Higher educational institutions tend to adapt slowly in response to changing cultural, economic, and technological environments. In this episode, Kim Scalzo and Jennifer Miller join us to discuss strategies that can be used to help lead productive change initiatives.
Kim is the Interim Senior Associate Provost for Digital Innovation and Academic Services, the former Executive Director of Open SUNY and SUNY Online. Jennifer is the Assistant Vice Chancellor of Community College Support at the State University of New York and Executive Director of the New York State Success Center. Kim and Jennifer co-teach a professional development course at the SUNY Center for Professional Development on Leading Change in Higher Education.
Show Notes
- Kotter J. (1996). Leading change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
- Kezar, A. (2011). Understanding and facilitating organizational change in the 21st century: Recent research and conceptualizations: ASHE-ERIC higher education report, volume 28, number 4.
- Kezar, A. (2018). How colleges change: Understanding, leading, and enacting change. Routledge.
- Elrod, Susan; Adrianna Kezar; and Ángel de Jesus González. Change Leadership Toolkit: A Guide for Advancing Systemic Change in Higher Education. Pullias Center for Higher Education. USC Rossier
- Miller, J., & Harrington, C. (2023). Challenges in Implementing and Sustaining Community College Organizational Change for Student Success. Journal of Postsecondary Student Success, 2(2), 28-56.
- SUNY Center for Professional Development
Transcript
John: Higher educational institutions tend to adapt slowly in response to changing cultural, economic, and technological environments. In this episode, we discuss strategies that can be used to help lead productive change initiatives.
[MUSIC]
John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca:: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and
Rebecca: Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca:: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
[MUSIC]
John: Our guests today are Kim Scalzo and
Jennifer: Miller. Kim is the Interim Senior Associate Provost for Digital Innovation and Academic Services, the former Executive Director of Open SUNY and SUNY Online.
Jennifer: is the Assistant Vice Chancellor of Community College Support at the State University of New York and Executive Director of the New York State Success Center. Kim and
Jennifer: co-teach a professional development course at the SUNY Center for Professional Development on Leading Change in Higher Education. Welcome Kim and
Jennifer:.
Kim: Thank you. Great to be here.
Jennifer:: Thanks for having us.
Rebecca:: Today’s teas are:… Kim, are you drinking any tea today?
Kim: I am. I have my Tea Forte black pomegranate.
Rebecca:: Yum. How about you,
Jennifer:?
Jennifer:: Well, I am an iced tea drinker, so I’m drinking Pure Leaf lemon tea.
Rebecca:: How about you, John?
John: …and I have an Earl Grey from Tea Forte.
Rebecca:: That’s a different choice for you today.
John: I know. I don’t have as many teas in this room as I do in our office.
Rebecca:: I know. Yeah, we’re in our recording studio. We have a limited supply here right now.
John: And mine is this because I ordered some of the black currant Tea Forte tea during COVID, and I got two boxes of the Earl Grey, and I’m gradually getting rid of the last of it. [LAUGHTER] So it’s elderly Earl Grey. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca:: And I have some Awake tea this morning.
John: Very good.
Rebecca:: …that I can be nice and alert.
Kim: Awesome.
John: We’ve invited you both here today to discuss change leadership. After what seemed like centuries of relatively slow change in higher education, the pace of change seems to have accelerated quite a bit in the last few decades. You’ve both been involved in leading change in the SUNY system in a variety of roles for quite a while now. What are some ways in which change leadership in higher education differs from change leadership in other organizations?
Kim: Academia has its own culture. I grew up in this culture, and so it’s very familiar to me. I’m very comfortable in the culture of academia, but oftentimes folks come into our campuses, or for
Jennifer: and I here at the system office, not from academia, and it’s very clear that their expectations of how things happen and how decisions get made and how change occurs is very different. So I’ll just say a couple of things about what I think that academic culture includes. And the first is that we have shared governance. That doesn’t exist in places like industry or even sometimes in government. We have a very strong faculty culture here in New York, our faculty are unionized. So we have to take all of those factors into account when we are leading change initiatives, and we have to make sure that critical stakeholders are engaged, not just in the decisions about what we’re going to change, how we’re going to change, but also in what it’s going to look like beyond the initial change so that it can be sustainable. In my space, which is the technology space, it’s also important to understand that the role of technology plays a supporting or enabling role to things like student success, and technology is not the driver. So how you think about that is also important. And then the final thing I’ll say is that many changes involve faculty, where affecting that change actually means that individual faculty have to change what they’re doing in their classes, and they have a great deal of autonomy, as you both know, in how they teach their courses and help students achieve the learning outcomes. So it involves a lot of engagement. It involves a lot of case making, oftentimes training and professional development, and it doesn’t happen immediately, so we have to have the long view in mind. So that’s what I would say. Jen?
