Rice institute leader: Many universities fail to develop students' leadership skills

Many colleges and universities have in their mission statement to develop their students into leaders, but they've been failing, according to Tom Kolditz, the founding director of the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University.

Since 2015, Kolditz and his team at the Doerr Institute have worked to build a comprehensive leader-development program at Rice and push other universities to do the same. Thus far, the Doerr Institute has formed a consortium of 152 universities.

"Our goal was never just to do a great job at Rice," Kolditz said. "It was to develop a much more profound respect and commitment to leader development by universities and colleges, who currently claim to be producing the next generation of leaders. But in fact, they tend to do very little. And when they do something, often it's for a very small group of students."

Kolditz said just attending a four-year institute doesn't guarantee improved leadership skills from high school. He said that universities are graduating people with terrific education, but with no ability to lead. Then when they get a job post-college, businesses have to train them.

"Businesses have had to try to make up the gap with large expenditures in very basic leader development," Kolditz said. "And what we want to do is flip that responsibility back towards the universities so businesses can hire new young people who can at least run a team."

Kolditz said at Rice, the institute did a "dramatic intervention" where Rice students gained a practical coaching skill set and worked with leaders like former Houston Mayor Annise Parker and former Harris County Judge Ed Emmett. Kolditz said it isn't enough just to teach leadership skills, the university has to create a space for students to apply their abilities in relation to what the students are learning. So at Rice, engineering students are coached in context of engineering project teams and student athletes in context of the athletic team.

"It's not just learn by doing, because you can learn a lot of bad habits that way. It's learned by doing with expert coaching," Kolditz said. "The biggest reaction that we get from presidents and provosts from other universities is they slap themselves in the forehead, and they say, 'Oh, my gosh, you're right.' So it hasn't been difficult to convince people that they're doing a terrible job of it."

He said he's seen some universities — like Yale, where he was a professor — invite leaders to speak to students, but it's not effective in practice.

"Colleges and universities don't focus on [leadership] the same way they focus on teaching physics or poetry," Kolditz said. "And when they do, the tendency is for them to teach leadership classes, which don't really develop students as leaders. … It makes them understand leadership theory, and that sort of thing, but there's very little evidence that going through a class makes you a better leader. You know what makes you better? To be coached as a leader."

In March, before Kolditz departs from the institute in June, the Doerr Institute will launch the Carnegie Elective Classification for Leadership for Public Purpose in partnership with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The classification will be available to every college and university in the U.S., but they will have to provide evidence of extraordinary institutional commitment.

In addition, the institute is working on a graduate course that students across the country can take, and the course will teach them how to measure leadership development effect.

"The future of the institute now is to continue to develop the strategic initiatives so that we can make leader development a core function of universities because the circumstances we have now allow them to graduate most of their students — 2.2 million a year — with no improvement in their capacity to lead," Kolditz said.