Collaborative leadership provides a platform for increasing opportunities and expanding meaningful participation. This type of intentionality leverages shared and compounding expertise within and among institutions to help everyone achieve their goals.

It must seek emotionally-intelligent decision making, challenge the status quo of superficial collaborations – and move us from a scarcity mindset to a “we can all win” approach.

Our resource-driven and resource-conscious mindset, so valuable for successful leaders in developing and executing strategic plans, may appear on its surface to be tied to a scarcity model; where the pie is finite and if one has a larger portion, another may not get anything or get a smaller slice.

Collaborative leadership, however, can lead to growing the scope and size of our impact on global learning worldwide and maximising success for multiple stakeholders. Since international education touches every aspect of a university or college, the impact of collective ideas and collaborative leadership is significant, and highlights the SIO’s role as advocate.

Such a leadership model relies on building cross-departmental teams, joint project management, shared expertise, adaptability, nimble response to change, flexibility, and to a great extent a level of humility that allows us to question, reconsider, redirect, and adjust as needed.

SIOs have employed collaboration at their own institutions in order to implement comprehensive internationalisation. Just look at the recent global risk, safety, and security work, led by SIOs on many campuses; in which risk management, export control, procurement, academic affairs, and human resources are brought together to ensure the safety of all travellers.

Leaders can apply the same approach to inter-institutional collaborations with the belief that working together can strengthen international education as a foundational pillar of a holistic academic experience.

Collaborative leadership also means providing robust opportunities for professional development for staff and faculty and working collectively within the international office. In international student enrolment, this means building a travel team with the institution’s needs and professional development opportunities in mind: distributing travel opportunities and training those who travel for recruitment.

By their very nature, successful global partnerships are collaborative, focus on shared interests, feature mutually beneficial work, and are sustainable. Global partnerships provide a model of cooperation and demonstrate the interconnectedness that can be applied intentionally in other areas.

For many SIOs, collaborative leadership with peers was prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing urgent need for international education leaders to connect with each other to share knowledge and discuss approaches to complex problem solving. These connections provided a safe harbour for SIOs, who often feel isolated due to the responsibility, uniqueness and centrality of their role.

The peer learning circle program that AIEA introduced as a means of support in 2020 is a prime example. The compound benefit of shared knowledge was evident in accomplishments that reached far beyond the participants: creation of new global safety and security protocols; development of new international global partnerships; implementation of new global learning opportunities; innovative international recruitment plans; increased strategic budget planning acumen; and SIO self-advocacy within their own organisations.

The collective wisdom gained from peer learning, as well as the vulnerability, compassion, and humility demonstrated, benefit the SIO, but also allow the leader to model collaborative leadership for their teams.

“SIOs face an increasingly complex landscape that demands new leadership approaches”

The advantages of collaborative leadership, both internally and externally, are immense. Not only are knowledge bases and expertise shared, but so are successes and accountability.

SIOs can reach out to colleagues for assistance, whether it is supporting an international student, connecting networks, or partnering with other universities on grant-funded projects that will increase capacity and accessibility to global learning for a diversity of students. When we adopt the collaborative leadership mindset, opportunities increase.

They face an increasingly complex landscape that demands new leadership approaches. Intentionally taking a collective approach and leading internationalisation with inter-institutional input provides multiple perspectives, and strengthens the SIO’s knowledge base and ability to advocate.

Collaboratively we can focus on advancing all aspects of internationalisation, bringing together the academic and the research enterprises to find innovative solutions to problems and to form multi-faceted, sustainable global partnerships and robust, high-impact global learning opportunities. This allows everyone to win.

About the authors: Jill E. Blondin is associate vice provost for global initiatives at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Mihaela Metianu is assistant provost for global engagement at Florida Atlantic University.