Change Management and Academic Leadership

Philip Cotton discusses how to lead transformational change in higher education institutions, especially in the face of resistance. Drawing from his leadership in Rwanda, he shares a framework for change that balances vision with empathy: recognizing the pain of the present, creating feasible first steps, and keeping energy high. He emphasizes the need for deep listening, dignifying concerns, and leading with love — reminding leaders that meaningful reform is about human connection as much as strategy.

Well, mercifully, it wasn't my my job alone to do that. And there are many, many people who are involved in creating the university, and moving the university. And, you know, when you make change, the one area that we constantly underplay and fail to do is the reinforcement and consolidation. So we might have had workshops, we might have had briefing meetings, but we rarely followed up. We rarely checked understanding. We rarely, you know, you look at change, and change as you say is powerful, is painful. And yet, you know, it's not painful across the board. For some people, it's more painful than for others. So trying to key into the perceptions of that pain, and what constitutes pain, why that particular change is difficult. I think one of the difficulties that people did experience was the change in the power. you know people who ran institutions had ultimate decision making within institutions, who were now somewhere else in the organigram and in the structure. And I think that hurt some people personally, but again we had to be very careful in curating and convening the kind of change. And, if you're going to change any institution, really be cautious if you're going to bring that change in an academic institution, which is populated by people who like to debate, and who like to argue, and who like to philosophize, and who like to present evidence against what you might be wanting to do. So, one of the key things was simply keeping up the energy levels, pushing out positive energy all of the time, reinforcing the message all of the time. So, you know, there was a clear vision. We had to manage, sometimes things weren't perfect in the former institutions. So, we were able to take stock of that and not only promise that we could change things for the better, but follow through on that. And then there were things that made things easier for people. And sometimes that was about financial resource. Sometimes that was about faculty and staff resource. So we had to move people around. And that's really I suppose, captured in those equations that would use a term such as feasible first steps. So, you know, we haven't got to go from here to here, but we're going to go from here to here, and this is how we're going to enable you to do that. But the kind of scale of change that we were undertaking,  this whole responsibility couldn't rest with with the Vice Chancellor. It was a whole range of people in government who were constantly playing out the positive aspects of moving forward, and taking stock, and supporting where support was needed.

Going back to something very simple, we talked about yesterday, like Beckard [and Harris]' Change Equation, you know the power of the vision, multiplied by the pain of the present, multiplied by the feasible first steps, has to be greater than the pain of the change. And the reason it's a multiplication is that if you have nothing in that box, if there's no power of the vision, if there's no vision or if there's no pain of the present, then something multiplied by something is nothing. And so helping people to connect with what was painful about the present in terms of giving them hope for the future was critical. I think the other part of change is perhaps part of the leadership narrative, which is love. You know, that if you don't have - if you can't express love by listening to people, by understanding people, by trying to understand deeply where they're coming from. They're not just making noise for the sake of making noise. They're not just trying to be difficult because it's easier than going through a change, but they might not understand. They might feel under threat. They might be unsure of their job and the job of their colleagues in the future. And if you can't dignify people and take people seriously and recognize that they're coming from a very human place, then I think you're not going to be able to lead change successfully.