Demonstrating the impact of a distributed leadership approach in higher education

ABSTRACT

Higher education is under pressure to advance from a singular focus on assessment of outputs (measurements) to encompass the impact (influence) of initiatives across all aspects of academic endeavour (research, learning and teaching, and leadership). This paper focuses on the implications of this shift for leadership in higher education. Demonstrating the impact of leadership in higher education requires taking a step beyond measuring the skills, behaviours, and achievements of individual leaders to demonstrating how universities can evaluate the impact of actions taken to build leadership capacity across the institution. The authors extend the outcome of empirical research into how a distributed leadership approach can be enabled and evaluated in Australian higher education – to analyse the effectiveness of these processes for both measuring output and assessing the impact and influence of practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Distributed leadership
• higher education
• impact
• measurement
• output

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for funding from the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching, through several grants. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Government. We further acknowledge the active contribution of many colleagues, particularly those from our respective project partner teams.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful for funding from the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching, through several grants.