In universities, the people who understand a problem aren’t always the people with the authority to solve it. Decisions cross departmental boundaries, priorities compete, and people can find themselves waiting for permission when what they really need is a way to work together.

A 2024 report from Advance HE and Wonkhe, Leading strategic change in higher education in challenging times, highlights the importance of trust, collaboration and agility in decision-making when navigating strategic change.

These all matter but there’s another question worth exploring: how do we create the conditions for people to draw on each other’s knowledge, relationships and influence to get things done together?

I’ve written a few newsletters about agency in HE recently, mostly from the point of view of the individual: how confident are you, how much autonomy do you have and what can you do to strengthen your team’s ability to make decisions and get things done?

The assumption has been:

• If individuals become more confident, they will act with more agency.
• If managers become more empowering, their teams will have more agency.
• If leaders communicate better, HE organisations will improve and work better, and change will be easier.

All of that still matters.

But a conversation with my colleague Pete made me think about it from another direction.

Agency, or the power to act, isn’t just something that sits with an individual. It is also relational and contextual.

You might have a lot of agency in one part of your working life and very little in another. You might be confident making decisions with your immediate team, but find yourself waiting for permission when you work across a faculty boundary.

Or you might be very experienced and capable, but become cautious in a room where hierarchy is particularly pronounced.

Agency isn’t simply something you have all the time. It manifests when the conditions are right.

And because of that we should be thinking about those conditions.

Rethinking power: from individual authority to collective agency

One way into this is to think about power.

We tend to think of power as something an individual has or doesn’t have, as formal authority. The ability to make a decision, allocate resources or tell someone else what needs to happen. That often comes from your job title or position in the formal hierarchy.

There is healthy power, ie taking up power in a way that supports getting things done, moving things forward, and making things better for everyone.

Power can also be experienced negatively, particularly when it is used to diminish, or constrain what people can do.

There is another way of thinking about it: power also emerges dynamically from relationships and from groups.

We are all familiar with the idea that we can be stronger together: think of the power that unions are able to muster. And while your boss might have formal authority over you, they also influence the power that you have. You might have power in your immediate team but believe you have almost none when it comes to shaping the whole institution.

Power doesn’t just rest in an individual, it also exists as part of the organisational system and in the right conditions can be drawn on or manifested.

For example, we see this in coalitions, where people with different roles and expertise come together around a shared purpose. Each person brings some authority, knowledge, relationships or influence, creating something that no single member could have created alone.

The power belongs to the group.

And that matters for agency, because when people belong to a group that has collective power, they can act in ways that wouldn’t have been possible on their own.

This feels particularly relevant in universities, where work is complex, interconnected and distributed across formal boundaries.

No single person has enough authority, knowledge or capacity to solve the bigger problems, however senior they are. Bringing people together and creating the conditions for acting collectively is a form of leadership in its own right.

What does collective agency look like in practice?

We see this in some of the Rapid Improvement work we’ve been doing.

The approach is straightforward: bring together people who are affected by a particular issue, make sure that different perspectives and expertise are represented, and create a space to work on the problem together.

The formal hierarchy becomes less important because what matters is what people can contribute and what they can learn from one another. This does require people ‘pausing’ their formal authority (at all levels) to make space for everyone’s contribution to be received equally.

In one recent example, a group working on a knotty administrative problem had developed a solution and, while they were waiting for the results – unprompted they took on another challenge.

They began talking to colleagues outside the original group, bringing people in who had different expertise and connections. Some of those were more senior but they joined the group as equal participants rather than arriving with the expectation that they should determine what happened.

Gaps in knowledge became visible. People found others who could help fill them. The work moved in ways that hadn’t been specified at the outset.

Nobody had instructed them to do this. It wasn’t in any project plan.

It emerged from the quality of the relationships and the way the group was working together.

That’s collective agency.

It wasn’t that everyone suddenly became more confident. Something changed in the space between them. People lent their power to the group, drew power and authority from it, and accomplished what they couldn’t have done alone.

Key Ingredients for Collective Agency

How leaders can create the conditions for collective agency

When agency emerges collectively, the role of leadership shifts from directing people to shaping the conditions in which they can work effectively together.

That means setting the conditions for a project, sharing power, holding people in the space and providing encouragement. It can become a virtuous cycle: people experience what they can achieve together, their confidence in one another grows, and they become more willing to take the initiative next time.

Much of this is practical. What happens in your meetings? Does seniority determine who gets heard, or can people contribute as equals?

There are also less visible conditions: whether people feel they belong, whether they believe they will be listened to, whether they trust one another, whether they feel safe enough to say something unpopular, and whether disagreement can be used productively rather than avoided.

These things affect the amount of agency people can exercise.

Working with uncertainty rather than trying to eliminate it

There is another condition that is particularly important in higher education: how you respond when things don’t go according to plan.

In complex organisations, uncertainty can trigger a desire for more control – more process, more detailed planning, more direction.

It is an understandable attempt to manage the unknown, but complex systems keep producing surprises. New information arrives. Something changes. Someone can’t turn up to a meeting. A dependency you hadn’t noticed suddenly becomes important. The plan that seemed sensible last week is no longer so relevant.

If the response to every unexpected event is to stop and seek complete certainty, work becomes slow and people learn to wait for permission.

An alternative is to establish some shared norms for what happens when the unexpected occurs.

Not another policy, and not detailed rules to legislate for every possible situation. Just a handful of reliable moves that people understand and can use when the plan stops being useful.

For example, a norm that everyone has the opportunity to speak in a meeting, or that challenge is directed at ideas rather than people.

You might agree that when new information emerges, the first question is whether it actually makes a material difference to a decision.

You might have a shared understanding that sometimes something is good enough for now, safe enough to try, and that decisions can be revisited when new information becomes available.

These are not fixed rules. They are ways of navigating complexity.

You can apply the same principle to faculty guidelines. You might agree that departments meet at least once a term, and that leadership teams meet at least twice, without prescribing exactly how those meetings work or what needs to happen in them, or preventing them from meeting more frequently.

The idea is to leave enough autonomy for people to work out what is appropriate in their particular context.

I think this is important because confidence doesn’t come from knowing exactly what will happen next. It comes from knowing how you will respond when something unexpected happens.

Five practical ways to build collective agency in your team

If you want to start building these conditions in your own team, here are six practical places to start:

1. Create more equal spaces for contribution

Look at your meetings. Who speaks first? Who speaks most? Whose expertise has the most weight? Experiment with meeting structures that make it easier for people to contribute regardless of their position.

2. Pay attention to psychological safety

Do people contribute freely, are they holding back? Is there someone on the team that is making communication difficult or making others hesitate? That needs addressing – that’s a negative expression of power that will diminish agency. It’s unlikely to resolve itself and will need you to explore the dynamics and support a shift.

3. Make informal networks visible

Encourage people to build relationships beyond their reporting line. When someone is stuck, ask who else might know about this? rather than automatically escalating upward.

4. Agree a few useful norms

Don’t try to prescribe every behaviour. Agree some simple ways of working to navigate uncertainty: everyone gets heard; challenge is welcome; “good enough for now, safe enough to try” is acceptable.

5. Notice where people are waiting for permission

When someone brings you a problem, resist the urge to solve it immediately. Ask what they think should happen, and what they could do without your permission.

6. Pay attention to what happens when plans change.

When something unexpected happens, notice whether your team’s instinct is to stop and seek certainty, or to gather, make sense of what has changed and decide what to do next. That tells you where agency sits in your system.

Making collective agency part of how you work

Perhaps the question for you as a leader isn’t simply, how do I empower my people?

That question still puts you as leader at the centre, as though agency is something handed down.

A more interesting question is: how do I create and maintain the conditions where people can exercise power together?
That means paying attention to relationships, and patterns of behaviour in the organisation.

When people trust one another, when different expertise is valued, and when people have enough autonomy to respond to reality rather than waiting for someone more senior to tell them what to do, people start to act collectively.

They solve problems that weren’t formally assigned to them, bring others into the work and spot opportunities that weren’t visible before. They respond to what is happening rather than simply following the plan.

None of this means that formal authority becomes irrelevant. Universities still need structures, accountability and decision-makers.

But perhaps leadership isn’t always about holding the power.

Sometimes leadership is about creating the conditions in which people can draw on each other’s power.

When that happens, agency becomes more than an individual capability, it becomes a property of the group.
Maybe agency, and the power to act, really is a team sport.

Putting collective agency into practice

• For Higher Education Leaders:
  Explore how power, relationships and collective agency shape the way people work together. Swap notes on management challenges and leadership approaches in our monthly online peer support group: Register for the next peer support call.
• For Leadership Teams:
  Want to build the conditions for collective agency, strengthen collaboration across organisational boundaries, or develop managers who can share power and help people navigate complexity? Get in touch with ThenSomehow.
• Free Tools & Next Steps:
  Explore our free Rapid Improvement toolkit to discover how cross-functional teams can work together on live problems, build agency and deliver improvements. You can also try our free 360 feedback tool, AdviceSheet, to gather perspectives on how people experience working together.

The post Why the power to act in HE is a team sport appeared first on ThenSomehow.

The agency crisis is an organisational pattern where university teams are unable to turn strategy into action because institutional culture prefers certainty, central approvals, and complex planning before people feel able to act. Overcoming this requires shifting from top-down control to collective agency, that’s built on psychological safety, individual confidence, and space to experiment.

On this page

• What do we mean by agency?
• Agency is powerful when people act together
• Creating the conditions for agency
• Collective agency in practice
• From ideas to action: practical tools for creating agency
• Rethinking leadership in Higher Education

Spend any amount of time working in Higher Education right now and you’ll hear the same pressures being discussed: financial constraints, changing student numbers and expectations, technological disruption, AI, increasing complexity and the continuing challenge of doing more with less.

There is no shortage of analysis. There are strategies, reviews, consultations, transformation programmes and plans.

And yet, despite all that activity, progress on change can feel remarkably slow.

This isn’t because people don’t see the problems, or because they don’t care about them. More often, it seems to be a consequence of the way universities respond to uncertainty.

When something important needs to change, the instinct is to make the uncertainty safer by adding more structure around it: understand the problem more fully, get alignment, develop the business case, secure sponsors, agree the plan, establish the project and then, eventually, start doing something.

All of those things can be sensible. The difficulty comes when they become prerequisites for action.

In a complex environment, the information you need to decide what to do next often doesn’t exist until you start doing something.

That can leave HE organisations caught in a strange loop: the more uncertain the situation becomes, the more certainty they try to create before acting, even though the action itself may be what generates the information they need.

This is one reason we’ve become increasingly interested in agency in HE: not as another leadership competency, but as a way of understanding what helps people move from seeing a problem to doing something about it.

If this feels familiar, three pieces from our work explore different parts of the problem:

• Why agency is evaporating and what to do about it – looks at what happens when people gradually lose the sense that they can influence what happens around them, and why that can become a systemic problem rather than an individual one.
• Why waiting for certainty keeps change stuck in HE – explores the tendency for people to wait until they feel sufficiently certain, confident or prepared before taking the first step, even when taking that step is what would give them the information they need.
• The fallacy of planning – looks at what can happen when the attempt to create a better plan starts to displace the conversations and experiments that might actually help you understand what needs to happen.

The rest of this guide brings these ideas together, and explores what it might take to create the conditions for more people to act.

What do we mean by agency?

Agency is the capacity to act: to use your judgement, make decisions and do something about the situation you’re in.

It sounds straightforward, but in practice agency is more complex than simply giving people more autonomy.

People often think about agency as though it is something an individual possesses. Someone is confident, capable and willing to take responsibility, so we say they have agency. Someone else is cautious, uncertain or waiting for permission, and we might conclude that they lack it.

But agency isn’t simply something that people possess.

It is shaped by context.

You might be highly confident and capable within your own team, but become much more uncertain when working across a faculty boundary. You might have considerable expertise, but be cautious when the hierarchy around you is particularly pronounced.

The person hasn’t changed.

The context has.

