Self-authorship isn't just for students

Every student affairs professional knows Marcia Baxter Magolda's self-authorship theory: the developmental shift from relying on external authority — what an advisor said, what a syllabus implies, what the crowd is doing — toward trusting one's own internally generated beliefs, identity, and relationships. It's the theoretical backbone of a huge amount of programming built to help students become the authors of their own lives.

Almost nobody applies it to the person running the division.

The formulaic knower in a corner office

Baxter Magolda's earliest developmental phase, formulaic knowing, describes someone who follows rules and plans provided by authority because they haven't yet built the internal capacity to generate their own. It's easy to picture this in a first-year student. It's less comfortable to recognize it in a vice president who still leads primarily by asking "what would my predecessor have done" or "what does the Board expect" rather than working from a clearly authored point of view about what the institution actually needs.

That's not a criticism — it's a description of where a lot of very accomplished people get developmentally stuck, because nothing in an academic career forces the next stage. You can rise a long way on competence and institutional knowledge without ever doing the internal work of authoring your own leadership identity.

The next level of leadership is not about adding more to the resume. It is about who you are in the room.

What the internal foundation phase actually requires

Baxter Magolda's later phases describe someone who has built an internal foundation — a coherent set of values and identity commitments — and can use it to navigate contradictory external pressures (a demanding Board, an anxious faculty senate, a student population with a different set of needs than either) without being captured by any single one of them.

This is precisely the skill a senior leader needs during a crisis, a budget cut, or a controversial policy decision — the capacity to hold a clear internal position while genuinely taking in conflicting outside pressure, rather than either caving to the loudest voice in the room or rigidly ignoring all of them. That capacity isn't a personality trait. It's a developmental achievement, and it can be built the same way it's built in students: through a deliberate cycle of challenge and support, reflection, and practice under real conditions.

Why this matters for coaching, specifically

An EQ-I 2.0 assessment gives a leader the same thing a good developmental theory gives a practitioner: a measured, external mirror. It's the "challenge" half of challenge-and-support — data that's hard to argue with because it's not one person's opinion. Coaching supplies the "support" half — a structured space to build the internal foundation the data reveals is missing, before the next high-stakes moment forces the issue anyway.