King's College London

As business education continues to evolve, universities must rethink how they develop the leaders responsible for shaping its future. 

Higher education faces a persistent paradox: academics expected to lead business schools and academic departments are rarely given formal leadership training themselves. Instead, many are expected to develop these skills largely through on-the-job experience, rather than structured professional development.

For education-focused academics, this creates a striking disconnect between what business schools teach about leadership and how they develop and reward their own academic leaders. Ultimately, the structures UK universities put in place help determine whose leadership potential is recognised.

Closing this gap requires more than clearer promotion criteria. It necessitates sustained investment in the people those criteria are intended to support. Professor Sally Everett and Professor Denise Hawkes, Director and Deputy Director respectively of the I-LEAD business education centre at King's Business School, argue that professional education has an important role to play in this process.

For academics pursuing teaching-focused careers, building leadership capability is not simply about becoming a more effective leader. It can also provide a route to greater recognition, progression and career advancement, helping business schools better align the leadership principles they teach with the opportunities they offer their own academic staff.

'Third Way' academics

The education-focused (EF) academic career is still a relatively new and unevenly established feature of UK higher education. Often described as the 'third way' (sitting alongside research-and-education and research-only pathways), it has grown steadily in recent years.

Research into the experience of EF academics has repeatedly identified the same problem: progression is often unclear, inconsistently supported and, particularly in research-intensive universities, harder to navigate than the routes available to research-focused colleagues. In Russell Group institutions, EF academics can find senior educational leadership roles particularly difficult to access, despite the growing emphasis universities place on teaching quality and the student experience.

Who gets to lead?

At the heart of the problem is a familiar question: What does higher education choose to reward?

Research achievement continues to carry considerable institutional weight, while expertise developed through sustained work with students can be harder to translate into career capital. This is despite the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) providing a substantial and rigorous evidence base for educational practice.

The structural barriers are well documented. Promotion criteria for EF careers are generally less established than those for research careers, access to internal and external mentoring can be more limited and there remains no consistent, sector-wide understanding of what an EF academic role should encompass. The consequences extend beyond individual careers. They influence who is developed for leadership and, ultimately, who gets to lead.

Building a leadership pipeline

What would it take to close that gap? Academics at I-LEAD point to professional development as an important part of the answer.

Professor Everett, for example, has co-authored How to Become an Education-Focused Professor with Professor Rhushana Khusainova (University of Bristol) and co-hosts a podcast exploring the same issues. She also runs the Leaders in Learning & Teaching Development Programme with the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS), aimed at academics preparing for, or aspiring to, senior learning and teaching leadership roles. The programme helps participants understand the complexities of the role, build leadership capacity, develop their research and practice profile and work through how to design and deliver learning and teaching enhancement strategies.

But provision remains uneven across disciplines. In economics, for example, professional development opportunities specifically designed for teaching-track academics are scarce. Professor Hawkes argues that programmes developed primarily for business schools do not necessarily translate to other academic fields. A model that works in one disciplinary context cannot simply be assumed to work in another.

That matters because the stakes for economists are particularly high. Research into teaching-track staff at UK research-intensive universities has found that leadership experience is a defining criterion for progression to professor, a requirement that appears distinctive to the UK system. In the US and Canada, by contrast, leadership experience typically follows professorship rather than serving as a prerequisite for it.

This leads to significant issues in the pipeline for academic economists: a midcareer bottleneck that stalls careers and homogenises the professoriate in the discipline, since the teaching track carries disproportionate numbers of women and other minoritised academics.

These are structural issues that Professor Hawkes' work on the D&I network and mid-career mentoring programme at the Royal Economic Society (RES) is trying to address. The RES’s diversity work is developing practical resources and toolkits for leadership in the discipline, but without economics-specific training and development, there is a risk that such resources remain interventions around the edges of a deeper structural problem.

Beyond Mentoring

What Professors Everett and Hawkes are advocating is not leadership training for its own sake. It is professional development designed around the particular realities of leading in education and development that takes disciplinary context seriously rather than importing a generic leadership model from elsewhere. More broadly, they argue that universities need to create meaningful leadership pathways for EF academics across disciplines, including those outside the business school.

The case for doing so extends beyond individual promotion prospects. As Professor Hawkes argues, professional development is also part of building the kind of academic community universities increasingly claim to value.

That observation points to a larger question about what universities mean when they talk about investing in educational leadership. If EF academics are expected to shape institutional strategy, lead programmes and departments and take responsibility for the student experience, then leadership cannot be treated as an informal skill they are simply expected to acquire along the way.

For Professors Everett and Hawkes, that is what real investment in educational leadership looks like: giving education-focused academics the same professional development that lets research-focused colleagues build their careers, so that leadership potential is recognised on equal terms across both pathways. If universities (and business schools in particular) want education-focused academics at the leadership table, the first step is investing in getting them there.