It began with an email. An invitation, really, sent to Patricia Prelock, the University of Vermont’s provost and senior vice president, about a potential exchange between UVM leaders and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Was it an opportunity worth exploring? Prelock asked Jane Okech, vice provost for faculty affairs, for her thoughts.

“I wasn’t sure where this would go,” Okech explained. “But after thinking about it a little bit I told Patty ‘I think I want to explore this further. We have a rich [study abroad] partnership with them, with students going to the university every year, so they are not strangers to us, but the collaboration has been strictly at the student level.”

This was different—an opportunity for university leaders to discuss how to lead their divisions, align with the institution’s strategic goals, and support the people they manage amidst events one can more easily predict, such as grant and hiring cycles, and those one cannot, such as the pandemic that flipped much of higher education online within days.

Okech did some investigating, and in late May of this year a delegation of 12 university professional and faculty leaders from Aberdeen touched down in Burlington for a three-day workshop. The conference brought both faculty and staff administrators together.

University of Aberdeen leaders toured campus on the first day of the exchange program to learn about UVM history and areas of distinctiveness.

While designed to help individuals think critically about leadership and their own practices, a secondary aim was to explore the potential of future collaborations involving research, teaching, and developing international partnerships to increase global engagement—one of the university’s strategic priorities under President Suresh Garimella. He welcomed attendees to the conference and stressed the importance of cross-border collaborations–international and otherwise–in higher education.

Okech saw value in the leadership exchange because of its alignment with the university’s strategic goals around internationalization and global engagement.

“We cannot talk to our students about global engagement or intercultural engagement when we don’t necessarily give our faculty a chance to engage in those types of experiences. And global engagement, a large part of it requires you to go abroad. Another large part requires you to bring people home.”

The hope is that, by experiencing discussions where intercultural perspectives are centered, participants will have a clearer feeling for their value. And that should have a positive effect in UVM classrooms, where both the students and faculty are increasingly diverse. In 2023 UVM’s graduating class came from 30 countries and 44 different states. And this fall, an estimated 16 percent of first-year undergraduates will be students of color—the highest percentage ever.

“We have our most diverse incoming class, our numbers of international students are up,” Okech said. “I can bet that a faculty member who participates in this process goes back to the classroom with a worldview expanded just a little bit—expanded in terms of creating space for people to talk in a place that is comfortable for them and that leads to meaningful engagement.”

Jane Okech, vice provost for faculty affairs, and her team organized the leaderhip exchange as part of UVM's priority to increase global engagement.

Leadership development is something Okech has pondered for years. For as long as she can remember, she has been tapped for leadership positions—from rising to roles (sometimes reluctantly) in primary school to being hired as an assistant professor overseeing UVM’s clinical mental health track right out of graduate school. She has taken on progressively senior positions since.

“But no one ever sent me to a program for leadership,” Okech said. “There was just the assumption that I had what it took to lead.”

When she became chair of the Department of Leadership and Developmental Sciences, she identified a workshop to attend and found that being in a room with leaders from different parts of the country and different institutions was invaluable.

“I began to think a lot about institutional investment in the cultivating of leadership,” Okech said. “Part of what inspires me about these programs is if you provide these opportunities, we will have homegrown leadership and those leaders will rise.”

That is something Debbie Dyker, University of Aberdeen’s directorate of people, thinks a lot about too. She helped organize the Scottish delegation and views the international leadership exchange program as a critical piece of the university’s strategic planning.

“The program is designed to help us motivate, develop, and engage our next generation leaders,” she said. “It is really important at the university that we are thinking about succession planning because some of the roles that we have are quite complex in nature.

“What we are really keen that the program does is have the team looking outwardly and not just inwardly at what goes on at Aberdeen,” she said. “Because we are all very good, I think, at looking inwardly and being quite siloed. The important part of this program is to give them that thread of what happens somewhere else.”

This helps them imagine new possibilities at home.

The value of the exchange for Debbie Dyker, University of Aberdeen's director of people, is the opportunity for people to see how things work somewhere else.  

The University of Aberdeen was established in 1495 and has a legacy of openness and inquiry. When considering collaborations with international partners, UVM was selected because of similarities in history, demographics, its focus on inclusion, and shared research interests including human and environmental health and energy transition.

“As international leaders we can advance scholarship, we help build economies, we can promote access to opportunities for our faculty, staff, and students, and we can strengthen communities at every level,” said Prelock during her conference welcoming address. “We have an opportunity to really create authentic leaders—leaders committed to building enduring organizations who have a sense of purpose, are true to their core values, have the courage to meet the needs of their stakeholders, and recognize the importance of serving. And we have the opportunity to share global perspectives on leadership. So, thank you for challenging us to take this step together.”

And it’s a step that Richard Sharpe, managing director for Elementa Leadership, an organizational development consultancy that partners with Aberdeen’s international leadership development program, believes more higher education institutions need to take. He argues that now is the time for university leaders to re-examine their purposes, identify their individual and institutional strengths, and learn their blind spots.

“Sometimes, out of these conversations you can ask [seemingly] dumb questions and they are good ones,” he said. “Why did you do that? Why did you do it that way? Why did you do it all? … Sometimes those are exactly the sort of questions that get missed because we’ve taken those assumptions as baked in.”

In the shade flanking the Ira Allen statue on UVM’s campus green, while on a campus walking tour on the first day of the conference, Sharpe explained why higher education leaders should put competition aside and focus on collaboration.

“There is a range of issues—health issues, pandemics, geopolitical stuff, division—a sense of othering people, feeling kind of disconnected, isolated post-COVID, political movements, populist movements, globally where evidence, data, science are seen as problems,” he said. “I think there has to be a bigger premium on collaboration, given some of the issues that the world is facing and how uniquely placed universities are to address those with science.”

Over the next two days, the impact of global forces like Brexit on student recruitment at Aberdeen, and the long-term impact of COVID on university workforces was woven into group discussions. There were conversations about financial stability and strategies for improving student success, and how to enhance university research opportunities. The final exercise involved dissecting the strengths and challenges facing each other’s institution.

“There is a trust in students,” one Aberdeen educator remarked to Sharpe about UVM leadership. “It’s quite empowering to have that level of trust in students. I like that a lot. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“I like their responsibility to the local community,” another added.

Okech took the microphone to share what UVM leaders absorbed from the conference.

“We noticed the plain speaking and clarity of your values. The warmth [of your leaders]. The focus on listening,” she said. “Every leader kept talking about how ‘we listened. We paid attention.’”

She noted how Aberdeen uses the term ‘staff’ to include everyone who works at the university regardless of their profession or rank.

“We have a lot to think about what that means for us,” Okech said.