Jennifer:: So I agree with everything that Kim just mentioned, and it’s a really great question, because I think a lot of the work that’s gone on in change leadership, as you mentioned, has been done in business and government sectors and not as much in the higher education sector. Yet, now we see the driving forces of needing to change in departments and classrooms and all organizational structures. So Kim and I have both been working on large-scale, multi-college change for a decade now, probably, between the two of us. And higher education professionals. In addition, not just coming in from outside of higher ed, you’re also focused on students. You’re teaching students. Folks are focused on student supports, and not project management leads or folks who have done leading types of change projects. So what we understand and know about higher ed is there’s more of a need, as Kim was talking about, that professional development, that support, and we particularly think that this can very much help the success rate of some of these change projects that are taking place in higher education, where in business and industry and government, there’s, I think, a more already existing knowledge base. And I think we need to make sure that we have supports for folks who are leading these change projects. The other thing is, I think, and Kim mentioned this very specifically, is that the number of different power and authority and structures in higher education that differ from other places and the values that can compete in higher education are very different in business and industry and other sectors. So we need some additional thoughts on how to support that change.
Rebecca:: Can you elaborate a little bit on what some of those values are that are different?
Jennifer:: Sure, I think some of the values that we see are the desire to change to support student success. One of our ideas is, how do you make sure that students are being retained? And that often has some very big value laden opinions and ideas with it, and those can often be competing. There’s also competing values of financial resources. There’s competing values of, as Kim mentioned, shared governance and who has the authority to make what decisions. So oftentimes in business and industry, those things are very clear. In higher education, they’re a little more complex and navigating that’s really important in any change project that we see moving forward, either at the campus level or the system level.
Kim: I would just add the really strong value on faculty and the particular expertise, whether it’s technical expertise in your discipline or expertise around teaching and learning, very strong value on that. And as I mentioned earlier, faculty are pretty autonomous in the way that they carry out their responsibilities, and so that’s a really big difference that we have to account for. By the way, I happen to think it’s a great thing… faculty are what distinguish our institutions of higher education from each other. And so in my work, I’ve always had a really strong value on faculty and on that culture.
Rebecca:: One of the things that I heard you say, and I think I hear faculty say on our campus, and I hear in a lot of the conversations that we’ve had on our podcast, is there’s desire for change, but also humongous frustration [LAUGHTER] about lack of change, or that speed of change, usually from professional development folks that we might interview, but also from faculty. Do you have any nuggets of advice for folks that really feel that frustration to their core, before we get into some of the nuts and bolts about how change happens.
Kim: One of the reasons why Jen and I talk about “change leadership” as opposed to “change management” is because we feel like there’s a role that everybody has to play and can play in being a leader in the change and feeling empowered to both help yourself as well as other constituents, to not feel like the change is being done to you, but that change is happening, and you can play a leadership role. And I think that when you can have that mindset shift, you can actually drive the change, or lead the change, or support the change in a way that can be less frustrating. That doesn’t mean that you control everything, but your mindset and your view on your role in it can be pretty empowering.
Jennifer:: I would only add that we also talk about leading change from where you are and what your sphere of influence is, and how you can do certain things and maybe not everything you want to do, so really looking at it from the holistic perspective of what you want to change, and then looking at a lot of things we’re going to talk about today, which is the institutional culture and the context around change, the moves you can make from where you sit about that change, and then the collective or shared group of people you need to bring in to work with you. Because I think what we do know is change doesn’t happen for one person alone, but we can see the value when folks start talking together and start looking at it more as change of ways you can make moves, you can use levers, and you can understand the context to make that change happen. So in some ways, it’s also learning about how does change happen in other places, especially the change that you want, and how to use external resources, and we can talk a little bit more about that, to also support maybe the change you aren’t seeing as quickly or as much as you want on your own campus.
