Leading a Leadership Journal's Rebirth
by Douglas Lindsay
Douglas Lindsay is the founding and current Editor in Chief of the Journal of Character & Leadership Development (JCLD) sponsored by the Center for Character and Leadership Development at the United States Air Force Academy. He is an educator, executive coach, scholar, and retired Air Force Officer who has an extensive background in the scholarship and practice of leadership. He received his doctorate in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from The Pennsylvania State University and is a prolific scholar who has over 100 publications on leadership and leadership development. Doug can be reached at douglas.lindsay@usafa.edu.
This article provides insight into the background and development of a journal that focuses on character and leadership development. It addresses the purpose of the journal, the types of scholarship that will be published and details how to submit scholarly work for consideration. This is relevant to all ILA members who do work in this area and are looking for viable outlets to publish their evidence-based work on leadership and character development.
About seven months ago, I was presented with an intriguing opportunity. I was asked if I wanted to take over an academic journal at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) as its Editor in Chief. It was called the Journal of Character and Leadership Integration (JCLI) and had started approximately nine years ago but was currently in a hiatus. While the opportunity to run a journal was intriguing in and of itself, what made this offer especially compelling was that I actually helped start the journal back in 2009. Perhaps a little background is warranted.
Almost 10 years ago, a colleague (Joseph Sanders) and I asked a simple question: How could we help facilitate the exposure of the great scholarship that was being done at USAFA with respect to character and leadership? While some of the work was being published in peer reviewed journals and as book chapters, most of the knowledge gained was used internally and integrated back into the courses and programs at USAFA. While this was important for the institution, it limited the impact that our personnel (faculty & staff) were having on their wider academic and applied communities. When we surveyed the scholarship that was being produced here, it was the same quality of work that we saw on a day-to-day basis from our colleagues at other universities. At that moment, we decided that something must be done and we were the ones to make it happen. Over the next year, the Journal of Character and Leadership Scholarship (JCLS) was formed. Our vision for the JCLS was for it to be “the premier venue for advancing the integrative study and development of character and leadership (Sanders & Lindsay, 2010, p. 1). We went on to postulate that, “Although many sources purport to examine the different aspects of this multi-dimensional puzzle, currently there is no single source wherein both researchers and practitioners can find a coherent and synergistic treatment of the relationship and attendant contextual factors of character and leadership” (p. 1). Those quotes came from the first article in that first issue.
What we realized rather quickly, as most established peer reviewed publications had already surmised, was the amount of work required to establish AND sustain a journal is not only time consuming, but also expensive. What we didn’t fully appreciate was the context in which the journal would exist. As a government agency, there were a host of policies and regulations that had an impact on our ability to produce a peer-reviewed, public, academic journal. In spite of that, and in addition to what we were already doing as faculty members, we were still able to publish several issues. While we were able to entice several scholars from other institutions to publish in the JCLS (David Day and Michael Mumford were notably part of that initial issue), it was decidedly inwardly focused. We gathered some external scholarship and combined that with internally produced work to help inform what we did as an institution. The information was impactful, but we were not able to fulfill our vision of a sustained journal that contributed to the larger fields of character and leadership.
During that same time, USAFA expanded its Center for Character Development (that was established in the mid-1990s) to a Center for Character and Leadership Development. While USAFA had been involved in character and leadership development since its establishment in 1954, this was an explicit step toward creating an organization that would help facilitate development across the entire cadet experience. As anyone who is familiar with such an endeavor can attest, establishment is one thing, but to truly integrate across a diverse organization is an entirely different proposition. When you consider that USAFA is both a military service academy as well as an undergraduate university, integration meant different things to different constituencies both inside and outside the organization. Faced with competing priorities (and lacking a steady revenue stream), the JCLS went into its first hiatus.
Several years later, through generous funding by the USAFA Endowment, the Center for Character and Leadership Development revived the journal as the Journal of Character and Leadership Integration (JCLI, note the name change). It was thought that if integration was such an important function of the journal, then it should be included in the name. An Executive Editor was hired and the JCLI had new life. Under the expert guidance of a former Senior Air Force Leader (Christopher Miller, Lt Gen, retired) much of the foundation for what is in place today was established. The JCLI had success and was on its way to fulfilling the initial vision as several issues were published over the subsequent years. Unfortunately, due to competing organizational demands (as with the initial JCLS effort), it was again put on pause.
