These comments illustrate the importance of selfawareness
for effective leaders, in that self-knowledge
motivated change and improvement. Another example
of when self-knowledge motivated behavioral change is
seen in one of the narratives when the remark was made
about learning to “moderate emotions, being calm and
cool.”tenure required considerable research accomplishment.
When asked to describe her own accomplishments, she
said, “I am working very hard to clear a path for my
faculty to be tenured. . . . They are generally successful.”
She clearly interpreted their success as evidence of her
own. She added, “Our job is to serve . . . To make the
work of all — administrators, faculty and/or students
— easier, better, faster, clearer. I wanted to be in a
position to help, develop, grow, and make things better.”
Porat (1991) labeled this approach to leadership as
facilitative leadership and argued that it is a style more
common among women administrators in educational
settings. One of the writers exemplified this approach
to leadership when she stated, “I believed that being
an administrator meant facilitating the work of others,
especially faculty, and these bureaucratic procedures
were sapping their time and resulting in low morale.”
Another directly addressed the downside of working
to support others, noting, “I want to help faculty and
students. I want to say yes to their requests for time,
dollars, doing something differently. Saying yes takes
time and working around the rules, creating new rules,
doing things differently. It’s important to do this, but
the path is uphill.” She referred to the desire to facilitate
the work of others as the “service mentality,” saying
that it can be a weakness because it consumes so much
time and energy. Stating that “I worked long hours,”
she reminded readers that, when you work to serve, it
is important to not do the work that others could and
should do.