John: One of the areas in which most campuses are working right now is trying to reduce some of the equity gaps in student success by introducing more active learning and inclusive teaching practices and more support for students on campus in general. Part of your course’s focus is on Kotter’s Eight Steps for Leading Change. Could you take this topic and provide an overview of how this approach might be able to address institutional change in this area?
Kim: So Kotter has identified eight stages in a change leadership process that I learned about many years ago, probably over a decade ago, and as I have been involved in various change initiatives, it just resonates with me as a nice set of steps to think about and go through to ensure, or help ensure, the success of the change initiative. So I’ll just walk through those very quickly and talk about how that might apply in the scenario that you outlined, John. So the first step is establishing a sense of urgency. This is really all about the why of the change, and when you can rally around why a change needs to be made, when everybody can get clear on that, it’s easier. So you have to create that sense of urgency. When it comes to student success, what does that look like? Oftentimes, there is data to show where are students not being successful, or where are there challenges that they’re coming up against. And so data can be your friend, we say, and sometimes, when it comes to issues around equity, you have to think about disaggregating that data so you can look at different demographic groups and look at where exactly students may be not achieving the outcomes that we’d like them to see. You can also use students to tell the story, to help create that sense of urgency, oftentimes hearing their voice directly is really powerful. And so thinking about the ways to bring forward the why of your change, so that people aren’t questioning why you have to do something. It then becomes more about the what and how we’re going to do it. So that sense of urgency is important. The next stage is forming a powerful guiding coalition. This is a really important part of the process for me, because, as
Jennifer: stated previously, no one can affect a change like this alone. This can’t be one person’s job or one person’s responsibility. So you have to think about who are the key stakeholders in this case? It’s faculty, faculty leadership. It might be chief academic officers, it might be advising and learning center directors. Who are those key stakeholders, and you bring them together to form your guiding coalition who will help outline what your strategies are going to be for getting to the change. The next thing is creating a vision for change, and this is really about outlining that compelling statement that everybody can rally around and get behind. So that statement might be, or that vision might be, “We’re going to improve student learning outcomes for a particular demographic of students in a particular set of courses.” That gives you a way to target, oftentimes, we talk about gateway courses for students. And so when you can create that vision for change, and everybody can rally around that, then again, it’s going to be harder for people to not engage or want to be part of that change. The next step is communicating the vision. And what I think is one of the most important pieces here is your vision has to be clear. We have to have everybody know what that vision is, so that everybody who is communicating it is communicating it. And multiple channels are really important here. So communication through the academic channels with faculty and individual departments, with maybe it’s campus newsletters, maybe it’s a webinar series. What are the ways in which you can get to those key stakeholders so they know what is happening and when, and keep them engaged throughout the change process. I think that’s a really important piece of it. Next is empowering others to act on the vision. So this is where then you take those key stakeholder groups and now you’re building teams of people who may be working on the various strategies that you’ve outlined. In this case, maybe there is a team that’s working on professional development for faculty. Maybe there’s a data team that’s looking at how you’re looking at the data and how you’re going to track progress over time. Maybe again, those advising center and learning center directors are working together on what they’re going to do to support students. So you’re looking at how you are taking your guiding coalition and empowering a broader group of people to act. Generating short term wins is the next one. This is one of my favorites, because along the way, you’re going to see those early successes, and this is time to celebrate them and to really help keep people motivated to see that the change is starting to work. You’re starting to have some successes. And maybe in this scenario, this looks like faculty talking about something they did that had a short-term impact in their classroom on students. Maybe it is students talking about, “Oh, this made so much more sense to me. I really get this now.” So how do you celebrate those and then, based on that, the next stage is consolidating gains and producing more change. You use that momentum to then accelerate the change. And let’s say, take a practice that work in one or two faculty’s classroom and use that as the basis for professional development to the rest of the faculty. So you’re getting it now across the whole audience that you want to try to serve, and then finally anchoring new approaches in the culture. This is where things like policy changes might be important, where allocation of resources might come into play. How are you going to sustain this and make this part of the culture? Does it become part of regular faculty engagement, part of regular faculty development, whatever makes sense for the scenario, maybe it changes the way that the learning and advising centers work. So it’s about anchoring those new practices, those new initiatives, that show that they produce the outcomes that you’re going for. And the last thing that I’ll say about these eight stages is we talk about them sequentially, but the reality is that you can go back and forth between them. Sometimes you might go through one of them really quickly and then think, “Oh, I gotta go back and do more of that communicating, or more of that engaging, or I’ve gotta expand that stakeholder group.” So there’s very much a learning process that goes on, and you can work through the stages, sometimes out of order, or going back. So I know that was very quick, but I love that set of stages, because I feel like I can apply it in a lot of different scenarios.