That matters because if you want more agency in your organisation, empowering people isn’t going to be enough. You need to look at the conditions in which people are being asked to act, as well as to the confidence and capability of the people themselves.

In our experience, three conditions seem particularly important:

Safety

Feeling able to speak openly and honestly about what you think and feel, including being able to admit mistakes, ask questions and disagree with authority, especially when it is inconvenient or challenges the prevailing view.

Confidence

Believing that you have something useful to contribute, that your contribution is valued and that you can exercise judgement without letting self-doubt stop you.

Agency

Having enough clarity, authority and room to make choices and act on what you know, rather than constantly waiting for someone else to tell you what to do.

These aren’t three independent ingredients. They interact with one another.

If people don’t feel safe, they may not speak up. If they don’t have confidence, they may defer to someone else even when they have something valuable to add. And if they have neither the authority nor the opportunity to act, safety and confidence don’t get very far.

But agency is more than an individual capability.

It isn’t just something that happens inside a person.

It is shaped by the environment and by what happens between people too: relationships, power, organisational structures and the opportunities people have to act.

And that takes us somewhere slightly different.

Agency is powerful when people act together

Agency is contextual. It is also relational.

Agency is contextual

An individual can have agency in one context and very little in another.

What anyone can do depends partly on who they are working with, the relationships they have, the information available to them, the authority they can draw on and the purpose they are working towards.

This matters particularly in universities because many of the problems that need solving don’t sit neatly within one team or one part of the organisation.

A problem might involve academic colleagues, professional services, different schools and faculties, IT, students and external partners. No one person has all the information, expertise, relationships or authority needed to solve it.

Yet the response can still be to look for someone who does.

And without agency, the organisational response to challenges can be to push the problem upwards ie someone senior needs to make the decision. Someone needs to bring the different stakeholder groups together. Someone needs to sponsor the work. Someone needs to approve it.

Sometimes that’s exactly what is needed. Formal authority matters, and there are decisions that should sit with people who have the responsibility for making them.

But if looking upwards becomes the default response to challenges, people gradually learn that the way to get things done is to find someone with more authority.

That creates dependency.

An alternative is to build the capacity to act together.

Agency is relational

Universities are highly networked organisations, but that doesn’t mean people necessarily know how to use those networks, or feel able to.

There are siloes, competing priorities and boundaries between schools, faculties and professional services can make collaboration difficult, particularly when there is no obvious person whose job it is to bring everyone together or very different understandings of the same problem.

Being able to build relationships, influence others, find shared purpose and bring people together around a problem is not just a useful leadership skill. It is part of an organisation’s capacity to change.

Agency is collective

Collective agency takes this one step further.

People can do things together that none of them could do alone.

Some people bring knowledge of the problem. Others bring technical expertise. Someone has the relationship that opens a door. Someone else has enough influence to bring another group into the conversation.

The power to act doesn’t necessarily sit with any one individual. It can emerge from the connections between them.

But collective agency doesn’t replace individual agency. It extends it.

Collective agency depends on people being willing and able to contribute what they know, exercise their judgement and take some responsibility for what happens next.

We believe this is where coalition building becomes important. A coalition doesn’t require everyone to agree about everything. It needs enough shared purpose for people with different perspectives, expertise and connections to contribute to something that matters to them.

We’ve developed a practical Building Coalitions toolkit that explores some of the mechanics of doing this: what’s needed for a coalition to operate, what to think about when planning them, the various stages and tools you can use to design and prototype solutions, and allow work to move.

We’re developing further thinking about collaborative leadership and collective agency, which we’ll add here as that work develops.

But relationships alone aren’t enough.

People also need to feel able to contribute, challenge what they see and act on what they know.

Creating the conditions for agency

If agency is contextual, relational and collective, what makes it more likely to emerge?

There isn’t a single answer, but three conditions come up repeatedly in our work: people need to feel safe enough to contribute honestly, confident enough to believe their contribution has value, and have enough room to act on what they know.

These conditions are connected, but they are not interchangeable. Someone can feel psychologically safe but have very little scope to act. Someone can have considerable authority but lack the confidence to use it. And a team can have capable, confident people who still struggle to make progress because decisions are concentrated elsewhere.

It is worth looking at each in turn.

i. Psychological safety: can people speak up?

Universities depend heavily on professional knowledge and expertise, yet hierarchy can make it surprisingly difficult for people to say what they actually think.

People may see a problem but decide it isn’t theirs to raise. They may have an idea but assume someone more senior will know better. They may recognise that something isn’t working but stay quiet because previous attempts to challenge the status quo haven’t gone well.

This isn’t necessarily about a lack of courage or commitment.

People learn from the environments around them.

If speaking up tends to result in being dismissed, ignored or labelled as difficult, people will quite reasonably become more cautious about speaking up. And if that happens often enough, the organisation loses access to information it already has.

Psychological safety isn’t about making work comfortable or avoiding disagreement. In practice it is about creating the conditions in which people can ask questions, suggest ideas, challenge, contribute and surface inconvenient information without fearing that doing so will leave them feeling humiliated, rejected or damage their position.

That matters because the information people are least comfortable sharing can sometimes be the information an organisation most needs to hear.

It also has a direct bearing on institutional speed. Problems that are identified early are usually easier to deal with than problems that have been allowed to become embedded, and organisations that can discuss mistakes and what isn’t working are better placed to learn and adapt.

If this is something you’re exploring, these articles look at different aspects of the relationship between safety, challenge and change:

• Why psychological safety is the hidden superpower for organisational change explores why psychological safety matters when organisations need people to speak honestly, challenge assumptions and adapt.
• The conversation you’re avoiding is holding your university team back looks at what happens when difficult conversations are avoided, and how that can leave problems unresolved.
• Trauma-informed leadership in HE: a different way to understand resistance to change is another lens on what may be happening when people find change difficult, rather than treating resistance simply as something to overcome.

ii. Confidence: do people believe they can contribute?

Feeling safe enough to speak is one thing. Believing that what you have to say is worth hearing is another.

Confidence is less about having all the answers and more about having enough self-belief to trust yourself. This affects whether people put forward an idea, offer a different perspective, take a position or step up for something they haven’t done before.

It can be surprisingly fragile in organisations where expertise and authority are strongly associated with hierarchy.

If people’s ideas are routinely dismissed, belittled or simply not listened to by someone senior, they can start to doubt their own judgement. If people are repeatedly criticised when they get something wrong, they may become more cautious about putting themselves forward. And if the safest response is simply to do what has been asked without questioning it, people have fewer opportunities to develop the confidence that comes from exercising their own judgement.

This isn’t about blaming leaders for undermining confidence, or suggesting that people simply need to be more confident. These patterns can emerge gradually, often without anyone intending them to.

Confidence is shaped by experience.

When people have opportunities to contribute, to try things, to get useful feedback and to see that their contribution has made a difference, they have the opportunity to build a more grounded sense of their own capability. Positive feedback matters, not as reassurance for its own sake, but because it gives people evidence that their judgement and contribution have value.

Sometimes that means helping less.

Instead of immediately providing the answer, ask what someone thinks. Instead of taking responsibility for a problem, ask what they think should happen. And when someone does something well, be specific about what you noticed and why it was useful. That kind of feedback can help people recognise their own strengths and become more confident in exercising their judgement.

The aim isn’t to leave people to work things out for themselves. It is to give them enough support and enough room to discover, through experience, that they are capable of more than they may have assumed.

Confidence doesn’t mean feeling certain.

In fact, some of the most useful confidence is the confidence to act while still knowing that you might get something wrong, and to remain open to what you can learn from what happens next.

If you’re interested in how this plays out in leadership and development, these pieces explore some of our thinking:

• Leadership is already in your teams looks at the leadership capability that already exists within teams, and what happens when institutions create more opportunities for that capability to be exercised.
• What if helping less is how you develop your team more? explores the slightly counterintuitive idea that leaders can develop people more effectively by resisting the temptation to solve their problems for them.
• The gap at the heart of leadership development in higher education considers the wider question of how leadership capability develops, and whether taking people away from the work is always the best way to help them become better at leading.

iii. Agency: can people actually act?

Safety and confidence matter, but neither is enough if people still can’t act.

You can have a team that feels able to speak honestly, and individuals who have confidence in their own judgement, but still find that very little happens because decisions are concentrated elsewhere, responsibilities are unclear or every significant step requires another layer of approval.

This is where organisational structures and everyday practices become important.

What we often see in universities is a gap between people being given responsibility and not actually having the conditions to exercise it. Decisions continue to be made centrally or several levels above. Or people may be encouraged to innovate, but find that even relatively small experiments require multiple approvals.

The result is people learn to escalate: when something is difficult, decisions are pushed upwards.

When the system repeatedly teaches people that important decisions sit somewhere above them, seeking permission becomes a rational response.

One alternative is to create more room for local experimentation.

That doesn’t mean abandoning strategy or accountability. It means recognising that, in complex environments, you often discover what the right response is by trying something, seeing what happens and adapting.

A small experiment can generate information that another six months of planning cannot.

The question is not always how to make change happen faster. Sometimes it is about creating enough space for people to take the next useful step, learn from what happens and decide what to do next.

There is a balance here.

Too little freedom and people wait for permission. Too much freedom without clarity can create confusion, duplication or risk.

The task is not to remove structure, but to make the boundaries within which people can act clear enough that they don’t have to keep asking where those boundaries are.

If you’re interested in this way of working, these pieces explore some of the thinking and practice behind it:

• Rapid improvement looks at how groups can work on live problems through small-scale experiments, learning as they go rather than waiting for a perfect solution.
• Slowification provides a useful counterpoint to the idea that agency is about speed. Sometimes deliberately slowing down creates the space to understand the problem, involve the right people and learn properly from what you’re trying.
• Moving Beyond Top-Down Transformation: if change depends entirely on decisions being made at the top, the capacity of the institution to respond will always be constrained by the capacity of the people at the top.
• How distributed leadership can unlock decision-making in universities explores what happens when decision-making is distributed more widely rather than being concentrated at the top.
• From top-down to all-around: the transformation of organisational leadership looks more broadly at what changes when leadership is understood as something that can happen throughout an organisation rather than simply from the centre.

Collective agency in practice

Collective agency can sound abstract until you see it happening.

We’ve seen it develop repeatedly in our rapid improvement work, where groups come together in coalitions to work on problems that affect them directly.

Often, those problems initially appear to require a significant intervention: a new system, a substantial investment or a decision from somewhere higher in the organisation.

Bringing together the people who are actually involved in the work often changes the nature of the problem.

Someone knows how the process really works.
Someone else understands the technology.
Someone has a relationship with another team that needs to be involved.
Someone has tried something similar before.

Once those connections are made, the group doesn’t necessarily produce a perfect solution. It starts somewhere, learns from what happens and changes its approach as it learns.

The important outcome isn’t only the immediate improvement.

People stop thinking about the problem as belonging to another team, another department or another part of the institution.

People discover that they can influence something they previously assumed belonged to somebody else. They discover who else can help. They build relationships across boundaries. They begin to see themselves as people who can make things happen rather than people waiting for someone else to make them happen.

And that has an effect beyond the original problem.

One successful experiment makes another seem possible. A new relationship makes the next cross-boundary conversation easier. Someone who has discovered they can influence one part of the system may be more willing to try somewhere else.

This is what collective agency looks like in practice.

Not a grand programme of empowerment, but people discovering that, together, they can do more than they thought they could.

To explore this way of working in more detail:

Our Rapid Improvement work describes the practical methods we’ve used to support these kinds of projects.

We’re also continuing to develop our thinking around collaborative leadership and collective agency, and we’ll share more of that work in the coming months.

From ideas to action: practical tools for creating agency

Large-scale organisational change often attracts much of the attention in Higher Education.

Strategies are rewritten, structures are redesigned, new initiatives are launched.

But much of what shapes agency is also shaped by everyday practices.

It happens in conversations, in meetings, in the way decisions are delegated and responsibilities are defined.

