You Get What You Hire: A Chorus of Soloists

Returning to the higher education sector last weekend to facilitate a strategic planning session for an academic department, I was reminded at how devilishly hard it can be to get university faculty to play in the sandbox with each other. Or, more precisely, to commit themselves to a set of shared goals, one or more of which may detract from their own individual agendas.

For the most part, academic faculty are hired based on their potential to be individual contributors, not team players. They are like soloists selected for their virtuosity at certain notes or pieces of music, rather than their ability to harmonize with other singers in the chorus. To a large degree this hiring strategy works, especially when it comes to conventional scholarship, but it begins to break down when the soloists are asked to take a turn as just another voice in the chorus. Planning for the future of a department (or any collective endeavor) is bit more like being part of a chorus. The whole thing works or it doesn't. Individual members have to harmonize for the music to sound as it should. To be sure, there have been a few successful chorus of soloist experiments in music, but as a general rule soloists struggle to sublimate their voices and wills when asked to sing with others.

Department chairs, deans and other administrators shouldn't be surprised when the soloist individual contributors they hire make poor strategists for the whole, or fail to support group decisions that seem contrary to their own more narrow interests. A question remains, though, about whether the tendency for higher education administrators to hire for individual performance alone serves the industry well. Maybe soloists aren't as essential to scholarship as to music; that is, prima donnas may be a necessary evil in one field but not the other.