Jennifer:: So one of the things that we have done in the course is look at two different change models, but they’re really related. Kim’s talking about Kotter, and that’s foundational for a lot of business and a lot of organizations. But Adrianna Kezar, in her work as a researcher has specifically looked at some of these types of changes in the higher ed context. So she adds to Kotter’s work when she talks about context that happens within the higher ed sector. So we have institutional type being different, leadership and governance, as we’ve mentioned, culture, I think, is a really important part of politics here, human capital and capacity resources and external impact and the external forces that work on higher education. So there’s that context piece, in addition to the Kotter steps, the other thing she adds, and her co-authors, Susan Elrod and others, in a Change Leadership Toolkit for Higher Ed, talk about leader moves. So very similarly to Kotter, there are eight leader moves in higher ed that this toolkit also addresses. So things like, very similar to the list Kim just gave, but vision, strategy, diversity, equity, and inclusion and fostering that, people in teams engaging those stakeholders, advocacy and communication, sense making, and learning. So how do the organizations really engage in these activities of understanding the change and then also preparing for the long term. So very similar to Kotter, there that in the Kezar and other researchers model. But the other piece that they also add that would be a little different than Kotter, is the levers or opportunities for change within higher ed are a little different. So we use both models because they’re very important, but it adds some of the higher ed context we’ve been talking about to the change process.
Rebecca:: One of the things you both mentioned earlier is leading change from where you are. That brings in the idea of both top-down and grassroots models depending on [LAUGHTER] where you’re situated in an institution. So can you talk a little bit about the different kinds of strategies you might use depending on where you sit in the hierarchy, and maybe the role of shared governance depending on where you’re sitting in that hierarchy.
Kim: Yeah. So I think when Jen and I talk about this, what we say is that we’re all somewhere in the middle. Depending on who you are, there are people to whom you report, and there are constituent groups that you work with, or people who report to you. And so if you’re a president, you have a board of trustees. If you are a dean, you have the provost, and then you have faculty. For us, we’re part of the system administration structure, and so we have people that we report to, and we have teams that we lead, and then we have all the campuses. So I think it’s important to just think about where you are and who are the stakeholders that you can influence, who are the stakeholders that you support. I often think about who is impacted by the change, and whose input is critical to the success of the change. And so in terms of some strategies, Jen talked about Adrianna Kezar, she talks about shared leadership and leadership in a collective process. And so the idea that we share ownership, we share responsibility for the change, and by working together collaboratively we can accomplish the change. And in SUNY, that is just so much a part of our process. And what I will say about that is some people fight it. Some people are frustrated by the fact that we have to engage all these people. If you can embrace that, and you can recognize that those people are your volunteer army, so to speak, you can have more reach, more impact, and again, that sustainability is a piece of it. And the other thing I’ll say about that is communication is critical. When you have the concept of shared ownership, or collective ownership of change, if people aren’t all in the know about where you are and how things are going when you’re having successes, when you’re not how you’re addressing those challenges, then you can lose people, and people can get frustrated or feel like they don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. We haven’t said this yet, but many people resist change, not because they don’t want to change, but out of fear of not being able to do what they do well. People know how to do what they’re doing today well, and when we ask them to change, sometimes that resistance is fear that I won’t be able to do it well. Things like communication and engagement help people have confidence in their ability to continue to do things well.