Are people clear about what they are responsible for? Do they know where they have discretion and where they need to involve others? Are they getting useful feedback? Are leaders delegating responsibility or simply passing on tasks?

These things can sound relatively mundane compared with institutional transformation, but they have a direct effect on whether people feel able to exercise judgement and take responsibility.

We’ve developed a number of practical tools that can help:

Role clarity

People find it difficult to exercise agency when they aren’t clear about what is expected of them, where their responsibility starts and ends, or which decisions they can make themselves.

Take a look at our guide to running a Role Clarity exercise, it looks at some of the questions that help make those boundaries clearer without turning them into another layer of bureaucracy.

Feedback

Feedback can either reinforce dependency or build capability, depending on how it is used.

If feedback simply tells someone what they did wrong, they’re left waiting for the next instruction. But when it helps people understand what happened, what they might try differently and what they can learn, it builds their capacity to judge for themselves.

Our article, How NOT to give feedback to your staff, explores some of the ways feedback can unintentionally undermine development and what to do differently.

Delegation and CPORT

Delegation is often described as a way of freeing up a leader’s time.

But delegation can also create opportunities for people to exercise judgement and take responsibility, provided they are clear about what they are being asked to achieve and the boundaries within which they can act.

Read our CPORT approach to delegation – it provides a simple framework for doing that more deliberately.

Circle of Influence

It is easy to spend time trying to change things that are outside your control, particularly in large organisations where there are plenty of legitimate frustrations.

Circle of Influence is a simple way of shifting the conversation towards what people can actually influence, and what they might do with that influence.

Three Questions

Sometimes the most useful intervention is simply to understand what people need in order to move forward.

Our Three Questions approach gives leaders a straightforward way to explore what’s working, what’s getting in the way and where support might be useful.

None of these tools solve the agency problem on their own.

They’re practical ways of translating ideas about safety, confidence and agency into everyday practice.

Rethinking leadership in Higher Education

We started with a fairly simple observation: universities know a great deal about the challenges they face, yet often struggle to turn that knowledge into movement.

It is tempting to conclude that the answer is better leadership.

Sometimes it probably is.

But the more we work with universities, the less convinced we are that the answer lies simply in asking senior leaders to make better decisions, communicate more clearly or work harder.

The lack of progress within HE is not a consequence of a disinterested workforce.

It is, at least in part, the predictable outcome of structures and habits that have prioritised control over capability.

And yes, formal authority, governance and accountability still matter. There will always be decisions that need to be made by people with particular responsibilities.

But leadership isn’t always about holding the power.

Sometimes it is about creating the conditions in which people have the confidence to exercise their own power, expertise, and the relationships they already have.

So instead of asking: How do I empower people?
you could ask: How do I create the conditions in which people can act together?

That is a different way of thinking about leadership, and it has implications beyond any individual change programme.

If more people can speak honestly about what they see, believe they have something useful to contribute, and have enough room to act, the institution will have more capacity to respond to the changing landscape.

And if those people can connect their agency with others, organisational capacity grows.

Perhaps that is the shift we need to make: from thinking about agency as something we give people, towards distributed leadership and thinking about the conditions that allow agency to emerge.

That doesn’t happen through a single big intervention.

It is more likely to happen through a series of small changes in how decisions are made, how relationships are built, how people are involved and how much room they have to act.

Then, gradually, the organisation becomes a little more capable of responding for itself.

And perhaps that is when change starts to move.

If you’re interested in our approach, this article explores how small steps, experiments and a stronger sense of agency can help HE teams move forward.

Restoring agency and momentum in Higher Education:

• For HE Leaders & Managers: Join our monthly online peer support group to share challenges, swap strategies, and explore ways to build agency across HE peers: Register for the next HE peer support group.
• Free Diagnostic Call: Book a 30-minute diagnostic session to talk through the specific culture and leadership challenges in your institution: Book a 30-min diagnostic call.
• Further Reading: Look beneath the surface of workplace culture with The Iceberg Model or explore How to change culture in your organisation.

The post The Agency Crisis in Higher Education appeared first on ThenSomehow.

How can you reduce workload and burnout in your team?

Burnout in Higher Education and other complex organisations emerges from systemic pressures, not just the volume of tasks. By giving staff the agency to set boundaries, question assumptions, and negotiate priorities, as a manager you can prevent your team from overextending themselves to prop up an unsustainable workload.

If you can find a moment to step back this year, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on how your team works, and why everyone is so exhausted.

Universities are particularly good at creating the conditions where people become exhausted, not because anyone intends it. Nor because leaders are trying to burn people out. It’s an emergent quality of the system.

HE is full of intelligent, capable people who care deeply about what they do. Who want students to succeed, want their colleagues to succeed, want to be helpful and who want to do good work.

Those are exactly the qualities that make universities such rewarding places to work.

They’re also the qualities that make it surprisingly difficult to say no, and then for people to struggle with overload.

The cost of caring

Recent research commissioned by Education Support found that more than half of HE staff are showing signs of probable depression, while almost a third report feeling emotionally drained every day.

The statistics are worrying, but the more interesting question is why that feels so acute right now.

Because there are lots of reasons why saying yes has become the default, and why institutions are creating the perfect conditions for burnout.

Professional Services colleagues are often incredibly aware of the service part of their role. They’re knowledgeable professionals, yet many find themselves culturally conditioned to be endlessly responsive and agreeable. In many institutions, academic primacy and highly structured hierarchies reinforce that dynamic: saying yes can feel like part of the job.

For early-career academics, the dynamics are different but no less powerful. If you’re on a fixed-term contract or uncertain about your future, is it really safe to say no? Becoming indispensable can feel like the sensible strategy.

Then there are the students.

People want to support them because they’re the next generation, and helping them flourish is central to the purpose of universities. At the same time, increasingly we have come to think of students as customers. Those are two very good reasons to keep saying yes.

The shifting ground beneath HE

None of that is new.

What has changed is the context.

Budgets are tighter than they have been for years. Revenue streams feel less certain. Competition for students has intensified. Recruitment freezes and headcount reductions mean many people are covering work that previously sat elsewhere. New regulatory requirements demand ever more monitoring, reporting and accountability. Systems that were merely frustrating when workloads were manageable become exhausting when everyone is already stretched.

And, of course, many people are anxious about job security.

Put all of that together and you have the perfect conditions for your team to compromise other parts of their lives, not because they don’t know how to look after themselves, but because they’re trying to do a good job.

The myth of the finished to-do list

At ThenSomehow, we’ve spent years helping people work smarter. That usually starts with becoming clear about your capacity, creating boundaries and learning how to defend them.

The difficulty is that, in university life, there is always more work than you have time to do.

There is always another meeting, another committee, another proposal, another student needing support. Even when you think you have everything covered, something unexpected pulls the rug from under you: a supplier changes their terms in unacceptable ways with days lost negotiating and researching alternatives, a colleague takes parental leave, a recruitment fails after all that effort. The work never really finishes. In many ways it is the definition of a Sisyphean task. The years roll round inexorably.

When there is more work to do than time available not all of it can get done. If you don’t choose your priorities, circumstances will choose them for you.

That’s why we think autonomy is the ultimate workload reduction tool. Not because it reduces the amount of work, but because it allows people to make better judgements about what matters most.

Reframing expectations with ordinary questions

It starts with surprisingly ordinary questions.

• What time are you going home today?
• How often are you prepared to work late?
• What have you decided won’t get done this week?

Those aren’t questions about working to rule. They’re questions about agency.

It’s amazing what an inescapable deadline can do for productivity. For example, parents collecting children from school become remarkably good at prioritising because there simply isn’t another option. During Covid lockdowns many of us experienced the opposite: without external boundaries, work had a habit of expanding to fill every available hour.

How to help your team reclaim their agency

As managers, we think you have a responsibility to help people reconnect with that sense of agency.

Not by telling them what their boundaries should be, but by creating the conditions where they can make thoughtful decisions for themselves.

That begins by checking assumptions.

One of the patterns we often see is that people assume what’s expected of them without ever testing those assumptions. The system teaches compliance, so questioning can feel uncomfortable.

Questions managers should be asking:

• As a manager, are you exploring those assumptions with your team?
• Are you talking about expectations around availability, priorities and capacity?
• Are you helping people negotiate work, rather than simply absorb it?

Putting on your consulting hat

One of my favourite questions, borrowed from my colleague Moyra, comes just before you agree to a new piece of work from a manager or colleague: “What change are you hoping this will create?”

It’s such a simple question, but it often changes the conversation completely.

Sometimes their request is exactly the right one. Sometimes though there is a better way to achieve the outcome. And sometimes the person asking realises they aren’t actually sure why they need it at all.

That’s what we mean when we suggest putting your consulting hat on: curiosity is often more valuable than compliance.

The same applies when priorities collide. Instead of simply accepting another piece of work, what would happen if someone felt able to say: “I can absolutely do X. It does mean I won’t be able to do Y. Which matters most?”

That’s not being awkward, that’s exercising professional judgement.

Another question for managers is how well you’re equipping your teams to access information and relationships beyond their immediate reporting line.

How often do people comply because they don’t know who to ask?

How often do inefficient workarounds survive because nobody feels able to question them?

Encouraging informal networks across teams and faculties gives people permission to understand the wider system, challenge assumptions and solve problems together rather than simply working around them year after year.

The danger of holding a broken system together

There’s one final thought that is worth reflecting on.

Many people quietly stretch themselves to stop a struggling system from breaking. It’s admirable, but there’s an unintended consequence.

While you’re successfully holding everything together, nobody can see how fragile the system really is.

When you finally can’t hold it any more it breaks – and so do you. It’s only then that the alarm is raised and help arrives. Too late for you. Instead you could consider stepping back, let it break now, and watch the rush of attention and resources the issue suddenly receives, this time before you break.

Sometimes as a manager you accidentally collude with the very problems you’re trying to solve. It is only when something does fail, that organisations finally appreciate the effort that went into holding it together.

Distributed leadership in practice

None of this is about creating a community of rebels, we’re advocating clarity not anarchy.

The clarity to question assumptions. The courage to negotiate priorities. The confidence to exercise professional judgement. And the autonomy to say, “If I do this, I can’t do that.” The right to set boundaries and protect them. Because that’s what distributed leadership looks like in practice.

Ultimately, wellbeing isn’t something that can be handed down through a policy or resilience training initiative. It emerges when people have enough agency to do good work, the confidence to make good decisions and, at the end of the day, go home on time.

If this resonates – and you’re navigating issues of burnout or lack of agency in your team, or change and leadership questions in your institution – here’s how we help:

• Helping teams resolve the dynamics that get in the way of change
• One-to-one mentoring for individuals facing leadership challenges
• Supporting and inspiring cross-functional rapid improvement teams
• Teaching skills for working smarter

We’d be glad to talk about how to support your teams to work together better. Send us a message or book a call here.

The post Why autonomy is the ultimate workload reduction tool appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Alongside ThenSomehow, I co-run a small cider business with my pal Phil.

Phil has a bit of land and a few apple trees, and one autumn about ten years ago we decided it might be fun to make some cider.

We didn’t really know what we were doing. A few school dads turned up, and somehow we ended up with about 60 litres of juice.

It was messy. It was enjoyable. It was a bit of fun.

That first batch eventually turned out to be okay. Not bad but not good either. But it sparked our interest. A friend told us we’d have more luck with a larger fermentation, then sold us some 1,000L tanks and encouraged us to get some proper kit. After much debate, Phil and I bought a press and a scratter. We told ourselves that if it all went wrong we’d sell it and hopefully only lose a bit of money.

We went from 60 to 4,500 litres in one step.

Luckily circumstances worked out: apples kept appearing and there was room in the tanks. Of course, pressing the juice was just the first piece, suddenly we needed a logo, labels, bottles. Then caps. Then boxes.

Only our bottles didn’t fit standard boxes, we needed bespoke ones. Every answer seemed to generate a new question, and require another investment. At this point we hadn’t even got any finished cider!

At no point did we have a grand plan. We weren’t working towards a five-year vision of becoming cider makers. We were simply responding to whatever appeared in front of us next.

