I met a guy who has done a fantastic job of building up a department of economics at a major university. He is an impressive administrator, who clearly has both an absolute advantage and a comparative advantage at academic administration. I said that he will surely become a dean, then probably a university president, and would do a great job at both. When I told him this he replied “maybe so,” but said that he won’t become either because he doesn’t want that kind of lifestyle.
Unlike in international trade or the allocation of productive labor in an organization, when we decide how to spend our time, our personal preferences matter. Our preferences do interact with monetary incentives, but those are apparently not enough in this case to induce this man to change his lifestyle.
One can’t argue with taste; but it is a shame, given his obvious and scarce skills, that his preferences are so strong in another direction. The general problem is how to create incentives for people with these skills without providing more economic rent for mediocre people who would love to, and so often do, fill these jobs.
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I agree with #3 [humility] — but it’s also possible that this person can do the type of things being a dean requires, but hates to do them. It might even be worse than that — it might be affecting his health due to the added stress.
Better to be happy and well-off than hate your job and be rich.
If the job is too intense in terms of hours, let them hire a competent deputy they can trust. Instead of one person doing a huge job, have two people do normal jobs. You probably don’t even have to salary bump that much.
You could look at this the reverse way; that if the person doesn’t want to do the job, then by default, he isn’t the right person for it. It is nearly impossible to throw enough incentives into the offer to make up for the drop in productivity and work quality brought around by a lack of desire for the work itself. Just like it takes a lot of seasoning to convince someone that rotten food is palatable, much less a gourmet dish. Really, getting the right person to take the job is the easy part, correctly identifying the right person is not.
People that are good at actually identifying the best person for the job out of a set of people are few and far between. If this wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t have so many people that are hardly competent in cushy jobs, while many of the grossly competent languish in unemployment or jobs where their talents are vastly under utilized. Instead of our incredibly inefficient labor market, we would have an efficient one.
If someone found a way to quickly, cheaply, and reliably attract and match the right people to the right jobs, it would reinvent the economy in much the same way as the industrial revolution did. It would be a human revolution to match the mechanical.
Is it possible that this guy is not the right person for the job because he is unwilling to change his lifestyle? My experience is that almost all leadership positions (especially academic and non-profit) require overtime hours, or at least flexibility to be available at night and on weekends. It seems that society really values that, although it may just be a badly constructed reward system. Could you imagine choosing a “highly-qualified” President of the United States who wouldn’t live at the White House or take calls from China at 3 AM? Maybe we would get a much more efficient leader, or is POTUS too much of an outlier position to serve as an example?
Face facts. Wealth, power, fame, accolades … personal exaltation isn’t everything.
Consider my own example. If less is more, there’s no end to me.
It seems to me that the university may face this problem more than other organizations. Why does one become an academic? Most, I assume, do it because they like research and/or teaching. The money’s great, too, but most people in academics could be making tons more money if they’d gone into other careers. But becoming Dean or President means kissing good-bye to both of these, and money is not itself an attraction.
Could be that with more hours and stress the candidate would be less productive.
Obviously I have no idea if the person in question was sincere or not, but no academic ever says they want to be a dean or a president.
In academia there is widespread disdain for anyone that expresses some ambition career wise besides doing research and interacting with colleagues.
But those titles and the compensation and political clout that go with it are widely coveted.