Provocation 5: Culture Change Requires Adept Shared Leadership

As a reminder to readers, I have decided to use the editorials to provide provocations to leaders in higher education about the most pressing issues of our time. In the past, editorials were used to make connections across articles, but with readers increasingly moving to online usage and downloading articles, this format was no longer the best approach. I hope these provocations press leaders to think differently about their practice.

For decades now, I have been studying culture and transformational change on campuses (Kezar, 2018). Higher education, as I have noted in Provocation 2, has been immune to deep changes that alter its fundamental system, with the exception of adopting neoliberalism, which will be the topic of another editorial (for more information about that issue now, see Kezar et al., 2019). But sorely needed changes—around helping student succeed; improving teaching and learning; achieving equitable outcomes for students; implementing assessment to be accountable for learning; creating an environment where faculty, staff, and students from historically minoritized backgrounds feel included and thrive; and partnering with community agencies to increase access for students or meet community needs—have been challenging to implement.

One of the fundamental and necessary parts of culture change is shared leadership in which faculty, staff, administrators, and students work together to advance a change initiative. Shared leadership is critical because it creates the buy in, engagement, learning, and understanding needed for changes to become a part of the habits and practices of higher education employees. Shared leadership also helps groups think in more complex and creative ways to address key challenges and get input from across the campus so the system itself can be changed. It builds relationships, trust, and motivation necessary for deep changes.

But why is shared leadership so rare? Higher education structures, culture, and bureaucracy have been responsible for maintaining siloed work, and so there is rarely deep or meaningful interaction across groups. As a result, when a task force is put together for a change initiative, they do not have the experience or shared history to work together well. Even if they overcome this hurdle, this means that just a small group of people have the habits of mind to implement a change. There is no critical mass of faculty, staff, and administrators that have experience working together, as they instead operate in their separate spheres.

We need more cross-functional practice and structures to enable groups to work together and develop their ability to be involved in shared leadership efforts as they emerge to support important change efforts on campus. One study of highly collaborative campuses I conducted—Kezar and Lester (2009)—provided a blueprint for campuses that want to reorganize so they can enable groups across campus to work in collaborative ways and can help group members foster the abilities to serve also in processes of shared leadership. The book outlines ways to create cross-disciplinary and cross-functional centers, technology, and budget systems that allow for collaboration, revision in reward structures, support for campus networks, approaches to rethink work spaces, and new values/mission statements to include more support for collaborative work. New efforts to support greater collaboration are beginning to emerge. For example, the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (2018) developed three guides about ways to work cross-functionally to support students in their critical first year of school, assisting with mental health and identifying behavioral problems. As these recent guides note and decades of past research illustrate, collaboration also enhances student success and improves teaching and learning, assessment, and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Working collaboratively and engaging in shared leadership also needs to be supported in terms of capacity building (Holcombe et al., 2021). Campuses cannot work cross-functionally or engage in shared leadership unless the campus has prepared people to work in a distributed fashion. This means providing professional development on managing group dynamics, being a successful facilitator, navigating conflict, creating a shared vision, and other issues central to shared leadership. It also means providing groups with needed human and financial resources to do their work, including team coaching and development, organizational changes such as hiring individuals committed to working collaboratively and in a shared leadership manner, and providing rewards for those involved in collaboration/shared leadership work. If you want to understand more about how to engage in shared leadership, my colleagues and I provide case studies of campuses that have moved in this direction to help guide your efforts in this recently published book—Shared Leadership in Higher Education: Responding to a Changing Environment (Holcombe et al., 2021).

If higher education leaders want to create culture change, they need to do more than implement the plan for the envisioned changes; leaders need to create the shared leadership necessary for culture change to take hold. Working to improve collaboration on campus so that the campus can be better prepared to engage in shared leadership is a great place to start. These efforts also develop the infrastructure for future shared leadership efforts.

So, we can continue to throw our hands up at one failed change effort after another and keep avoiding needed changes knowing how daunting is the task. Or we can begin to build the collaborative infrastructure and capacity building to support shared leadership as well as engage in leadership development broadly among faculty, staff, and administrators.

—Adrianna Kezar