Eventually winter turned to spring, the tanks stopped bubbling, and we tasted what we’d made.

Thankfully, it was pretty good and almost by accident we found we had started a business.

Eleven years later we’re still doing it. And there is a community around it that neither of us could have predicted when we started. There are people who bring us apples. People who help us pick. People who come to cider events.

Looking back, it’s easy to tell that story as though we knew where we were heading.

We didn’t. We took a leap and just kept doing the next thing.

Leading change in Higher Education: why transformation often stalls

One of the things that strikes me when working with change in Higher Education is how often people do the exact opposite to that.

A team sees a problem, a process is frustrating, something is wasting time. Everybody agrees it could be better.

And then almost immediately the reasons for not starting begin to appear.

“We need a system…”
“We need approval…”
“We need alignment…”
“We need IT…”
“We need a plan…”
“We need a project…”
“We need someone senior to sponsor it.”

And so the thing that might have been improved gets pulled into a long cycle of waiting.

In hierarchical organisations particularly, people can start to assume they need certainty before they can act. That they need permission before they can experiment. That they need expertise before they can begin.

The result is that uncertainty becomes a reason to pause.

The irony is that most useful change doesn’t begin with certainty at all.

It begins with curiosity. And with somebody deciding to have a look.

What agency looks like in practice: 3 examples from university teams

Over the last few years we’ve supported a number of university teams working on rapid improvement projects. Across all of them, progress happened the moment people stopped waiting for a grand master plan.

1. Solving administrative frustration from the bottom up

One group exploring a problem affecting administrators across multiple departments started with a belief that it would require a major technology investment to solve. The process was consuming huge amounts of time, affecting lots of people, and creating frustration everywhere it touched.

Their original instinct was to build a business case for a new system, for someone else to solve it.

Then somebody asked: why can’t we just fix this ourselves?

So we helped get the people involved into a room and explored what was actually happening.

Much of the problem wasn’t technological at all. Using tools they already had access to – Microsoft Forms, Lists and Power Automate – they were able to create a much simpler admin process. Not perfect, but dramatically better than where they had started.

In the end, the important thing wasn’t the fix they introduced. It was that the group working on it discovered they had more agency than they thought. That they could use that agency to fix other things too.

2. Ditching perfect spreadsheets for OKRs

In another institution we worked with a leadership team that felt disconnected from one another’s priorities. Planning had become a collection of spreadsheets and project lists that nobody could really navigate.

Rather than trying to design the perfect process, they started experimenting with a more conversational approach using OKRs. Just to get them going.

The first version was clunky. Everyone knew it was going to be clunky. But that wasn’t important. They knew they could improve it later.

More importantly, for the first time, people were talking across team boundaries. They could see what other teams were trying to achieve. They could spot overlaps and dependencies.

The process wasn’t successful because it was polished. It was successful because they were willing to start before they knew exactly how it would work. And they learned from that and each year after they made changes and improvements, making it a bit better each time.

3. Organic innovation with AI tools

There was a group at another institution who became interested in whether some AI processing might help with a particular challenge they were facing.

Nobody commissioned the work. Nobody launched a programme.

A couple of people got curious and built something.

At first only a handful of colleagues used it. Then more people became interested. Then managers started asking questions about it.

The thing gained traction because it was useful, not because somebody senior had declared it important.

Across all of these examples the pattern is remarkably similar.

People started without knowing exactly where they would end up. They learned by doing.

Why confidence comes after action (not before)

I think this is the bit we often get backwards. We assume confidence to do things comes first.

Once I’m confident, I’ll act. Once I know enough, I’ll begin. Once I feel ready, I’ll take the leap.

But most of my experience suggests the opposite is true. Action comes first. Then learning. Then confidence.

I say the same thing to people applying for jobs, when their confidence is at a low ebb. The goal isn’t necessarily to get this job. The goal for now might simply be to write an application. Or to get an interview. Or to find out what employers are asking for these days. Not getting that job isn’t a failure, it’s a step on the journey to getting the right job.

Every step gives you information you didn’t have before. Every step changes what you know.

And what you now know changes what feels possible.

You don’t need the answer to begin. You just need to be open to the possibilities.

A core principle: “good enough for now, safe enough to try”

That doesn’t mean throwing caution to the wind. One of the things I’ve learned from working in universities is that the system pushes back when change feels too large or too threatening.

People need time. They need involvement. They need to understand what is happening and why.

If you try to force something through, the system often rejects it.

Which is why I find myself coming back again and again to a simple question when leading change in higher education: what’s the smallest thing you could do that is good enough for now and safe enough to try?

Not the perfect solution. Not the finished product. Just the next step.

The one that teaches you something. The one that generates information. The one that helps you understand the problem a little better than you did yesterday.

Then somehow…

Looking back, our cider business started that way. My consultancy business, ThenSomehow, started that way too.

Culture Catalyst – one of our successful culture analysis tools, now called Cultural Conversations – started that way. Most of the things I’ve been involved in that have gone on to matter started with a degree of uncertainty and a willingness to act anyway.

Not blindly, just without needing to know the endpoint before beginning the journey.

Institutions don’t change because somebody produces a better plan.

They change because enough people discover they have more agency than they thought.

The jump, in my experience, is rarely a dramatic moment. It’s usually a series of small steps that only look obvious in hindsight.

You don’t need the full picture to begin. You just need something that’s good enough for now and safe enough to try.

Then somehow, it becomes something.

A question for your team

If you’re leading change in higher education, what’s one thing in your team, department or institution that everyone agrees could be better, but nobody has started because the solution feels too big, too complicated, or requires someone else’s permission?

What’s the smallest next step that might be good enough for now and safe enough to try?

You don’t need to solve the whole problem. You just need to learn something you don’t know yet.

How ThenSomehow supports Higher Education leaders

At ThenSomehow we help leaders, teams and institutions navigate change, culture and complexity. Our work creates the conditions for better conversations, stronger relationships and more effective collaboration, particularly during periods of uncertainty and transformation.

If you’re exploring how to support teams through change in your institution, we’d be happy to talk – get in touch here.

The post Leading change in Higher Education: why waiting for certainty keeps change stuck appeared first on ThenSomehow.

It’s a counterintuitive question, but a critical one for any leader in HE.

Because often the instinct to help comes from a desire to create clarity and momentum. Yet, according to data from Gallup, only about 50% of workers strongly agree that they know what is expected of them.

When role clarity is lacking, problems inevitably gravitate upward. With the best of intentions, it is incredibly easy to become the ‘Fixer-in-Chief’ – the person every decision depends on.

Most leaders in HE do not set out to create dependency.

In fact, the opposite is usually true: they want capable, confident teams who can take ownership and move work forward without constant oversight.

Yet, many leaders find themselves pulled into more and more meetings, not because they want to be there, but because things do not seem to move without them.

However, if ownership is unclear and feedback is in short supply, then helping more can become part of the problem rather than the solution. This leads to the creation of bottlenecks and a reduction in agency.

A leadership trap: when helping becomes a bottleneck

This bottleneck dynamic builds through a series of small, reasonable interventions.

A colleague brings a problem; you offer advice. A piece of work is drifting; you step in to get it back on track. A decision needs to be made; you make it to avoid delay.

In the moment, it feels like good leadership. The work progresses, the issue is resolved, and the team is supported. But over time, these rescues shape expectations.

People begin to defer decisions they could have made themselves. You find yourself solving more problems while your team learns less from them.

Each time you step in, you inadvertently remove a potential learning moment.

Psychologists call this the Parent-Child dynamic. When you act as the protective, omniscient Parent who fixes every problem, you inadvertently force highly capable adults into the role of dependent children. Breaking this cycle isn’t just about changing tasks, it’s about shifting the psychological contract.

Stepping back entirely is not the answer, but continuing to step in, in the same way, tends to reinforce the pattern.

Why decision-making isn’t the real problem in HE

Leaders across many organisations often tell us they step in because in their minds there is a problem with decision-making. Decisions take too long, they say, too many people are involved, or issues are repeatedly escalated.

But if we ask about specific examples, the real issue usually turns out to be that colleagues have a lack of role clarity and don’t believe they have ownership.

Because it is often not clear where the bounds of someone’s authority sits, or who makes the decision when there is a choice to be made.

Especially when projects bring together people from different functions. If the roles within the project itself have not been explicitly defined then decisions are passed upward not because people are unwilling to take responsibility, but because the limits of their territory make them reluctant to make asks of people in other teams.

Navigating the complex web of a modern HE organisation

The problem is not a lack of skill.

In the complex web of HE – where professional services, academics, and policy teams overlap – people are often afraid of treading on toes or embarrassing a stakeholder. They don’t have the license to operate autonomously. Escalation becomes a safety mechanism.

The consequence is that senior people are drawn into operational detail, and the organisation becomes more dependent on them than it needs to be.

When politeness smothers expertise in university culture

We recently worked with a professional services team – highly capable experts in their field – who had fallen into this trap. Because a feature of HE is a hierarchical culture that values people being agreeable, the team had become chronic ‘order-takers.’ When senior colleagues requested a specific output, the team delivered exactly what was asked for. Out of deference to the formal authority of their requesting colleague, they didn’t ask the purpose of the request or enquire about the desired outcome.

And similarly they didn’t engage their technical expertise, which could have identified that what was being asked for wouldn’t actually solve the underlying issue.

Out of a desire to be helpful and polite, they were effectively squashing their own expertise.

The consequence? Senior leadership began to view them as middle-of-the-road and uninspired, unaware that the team was just politely executing flawed briefs.

Worse, the senior leadership were right.

Everyone was being perfectly nice, yet the organisation was starved of the very expertise it needed.

High support vs. healthy jeopardy: moving teams from fragility to confidence

This reality can expose a dilemma for HE leaders. When you inherit a team that is underconfident, fragile, or used to lying low, you may find yourself paralysed by conflicting and valid leadership instincts.

You want to shield them from potential harm from the organisation’s impatience or institutional politics. You also want them to recognise their jeopardy and step up. How do you move them from fragility to confidence?

Ultimately protection without stretch only breeds further fragility.

In many HE cultures, accountability is an alarming idea. Leaders and managers fear that blunt feedback will cause a backlash or induce panic. But leaving expectations fuzzy isn’t a kindness – it’s a disservice.

If a team doesn’t realise that the organisation is losing patience with their lack of initiative, they will continue to quietly operate under the radar until a crisis hits.

Your job as leader or manager is not to eliminate all jeopardy, but to introduce healthy friction and compassionate clarity.

We have to stop protecting our teams from the organisation and start equipping them to lead within it. That means being honest about where they are falling short, while providing the safety net they need to raise their game.

Case study: building agency through cross-functional coalitions

Recently we’ve been supporting teams with Rapid Improvement Projects. These are great models for helping people find their own agency.

In these projects the issue being addressed is interdependent with elements of the work linking across multiple teams. No team has responsibility for the end to end process.

Example: streamlining student deadline extensions

One example addressed time-intensive manual processes resulting from student requests for deadline extensions. Identifying an intervention that saved time and improved the student experience meant understanding the needs and constraints of different schools, institutional policies, IT resources and infrastructure, communications, and multiple academic and professional services teams.

Navigating that complexity was made easier when people formed a multidisciplinary team, to listen carefully, build networks, manage politics and resourcing and roll their sleeves up. Success required pragmatism, compromise and the willingness to engage with ambiguous (or no) authority.

As well as delivering an improvement, the project team members learned so much and their confidence and capability grew. I remember in one project a member of the group said coming to the meeting was like arriving home, it was where they felt safest, where they belonged. I was surprised by how much the project had shaped their sense of themselves and how it was different, better, in the project space than in their ‘day’ job.

The Manager’s Toolkit: designing an environment for agency

So instead of telling people to step up, what is needed is an environment where stepping up is possible and politically safe. This means moving away from simply making the decision, solving the problem, giving instructions, and toward giving people the safety, space and confidence to do so themselves.