Jennifer:: I would also say top down, bottom up. These terms are things that we’ve labeled in the change effort. So if the change is coming from senior leadership, that’s top down, and it’s coming from bottom up, from one faculty member’s idea of what they want to do. I mean, it’s very siloed. So in change, where we see the change that becomes successful as Kim mentioned, is this shared leadership. There has to be a willingness and a mindset to do that kind of work in an organization. Sometimes you find yourself in an organization or a college that may not have that aptitude. So really understanding the context that you’re working in and where you want to go with this change, especially if it’s a bottom-up change. If you’re a senior leader, how do you want to engage the people that are affected by the change, as Kim mentioned. I also think in some of the research that I’ve done in my own work, so I did a literature review that was published in the Journal of Post-Secondary Student Success on change. And Kim mentioned this, but it’s really out there in the literature, which is the context of the change matters to folks, the awareness, whether they are understanding the change and the motivation behind it, that’s really important, because we are people, and we have our own motivations plus institutional motivation, and then process and all these things at any given time can really impact the change that is happening. So really understanding that and being able to first of all acknowledge it, and then look at ways in which you can build that group of people to help with whatever, if it’s top down or bottom up, change, but really thinking about, as Kim mentioned, the communication, the engaging of stakeholders, and then reflecting: Is this working? Are you evaluating the change? Are there things we need to do differently? Are there different people we need to engage? And Adrianna Kezar talks a lot about this, is sometimes we start in a direction and we have to stop and say, “Okay, if this isn’t working, why is this not working, and how do we better understand it? Is it supposed to be something that should be an easy change, technical change, something that should be easy to do, or is it adaptive, where the cultures and the norms and things are underlying.” So I think all of that, it is very complex, but I think the key is also understanding these things are going on, acknowledging them, and then planning for them.
Rebecca:: I think a good example of this is in our faculty accessibility fellows that we’ve had at SUNY Oswego, we’ve had some really interesting examples of faculty leveraging some of the influence that they have with their colleagues, for example, in their department or their students in their class, and helping the folks around them recognize some of the easy changes that they can make in digital accessibility by sharing some technical skills, for example, with their colleagues or even with their students, and having their sphere of influence make changes in the culture in their kind of immediate sphere of influence change, and you can kind of see that start to blossom out from where they’re situated. And so that’s an example of someone not recognizing immediately that they have this kind of influence, but that happens.
Jennifer:: We see that often with the work we do, where you have change leaders doing change work, and then they have to find other change leaders, because it’s often hard and complex work, and it’s time consuming, and there’s often a real desire to make these changes, as you mentioned, and then finding others who are at that same mindset, both on your campus and your department, but also within other colleges and other external factors. I know that some of the change that we are seeing in the system and in colleges, is coming from external factors, and that might be a positive thing, especially if that helps the change happen that people want to have happen. They can also be a challenge in that if it’s working against the culture of the institution and what folks think should happen, Kezar talks about this a lot, is the ethics around change, and we talked about values, but there’s ethical considerations that even in a change project, that folks may come at it a little bit differently, and that also breeds resistance that we know is a barrier to some of the change. But not all resistance is bad resistance, some of the resistance tells us that there needs to be a different way of looking at things, or a different movement that needs to happen to support that change. So it’s not all resistance to change isn’t necessarily bad, and I think the research does call that out as well.
John: If we go back to that example of trying to spread inclusive teaching techniques on a campus, we do see some different values from faculty in different departments. Some faculty and some departments see themselves as being gatekeepers who maintain the quality of higher ed by failing as many students as they can to try to keep limiting the number of people who pass through those gates. How can we bring those people into discussions when they believe strongly that what they’re doing is the best way of doing this, and that everyone else is perhaps going in a wrong direction?
Kim: So, I’ll just say I think one of the really important things to do is bring them in as part of your guiding coalition. We need that voice to be at the table as we’re talking about the why of change, and if there is something about the way they’re viewing it and the way they’re experiencing it, quality in education is a really important factor. We often talk at SUNY about providing affordable access to high quality education. They believe they’re bringing that perspective of I’m keeping this high quality. And so when you can start to talk about what that means and how we measure quality, and how their practices may be contributing to or not contributing to that, I think that’s a way to understand both where they’re coming from and what’s important to them, and have that be part of the change initiative. And so it’s about meeting people where they are and engaging them, as opposed to oftentimes we say we’re just not going to invite them to the party. We’re going to go around them, and if they don’t come along, so what? And that’s a decision that you have to make about your team and what change you’re trying to affect. How significant is that perspective and how important is it to really understand it and address it? I’m the kind of person who when I hear those really strong perspectives, my gut reaction is to pull them in, and let’s talk about that. Let’s hear about that, and let’s think about how that factors into the design of whatever change we’re going to do.
