The Changing Landscape of Higher Education
According to the Guardian one in four major UK universities are reducing staff and budgets to manage deficits. We think it might be more than that. We actually think it might be all of them. It’s causing a lot of disquiet.
For many years we have supported Higher Education organisations to build capability in their teams, in order to be better able to respond to change in an increasingly complex world.
UK Universities Under Pressure
However the sector as a whole is now grappling with significant financial pressure due to rising costs, capped tuition fees, and a drop in numbers of international students. There has never been this kind of pressure before and HE has never had to be as accountable as it is now.
In response to these complex problems, institutions are having to change and adapt in new and deeper ways than they are used to.
And as HE institutions attempt to navigate these challenges and shift and adapt, HE people are having to interact with each other differently.
Why Change is So Challenging
As members of our HELP peer group who’re striving to drive change can attest, change efforts often struggle. Because, regardless of how big and radical or small and incremental, change is usually difficult and messy.
As an example, one project we ran at a London university to bring in distributed leading was really successful, but the university itself was in complete turmoil and many of those we worked with left or were made redundant afterwards.
The Hidden Barriers to Successful Change in HE
And I was chatting to someone who’d worked as a change manager for years at several organisations – for most of the projects that he worked on, the change either hadn’t happened due to what could be described as internal resistance or “tactical inertia”, or it had all been reversed when a new CEO was hired.
This is not uncommon.
Why Traditional Approaches to Change Don’t Work
In 2020, research and insight agency, Gartner reported that 50% of change initiatives fail, because of lack of leadership alignment, poor communication, employee resistance, and inadequate follow-through.
The trouble is that most change initiatives in universities seem to follow the same pattern: they’re top down, directive and focus on introducing new policies, new processes or new structures without taking into account or addressing the stuff that’s below the waterline – the underlying group dynamics that slow down change initiatives.
The reality is that most people don’t like being told to change.
The Harvard Business Review (2022) suggests that success rates of change programmes can be improved by good leadership, communication, and adaptability.
The Limits of Training Programmes
So how do you build capability in staff and your organisation to ensure change programmes are successful?
The solution used to be training. You sent individuals on a course to learn how to be good leaders but then it was realised that when they returned to work, they rarely applied what they had learned.
Partly because in real life they encounter a double whammy of complex people dynamics and volatile and uncertain conditions.
And partly because, we believe, the focus on training individuals is unhelpful.
The Power of Teams Over Individuals
We know from experience that effective teams really make a difference, more than individuals.
Which is why we believe organisations should be thinking about coaching people in teams, because teams are the unit of most effective change.
In fact research shows that teams are the most adequate framework for enabling collective learning.
While there is a growing recognition that groups and teams are a useful building block, HE organisations have tended not to train groups, which has led to a skills gap in helping teams to be more effective.
As a result the challenge for lots of organisations is that they haven’t addressed the stuff that’s below the waterline, things such as beliefs, feelings, values and identity – the very things that are threatened by change.
This is particularly important in leadership teams.
Leadership Isn’t a Role — It’s a Dynamic
Leaders have an organisational role of coordinating and holding the space, facilitating and removing blocks, arbitrating around priorities, and making decisions about the way organisations work.
But really effective leaders don’t ‘do’ any of these things, they emerge out of a leadership group’s dynamic and their conversations. When it’s really working, everyone is contributing.
When it’s not working, people don’t trust each other, don’t listen or don’t feel safe to speak up if they disagree and things can become toxic, which makes change programmes less effective.
How Team Coaching Helps Universities Navigate Change
One way to address this is to employ group or team coaching. The practice of team coaching helps to address the underlying factors that hold people back, as it can:
- turn conflict in teams into useful energy to get productive work done
- unblock teams that are struggling with decision-making
- support problem-solving and increase engagement
- increase confidence to explore beliefs, values and identity to bring in difference safely
Why Universities Need Internal Coaching Capabilities
At ThenSomehow we have been providing team coaching to the higher educational sector for many years. We’re seeing more demand for this kind of support as organisations struggle with the need to empower and organise people from the bottom upwards.
Many of the people we work with immediately apply the skills and learning in their day to day work. They use what they learn to make a difference straight away. They become better managers, colleagues, coaches or mentors.
It’s only a short leap to think about how these people could apply what they have learned to help other colleagues, and become effective team coaches themselves.
It seems like an obvious opportunity for organisations – to train their own people to support groups themselves.
And we’d like to help the people-side of universities to do that.
Our New Team Coaching Programme for HE Institutions
So we are announcing a new offer: Team coaching training programmes for OD professionals and managers working in HE.
As part of this we would like to build an active community of practice linking together people trying to do this sort of work across institutions.
We have developed a proven curriculum that we have applied over and over. We can build and iterate on this to really help a group of people share their skills and build an internal team coaching capability.
The Benefits for Your Institution
- Better functioning teams throughout an organisation.
- Reduced friction around change.
- Better ability for central OD and HR departments to service Faculty and School needs.
- Reduced reliance on external support.
- It is cost effective and builds a long lasting internal capability.
Join Our HE Team Coaching Programme
Get in touch here if you’re interested in leadership and team coaching for your organisation.
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.