Trust is paramount when leading strategic change in challenging times

Leading an organisation always means balancing core mission and strategy with changes that are happening in the external environment that shapes the conditions the organisation is working in.

In higher education in the UK we have seen a flurry of really positive change agendas around digital transformation, portfolio and curriculum enhancement, inclusion, civic engagement and much more, as higher education institutions continue to increase their impact. But these change agendas are being delivered against a backdrop of rising costs, income constraints, and new regulatory accountabilities – legislation on freedom of speech in England is one example but different jurisdictions will have others. Students are seeing their costs rise too, affecting their engagement with learning.

Even where institutions are relatively financially secure, effecting strategic change to ensure the institution continues to be sustainable and to deliver its mission can involve making difficult choices about allocation of resource. Where institutions are having to undergo difficult structural changes, involving decisions about the teaching and research portfolio and staff roles, the challenge is greater still.

In such times, effective strategic leadership demands a finely-tuned balance between setting out a vision for the future that can inspire, while also making pragmatic and often difficult and contentious decisions in the present. Leaders are under enormous pressure to get it right, for the sake of students, institutional staff, and the communities and external stakeholders that value and depend on them.

Advance HE and Wonkhe have published a new report Leading strategic change in higher education in challenging times, based on work we have jointly undertaken to explore leadership dynamics at times of strategic change and challenge. We co-hosted three round tables in June and July, one for governors, one for members of executive teams, and one for heads of school, with participation from a range of UK and international institutions, and have published an insight report on the themes that surfaced.

Some universal themes emerged from the three different groups, applying to leaders across the institution, that speak to the complexity of navigating institutions through change in a volatile and uncertain environment, and the demands that fall on the leaders who are responsible for doing that work.

Agility and inclusion

Pace, timing, and agility surfaced across all three conversations. The ability to respond quickly to a changing environment, identify both opportunities and threats, and execute an appropriate change in direction is widely perceived as a vital organisational capability in times of challenge. It can be hard to make decisions when there are factors that are unknown or changing, but failure to make decisions, as one member of an executive team observed, is “the death of the organisation” leading to stagnation and lack of preparedness for the next challenge.

Yet cultures of consultation and discussion tend to prevail in universities, where leaders often value the input of thoughtful and well-informed colleagues, and in which consultation should in theory improve the quality of the decision and help those affected understand it, even if they do not agree. So executing a high quality discussion and finding the balance between discussing an issue and arriving at a conclusion remains a key skill for higher education leaders, and is not always facilitated by sufficiently agile governance structures.

I think we are operating within what I would perceive, and I think a lot of other people would perceive as quite an old fashioned institution that needs to catch up to the rest of the sector, or suffer some damage if it doesn’t. And I think the challenge that we’re all facing is how we can do that now we can move at the speed we need to without breaking things or losing things that are precious and without destroying staff morale.
Head of school, UK research-intensive institution

Navigating a volatile landscape

In different ways, all three groups discussed the challenge of developing and implementing strategy in a volatile environment and governors and executive teams were especially reflective about the impact of volatility on innovation and the institutional risk appetite. Higher education institutions have historically tended to be more concerned with mitigating risks rather than taking them – reputational and regulatory accountabilities also tend to discourage higher education institutions from taking risks when the rewards are uncertain, because the consequences of failure could be very severe.

Against this backdrop, uncertainty and unpredictability can stifle innovation and reduce appetite for risk even further. On the other hand, arguably, uncertainty can create the conditions for innovation and increase risk appetite, because doing nothing or avoiding change is perceived as a risk in itself. Developing a common understanding across the leadership team of the institutional approach to mapping and analysing its environment, and determining what degree of risk appetite is appropriate in relation to what element of the strategic direction, remains a complex task for leaders.

I’ve noticed leaders, including myself, when we are at a crisis moment where a decision needs to be made, and you don’t have all the information. You don’t have the luxury and the time to have all the information to make a decision. We could be at the lowest point of our human side as well.
Member of executive team, UK post-92 institution

Working differently

Overcoming ingrained cultural practices and ways of thinking and finding ways to work differently and encourage others to work differently was also a recurring theme. In particular, for executive teams, there was a focus on breaking down institutional silos and building a sense of a single team with a common and collective purpose.

Among heads of school there was a recognition that to survive, they would need to ask academic colleagues to operate in a different way, collaborate with other departments, or change courses to meet market demand, with job losses the unpalatable alternative. For governors, there was a sense that the traditional large scale board meeting six times a year is not agile enough or always delivering the quality of conversation that the challenging institutional context demands.

We can have robust and respectful debate in committee. But once we’ve made the decision, we go out there and we implement it as one. That has been a problem in the past. I think it’s probably still a little bit of an issue with some here. But actually I can see that changing quite rapidly.
Member of executive team, UK post-92 institution

The necessity of trust

Underpinning all of these tough situations, where leaders as individuals may occasionally doubt their own abilities and whether a positive outcome is even possible, is the theme of the necessity of trust. There must be trust between governors and executive teams to provide the right level of support and critical challenge. Executive teams must trust each other and believe each member of the team is working to serve the institution and its mission, not their own ends.

Executive teams must trust heads of school to execute the strategic direction effectively for their disciplinary grouping. They must be trusted in return, and believed to be acting with integrity and taking the institution the right direction. The size and complexity of higher education institutions, the competitive cultures of higher education, and the strongly held views about the purpose of higher education and how it should be executed, can sometimes mitigate against trust. But it is all but impossible to lead effectively without trust, especially when there are tough decisions to be made. Where there is trust, it becomes possible to expose vulnerabilities, and having the strength and confidence to admit to not knowing can open up leadership discussion in very positive ways.

We have significantly over that time, I think, strengthened both our executive and the board, and that’s to my mind, led to a great improvement in some of the issues others have talked about around transparency and trust. Trust and ability to challenge are opposite sides of the same coin for me. You only get one with the other.
Governor of a UK specialist institution, reflecting on the context of how external pressures and financial challenges have changed relationships between the executive and the board

When asked what would help leaders navigate these challenges, there was a strong consensus that opportunities to talk and reflect with peers can be a powerful way to relieve pressure and gain insight. Although institutions have to make their own way in navigating the external landscape and executing their own change agendas, as a sector we can always collaborate on how to build and sustain effective and resilient leadership teams across higher education, and we’ll need to keep doing that as we face more change in the years ahead.

This article is published in association with Advance HE. You can download the report Leading strategic change in higher education in challenging times here.