Jennifer:: In some of the work we’ve done at the system level with faculty, especially in developmental education redesign, we’ve had some of these similar conversations that is this the right thing for students? Should we keep a really high quality education? It means these things and this kind of math courses that they need to take. And I think what we found as well, just as Kim said, is bringing people to the table to talk about it, discuss it, understand it. It may not be that their view is the view of the change effort going forward, but it does add or change how that might be interpreted or made better based on those viewpoints. So that kind of inclusiveness of a diversity of thought on the change project is part of the process. And then in some cases, there’ll be people who are just against change because of it. There’s a lot of resistance that’s personal resistance to change, or has something that isn’t uncoverable through a conversation. And then you have to make some decisions about if this change is going forward, how do you engage as many people as possible, but not everyone, and that is a challenge, especially in teaching, especially in the idea of what are we doing to support our students in an inclusive way? But at some point, if we just let all of the people who don’t want the change their voice to be the strongest, then the value to students is compromised. But it’s also important to make sure that all voices come to the table and are able to discuss it in a way that’s civil discourse that we can understand and that can make the change project better.
Rebecca:: You addressed this a little bit already, but context clearly matters, and higher ed is not uniform at all. Even within our system, it’s quite diverse. So how is it important, or in what ways is it important to work within a singular institution and adopt strategies or adjust strategies to really take into account the culture of the place, where it is in this moment when the change is initiating, and how might it evolve over time as the culture of the place changes over time.
Jennifer:: I would say for that, in particular, the research that Kezar and her colleagues have done on context is really important because culture is one of the many contextual elements that we’re talking about. And I think adapting the culture to the context, especially in the variety of higher education institutions we have, it’s really an important part of the process for a successful change project, if we want to call it that, mobilizing and implementing and then codifying that change in an environment changes the culture often. So understanding it really helps with missteps. So if the institution has unique rules or values or processes that might impact how that leader, whether it’s someone in the middle of the organization, the upper part of the organization, or a real grassroots makes a misstep, is about not understanding or identifying the culture and other contextual elements, and then they’ll use different levers, so whether it’s a strategic planning process or an evaluation process for faculty to really understand how that’s going to work within that contextual culture. You mentioned it, it’s institution type, it’s governance structures, it’s politics, it’s human capital, it’s resources, and then it’s the external factors that are really impacting either departments, divisions and whole colleges. So I think that acknowledgement, that there is that happening and going on, and then what does that, as Kim mentioned with all the other eight steps of Kotter, how do we actually plan for it? How do we think about that before we launch into whatever change project we’re going to take on? And I think that’s one thing we’ve seen a lot are there are toolkits and models out there to help support that, that folks don’t have to do this work alone or without some forethought about how to approach it in their culture.
Rebecca:: And that that culture can change over time.
Jennifer:: Oh yes,
Rebecca:: The organization 20 years ago is not this organization today.
Jennifer:: Well, and it’s also that, with the change project, if it’s organizational culture that you’re trying to change, I would work a lot with community colleges and their desire to change some of their structures to better support student, not just access, but student success and retention, moving students and really understanding what their needs are to move forward in their community college structure, that’s big change, and that has a lot of moving factors involved in it, and a lot of contextual factors involved, and sometimes takes a long time. And so it is, I think, ultimately trying to move the culture towards this culture of student success that it’s going to change the culture with the change project. But yes, the institutions of 20 years ago are not where we are today, and our students aren’t the same. So some of this change is important because students change, and we need to be understanding of what the environment is and what is surrounding them and what we’re dealing with today versus 20 or 30 years ago.
Kim: If I could just add one comment to this on a very practical level, because the change projects that Jen and I are involved in, we sit at system office and oftentimes where this is about change that has to happen at the campus level. And to your point,
Rebecca:, about how different every campus is in the culture and the context of every campus is different. One of the strategies that has worked, well, I think, in our projects, is that we have a lead person at the campus, a champion, somebody who is kind of a liaison to us to be able to talk about and communicate what the current context and culture is of the campus. What are their current pain points? What are they trying to do? How can they leverage what we’re trying to do to accomplish their own changes? And so, having that structure of a champion in the organization who can be the conduit to those of us who are leading the wider scale change has been really, really helpful to making sure that that local context and culture can be accounted for. The other benefit, and Jen talked about this, is it creates a community of all of those campus leads who can support and help each other. And that structure and that approach works for us at the system level with campuses. But if you’re on a campus level and you’re trying to affect a change across all the faculty, you have different colleges, you have different departments, so you could think about applying that structure at the campus level, or whatever organizational level, the change is occurring. And I think that bringing people together, to go back to Kotter a little bit, it’s about creating that guiding coalition and then enlisting the volunteer army. So those are some of the really key ways that you account for the different context and culture of individual campuses.