This is an opportunity to shift towards Adult–Adult relationships – where responsibility is shared, expectations are explicit, and people are supported to act within a clear frame, rather than waiting for permission.

The question to ask yourself, the experiments to run, are about what you might do or say differently to help your colleagues spend more time in the appropriate quadrant.

The simple answer is to say that when expectations are clear, authority is understood, and support is available, people are more able to decide, act, and take responsibility.

When those conditions are absent, hesitation and escalation are entirely rational responses.

And it’s also worth saying: the truth is expectations are rarely clear, or they are in conflict. Authority often needs to be dismantled, borrowed or adapted: it is often fuzzy, fickle and ambiguous. And that can actually be useful because there is more room for manoeuvre than org charts imply. Support isn’t a given, it’s an emergent quality of relationships with managers, co-workers, good chairing in meetings, allyship, managing conflict safely.

6 Prompts to create the conditions for agency

Before your next delegation or 1-to-1, here are some prompts to help you think through alternate ways to engage that could help you build agency. These questions won’t give you a formula, but they might open up a different kind of conversation:

1. Where is this person starting from in the quadrant? [Or in the parent-child dynamic]
2. What assumptions are they making about themselves, you, this situation, colleagues needs?
3. How would you like them to be showing up and contributing?
4. What small steps might help them get closer to that?
5. Given that, what might be a good contribution for you to make?
6. What might be the consequence of doing what you always do in this situation?

From offering answers to conditions

Every time you solve a problem for someone, you might be stealing a chance for them to grow.

The goal isn’t to be hands-off, but to be hands-on with the conditions (the safety, the clarity, and the political license), so you can be hands-off with the tasks.

The next time a problem lands on your desk, ask yourself: am I helping them progress the work, or am I helping them progress their ability to do the work?

In the complex, ambiguous, messy, creative, wondrous world of Leadership in HE, it is less about being the source of all answers and more about creating the space where answers can be found by those who actually create the value.

Working with leadership teams in Higher Education

At ThenSomehow we help leaders, teams and institutions navigate change, culture and complexity. Our work creates the conditions for better conversations, stronger relationships and more effective collaboration, particularly during periods of uncertainty and transformation.

If you’re exploring how to support teams through change in your institution, we’d be happy to talk – get in touch here.

The post What if helping less is how you develop your HE team more? appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Why do people react so differently to change?

Some workplace behaviours can seem irrational until you understand what sits behind them.

An HE client we worked with recently had become hesitant to ask basic questions about their (hefty) expenses, which were taking months to recover. To them it seemed safer not to ask, even though they had the stress of juggling mortgage payments and credit card interest as a result.

On the surface, it didn’t make much sense. The query itself was entirely reasonable.

But this person had seen colleagues disappear overnight – leaving one day and not returning the next, with little explanation. Over time this created a kind of learned caution. They avoided drawing attention. They didn’t ask. Raising even a simple question began to feel risky.

Not because of the nature of the issue, but because of a loss of safety and predictability that made asking anything feel dangerous.

What can look like resistance, disengagement, or even incompetence makes perfect sense when you recognise that there may be a context you can’t see.

That story came back to me recently when I was completing a bid application and found myself staring at a question asking whether our practice was “trauma-informed”.

I had no immediate answer, and I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.

So I looked it up.

There’s a growing body of thinking around trauma-informed practice. It appears in NHS guidance, local authority services and UK government materials.

What struck me though wasn’t the definition. It was the realisation that this was describing something we are already doing.

When you work in HE, it’s not difficult to see why a trauma-informed approach to leadership might matter.

I can think of clients who have gone through five restructures in ten years. Others who have reduced their headcount by 20% in one cycle. Teams that have been together for 20 years, broken apart. Change processes that have resulted in grievances and counter-grievances lasting years. And, in some cases, teams dealing with death and loss during the period we’ve been working with them.

If you’ve seen anything like this in your organisation, it’s likely that there is trauma present in the system.

Before digging into this further, this isn’t an excuse to pathologise, judge or “fix” people. Sometimes trauma comes from outside, sometimes from inside our organisational systems, and the ways we work can help or make it worse.

And I am noticing that this keeps showing up in our leadership work. It feels important to try and make sense of it.

Why trauma-informed leadership matters in Higher Education right now

Higher Education is operating in a context of ongoing change and uncertainty. When that’s combined with the impact of past experience, it can lead to unexpected responses that might be misinterpreted, and patterns of reaction and counter-reaction that can be difficult for everyone involved.

Many leaders talk about “resistance to change”, a catch-all term that implicitly blames “them” for not playing along, without understanding or valuing their lived experience.

For instance, have you ever noticed any of these happening?

• Strong reactions to relatively small things
• Silence where you might expect challenge
• Disproportionate responses to reasonable proposals
• Conflict avoidance leading to over-compliance

It’s easy to interpret such behaviours as resistance, attitude or poor performance.

And sometimes that might be the right interpretation. Sometimes though there is something else going on.

One way of making sense of that is through a trauma-informed lens.

Reframing behaviour: a lens, not a solution

At the heart of trauma-informed thinking is a simple shift in perspective: you have no idea what people are carrying.

Research – including studies on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) – suggests that trauma is not rare. In fact the opposite. It is statistically common, with around 60% of adults reporting significant adversity during childhood.

And that’s before you even consider what happens in adult working life.

So it’s reasonable to assume that in almost every team there will be lived experience of trauma present in some form, whether it is visible or not.

And it is not only personal histories that matter. Organisations can generate traumatic conditions too.

Repeated restructures. Job insecurity. Lack of transparency. Ongoing uncertainty. Systems that shift faster than people can absorb. These conditions shape how safe work feels.

There is growing evidence for this too, linking organisational conditions with job strain and stress-related outcomes. For example a 2-year study of Dutch health care employees found a strong relationship between jobs with high demands and low control, and psychosomatic sickness and absence.

However this is not about diagnosing people. It’s about shifting from a question of: “what’s wrong with them?” to: “what might they be responding to?”

That might be the conditions you’ve created. It might be physical exhaustion. It might be something carried from elsewhere in life. Or it might be all of these things at once.

A key point here is that this is a lens, not the lens.

Not everything is trauma. Poor performance still exists. Capability matters. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one.

Trauma-informed leadership is not clinical expertise.

It is a practice of attention.

What trauma-informed leadership looks like in practice

When you start looking through a trauma-informed lens, you can sometimes make sense of reactions that initially seem surprising.

Example one: when consultation becomes a trigger

One client was working through a change process. In hindsight, they were probably rushing it and their consultation was a little performative.

The strength of feeling they encountered shocked them and sent them running for the hills. Communication broke down and we were asked to help.

Part of the anger came from a belief that the bosses weren’t really listening, and weren’t interested in hearing opposing views. A genuine safety concern was also being ignored.

That alone didn’t explain the intensity of the response.

It was layered onto a series of previous change processes that had already felt brutal, alongside a range of personal issues that created a perfect storm of frustration, grief and anxiety.

The consultation became the trigger point through which all of that exploded.

Example two: learned caution

The expenses story at the start of this article is more mundane, but perhaps more revealing.

The individual avoided drawing attention. They didn’t ask. They stayed quiet. They complied.

Not because of the nature of the issue, but because previous experiences had taught them that visibility might not be safe.

Example one describes an immediate shock.

Example two describes a slow burn.

Both make more sense in the context of past trauma.

Turning the lens inward

One of the more uncomfortable parts of this is that it doesn’t just apply to other people.

As leaders, we are not neutral in these systems.

We bring our own histories, anxieties, fragilities, even our shame into how we respond.

I was reminded of this recently after spending some time with my mother.

When I was 20, she made a decision to return to Germany. At the time, I supported it without hesitation. But the consequences of that decision have played out in ways I hadn’t fully registered.

On one visit, I found myself getting unexpectedly wound up trying to make sure she cooked food that my children could eat.

What I realised was that I’d stumbled into some unresolved anger about her decision to leave the UK all those years ago.

At a rational level, I understood her choice to leave. At an emotional level, it still has charge.

We often assume people are responding to what is happening now, when they may be responding to something from layers underneath.

And if we don’t have some awareness of our own triggers – the places where we become defensive, overly certain, or reactive – we are more likely to blunder.

The unintended consequence of venting my frustration with my mother was that everyone got upset. It was awkward for my family. I had to explain it all to my mum. There were tears and regrets.

In a work context this might show up as shutting conversations down, escalating conflict, or moving too quickly to judgement.

What trauma-informed leadership actually looks like

As a leader, none of this requires you to become a therapist.

It’s not about that.

In a similar way to our article on agency and leadership, this is about recognising the possibility of trauma and consciously working to create conditions in which people can think, contribute and make sense of what is happening around them.

A few simple shifts can help:

Assume sensitivity, not robustness

People are not all in the same place. Change is experienced unevenly. You may have been thinking about a change for weeks and already processed something that others are just encountering for the first time.

Create safety in small interactions

Are you aware of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of you? This is particularly important when something is at stake – giving feedback, responding to challenge, or communicating uncertainty. Do people feel shut down, exposed or rushed? Or do you allow space for them to think, respond and stay engaged?

Acknowledge reality, don’t smooth it over

Naming what is happening – even when it is difficult – can help. Acknowledging people’s experience, recognising it as real, relevant and significant matters. Forced positivity or premature closure often does the opposite.

Give agency where you can

Even small amounts of choice and involvement matter, especially in uncertain environments.

Pay attention to the system, not just the individual

Workload, fairness, transparency and organisational memory all shape how safe people feel. In many institutions none of that has been wholly positive for a while.

When this lens becomes particularly useful

There are certain situations where it is worth consciously holding a trauma-informed lens.

• Periods of significant change.
• Moments where reactions feel out of proportion.
• Silence where you would expect challenge.
• And those times where you find yourself becoming unusually defensive or impatient.

The risk of not considering this lens is that you may default too quickly to an easy judgement – labelling something as resistance, attitude or poor performance – and respond in a way that unintentionally escalates the situation.

In some cases, that can reinforce the very conditions that made the response more likely in the first place.

A necessary word of caution

A trauma-informed approach is not a silver bullet. It doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t replace other explanations.

And if you start over-interpreting and seeing trauma everywhere, you’ll lose clarity rather than gain it.

Sometimes behaviour is about capability.
Sometimes it is about disagreement.
Sometimes it is simply about fit.

And you will get it wrong.

But it does change the starting point. It helps you stop making everything about you, and
it encourages curiosity before judgement, context before conclusions, and understanding before intervention.

What this enables

When this lens is useful, it tends to create a few shifts in leadership practice.

Things slow slightly. Judgement turns into curiosity. You may become more aware of what has shaped people’s reactions.

And perhaps most importantly, it helps you recognise something quite simple: if you are leading change, you might already be through it, while others are just beginning to experience it.

That gap in timing can easily create misattunement, which is often where tension arises.

Questions for reflection

A few prompts that can help create space for reflection:

• How might someone’s reaction make more sense if you questioned your assumptions?
• What situations cause you to react strongly, or unexpectedly?
• Where might your organisation be creating unnecessary uncertainty or fear?
• Where has acknowledgement been missed?
• Where could you offer a little more agency?

You don’t need to know the answers to lead well.

But increasing your awareness of what might be going on beneath the surface can help.

And perhaps the simplest question is this: what have you seen handled well?

Further reading

Here are some links to further resources, including info on organisations who offer grounded, principled guidance.

Working with leadership teams in Higher Education

At ThenSomehow we help leaders, teams and institutions navigate change, culture and complexity. Our work creates the conditions for better conversations, stronger relationships and more effective collaboration, particularly during periods of uncertainty and transformation.

If you’re exploring how to support teams through change in your institution, we’d be happy to talk – get in touch here.

The post Trauma-Informed Leadership in HE: A Different Way to Understand Resistance to Change appeared first on ThenSomehow.

The quiet loss of agency in Higher Education

There’s a common frustration that we hear from many leaders in HE: why won’t colleagues step up? Why does every decision get pushed upwards? Why do team members wait to be told what to do?

