Change Leadership in Higher Education

A Practical Guide to Academic Transformation

Jeffrey L. Buller

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118762127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Initiate innovation and get things done with a guide to the process of academic change

Change Leadership in Higher Education is a call to action, urging administrators in higher education to get proactive about change. The author applies positive and creative leadership principles to the issue of leading change in higher education, providing a much-needed blueprint for changing the way change happens, and how the system reacts. Readers will examine four different models of change and look at change itself through ten different analytical lenses to highlight the areas where the current approach could be beneficially altered. The book accounts for the nuances in higher education culture and environment, and helps administrators see that change is natural and valuable, and can be addressed in creative and innovative ways.

The traditional model of education has been disrupted by MOOCs, faculty unions, online instruction, helicopter parents, and much more, leaving academic leaders accustomed to managing change. Leading change, however, is unfamiliar territory. This book is a guide to being proactive about change in a way that ensures a healthy future for the institution, complete with models and tools that help lead the way. Readers will:

• Learn to lead change instead of simply "managing" it
• Examine different models of change, and redefine existing approaches
• Discover a blueprint for changing the process of change
• Analyze academic change through different lenses to gain a wider perspective

Leading change involves some challenges, but this useful guide is a strong conceptual and pragmatic resource for forecasting those challenges, and going in prepared. Administrators and faculty no longer satisfied with the status quo can look to Change Leadership in Higher Education for real, actionable guidance on getting change accomplished.

Chapter 1
The Only Thing We Have to Change Is—Change Itself

It should come as no surprise to anyone that change is rampant in higher education today. One of the most widely read magazines about postsecondary learning is simply called Change. If you enter a bookstore (anywhere that bookstores still exist), you'll find book after book in the higher education section that has the word change in its title. Witness the following.

• Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy (2013) by Andrew S. Rosen
• Checklist for Change: Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise (2013) by Robert Zemsky
• Women, Universities, and Change: Gender Equality in the European Union and the United States (2012) by Mary Ann Danowitz Sagaria
• The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out (2011) by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring
• Community College Leadership: A Multidimensional Model for Leading Change (2010) by Pamela Lynn Eddy and George R. Boggs
• Driving Change through Diversity and Globalization: Transformative Leadership in the Academy (2008) by James A. Anderson
• Sustaining Change in Universities (2007) by Burton R. Clark
• Transformational Change in Higher Education: Positioning Colleges and Universities for Future Success (2007) by Madeleine B. D'Ambrosio and Ronald G. Ehrenberg
• Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (2005) by Joe Berry
• Public Funding of Higher Education: Changing Contexts and New Rationales (2004) by Edward P. St. John and Michael D. Parsons
• Strategic Change in Colleges and Universities: Planning to Survive and Prosper (2001) by Daniel James Rowley, Herman D. Lujan, and Michael G. Dolence
• From Strategy to Change: Implementing the Plan in Higher Education (2001) by Daniel James Rowley and Herbert Sherman
• Understanding and Facilitating Organizational Change in the 21st Century: Recent Research and Conceptualizations (2001) by Adrianna Kezar

And those are just the works published since the turn of the century. Moreover, if you go to workshops and conferences on higher education, you'll almost always find a panel or even an entire day devoted to the topic of strategic change. Then consider all the articles on the need for change in higher education, how we ought to change higher education, or what we can do to respond to all the changes in higher education that regularly appear in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Insight Higher Ed, Faculty Focus, Academe, and the Journal of Higher Education. There's even a website with change in it: www.changinghighereducation.com. The topic is almost inescapable.

So in light of all the attention that's been paid to change in higher education, I have to ask a rather uncomfortable question: Why do those of us who devote our lives to teaching and research handle change so poorly?

If you've been involved in higher education for any time at all, you know exactly what I mean: visionary strategic plans that somehow never get realized; curricular reforms that stall halfway through; changes in institutional direction that are deemed absolutely essential by the administration but then are blocked by the faculty at every turn. It's both frustrating and confusing. Why is it that in a field of endeavor that prides itself on new ideas and cutting-edge innovations, we so frequently resist, undermine, or obstruct change? It's not the case, of course, that colleges and universities are the only entities we know that seem averse to change.

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All organizations resist change. After all, that's their job. The whole purpose of any organization is to act in ways that are regular, consistent, and predictable. And regularity, consistency, and predictability are natural enemies of change.