Rebecca:: One of the things that you brought up earlier, and I think might be helpful for folks is to dig a little bit into the role of shared governance, which sometimes I think it’s there, but sometimes folks don’t fully know how to use that lever. You kind of hinted at the role of shared governance throughout the entire eight steps, that shared governance is actually involved in all eight steps, but, could you talk through that a little bit?
Kim: Sure. Yeah. So for me, and this is kind of a lesson that you learn over time, that’s part of SUNY’s culture is shared governance is very strong and very highly valued. And so when I’m thinking about a change project, one of the first questions is, where and how do I engage them? And it’s usually early, and it’s always often. So for us at the system level, we have the presidents of the University Faculty Senate and the President of the Faculty Council of Community Colleges. And so there’s two groups, and those presidents are very involved. So whatever the initial group or committee is that is thinking about the change or articulating the vision, we engage them in helping to create that. I’m going back to my eight steps as we are creating that sense of urgency. Does it resonate with them? What are their perspectives on that? As we’re forming the guiding coalition, they’re part of it. Always ask for a rep from both groups to be on our core team, committee, governance structure, whatever we’re forming. I always want them to be involved in it. As we’re creating the vision for change, they are able to weigh in on that and to provide the perspective of how’s this going to resonate with faculty. A lot of times when we’re talking about the work that we do, there’s this question of, what is individual faculty call versus what is an institution’s decision versus what can we decide at the system level? Those are very different, and so they provide good perspectives on that that help us throughout the stage. They’re a big part of communicating the vision. They’re a big part of bringing in others to act on that vision, creating that volunteer army. When we have wins to celebrate, I’m always sending them things, saying, “Can you send this out to your constituents?” And so that word is getting out. They invite me to their plenaries. So whenever I go to their plenary sessions, and I think Jen goes to some of them as well, we get to talk about what we’re doing, so that all the delegates here, and so they’re just a part of it all throughout because it is such a strong part of the ethos of what we do here in SUNY. And if we didn’t engage them, they would be kind of out there on the side, always wondering, questioning, challenging, and rightfully so, in my opinion.
Jennifer:: I would just add that on the campus level, I think you both probably know even better than we do about the need for the different voices involved in shared governance for projects that are going to really impact big groups of people on a campus, and how do you bring them into the process and make sure that there’s appropriate places. And some of the research I’ve done, not just here in New York State, but in other parts of the country, a really big piece of what matters in this particularly organizational change is communication, of course, we’ve talked about, but in reflection on the process, but engaging the right stakeholders. And that’s a shared governance piece, because it’s often faculty, but also in our environments, in New York, it’s collective bargaining units and other things. So your governance is a bigger group, often than just faculty’s voice, but an important thing that I think leaders who are undertaking this kind of work really need to make sure fit into whatever change model, like Kim said, whether it’s Kotter or Kezar’s Change Toolkit, or whatever model of change you’re looking at, because that’s part of the engaging stakeholders and the shared leadership of a change project that’s going to be more successful than just a small group of people making decisions, and that happens often, unfortunately. But I think the idea is, the more engagement and understanding people have of different shared leadership, the more that they’ll use that as part of a change project that’s affecting the whole campus, in some cases, or if it’s a department, it affects all the people in that department, or a division, or a college. So I think it’s an intentional thing that needs to be done, both at the campus level and the system level, to make sure shared governance is a part of the process, and sometimes that really works well. And we see those projects where that’s working really well, and then we see the projects that it isn’t working well, and sometimes we step in and say, “Have you thought about engaging in shared governance processes? Have you followed [LAUGHTER] your shared governance processes on the campus?” So you often, sometimes have to stop, reflect, and see if that’s actually happening. But it’s a great point, because I think the most successful projects in higher ed have that really embedded intention of shared governance. There’s no single one way to do all of this. Each campus is going to approach it a little different, but there are tools out there to support change leadership for colleges and system folks in higher education. So we’re also looking to make sure that we bring some of that to the table. And many of these are free resources or books that are available. And I think that’s important, because I think sometimes we launch into change projects, there’s a timeliness or an urgency sometimes, and yeah, as urgent as something might be and important to student success or student retention or the institution’s well being, some planning that goes into it often saves a lot of challenges or resistance or barriers as you move through the process. With like any project, with a little planning, you can sort of overcome some of those things before they become issues. So I think this understanding and knowledge and bringing this to higher education is really important. But there’s not one way to do all this work, and that’s what makes it so challenging and complex, is there are multiple models. There are multiple ways in which context is going to matter to institutions and systems. But the more simple we can make it, and the more easy it is for people to identify what this is, that really will help, I think, overall, mitigate some of the issues with the needed change that has to happen with our institutions for our students.
