A leadership challenge: Communicating the mission of a comprehensive community college

The chief responsibility of a community college president is to preserve and protect the multi-pillared mission. This dissertation examines how a community college leader can effectively communicate this mission to enlist the support of key stakeholders. MyCollege Community College is the milieu for an action-research project that explores how a community college's external and internal publics may feel personally invested in a community college. This research is also a study into the researcher's own leadership. The project adopts a qualitative methodology that develops in three cycles and involves almost 100 focus-group participants. Emerging from the first cycle is a grounded theory positing that stakeholder groups respond differently to certain "emotional triggers." The second cycle advances the theory to MyCollege employees, who develop an alternate theory. Cycle 2 research also investigates the researcher's leadership from the perspective of his peers and staff. The project concludes with the theories tested on each stakeholder group. Participants respond to posters that employ varying strategies to promote individual mission elements. The research identifies which methods are the most effective for each constituent. This also enables the researcher to reflect on what he learned from both the research project and the exploration into his leadership.