By Philip Garrow, Ed.D.

From major universities to community colleges, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated innovative thinking and flexible changes at American institutions of higher learning. In the span of two weeks, the United States Naval Academy (USNA) went from never before offering a remote course to shifting its entire undergraduate curriculum online. To accomplish this, it can be surmised that USNA’s most senior leaders employed adaptive leadership techniques to accomplish its primary mission of safely graduating and commissioning midshipmen on schedule. The rapid pivot to an online learning environment reflected the positive aspects of adaptive leadership theory, especially with respect to defining an institutional vision and incorporating feedback from faculty. Yet other actions exposed some of adaptive leadership’s dangers, such as administrators’ tendencies to favor policy uniformity at the expense of instructor autonomy as well as the proclivity to rush decisions in the face of time constraints. In the end, USNA’s transition to remote instruction is best characterized as a missed opportunity to reexamine minimum professional competency levels (i.e., “commissioning standards”) for military service. Although USNA leadership successfully harnessed adaptive leadership to meet its graduation objectives, it failed to see the pandemic response as a larger chance to assess, evaluate, and revise commissioning requirements and faculty practices.

Adaptive leadership ¹ is a relatively new subject in leadership theory; in Dinh et al.’s 2013 review of 752 articles published in ten widely-cited academic journals, adaptive leadership was only explored in five pieces.² While Nelson and Squires contend that adaptive leadership was originally developed for commercial applications,³ Heifetz and Linsky outlined its uses in the realm of education.⁴ A more concise framing from Campbell-Evans et al.⁵ summarized Heifetz et al.’s 2009 book on adaptive leadership by asserting the term explains the skills and strategies necessary to address gnarly situations, immediate problems, and changing conditions.⁶

With its wide-ranging impacts across all industries and professions, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic represented a challenge of the highest order.⁷ Contending with it on “the Yard” (USNA’s informal nickname for its campus) fell primarily to USNA’s Superintendent and Provost. The Superintendent is a generally a three-star, active duty Navy Vice Admiral whose positional responsibilities are similar to those of a university president.⁸ The Provost, meanwhile, oversees curriculum design and delivery for the entire campus as well as personnel issues such as faculty hiring, review, and promotion.⁹ From March to August 2020, both released a series of emails notifying USNA personnel of institutional virus response efforts and remote learning support options. The plan as promulgated kept the institution on track to meet its annual timelines but did not offer a chance to reflect on which aspects of the traditional commissioning path were truly necessary.

USNA leaders displayed adaptive leadership by promulgating a cautious, flexible model for remote classes by clearly articulating an organizational vision.¹⁰ In light of rising COVID-19 cases nation-wide, in early March 2020 the Provost sent a pandemic-related email to faculty, simply passing along information on international travel.¹¹ The day after, approximately 4,500 midshipmen left the campus on what they expected to be a week-long spring break. A few days later, the Provost sent another email, asking faculty to brainstorm strategies for shifting courses to online formats (such as Zoom or GoogleMeet) and to push those ideas up through their department leadership.¹² Also, acting on information received firsthand from Maryland’s governor, the Superintendent announced that students would remain off campus for an additional two weeks.¹³ The decision was intended to give the faculty time to adjust their lesson plans for remote learning, which was employed for the rest of the semester and the summer term that followed.

One Provost email update acknowledged the challenges presented by a world-wide virus and admitted to looking to models from other institutions across the country.¹⁴ This made the decision-making process transparent and “user-centric”¹⁵ by soliciting faculty feedback – an improvement-science approach to adaptive leadership. The Provost exhibited a clear belief that unforeseen challenges required unprecedented solutions. But all emails were in service of a simple goal defined by the Superintendent: safely completing the semester (from a public health perspective) and getting midshipmen commissioned on time.¹⁶ As campus operations were streamlined, there did not seem to be much organized reflection about how minimal commissioning standards had long been defined and perpetuated. With Physical Fitness Assessments paused Fleet-wide for the second cycle of 2020, how defensible were the traditional USNA higher-than-the-Fleet standards for running, swimming, and the like?

Despite the laudable efforts outlined above to meet Fleet manning requirements safely, two drawbacks of the adaptive model emerged in USNA’s transition to online learning: the process became less user-centric and more directive over time, and last-minute changes in the name of improvement resulted in unnecessary staff and student burdens. Both the spring and summer 2020 terms were executed with students residing off-campus and completing only online coursework. Although the Provost solicited and acted on faculty feedback initially, as evidenced by his decision to shift school hours to the right in consideration of students living in the Pacific Standard Time zone,¹⁷ requests for suggestions from staff dwindled as the weeks wore on. Faculty autonomy with respect to attire¹⁸ or meeting synchronously or asynchronously¹⁹ were increasingly restricted by prescriptive directions. Rather than ask why the institution did things the way it traditionally had, the focus was on returning to pre-COVID standards and practices as soon as possible.

Educational systems are prone to return to previous methods and ways of operating,²⁰ while leaders often face great temptation to issue unilateral solutions when achieving group consensus proves difficult.²¹ The ever-increasing volume of additional written instructions – in the form of USNA Academic Dean Notices – demonstrated that the adaptive flexibility of the early weeks of the pandemic gave way to the institution’s natural inclination to codify and standardize. The transparency of the thought process behind the early emails mutated into less forthcoming initiatives, such as a process for students to share course concerns with Associate Deans directly while bypassing the faculty and the chairs of academic departments.²²

The extended nature of the pandemic eventually encouraged a tendency to think about how to return to old ways of doing things in the new environment, rather than stimulate improvement-science driven initiatives to ask what procedures deserved to be permanently eliminated.²³ After expending considerable funds to outfit classrooms with remote learning tools like OWL camera and microphone devices, faculty were forbidden post-pandemic to use such devices rather than arrange for in-person substitutes. The insistence on returning to pre-COVID business-as-usual denied faculty the chance to refine and hone remote teaching skills they acquired during the crisis. At the very least, a better adaptive leadership approach would suggest faculty be given autonomy to decide when an in-person sub versus a remote session best suits their needs. The administration’s quiet shift from adaptive leadership to a more directive style caused problems that might otherwise have been avoided.

Another problem with adaptation and flexibility is that it can prove too tempting to continue to tinker with changes past the point where further adjustments are no longer optimal. After weeks of changes, a plan was made to teach remotely for the first two weeks of class and then divide students into “blue/gold” sections in order to decrease class sizes by half and facilitate six feet of separation between student desks.²⁴ A week later, that plan was heavily modified such that only the first two days of class were mandated as remote and departments were under increased pressure to find teaching spaces large enough to accommodate regular class-sizes.²⁵ Worse, student assignments to course sections were constantly in flux, with some First Year Composition English courses experiencing a full 50% change in assigned students as late as the afternoon before the first day of class.²⁶ Such adjustments meant that some students were making two or three return trips to the campus bookstore in order to ensure they possessed the correct text for the instructor they were assigned.²⁷ Curiously, most texts on adaptive leadership do not warn that flexibility can be carried too far. By failing to recognize the point at which further changes, even in the interest of optimization, were likely to cause unnecessary frustration and stress, USNA administrators placed too great a premium on top-down adaptation at the expense of efficiency and common sense.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the sort of gnarly, “multifaceted”²⁸ problem that adaptive leadership is well poised to resolve. Yet USNA leadership delivered a mixed result, properly emphasizing shared goals and stakeholder buy-in during the initial response stages but succumbing to centralized and directive solutions as time progressed. The chance to question what elements of commissioning were truly required was overlooked and the opportunity to afford faculty greater voice in post-pandemic teaching options was missed. While it is important not to judge too harshly in light of the pandemic’s complexity, it is clear in retrospect that a summer stand down to reflect on the process and jointly reevaluate the options for the fall semester would have been well-advised, as would a similar reflective session at the conclusion of the COVID-19 crisis. USNA is a model of adaptive leadership; sometimes it just does not know when to stop adapting.

Lieutenant Commander Philip Garrow, USN, is a career Surface Warfare Officer and has completed guided missile cruiser, frigate, littoral combat ship, and destroyer squadron afloat tours. He holds a B.A. from Tulane University, M.A. degrees from Salve Regina University, the U.S. Naval War College, and the University of Maryland: College Park, and a doctorate in Entrepreneurial Leadership in Education from Johns Hopkins University. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy.

All views expressed and comments provided in this article are my own thoughts and opinions based on my professional and academic experience and expertise. They do not constitute (nor should be construed as reflecting) DOD, DON, or USNA official policy or endorsement.

Endnotes

¹ Ali Baltaci and Ali Balci, “Complexity Leadership: A Theoretical Perspective,” International Journal of Educational Leadership and Management 5, no. 1 (2017): 30-58, doi: 10.17583/ijelm. 2017.2435; Glenda Campbell-Evans, Jan Gray, and Bridget Legett, “Adaptive Leadership in School Boards in Australia: An Emergent Model,” School Leadership & Management, 34, no. 5 (2014): 538-552, doi: 10.1080/13632434.2014.938038; Tenneisha Nelson and Vicki Squires, “Addressing Complex Challenges through Adaptive Leadership: A Promising Approach to Collaborative Problem Solving,” Journal of Leadership Education 16, no. 4 (2017): 111-123, doi: 1012806/V16/I4/T2.

² Jessica E. Dinh, Robert G. Lord, William L. Gardner, Jeremy D. Meuser, Robert C. Linden, and Jinyu Hu, “Leadership Theory and Research in the New Millennium: Current Theoretical Trends and Changing Perspectives,” The Leadership Quarterly 25, (2014): 36-62, doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.005.

³ Nelson and Squires, “Addressing Complex.”

⁴ Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, “When Leadership Spells Danger,” Educational Leadership 61, no. 7 (April 2004): 33-37, https://www.wisconsinrticenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/6.3-When-Leadership-Spells-Danger.pdf.

⁵ Campbell-Evans et al., “Adaptive Leadership.”

⁶ Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Kinskey, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2009), 251.

⁷ Charles A. Goldman and Rita T. Karam, “College in America could be changed forever,” CNN, July 7, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/07/perspectives/higher-education-pandemic/index.html; Annie Grayer, “Administrators prepared for Covid-19 to change life on campus, but students partied anyway,” CNN, August 21, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/21/us/ university-college-covid-19-partying-quarantine-pandemic/index.html.

⁸ United States Naval Academy 2015 Faculty Handbook, 2015, https://www.usna.edu/ Academics/Faculty-Information/Faculty%20Handbook/ 15%20Faculty%20Handbook.pdf.

⁹ United States Naval Academy 2015 Faculty Handbook.

¹⁰ David J. O’Connell, Karl Hickerson, and Arun Pilluta, “Organizational Visioning: An Integrative Review,” Group & Organization Management 36, (2011), 103, doi: 10.1177/1059601110390999.

¹¹ Andrew T. Phillips, personal communication, March 5, 2020.

¹² Phillips, personal communication, March 11, 2020.

¹³ Sean S. Buck, personal communication, March 12, 2020.

¹⁴ Phillips, personal communication, March 11, 2020.

¹⁵ Anthony S. Bryk, Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow, and Paul G. LeMahieu, Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools can Get Better at Getting Better, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2015).

¹⁶ Sean S. Buck, personal communication, March 12, 2020.

¹⁷ Andrew T. Phillips, personal communication, March 20, 2020.

¹⁸ Andrew T. Phillips, personal communication, May 22, 2020.

¹⁹ Sharon Hazelton, personal communication, May 9, 2020; Jennifer Waters, personal communication, June 1, 2020.

²⁰ Nelson and Squires, “Addressing Complex.”

²¹ Heifetz and Linsky, “When Leadership.”

²² Michelle Allen-Emerson, personal communication, April 20, 2020.

²³ Bryk et al., Learning to Improve.

²⁴ Samara Firebaugh, personal communication, August 4, 2020.

²⁵ Samara Firebaugh, personal communication, August 11, 2020.

²⁶ Philip Garrow, personal communication, August 18, 2020.

²⁷ Temple Cone, personal communication, August 19, 2020.

²⁸ Campbell-Evans et al., “Adaptive Leadership,” 542.

Featured Image: The U.S. Naval Academy holds the fourth, socially-distanced swearing-in event for the Class of 2020 on May 18, 2020. (U.S. Navy photo by Stacy Godfrey)