I was lucky enough to host a webinar last week about change in higher education with Joe Gottlieb, President and CTO of Higher Digital. You know that I joined Higher Digital after I retired, having taken a year off to take care of some health things and focus on family priorities. Higher Digital has such a healthy and logical focus on Digital Transformation in Higher Ed, including the people aspect of technical change. It drew me in.
During our webinar, Joe and I reviewed some of the factors that correlate to poor institutional outcomes in technology environments, and a couple of things really stood out to me.
- While it is easy to blame leadership for everything that ever goes wrong, it is also the case that leadership does bear responsibility for promoting a change culture and exemplifying behaviors conducive to better outcomes in transformation. Each of the items highlighted, whether Alignment on Priorities, Leadership Acts on Feedback, or fostering Cooperation across Departments just to name three of the ten we reviewed, fall squarely into the Leadership bucket. As leaders, it is also easy to give ourselves a pass when it comes to falling short, but it is worth reminding ourselves that behaviors are just that - behaviors. No matter how good your excuse is for not following through on feedback or communicating the status of a project (I’m too busy, it’s a bad idea, no one understands how hard this is), the fact remains that it just didn’t happen, and that impacts organizational trust which in turn impacts results - not in a good way. Change culture, and more importantly behavior consistent with change culture, requires accountability from the top whether that is at an institutional level or at a team level - all leaders must act out the changes they want to promote in their own teams.
- The other thing that stood out was actually pointed out to me by an attendee. These results were from 21 institutions, most of which - although not all - are US-based; however, we know from our work and personal experience that the findings are largely the same in the UK, Australia, Canada, and Ireland. It is typically the “people” side of a project that precludes obtaining stellar results, not a failure of technology. It is true that sometimes technology fails, but even in those situations, it is people who make decisions, need to identify problems before they crop up, or at least minimize the damage. Which brings us back to people, who are not all that different no matter what side of whichever pond you happen to be on.
Financial pressures, changing regulatory environments, shifting public support, and epochal technology advancement are all hitting institutions in advanced economies at the same time. Those institutions who are poised to thrive, no matter which country they are in, are highly conscious of the need to manage change as well as building a Strategic Portfolio Management discipline to ensure that Priorities are Aligned, there is a Balance of Strategic and Operational Efforts, and that the Digital Strategy is alive and well.
I’m looking forward to my next webinar toward the end of September when we talk about internal factors that put your strategic projects at risk and how to overcome them.