It is at this point that I was presented with the opportunity to pick up roughly where I had left off years prior, within the same organizational context that had previously challenged the notion of a journal focused on character and leadership development. The “new” journal would be called the Journal of Character and Leadership Development (JCLD). As a motivated individual, I accepted the challenge. However, I did so with pause. Having studied leadership for over 20 years as an industrial/organizational psychologist, and having served in several leadership positions in the Air Force, I know the importance of context. This was an endeavor that not only had a history of challenges, but was embedded in strong academic and military cultures. Failure to understand the power of these cultures would lead to a predictable result — the limited success of the journal. In order to deal with this, I was able to address several issues up front to increase the odds of success. Several of these are worth mentioning for those who may be interested in embarking on a similar endeavor.
Purpose/Mission of the JCLD
The first thing that I had to address was the overall purpose of the journal. This may seem a bit obvious at first glance, but it was critical in order to ensure that the journal was situated correctly in the appropriate organizational and academic communities. Since there had been several name changes over the years, I needed to make sure that everyone was on board with the intent of the journal. If I couldn’t create this alignment, then the JCLD was on tenuous ground. I wanted to make sure that we weren’t just contributing, but that we were going to position ourselves to make an impact. While there are a host of phenomenal journals aimed at understanding leadership and character separately, there aren’t any that specifically examine their development and integration. This was echoed by JCLD Editorial Board member Barbara Kellerman who said, “The Journal of Character and Leadership Development is the only publication that specifically links leadership and followership in military life to leadership and followership in civilian life. This alone makes it merit our collective attention.” Not only is it important to understand effective leadership and character, we must also be keenly aware of how these constructs develop. Without this understanding, we are not in a position to be able to influence their development over time. To address this need, the JCLD will facilitate scholarship and dialogue around the development of leadership and character. Its purpose is to illuminate these two critical fields as interdependent areas of study, whose integrated understanding and coherent application are highly relevant to preparation for leadership in today’s complex world. We will accomplish this through publishing scholarly work and practical perspectives in order to inform, challenge, and inspire all who are interested in the integrated development of character and leadership.
Audience
Who did we want our audience to be? Certainly, there are the internal audiences of USAFA and the United States Air Force. However, there are more stakeholders that we must also consider. Leadership and character are critical to ALL aspects of work. As such, all disciplines and domains can benefit from a comprehensive evaluation of the development of leadership and character. While we often like to discuss different types of leadership and contextual factors that influence leadership, the reality is that effective leadership looks very similar regardless of those factors. What I mean is there are consistent things that good leaders do regardless of whether they are in the medical field, business, nonprofit, or even the military. Understanding how to take care of your people, develop relationships, create and manage teams, etc. share many similar behaviors. If we understand the development of these leadership practices, then we can positively influence leadership in all domains. We must also be careful to not be too myopic in our approach to development lest we close off lessons that we can learn from other fields. Therefore, the JCLD will be a resource to those in the military as well as to those outside the military. It must be this way if we want to increase our understanding of these critical constructs.
