Change Leadership

I have been fortunate in my career to have been entrusted with several significant change leadership projects for institutions at which I have worked. The work centered around these tasks continues to give me immense professional satisfaction and I believe the institutions where change has occurred are better for them today. Two texts I return to often as I am reflecting on change processes are Michael Fullan’s Leading in a Culture of Change and Bolman and Gallos’ Reframing Academic Leadership.

Example 1 – General Education Change. At FHSU, I was responsible for a multi-year project to revise our campus general education program. Finding the right leader to, as Jim Collins’ remarks, “fill the right seat on the bus” was the initial task on this change project. This project has been fortunate to have had three strong leaders in it’s development, so the ability to plan for succession was important, as well. Providing excellent support and training for the leaders and committee members has been critical – a 5-member team from this committee completed the AAC&U Assessment Workshop on General Education. Transparency was a critical element and the program was launched in 2022.

Example 2 – AASCU Re-Imagining the First Year (RFY) project. In 2015, FHSU was selected to be one of 44 campus partners in the AASCU RFY project, which is a three-year project to improve first year student success. The project asked us to consider four areas of change related to first year student success: institutional intentionality, faculty, curriculum, and student. I have been leading this initiative for our campus. Our team has participated in two national AASCU meetings about the project and I, as leader, have attended an additional symposium of sharing best practices. As with other large-scale change initiatives, identifying leadership is a crucial first step, followed by training and support of team members. Data collection and analysis is a major aspect of this work, so I have been working hand-in-hand with our Institutional Research office as a partner in this project. This project is also unique in that I coordinate monthly with the overall project leader at AASCU. However, the key skills to achieve the work continue to be transparency and effective communication.

I enjoy using Microsoft Project to organize and monitor the progress of my team toward the completion of large scale projects.

See Designing Interventions in Higher Education as an example of how I like to plan change interventions.