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Yet despite how often change is resisted in the world at large, colleges and universities seem particularly resistant to even modest change. In a comment attributed to various figures, including former governor Zell Miller of Georgia, chancellor of the University System of Georgia Stephen Portch, and the headmaster of Ohio's Lawrence School Lou Salza, “It's easier to change the course of history than it is to change a history course.” But does it have to be that way?

In order for us to answer these questions, it may be helpful to begin with a look at three common models of change and a discussion of why these models aren't particularly helpful when it comes to higher education. Although there are many more change models we could consider (I introduce several in later chapters), the three that I'll examine here provide a good, general introduction to the way in which change is often perceived. Besides, these three models are particularly easy to remember because they all begin with the letter K.

The Kübler-Ross Model of Change Management

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced what's become known as the five-step model of change in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. As that title implies, her focus in the book was the five-step process many people go through when they learn that they have a terminal illness:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

In most cases, a dying person progresses through these steps in the exact order listed, although exceptions certainly occur. Some people regress temporarily from a later to an earlier stage, and others skip certain stages entirely. Grief counselors can assist people as they move through this process, but the steps themselves are regarded as natural and almost inevitable. It does little good to try to reason with someone in the denial stage when a person's reaction is almost entirely emotional, and it's futile to try to cheer someone up in the depression stage when he or she is yielding temporarily to grief. Kübler-Ross's process is simply the way in which most people adjust to the idea of their own mortality. While some people spend more time at one step than another, these steps all appear to be vital components that have an important role to play in comprehending and acknowledging the finality of death.

It wasn't long after Kübler-Ross first presented her five-step model that organizational theorists began to realize that death isn't the only event that can trigger this type of progression. P. David Elrod and Donald Tippett (2002) outlined how Kübler-Ross's basic concept ultimately developed—through such intermediaries as Walter Menninger's change curve model, John D. Adams's theory of transition, and Dottie Perlman and George Takacs's ten stages of change—into Thomas Harvey's recognition that responses to change mimic almost precisely those that people have when faced with the loss of a loved one or their own impending death: “It is crucial to remember that for every change proposed or achieved, someone loses something” (Harvey and Wehmeyer, 1990, 6).

Many of the change models based on Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief represent the process graphically as a series of active and passive responses over time. (See figure 1.1.) Because of the shape of this curve, the five-step model is sometimes also called the rollercoaster model of change. By understanding this natural progression, it is argued, effective change managers can respond in an appropriate way to what those experiencing the change are feeling.

• During the denial stage, change managers can keep their message consistent, emphasizing why the change is both necessary and desirable.
• During the anger stage, they can remember not to take resistance and rejection personally, calming stakeholders with a positive, forward-looking message.
• During the bargaining stage, they can resist the urge to make concessions that may initially seem minor but ultimately will be detrimental to their overall vision.
• During the depression stage, they can emphasize improvements and accomplishments that are already being made along the way, thus helping people see that what they have lost is more than compensated for by what they have gained.
• During the acceptance stage, they can use the energy of those who have come to support the change vision to begin making more rapid progress and moving more systematically toward their ultimate goal.

Figure 1.1 Kübler-Ross Model of Change

Perhaps the most important contribution of the Kübler-Ross model to the field of change management is its theory of why people so often resist change: they perceive each break with the past as like a little death. Leaders who attempt to ignore the need for healing that must occur during every change process thus run the risk of deepening resistance to the new vision and undermining the entire process.

The Krüger Model of Change Management

Until his retirement in 2008, Wilfried Krüger served as a professor of management and organization at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. In articles like “Implementation: The Core Task of Change Management” (1996) and essays like those appearing in Excellence in Change, Krüger posited a theory of change that has become commonly known as the iceberg model. His idea was that change, like an iceberg, is a phenomenon for which most of the danger lies below the surface. Krüger believed that most people involved in organizational change tend to engage only in issues management—the facts and figures that result from the process. They devote their time to such factors as cost, the time that will be required to complete the change, input and output metrics, and the desire to improve quality. But these issues are rarely what cause the real problems for a change process. More frequently difficulties arise because of less immediately visible factors, like power relationships, politics, beliefs, biases, and perceptions. The successful change manager, Krüger argued, is the person who takes time to address these hidden elements of any organization, which he believed could constitute as much as 90 percent of an initiative's success or failure (fi...