Editorial Board
Part of the success of any endeavor is being able to think strategically — to not only understand where you are currently, but to have a plan on how to get to where you want to go (much like leadership and character development). With that in mind, we assembled an esteemed editorial board of senior leaders, scholars, and thought leaders. This is critical as it not only provides guidance to us on the decisions that we make, but they also keep us connected to their respective fields so that we can be responsive to trends that they are seeing. Knowing this, we can make sure that we are generating scholarship that is grounded in theory and practice, current, impactful, and important. While I am still adding to the Board, a quick look at the current members shows a representation across, academia, business, and the military. This diversity of experience and expertise is a core strength of the JCLD. In the future, you will see these individuals showing up in the pages of the JCLD as they have insights and perspectives that are valuable to all of us who endeavor to understand leadership and character development. The JCLD Editorial Board currently consists of:
- Dr. David Altman: Center for Creative Leadership
- Dr. Marvin Berkowitz: Center for Character & Citizenship, University of Missouri - St Louis
- Dr. Dana Born: Harvard University
- Dr. David Day: Claremont McKenna College
- Dr. Shannon French: Case Western Reserve University
- Dr. William Gardner: Texas Tech University
- Mr. Chad Hennings: Hennings Management Group
- Dr. Barbara Kellerman: Harvard University
- Dr. Robert Kelley: Carnegie Mellon University
- Ms. Cathy McClain: Chairman, USAFA Association of Graduates Board of Directors
- Dr. Michael Mumford: University of Oklahoma
- Dr. Gary Packard: Colonel, United States Air Force Academy
- Dr. George Reed: University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
- Dr. Eduardo Salas: Rice University
- Dr. Arthur Schwartz: Widener University
- Dr. John Sosik: Pennsylvania State University
- Dr. Steve Trainor: The Google School for Leaders
- Dr. Steve Zaccaro: George Mason University
Focus Areas
The JCLD will be a combination of peer-reviewed scholarly articles and invited articles. It will focus on three primary areas:
- Integration: Knowledge for application. How does what we know/learn impact how we develop leaders of character across different domains? How do we use this knowledge to impact our education, training, and development programs?
- Scholarship: Theoretical and/or empirical examination of a relevant construct, program, approach, etc., related to character and leadership development.
- Assessment: How do we know what we are doing with respect to character and leadership development is working? What evidence can we gather to assess the efficacy of the efforts?
In addition, we will also feature interviews from thought leaders in the fields of character and leadership. For example, in our first issue, we have interviews with Dr. Edgar Schein and Peter Schein discussing what they refer to as Humble Leadership and Mr. Chad Hennings (former Super Bowl Champion with the Dallas Cowboys and current President of Hennings Management Corp) talking about how to be a Force of Character. Being able to have and publish these conversations is important as they represent current topics that are relevant to the JCLD.
Distribution
As I mentioned earlier, context is something that is critical to understand with respect to publishing and distributing a journal. Since we are a government agency, there are certain procedures that we must follow in order to produce the journal. For example, we cannot establish distribution systems like many other journals (i.e., sell subscriptions). As such, we have decided that the best medium for distributing the JCLD will be online. The nice part about such an approach is that we will be able to be timely in our publication of the JCLD as well as be able to produce special issues as needed. Even though we will be hosted on line, you will still see the same quality as other printed publications in the field. In addition to the JCLD (which will publish three times a year) we will also produce an Occasional Paper series that will be of the same quality as the articles published in the JCLD, but due to the need to address a particular topic and/or get information out more rapidly, will be published intermittently throughout the year.
Moving Forward
As scholars and practitioners of character and leadership development programs, we will mirror the developmental approach with the growth of the JCLD. We have come a long way, but know our journey is really just beginning. As one of those first steps, on 25 September, we published the first issue of the JCLD. It can be found by visiting https://jcli.scholasticahq.com/. Please join us on our journey to understand the developmental trajectories of leaders with respect to leadership and character.
For those who are interested in having their work considered for publication, the submission process is hosted through the Scholastica website, where there are specific instructions for authors (https://jcli.scholasticahq.com/for-authors). The key consideration for authors is to make sure that there is a direct link to leadership and/or character development. This connection must be explicit in the manuscript.
Each issue of the JCLD will have a theme. Therefore, the issues will have a blend of invited articles as well as peer reviewed articles. Please pay attention to the themes that are listed on the JCLD website to make sure that you are adhering to that theme. For example, the issue that will come out on 1 Jun will be focused on assessment. After reviewing the website, if you have any questions, you can contact me at douglas.lindsay@usafa.edu. Thanks for what you do for the field of leadership.
Reference
Sanders, J. E., & Lindsay, D. R. (2009). The Vision of the Journal of Character and Leader Scholarship. Journal of Character and Leader Scholarship, 1, 1-6.
Field Reports
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