The ‘Golden Braid’ Model: Courage, Compassion and Resilience in Higher Education Leadership

Abstract

This paper explores the state of leadership in UK universities in the face of external pressures and turmoil, and makes the case for a new model of leadership constructed of a ‘golden braid’ of three threads of courage, compassion and resilience. Each thread is discussed with the intention of developing a framework that can be used to support leadership development to lead our universities effectively through the current chaos. Even before Covid-19 hit the world, UK higher education was perceived as being in a state of huge flux and chaos: the “old order” of a traditionally male-dominated elitist system funded by central government (O’Connor, 2015), has been dismantled and replaced with mass participation and student fees leading to an increase in marketization and government regulation for which academic leadership is generally under-prepared (Deem, 2004; Flückiger, Y. 2021). As such, this is the crucial time for us to embark upon a sector-wide discussion of what we want our universities to look like in this post-pandemic period – how we want to be teaching, researching and working and what we want the core values to be. In this paper, I suggest that the ‘values’ we had before will no longer be the ones we want to take forwards. For this, therefore, we need the ‘golden braid’ of courage, compassion and resilience in leadership discussed herewith.