Kim: I’ll just add that this is something you can learn. One of the reasons that Jen and I started the course that we’re teaching is because it is something that you can learn. It’s something that we’ve learned. And so to be able to provide the opportunity for people who want to learn and understand what can we do to help improve the effectiveness of change initiatives is something that you can learn. A lot of it is intuitive, but some of it is just codifying what you think of as good, intuitive practices and following a process and a methodology and to the tools that Jen mentioned, we end our course with providing folks with a template to outline what you would do in a change plan following Kotter’s eight steps, and so to be able to take what they’ve learned throughout the course and outline a project that they want to do, or are thinking about, or maybe have done, and say, “What would that look like if we ran through Kotter’s eight steps?” It’s just a real easy tool that they can use to apply that, when they finish the course, they feel like they’ve got a language, they’ve got some tools, they’ve got a network of people that they can reach out to. And so that’s really what our goal is in teaching the course is to help more people to be able to do this.
Rebecca:: It really seems like the key features are some intentionality, some structure, some interaction, some collaboration, and not a lot of just reporting out. The interactive component seems really important.
Jennifer:: And I think that your outline there is very succinct, and I think it’s excellent, but within that, there’s so much embedded for organizations. So I think we are really trying to support people and understanding that sometimes just thinking those things through a little bit ahead of time is going to save a lot of time for a project that needs to get done fairly quickly, because many change projects are time sensitive. Although the organizational change projects, often the research tells us, takes a really long time, but the idea is that we need to do things quickly. And I think sometimes that can be really problematic. And if we just take the list that you just had and just kind of say, “Okay, let’s look at these things ahead of time, it saves a lot of issues, because both Kotter and Kezar talk about 70% of change projects fail. So people are launching into change projects trying to get them done, and the intent that they had is not happening. So we have to think about a little bit of a better way to support, through research and through practice, the things that do work and that can work in an organization, in college.
John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?” …which is certainly an important question to ask involving change management.
Jennifer:: So as we mentioned, we have a course currently through the Center for Professional Development here at SUNY, and we are actually just in the process of extending that to a second course to create a leading change in higher education certificate through the Center for Professional Development for faculty and staff. We have faculty and staff within our SUNY system, but we’ve had folks from outside the state come and take the course, which has been really great, because leading change in higher education isn’t just a thing that we’re doing here. That’s a national effort, and there’s many national organizations that have taken on some of this work, so we really wanted to be able to support the work that’s going on in our state, but also really bring these principles wherever we can to support higher education change efforts. So that’s what’s next for us, and we look to, in the future, to be able to support the leadership work in that way. Kim, did you want to add anything to that?
Kim: Yeah, so another part of what’s next has to do with our community of practice. So we formed a community of practice across SUNY for Change Leadership, which started out to support the implementation of the SUNY Digital Learning Environment (the DLE), which was our Brightspace implementation and required a significant amount of change at the campus level. So we created this community because, back to where the change really needs to happen, we wanted to empower campus leaders to not see it as something that was being done to them, but instead try to empower them to take a more proactive role in leading the change so they could accomplish their own objectives for their campus. And so based on the success of that, we’ve expanded that out to anyone at the campus level who is leading change initiatives, and we’ve brought in someone to facilitate that community of practice. And starting with this fall, there have been regular monthly webinars. And what we’re looking to for the next academic year is more campuses sharing, because now the Community of Practice has grown, and so rather than us leading the discussions and facilitating those, more campus leadership, campus engagement to share what’s happening at the campus level and to hope to continue to grow that and expand it as we try to do what we initially set out to do, which is build the capacity for change leadership at the campus level at SUNY.
John: Well, thank you. This was a really interesting discussion, and I think it’s an area where many people need to work on their skills in doing this if we are to adapt to this rapidly changing environment.
Rebecca:: Yeah, thanks for joining us.
Jennifer:: Thank you.
Kim: Thanks for having us. This was a lot of fun.
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Rebecca:: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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