None of this is unusual. In fact, it’s a rational response to the environment people find themselves in.

Repeated restructures, frequent leadership turnover, top-down decision making, cycles of cost-cutting, power structures, and ongoing uncertainty about the future all play a part.

Over time, taking the initiative becomes risky, while waiting for permission becomes the safer option.

When agency is missing, it isn’t because people lack ability. It’s because the system has shaped behaviour to suppress it. And if that’s the case, then trying to unlock agency by simply encouraging people to take it tends not to have much impact.

You need to change the conditions in which people are working.

What agency actually looks like in teams

When we talk about agency – the ability to make decisions and act independently – we don’t mean in an abstract way. It appears in practical ways when people feel able and allowed to improve things.

You can spot it when:

• people suggest ideas rather than waiting for instructions
• problems get fixed locally rather than endlessly escalated
• teams experiment, learn and iterate
• individuals feel ownership of their work

Small signals, big impact

Agency isn’t dramatic. Often it looks quite ordinary in small improvements and small decisions. But taken together, it changes the feel of a team.

Importantly, agency doesn’t appear because someone has been told to take ownership. In fact, that instruction can sometimes have the opposite effect, particularly in systems where people have learned that acting without permission carries risk: “You want me to take ownership? You want me to stick my neck out? You want me to take the fall when it goes wrong?”

Instead, agency seems to emerge spontaneously when the conditions are right.
It has to be safe enough.
It has to feel equitable.
And it has to be within the person or team’s sphere of influence.

These conditions can be hard to create in HE right now, when job security feels low, when reorganisations leave many over-burdened and the challenges being faced seem to be structural and monumental in scale.

Three practical ways to unlock agency

Here are three ways to try creating those conditions for people to take up their agency:

i. Invite people into the problem

In our work we often come across teams that have never been asked to think strategically about the challenges.

I had a conversation with a client recently who had been asked to review the efficiency of their workflows, to help them do more with less. They enlisted the help of their team: “If we were asked to redesign our processes, what options might exist?” they asked.

Instead of going straight to the answer, the team explored a spectrum:

• Do nothing
• Tweak processes
• Partial redesign
• Full rebuild.

The team’s feedback from this exercise was marked: no one had ever asked them to think like this before, and they really engaged with the task. They felt ownership of their recommendations and were motivated to make some changes, including initiating conversations with other teams to set up some trial ways of working.

Once people begin exploring a problem, they inhabit it. Research consistently shows that involving employees in problem-solving increases engagement and performance because people are far more committed to solutions they help shape.

That shift is subtle: it’s not about dictating solutions, but about creating space for them to think and act.

ii. Make it safe to share imperfect work

A common barrier to agency is when people hesitate to share work until it’s finished and perfect. Previous experiences may have taught them that sharing something incomplete can lead to criticism, confusion, or extra work.

Leaders, on the other hand, can find themselves frustrated that they’re only seeing things at a late stage, when changes are harder to make and their feedback might feel like too much too late.

What it does

One small intervention we’ve seen in use is the ‘scrappy first draft’: explicitly labeling early drafts as rough and intended to surface ambiguity, invite early feedback and remove the fear of criticism. They are straw models for breaking down and rebuilding.

Why it works

The ‘scrappy first draft’ works when everyone understands it’s part of a process, where leaders clarify what they want, peers chip in ideas and everyone knows the initial feedback is formative.

No one minds when this version gets a radical overhaul – that’s what it is for.

But everyone needs to be explicit that this version is the Scrappy First Draft. Without that context, early drafts can backfire – people expecting something more formed might panic, take on the work themselves or lash out. Others may feel criticised, frustrated, or unsure of expectations.

Research from Google’s Project Aristotle highlights that psychological safety is the number one factor in high-performing teams—people need to feel safe to take risks, including sharing incomplete ideas.

It’s worth overexplaining to colleagues: signal clearly what you want, and what the draft is for.

iii. Start with small improvements

A third way to cultivate agency is to give people small manageable problems to fix or improve, and give them the freedom to solve that problem as they see fit.

The work doesn’t need to be monumental – the goal is to enable people to experiment and discover what they can achieve. In so doing, they’ll release their own agency.

For example, we recently supported a cross-faculty coalition to improve a single administrative process: one form with a fair amount of manual handling used across multiple faculties and hundreds of modules. A small project to fix, but lots of stakeholders with differing needs, policy implications and student wellbeing at the heart of it. Instead of waiting for a major system overhaul, they got the right people in the room, made use of existing tools, built a simple prototype, tested it quickly, learned and iterated.

The results were tangible: time saved, relationships strengthened, and individuals discovering previously unrecognised skills. The prototype itself was good enough and safe enough to have an impact until something more formal could be built.

More importantly, the mindset shift was profound, the coalition team started to believe “We can fix things around here.”

The real benefit wasn’t the process improvement – it was the emergent sense of agency, the confidence to experiment, and the collective momentum that followed. It demonstrated, in a very practical way, that change was possible.

In fact, the team were eager to tackle the next problem.

So give teams:

• A contained problem
• Autonomy to solve it
• Permission to experiment

Why this matters now in universities

All of this sits within a wider context. Universities are dealing with financial pressure, changing expectations from students, and rapid shifts in technology. It’s understandable then that the focus often turns to cost reduction, structural change, and tighter control.

But these responses carry an unintended consequence: they reduce the very capability institutions need most – the ability of teams to adapt, improve, and solve problems locally. It’s less safe, there’s less capacity and time, and less freedom to operate.

The hidden cost of control

When decision-making becomes more concentrated, and uncertainty remains high, the system inadvertently teaches people to wait, to defer, to hold back.

And that rapidly reduces the organisation’s ability to respond well.

Here’s a related example.

A client in a senior role shared their PDR with me. The role carried a lot of responsibility across a very broad range of activities. Reading the PDR made me feel a bit twitchy. One KPI in particular really made me nervous: “Zero reports of health and safety breaches. No remedial actions required.” On the surface, that reads as success.

When teams are smaller, pressure higher, the desire for control in the face of ambiguity so much stronger, this sounds like exactly the thing we want – no safety breaches, no additional work needed to put things right.

But what kind of behaviour might this encourage? If zero reports are what’s wanted, that’s most likely what you’ll get. No near misses, no lessons learned, no incremental improvements. No conversations, no shared responsibility, no expectation of fixing it. No agency taken.

In practice, framing an outcome of ‘no mistakes’ often discourage reporting, hides learning opportunities, and reinforces risk-avoidance. When people fear consequences, problems go underground instead of being addressed early.

A more enabling measure would be regular reporting of near misses and rapid remediation – creating a culture that would make learning safer, more visible, and iterative. Airing problems together motivates people to fix them. And in this case, would ensure that major problems were solved more quickly.

The systemic nature of the problem

There are plenty more ways we gently drain our collective agency. Siloed, hierarchical structures, committee-based decision making, and the primacy of academic over professional services can all contribute.

Creating protected spaces for agency

So what can you do?

In practice in our work with clients, we strive to create a protective ‘bubble’ around a project: a space safe enough for experimentation, shielded from misinterpretation or hierarchical encroaching. It’s easy for us, as external consultants, to carry some of the risk – we are visible reminders of the senior sponsorship of the project.

Even then, those spaces are fragile. A junior colleague might try to build a network and be met with suspicion, simply for reaching out. Or constructive suggestions in a project may be misread by a senior observer, threatening the momentum. Culture has a way of self-correcting – often in ways that inhibit initiative rather than reward it. When the choice is experienced as between control and risk, it’s understandable why many of us default to the former.

These dynamics are systemic, not about blame. The solution is careful, sustained cultivation: creating small, safe spaces for agency, monitoring the system for points of friction, and being ready to respond and ‘reinflate’ bubbles when the system pushes back in an effort to maintain the status quo.

The three tools to unlock agency described above can help with that.

A better question for leaders

With all this in mind, here’s an alternative to the leadership frustration I mentioned at the start. Instead of asking: “Why won’t my team take more initiative?”, a better question might be: “What conditions would make initiative feel safe and worthwhile?”

Agency isn’t something that can be required. It tends to emerge – gradually – when the conditions support it.

And when it does, the effect can be cumulative. Small shifts in behaviour, building over time, leading to something more adaptive, and more capable, than any single intervention driven by a Leader could produce.

If this resonates – and you’re navigating change, culture shifts, or leadership questions in your institution – we’d be glad to talk about how to support your teams to work together better. Send us a message or book a call here.

The post Why agency is evaporating in university teams – and what to do about it appeared first on ThenSomehow.

If you work in Higher Education, you will probably recognise this pattern. Universities invest significant time and money in leadership development. Programmes are commissioned. Cohorts attend workshops. Participants often enjoy them and report positive experiences. And yet, when people return to work, many institutions see little shift in how decisions are made, how teams collaborate, or how change actually happens.

This is not because leadership development is pointless. But there is a growing gap between how leadership is developed and how universities actually function.

The context matters here. UK Higher Education is operating under sustained pressure and uncertainty. The Office for Students reports that around 45% of universities are forecasting deficits.

In England, universities now receive roughly two-thirds of the real-terms funding per student that they did a decade ago – a gap of around £6.4bn across the sector – forcing institutions to do more with less while navigating digital change, workload concerns and organisational restructuring

In this context, leadership has become harder, not easier. Many of the challenges leaders face today are not technical problems with clear solutions, but relational, behavioural and organisational challenges: leading through uncertainty, working across boundaries, and helping teams function well under pressure.

And yet much leadership development still assumes organisations are stable, predictable places where leadership is primarily about knowledge, models and individual capability.

And a faculty leader said something to me last year that might sound familiar:
“We estimate around 150 people across the institution could benefit from leadership and management development. But we’ve only been offered two places on the existing programme.”

Across HE, there is a genuine hunger to develop current and future leaders and managers. But programme places are limited. Costs are high. Access can feel rationed. Even where participation is strong, institutions are not always seeing the shift they hoped for.

The myth of leadership with a big ‘L’

One of the quiet assumptions still shaping much leadership development is the idea of Leadership with a capital L – something located in a role and often heroic in nature. Leadership that knows the answers, can predict the future and provide the comforting certainty we all crave.

There are some examples of that on the left of this table:

So when people come away from leadership programmes believing title + course certificate = everything you need to do the job well, discovering none of that works in the real world is discomforting for the individual and even more so for the people they hope to lead.

Instead real leadership comes with a small ‘l’ and shows up in micro-bursts:

• In a corridor conversation that unblocks a project
• In how people in a meeting handle disagreement
• In whether a colleague feels able to name what is not working, or ask a question<

It’s the difference between leadership as a noun and leadership as a verb. Small ‘l’ leading is all about what you do, not what you are.

Because leading is a behaviour, not a job title.

Leadership in HE is profoundly behavioural and relational, and it’s happening everywhere in every interaction that builds trust, confidence, clarity, safety.

And yet so many programmes still implicitly treat leadership as something that can be installed through the right combination of frameworks, 360s and intensive workshops.

There is useful learning in all of those things. But the gap between theory and practice is wide.

For example a client of mine who had completed an L5 leadership apprenticeship programme shared their disquiet at some of the course content:
“I loved the stuff about difficult conversations, communication styles and personality types. Some of it just seemed like common sense, but in some modules there was an implicit treatment of human beings as ‘resources’ or cogs in the machine that seemed off to me.”

It is a bit like learning to drive. Passing the theory test is not the same as driving in traffic. Capability only develops through practice, feedback, and growing confidence over time.

Leadership development that doesn’t connect to the real work and experiences of participants risks stopping at the equivalent of the driving theory test.

To explain this further, I love these two models of organisations. The one on the left is what much theory pretends is real. The one of the right hints at the actual reality. Leadership development needs to embrace that complexity.

A desire to reduce things to simple ‘truths’ fails us because life, and work, it turns out, is messy, chaotic and unpredictable.

Why the assumption persists

If this mismatch is reasonably well understood, why do traditional models of leadership development persist?

Partly because they offer emotional and organisational comfort.

