships. Whatever gifts we can bring to the table are ultimately fulfilled in others. A primary aim of the collegium is to nurture this ethical ideal. In the collegium of my musing, I see distributed leadership in service of healthy development, mutual respect, and inter-relational being.

part 3:

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                    September 15, 2014

Leaders can generate engagement of this freedom to participate in institutional direction setting and decision-making. Faculty needs to see evidence that the university is a true collegium that supports professional development and academic freedom. Leadership must ensure compliance with state and federal regulations, even while furthering university values and primary purposes in order to transcend those constraints. It must identify a workload as abusive and therefore unjust, if it fails to balance life and work in support of health and well-being. Such leadership cares for its employees beyond value as human capital or return on investment.

Finally, a just leadership presupposes self-regulation and self-governance. This means that we monitor our thoughts and behavior and command our impulses. Leadership in a collegium requires emotional intelligence that minimally includes the capacity to modify personal agendas, however briefly, on behalf of others. As such, leadership can manifest as mentoring, offering gifts of experience to others for their job development and general vitality. In addition, the civility of “getting along” must never be reduced to censorship.

To be continued.

part 2:

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                    September 11, 2014

Driven by metaphors of battle, graduate schools train people to believe that intellectual stature results from critical assaults that demean others’ work, rather than from deep, empathic listening urequired for authentic dialogue. Yet learning and service obligates us to one another as institutional citizens within a community committed to free exchange of ideas in sincere hope of enriching each other’s understanding. In the spirit of Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, we understand that hope as an ontological imperative of learning as liberation.

 Leadership that moves beyond mere power of office requires a capacity to confront one another with our freedom to pursue knowledge for its utility, inherent truth, and transformative potential. This brand of leadership emerges as a manifestation of humility to be understood as energetic service on behalf of others, avoiding the subtle coercions of self-importance, and co-creating desired futures. Historically, the origin of power lies in culturally defined positions of authority on which folk communities relied for resolutions of problems and disagreements about how to act wisely and effectively. True power resides in the ability to empower others to act wisely and effectively.

To be continued.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                                       September 8, 2014

Leaders throughout higher education can engage self-reflection and personal inquiry to embody ongoing learning on the job and in life. I think of Gandhi’s insight, “As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as in being able to remake ourselves.” The more self-unaware we are, the greater the likelihood of projecting outward our indolence, distorting relationships, destabilizing commitments, and dehumanizing others.

Global perspectives and human difference supports community above isolation that shackles the will and dulls imagination. A healthy academy is more than a collective ego or we go; it values participation as an intelligence and presence as a way of knowing. Knowledge by presence means we consider data in decision making and that we be fully available to ourselves and each other, embracing non-defensiveness, flexibility of thought, curiosity, suspension of disbelief, and a willingness to be changed by self-inquiry. A learning environment conducive to inquiry calls for leadership to model relatedness, structure belonging, and move action forward.

(To be continued)