Leadership, diversity and decision making

Abstract

This working paper reports on leadership decision making in the UK Further Education (FE) sector drawing on the Integrating Diversity in Leadership project funded by the Centre for Excellence in Leadership (CEL). The project was undertaken by a team from the University of Southampton and Oxford Brookes University. The Full Report is available at: http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/leadership/cel/ The focus on leadership decision making arises from a conviction that increasing staff and student diversity in the sector brings unprecedented challenges and implications for leading and managing learning, learners and the learning community (Lumby with Coleman, 2007). Among the wide ranging challenges is that of enabling groups and teams to deliver ‘quality decisions’ (Hoffberg and Korver, 2006:2). The paper investigates the extent to which the increasing diversity in colleges impacts on the decision making capacity of leadership teams and groups within the sector. Our focus on this aspect of decision making is based on three key assumptions