Structured programmes feel rigorous. They are defensible. They are controllable. A seven-step framework gives the reassuring sense that leadership capability can be built methodically and safely.

By contrast, approaches that emphasise feelings, needs, identity, experimentation and iteration can feel – especially in complex institutions – challenging.

Steve Hearsum captured this dynamic well in No Silver Bullet: organisations can, sometimes unintentionally, collude in the myth that the right model will unlock the change they need.

But leadership in universities is rarely that linear.

Leadership doesn’t live in a classroom

Another of the quiet assumptions behind many programmes is that leadership can be meaningfully developed away from the work itself.

But when participants return to their institutions, they step straight back into the same meetings, the same pressures, the same informal norms about what is and isn’t safe to say.

What made sense in the classroom is multidimensionally more complicated in the real world.

What we should be emphasising in development programmes is practising the relational skills and behavioural habits that have the most impact. Then taking that into the field.

Because leading is not easy. It is shaped by identity, confidence and — crucially — context. When development happens in isolation from the relational realities of the workplace, its impact has limits.

We need to equip people to deal with stuff that’s real like:

• Rewiring committee processes that slow decisions
• Flipping the quiet ‘waiting for approval’ culture that stalls initiative
• Flushing out bureaucracy slop where the process has become more important than the outcome
• Calling out poor behaviours in peers and leaders

We all recognise these leadership challenges. It’s not a knowledge or visibility issue. Most people involved understand perfectly well what’s wanted. Making it happen is considerably harder.

Shifting the relational patterns and risk calculations that shape behaviour in the moment. That’s what leaders could usefully learn how to do.

Leadership development that does not engage with these lived dynamics risks missing the point – however well designed it is.

A different approach

Over the past few years, we have been exploring a different approach.

Not a replacement for all formal development, and certainly not a silver bullet. More a living experiment grounding leadership learning in real work and real relationships.

Two design principles have mattered most.

1. First, scalability and accessibility.
   If leadership capability truly lives throughout the institution, development needs to reach beyond small cohorts of nominated senior or high-potential participants.
2. Second, mindset shift.
   Less focus on acquiring theoretical leadership knowledge, and more on developing leadership as a practice embedded in day-to-day work.

It is worth saying that this approach is not universally loved.

In one pilot, around 70% of participants found it energising and highly relevant. But 30% did not. In fact they hated it. That ‘Marmite’ pattern was instructive.

Some colleagues are understandably looking for clarity, structure and prescription: “just tell us what to do”. Many traditional programmes provide exactly that reassurance.

But if the goal is adaptive capacity in complex environments, the work needs to be a little more alive – and a little less tidy.

What actually makes a difference

From what we are observing, traditional leadership content is not useless. Conceptual clarity still matters.

But sustained growth in capability tends to come from a different mix:

• Practising listening in live situations
• Handling difficult conversations earlier and more directly
• Surfacing unspoken needs within teams
• Working collaboratively and in safety on real institutional challenges
• Iterating and adapting and learning in the flow of work

As an illustration, we were recently working with a cross-institution group exploring how meetings were functioning in order to make them more effective. Most participants arrived with visibly low expectations, sitting with arms folded and a “how soon can I get out of this?” look on their faces. They were braced for the standard lecture on ‘good practice’ and ‘proven’ leadership models.

But we didn’t do that. Instead, we started a genuine inquiry into their actual experiences, inviting their best guesses on why things were stalling and holding a space where different points of view could be aired.

When the group realised we weren’t there to lecture, but to facilitate a real conversation about their committees and projects, the atmosphere changed.

Shoulders softened. Arms gradually uncrossed. People began speaking more candidly about where decisions were looping or energy was draining away.

It wasn’t a dramatic breakthrough, but a visible shift in how safe the room felt, and how willing people were to engage with the real work.

Moments like this capture the relational, practice-based side of leadership, where learning is embedded in doing and noticing rather than in frameworks or models.

Small intentional shifts compound

Through practice and iteration we have seen:

• Better quality conversations at senior levels
• Coalitions forming across organisational boundaries
• Issues being surfaced earlier, when they are still workable
• A gradual strengthening of psychological safety in operational spaces

Keep making small steps like that and over time it all adds up.

It was simple practices that enabled the shifts in the case above. For example:

• Ending meetings with three minutes of “what have we not said yet?”
• Building lightweight cross-team check-ins around live work
• Explicitly naming where decisions feel stuck and why

None of these look like major interventions. But repeated consistently, they begin to reshape what becomes discussable.

Reframing leadership development

Leadership development in Higher Education could use a gentle reframing. Let’s make it…

• Less about episodic knowledge transfer. More about context-informed practice.
• Less purely individual. More explicitly relational and collective.
• Less one-off. More iterative and sustained.

In essence, leadership as something you practise, reflect on, and refine continuously in live situations — rather than something primarily acquired through attendance.

If leadership is more a thing you do than a thing you are, let’s help people do it.

Several institutions are already moving in this direction.

A final thought

Leadership development in HE is not completely broken, but there is room for improvement.

In many institutions programmes emphasise an individualistic approach to equip people to solve systemic problems. If you’re noticing that people come back from programmes energised but the wider culture remains stubbornly unchanging, it may not be a failure of the individuals involved.

It may simply be that the development focus needs to move closer to the real dynamics of how teams and organisations operate day to day.

And the good news is – that is work that can be done.

What you can do next

If this resonates, here are two simple next steps you might take:

1. Start a conversation in your team: Where does leadership feel stuck in our day-to-day work, not just in theory?
2. Review your current offer: Is most of your investment focused on individuals, or on how teams actually work together? Is the emphasis theoretical or practice based? Is it available to the many or the few?

And if you’re exploring how to help leadership development translate into real cultural movement in your institution, I’d be very happy to compare notes.

If this resonates – and you’re navigating change, culture shifts, or leadership questions in your institution – I’d be glad to talk about how to support your teams to work together better. Get in touch or book a call here.

The post The gap at the heart of leadership development in Higher Education appeared first on ThenSomehow.

If you are a leader or manager in Higher Education, you don’t need a report to tell you that the pace of change is relentless. Across the UK, university teams are navigating constant volatility, from financial deficits to complex restructures.

In this environment, ‘change fatigue’ is a real barrier to progress. When everything feels urgent, the very thing that could help is often avoided: honest, difficult conversations. We tell ourselves we’re protecting our teams from more stress by staying silent, but the opposite is true.

Avoiding these discussions – whether about a missed deadline or a departmental shift – is exactly what holds your team back. By reframing these moments as opportunities rather than threats, you can unblock the energy and collaboration your institution needs right now.

The cost of silence in HE

There is a lot of change, transformation and rapid improvement in Higher Education in the UK right now.

Even the mention of change can spark anxiety about job security, about roles, about workload. Before you even start talking, people are primed for conflict. That’s a scary prospect.

This baseline anxiety is not helped by the state of workforce wellbeing: the 2025 Teacher Wellbeing Index reported that 76% of all education staff are stressed, with half stating that their organisational culture negatively impacts their mental health.

In our work supporting change in HE we often see a similar pattern. ‘Consultations’ that feel performative because they’ve been rushed to gloss over anything uncomfortable. The result is frustration and resistance: people feel unheard, powerless, adrift, angry. Exactly the outcome you feared.

The truth is though, if you’ve been avoiding the smaller day-to-day difficult conversations in Higher Education – the missed deadline, the tension in a team meeting, the underperforming colleague – you reduce the capacity to have these ‘bigger’ ones.

The invisible debt of unresolved conflict

Have you ever worked with a ‘difficult’ colleague? Have you waited in vain for your boss to ‘deal with it’? Or avoided doing it yourself, because you are just thinking about the worst that could happen?

Whether it’s a faculty-wide reorganisation or a single team member’s negativity, the danger of staying silent is the same. The people affected by a difficult colleague build up a debt of resentment, waste energy working around them, and absorb their negativity. Things look functional from the outside so you can justify not acting. But what’s your staff turnover like?

This isn’t just a cultural issue; it’s also a productivity one. Research from Acas shows that workplace conflict costs UK employers between £500 million and £2.3 billion and estimates that when conflict leads to an avoidable resignation the cost to the organisation is about £31,000.

Reframing conflict as a superpower

It’s tempting to imagine that by ‘not going there’, by not having that difficult conversation, you’re keeping things safe – but actually that’s only because you haven’t worked out ways to do it well.

In a university context – where transformation and pressure is everywhere – you simply can’t afford to stay stuck. Avoiding difficult conversations in Higher Education leaves projects stalled, teams frustrated, and blockers to change piling up.

The longer conversations are avoided, the more friction, miscommunication, and wasted energy accumulates.

What if, instead of seeing these conversations as something to avoid, you saw them as opportunities to make things better? It might sound crazy, but if you can see your way to that mindset shift, you can unblock a lot of energy, progress and collaboration.

How teams get stuck

The words ‘conflict’ or ‘storming’ (from Tuckman’s team development model) are really loaded. It’s hard to see how they could ever be positive. But rather than seeing conflict as a threat, if you see it as the bringing together of differences it becomes less negative.

Developing a practice of bringing differences into the light is a superpower we can all learn to harness. It starts with the recognition that no two people see the world in the same way. I’m responsible for good student outcomes, you’re responsible for cost reduction. You want to simplify your processes, I don’t want to pick up the work your team is no longer resourced to do.

Everyone’s point of view is reasonable from where they are sitting.

‘Conflict’ in some form is inevitable when you’re trying to do anything complex. Teams have different ways of working or different KPIs. People feel unsafe, their identities threatened. Learning to sort out disagreements is something that you have to be ready to do and need to learn to do well.

And it’s not so hard, most of us have been doing it since we could crawl.

The trap of the mental rehearsal

I recently spoke to a leader who was quietly frustrated about a team member who prioritises the wrong thing, or is too detailed: when a three-point bullet summary is wanted, they deliver a five-page document that the leader doesn’t have time to read. They needed to raise it with them, but kept not quite doing it.

When faced with something like this people often rehearse the conversation over and over in their head, trying out different ways it could go. You might get trapped there, imagining all the ways it could go wrong, putting it off or waiting until the moment is right.

And while you’re doing that, the real conversation isn’t happening – your colleague doesn’t get the chance to be different and your frustration continues to fester.

You are not being as kind or honest or courageous as you might be – to yourself or to them.

Avoiding the issue strengthens the invisible barriers that keep you all stuck. A manager might be quietly seething because someone isn’t delivering, or a team member might feel unheard. That stuff burns slow, and deep.

All that energy on worrying and imagining unhappy outcomes instead of solving problems and getting work done.

What’s the worst that can happen? Actually, honestly, it’s THIS: what’s already happening because you are not talking about it.

The good news? The majority of the time, having the conversation goes way better than you expect.

And even if it doesn’t solve everything, it makes future conversations easier. If not solved, progress at least.

A personal lesson: when the problem was me

Here’s an example from my own life. My first job was in radio. I did well and at a young age I was promoted to head up a local station. A few months in, during the regular weekly team meeting, I asked about any problems. There was an awkward silence. After a pause, someone finally said:

“Well the thing is Steve, there is a problem. And it’s you… You’re a nightmare. One minute you’re cracking jokes and being a laugh. The next you’re all uptight. Grumpy. Aggressive. We’re sick of it. We don’t know whether we’re coming or going. It’s horrible working with you, Steve.”

I’ll be honest, my first instinct was panic, then defensiveness, then desperately grasping at straws for a way out of it. I found one.

I was completely taken aback but I managed to respond with something we could all do: I asked the team for their proposals for what could be better and what they could do to help that. Later at the suggestion of my boss, I asked them to add what they loved about working there.

And I did it too.

A few days later we read out our answers. Without interrupting, without justifying. The more we spoke, the more we all realised: this wasn’t an attack, it was a mutual shout for help. We were working out what was holding us all back.

It was a turning point.

We started to talk openly, to acknowledge frustrations, to work on the issues together. We all felt heard, and I felt a clarity I hadn’t had before. What began as a moment of conflict became a moment of connection.

