Identifying and expanding your leadership styles.

After Dr. DonnaJean Fredeen interviewed for but didn't get a job as provost, she was so disappointed that her husband went online to research the hiring committee's selection process. He found that the finalist pool included three women and two men--yet the committee chose to hire a man.

Shocked that they couldn't find a suitable female candidate in that pool, Fredeen, a participant in the 2004 Harvard Institute for Management and Leadership in Education, started thinking about women's leadership styles. She also started examining her own style, wondering if it was too severe.

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Wanting to frame and define her own style, she employed a creative research strategy: reading 10 years of back issues of Women in Higher Education, along with Gender Equity or Bust!, a book by WIHE editor Mary Dee Wenniger, and three other academic books and publications.

Finding patterns in the methods different women used, she organized them into four distinct leadership frames, which women can use as a starting point to identify and possibly reshape their styles. Now dean of the school of arts and sciences at Southern Connecticut State University, Fredeen presented her findings at the Oxford Round Table Women's Leadership Conference in Oxford, England in August.

Four leadership frames

A frame, said Fredeen, is a way of defining the way we look at leadership. She analyzed women's styles in higher education leadership according to four frames she learned about at the Harvard Institute, from a book by Dr. Lee G. Bolman and Dr. Terrance E. Deal: