Read the interview:
Rensburg brings forward powerful personal stories from his leadership at the University of Johannesburg, illustrating how institutional change is a long game. He speaks to the importance of firm guidance tempered with empathy, and shares what it took to motivate faculty, raise research productivity, and sustain momentum through multiple horizons of transformation.
I have this anecdote of the dean of the law faculty, coming to me on my last day as I'm packing my box. You know, all of us eventually pack our box as we head out and find a new role for ourselves. And so as I pack my box, in walks the dean – the first dean of law that I had over the 12 years at the University of Johannesburg and he says to me, Ihron, I don't know what you smoked 12 years ago when you started this journey, but when I look at this faculty of law and what we've been able to accomplish, it's extraordinary.
And so I guess the message in there was that initially it required courage. It required determination. It initially required a firm hand, right? A firm hand combined with envisioning the future. Right. A firm hand combined with persuasion and encouragement. But a firm hand was needed initially in order to move the institution out of its potential inertia so to speak out of its humdrum and into a new possibility.
The Dean of the Faculty of Management, also came to me a couple of days earlier. And he had said Ihron, I always wanted to steal your notebooks, because every year when we meet in August to review the first eight months of the year and to look ahead to the next year, you would pull out the notebook from the previous year and you would remind us, Daniel, you committed to X number of research publications and, how's it going?
And of course, the issue was not just about raising, all the time, the bar – the University of Johannesburg today is the largest producer of research output on the continent of Africa amongst its institutions. So it was important to raise the bar, but as I always say, the role of senior administrators in our universities is always to ask the question. Now that you have set that new bar for yourself, how can I help you? And so that was my spirit and my approach. It was a firm steer, combined with compassion, combined with always rolling away or helping roll away obstacles that might be in the way of mobilizing the resources and support to enable us to go through these three horizons that we went through at the University of Johannesburg.
So we can't do it in one shot. It's not going to happen in 2 or 3 years, right? It requires us to go through at least an horizon. It's my experience through three horizons of 4 or 5 years, and constantly pressing colleagues because a majority of colleagues might want to say at the end of the first horizon, it is done, and then you have to re mobilize and energize them and say, “it's not done.” And provide the evidence as to why it's not done, and then help us move through the next horizons. So that's been my own experience.
A combination of leadership styles that's required. Not just one leadership style. Combined, on the other hand, with going beyond self reference because so many of us look inward as opposed to outwards and say, so, “how are the peers doing?” And particular peers that we believe sit within our broad reference group, so to speak. And can we now faculty by faculty and academic department, by academic department account and reflect on how we relate to those peers?
Recently I was asked by one of the vice chancellors in South Africa, to come and, or at least to go and, reflect with him and his team at the University, the senior leadership team on their own research performance. And I did the homework. And I said to the colleagues, the homework included meeting with the deans and the heads of departments in that university and then reverting to the senior leadership team and sharing with them my analysis and demonstrating to them that the university is only sitting at half of the place where it should be, and providing the evidence to them, and making the point again to that Vice-Chancellor and team.
We cannot be self-referential. We have to look outward. And so the importance of foresight, strategic foresight, combined with the ability to reflect, self critically and in a self-aware manner on where we find ourselves as an institution, but also in relationship to our peers is equally important because it is then that we might be able to think about what our peak performance might look like, and then to build ourselves towards that peak performance moment.