From that point on, meetings were different. It didn’t solve every problem overnight, but it created a culture where difficult conversations became opportunities to improve, rather than threats to avoid.

That lesson has stuck with me ever since.

How this plays out in teams

That same principle plays out with the clients we work with:

At one faculty, the leadership team went through a formal consultation on a reorganisation. On paper, the process was followed perfectly: “But we did the consultation, Steve,” they told me. They did, but it was performative. They only succeeded in convincing colleagues they hadn’t heard a word. Frustration built. Meetings became tense, people shouted. Had the leaders been willing to really listen and create space for candid feedback, for genuine concerns to be raised, the process could have been smoother, resistance evaporating instead of solidifying.

At another institution, one senior leader I worked with dreaded giving honest feedback. They imagined arguments, upset colleagues, even blow-ups. When they finally had the conversation, it was calm, constructive, and revealing. It didn’t magically fix everything, but it cleared the air, allowed both sides to feel heard, and made future conversations easier.

Even the hardest conversations – like discussing someone losing their job, or giving difficult feedback to someone whose behaviour has been challenging – can lead to unexpectedly positive outcomes.

The act of talking, listening, and acknowledging each other’s perspective can form an allyship, even in difficult circumstances.

Moving from friction to collaboration

If this resonates, here are a few questions to consider:

• Which conversations are you replaying in your head instead of having?
• Where is your team stuck because of unspoken issues?
• Which discussion could move your team from friction to collaboration?

7 guidelines for a good conversation mindset

However, before you jump straight in and have that difficult conversation – it’s worth pausing to check on your assumptions.

If you think you know what’s going on for the other person, take a breath. Instead start with curiosity, generosity and respect, it’ll demonstrate that you value them enough to find out more. That is a good foundation for progress.

Here are seven guidelines for a good conversation mindset:

1. Listen first: ensure people feel heard, especially when they are angry. Irritation is usually a sign of an unmet need.
2. Assume you don’t know: Your ‘facts’ about why someone is underperforming are usually just guesses. Ask them instead.
3. Clarify your intention at the start. Begin by saying: “My goal is for us to work together better, not to place blame.”
4. Admit your own anxiety, and commit to trying and sticking with it even if it gets hard. Acknowledge your own contribution: your behaviour shapes the conversation and their experience too.
5. Set simple ground rules: pause if needed, agree to keep trying, clarify next steps.
6. Be aware of any power imbalance. How can you make this space safe for everyone?
7. Stop imagining the worst, start imagining the best. Assumptions are guesses, not facts.

Difficult conversations are iterative: the first one rarely solves everything, but it creates a pathway for progress to be made together.

What you can do: a call to action

If a difficult conversation is keeping you up at night, here’s one practical step you can take:
Try to reframe it as an opportunity. What would be better if you managed to get unstuck?

Even if you can’t fix it all, having the conversation will move things forward and will often help more people than you expect – you, your team, and your wider organisation.

Often the worst-case scenario is far less likely than you imagine. And the act of having the conversation is often the best thing that can happen.

At ThenSomehow we help universities and other HE organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post The conversation you’re avoiding is holding your university team back appeared first on ThenSomehow.

People are solving problems, making decisions, and influencing outcomes every day – but it’s rarely called leadership.

However in many institutions the overriding culture is still one of waiting for permission, for approval, for a senior figure or a committee to give the green light. And when that green light is slow or uneven, the system slows.

This is especially a challenge now, when so many universities are implementing transformation projects and are thinking: “we’ve got to resize… we’ve got to take costs out… we’ve got to be more efficient… we’ve got to do more with less… we have to do it at pace…”

But the faster they try to move, the slower they go.

We believe a habit of looking up for solutions is a big contributor to this inertia.

In a recent workshop with a senior group from one university, we were discussing the traditional “heroic” model of leadership – prompted by the recent Gillies report on the failures at Dundee university.

There, one leader at the top owned and held the vision, decisions, and attention, creating an environment where expressing difference or doubt became so uncomfortable that there was no challenge at council, court, or anywhere else in the organisation.

The group I was with looked sideways at each other. “Yes, we’ve got a bit of that going on,” someone said.

Another participant put it succinctly: “That style of leadership… it’s sucking all the leadership out of our group.”

That phrase captures what many universities experience. When attention and authority are concentrated at the top, and it doesn’t feel safe to challenge, people lower down hesitate to take initiative. They feel disempowered and much of the leadership potential present in the organisation is never realised.

The cost of centralised attention

The Gillies report suggested that the senior leader’s focus on certain areas effectively created ‘mandates’ for some people, while others struggled without the same visibility or interest from above.

When that happens the system becomes reactive: teams respond to what the senior leader notices or prioritises, not necessarily to what matters most.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about understanding patterns: overly hierarchical structures can inadvertently remove agency, diminish initiative, and slow down meaningful progress. Staff feel less empowered, waiting for permission to act. Leadership – if it’s seen only as a top-down role – gets trapped at the centre.

An alternative to looking up

The alternative can seem paradoxical from a leader’s perspective because it’s about letting go, ceding control, carrying less. It’s about relinquishing the dominant idea of what being a leader means. And it’s not free of risk, although it might be inherently less risky than what happens now.

It’s about leadership being distributed through the system.

Whether this is possible comes down to how people see themselves, and if they can give themselves permission to act. Whether they believe it’s their responsibility to fix that thing that’s clearly not working, or whether they assume it has to be solved somewhere else by someone more senior. In universities in particular, people are often conditioned into that kind of powerlessness.

I think that’s because people often confuse leadership with being a ‘leader’. The latter is a role, a job a person does. The former is a set of behaviours all of us can do.

Distributed leadership works when people practise leadership behaviours regardless of the job title. It’s people close to the work sorting out local issues, in a collaborative way with others involved or affected. It relies on people feeling empowered, being networked, having access to one another, and having spaces where they can come together and say, “let’s just try this.” It doesn’t require grand permission. Often, it’s about trying until someone tells you to stop… and discovering that nobody will.

When that happens, leadership stops being something reserved for a few people sitting at the top of the organisation and starts becoming something that’s practised every day, through small decisions, experiments, and improvements. That’s when momentum might build, not because someone is pushing harder from the centre, but because people throughout the system are taking responsibility and moving things forward.

Distributed leadership in action

Here’s an example that highlights how to enable and encourage leadership behaviours. We’ve been supporting rapid improvement projects at a number of universities that illustrate what distributed leadership can look like. Staff are often frustrated by fragmented processes, for example, relating to student assessments: different systems in every school; thousands of requests each year; manual intervention required at every step.

Instead of waiting for top-level approval or relying on someone senior to commission a solution to the problem, we bring the right people together, give them space to collaborate, and encourage them to take small, practical steps. With no development budget, just enough authority, and the right voices in the room, a simple solution is specified, built and rapidly prototyped on a small scale (initially). Regulatory or territorial blunders are avoided, comms get sent out, training takes place, users get looked after and lots of lessons are learned, reflected on and responded to in the next (larger) iteration. These projects can save thousands of hours of unnecessary work or thousands in unnecessary spend.

The impact is enormous: better experiences for staff and students, time saved, and a repeatable process that teams can use independently in the future.

It sounds easy. The truth is it always takes effort to gather the group, demonstrate it is worth their time and reassure them they won’t be at risk. And it takes effort to keep it going – regular meetings to scope the work, build trust, strengthen relationships, renegotiate scope, fit the work in on top of business-as-usual, and hold everyone together when things go wrong.
Taking part in these projects shows people that they can do these things. Maybe even should do these things. It shifts their sense of who they are in the system.

That is the best part, and the point of the whole thing.

Principles for unlocking leadership everywhere

From these kinds of experiences, we’ve identified the patterns that make distributed leadership possible:

• Psychological safety: People need to feel they won’t be punished for trying something new, for experimenting, or even for failing. A senior sponsor in the background can help, and clear terms of reference. But mostly this is about how people show up in meetings.
• Agency: Staff could discover they can act and that it’s a part of their role they can choose to access: to make improvements, not wait for direction. It’s not a given that it is present, and it is what we want to see emerge.
• Networks: Find ways to build strong networks. It’s a key enabling technology to gather perspectives, cutting through inertia, getting help. People need to know who to connect with, share ideas, and how to solve problems together.
• Do things together: Doing something different is the fastest way to learn. Staying practical is too. And it’s better to aim small, fixing simple things quickly to maximise the frequency of success. That’s motivating and builds capability for addressing harder things.
• Repeatable habits: Small, structured practices such as early sharing, mini experiments, coalition working, or ‘kick-off’ sessions, help distributed leadership become habitual rather than sporadic. How we do things is often more important than what we do.

These things help people reframe their identity, grow their confidence and support their ability to act locally, solve problems, and gradually transform an organisation from within.

Small moves, big impact

It’s worth emphasising that distributed leadership isn’t about grand projects. Often, the most powerful leadership is local and incremental:

• Choosing to focus on five priorities instead of the expected thirty(!), as one team did. Better to choose to deliver well on a few than poorly on all of them.
• Running small improvement experiments, knowing that even failures generate useful data and learning.
• Sharing early and openly, modelling safety and creating opportunities for others to engage and contribute, and bring in different perspectives.

The cumulative effect of ‘small moves’ can be profound. Hours saved, processes improved, teams feeling empowered.

Leadership emerges when people discover it can be safe to take responsibility.

Challenges to distributed leadership

Of course, it’s not automatic. Universities are complex systems, full of noise, competing agendas, and hierarchical conditioning. Staff are often socialised to wait for permission or to assume they can’t make meaningful change.

There are times when this approach has met with resistance. A few people say things like “I don’t get paid enough to do that work”, or “It’s above my pay grade.”

In one sense that is an attractive proposition, to deliberately (if unconsciously) relinquish your agency, or submit to power. There’s no pressure to decide, no responsibility for failure, no expectation of understanding. It’s an easier path and best of all – you get to complain about everyone else messing things up.

How dangerous is that for an organisation?

The truth is we co-create the culture we operate in. We are all in part responsible for it, because we actively propagate it or passively collude in maintaining it.

The resistance of a few is normal, and from another perspective perfectly reasonable.

That’s where there is a role for facilitators, coaches, and colleagues to help people recognise their own agency and create the conditions for action. That might include convening groups, clearing obstacles, or simply encouraging people to experiment.

Once the first steps are taken, and the right conditions are maintained the pattern can become self-reinforcing: confidence grows, networks strengthen, and leadership spreads.

A different way to lead

And distributed leadership doesn’t remove the need for senior leaders. Their role shifts: instead of being the sole source of authority and direction, they become enablers, creating psychological safety, empowering people, offering priorities, holding spaces for different voices to be heard, and modelling curiosity rather than control.

Acting in service to the organisation by enabling the right conditions.

Ultimately, transformation in universities happens faster when it is recognised that leadership exists at every level. It’s in the questions staff ask, the solutions they try, and the improvements they make. It’s the small, local, connected actions that collectively transform the organisation.

Taking action: what you can try now

If this resonates, here are a few small, practical things you might experiment with.

• Notice where you or your team are waiting for permission, and ask whether it’s actually needed. Encourage them to decide for themselves and take action until someone tells you to stop. Promise you’ll take the heat if they do – and see what happens.
• Create a space for people to come together around a real problem that’s irritating you. Give it a clear, short timeframe and focus on making one thing a bit better, rather than solving everything.
• Share work earlier than feels comfortable. A rough first version often invites collaboration in a way a polished solution never does. Tell people what you are doing and why.
• Reduce the noise where you can. Fewer priorities, fewer meetings, fewer competing demands can create the headspace needed for people to take responsibility and act. That’s a really important part of leading.
• And perhaps most importantly, pay attention to where leadership is already happening quietly in your organisation. Name it, value it, and make it easier for it to happen again.

If you can see leadership everywhere, you can unlock the potential that hierarchical systems often obscure.

At ThenSomehow we help universities and other HE organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post The leadership you need? It’s already in your teams appeared first on ThenSomehow.