Over the last 12 years, David Graham has held the title of Provost and Vice-President of Academic Affairs at both the University of Ottawa and Concordia University. In 2019, he retired from his long and storied career in Canadian higher education and is now an independent consultant.
With your experience, you have a ton of insight into what it takes to successfully create change within an institution – the pitfalls and psychological barriers that come with trying to move a ship that size. Any advice that you'd give someone trying to make a positive impact within their institution?
Well, you’ll be happy to hear I conduct workshops on this very question.
One of the things that I’ve always prioritized in my career has been formal training in leadership development. Along the way, I acquired a certification from Ralph Kilmann's outfit in conflict and change management and organizational transformation.
That's really at the core of a lot of the work that I've done. As Kilmann says, conflict management is really change management. So, do I have something to say about the kinds of traps that people fall into? Honestly, I have far too much to say about it! We’d never get through it all in this article. But I'll aim to summarize with a focus on practical tips.
The very first thing I’ll say: Never underestimate the power of institutional culture.
People who want to lead change tend to overestimate their own ability to lead and underestimate the ability of a culture to resist change.
There are good reasons for this. One of them is resilience. Cultures survive by accommodating change very, very slowly, if at all. And so it’s true, as many people have said, that when you come into an organization, after a year you're part of the problem, because the culture will absorb you. You will be assimilated. People don't realize how quickly and how forcefully that happens, so they tend to overestimate their own ability to transform cultures and underestimate the ability of cultures to resist that process of transformation. It’s especially important to respect the culture by not trying to strong-arm people into doing what they believe is a betrayal of their culture: we need to strive to become a better version of ourselves, even when we have a long-term goal of transformation.
The second practical tip I would offer is to identify (either on your own or ideally with the help of a practiced expert) a model of academic leadership that works for you, and to hone your skills at exercising that. I'm a big fan of James Kouzes’ and Barry Posner’s work in transformative leadership.
One thing they've been fond of saying over the years is that leadership begins with the challenge of how to transform cultures; how to make cultures better in the face of resistance from people who are comfortable or from those who are hostile to the notion of change. Cultures work by enabling people to carve out a zone of comfort where they can operate without even thinking. Ninety five percent 95% of culture is below the surface, almost none of it is stated – as we find out when we break those unspoken rules.
So because genuine leadership is about leading, facilitating and promoting positive change, good leadership models tend to focus on that, not on the managerial nuts and bolts, the so-called hard skills. Those skills are vitally important, but they’re not the same as leadership skills, which are all about effecting transformation by motivating people to work together toward a better future.
So in the knowledge that the culture is more powerful than you are, find a leadership model that works for you, that is focused on how to effect a cultural transformation and practice it.
The third tip I would have is improve your skills in conflict management and practice them relentlessly.
Conflict is not a negative thing and it’s inherent to change. My workshops always center on conflict management, not conflict resolution, because while it's not always possible to resolve conflicts, it’s almost always possible to manage it.
If you want to lead change, you need to improve your ability to manage the conflicts that will inevitably arise. Partly by foreseeing what those conflicts are likely to be and partly by learning the skills of conflict management to equip you better to deal with conflict as it arises and manage it effectively so that it doesn't fester and become irresolvable.
Those would be the three pieces of advice I'd give to anyone trying to create change. You need to make yourself the most practically effective transformative leader you possibly can, which anyone can do.
“One hidden assumption about consensus is that it's the same as unanimity. It is absolutely not.”
We know most institutions tend to be quite risk-averse, so how can leaders start to build consensus among stakeholders when creating change? How can they best rally people around a new initiative?
When people talk about creating consensus, my starting point is always to surface what is sometimes a mistaken assumption. Killman talks a lot about the need to surface the hidden assumptions in our culture.
One hidden assumption about consensus is that it's the same as unanimity. It is absolutely not. James Downey, the former president of Waterloo, said that consensus is what enables you to proceed in the face of opposition. In other words, consensus is a state in which people will not object so strenuously that you cannot go forward. They will either support what you're doing, be neutral about it, or if they do oppose it, won’t try to subvert and derail it. That's consensus – enough support to go forward together.
This goes back again to why change management and conflict management skills in particular are so important: the foundation for consensus is trust. Among the maxims of leadership that I try to teach people is the need to invest sufficient time to do an assessment of the culture to see what the trust levels currently are and then to focus constantly on building and strengthening trust.
There are a lot of techniques to build trust. Much of it boils down to just doing what you say you're going to do and being honest with people.
If you set optimistic but achievable goals and do your very best to deliver, over time, people will come to accept that they're not getting some phony bill of goods from you. The foundation of consensus is that trust that you build over time in you as a person, in your integrity, in your vision of a better collective future, and in your competence and ability to deliver that future by getting people to work together to achieve the common vision.
“it's often incredibly difficult for people to collect the data themselves, organize it, and then, crucially, distill the conclusions out of it, right? And yet it needs to be done.”
What’s the role that data plays in fostering that trust or contributing to decisive decision making within these institutions? How have you seen that play out?
The one thing that I’ve learned is that data should be shared. Open the books.
My litmus test for whether we should do thing X or not, if it’s fraught with potential risk and complication, is how sincerely and forcefully can we defend the decision? Are we comfortable with the principles we are using to make this decision? And are we comfortable articulating them openly and honestly?
If we're not, then we shouldn't do it. If we are, there's no reason not to proceed if we believe it's the right thing to do. Part of the process of justifying a decision is almost always sharing the data that you used to get there. So if you can't share the data, you're going to be in trouble. While there may be guardrails of confidentiality and privacy and so on that need to be respected, in my experience, there's almost always a way to work around them.
Garbage in, garbage out, as they say, so good data is essential. And sharing the data with the people you're working with, that's part of building that consensus that’s founded on trust.
That's where companies like CRI can be invaluable. Being able to collect that data, build that case and also help make the case to stakeholders is of huge value. Because it's often incredibly difficult for people to collect the data themselves, organize it, and then, crucially, distill the conclusions out of it, right? And yet it needs to be done to build that trust and make good decisions together.