Last week was my first WACUBO Annual Conference, but I felt right at home. The annual gathering of business officers from colleges and universities across the western US exemplified one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about higher ed conferences: how much of the value sits outside the program. Our community shows up willing to talk. People who could easily just come and listen to speakers instead spend it sharing what worked, what didn’t, and what they’d do differently at their own institutions. A lot happens on stage, but just as much in the hallways, waiting for sessions to begin, and in the line for the lunch buffet. I always walk away with great insights from both.
The conference presentations covered a lot of critical ground: mergers, budget models, organizational transformation, planning systems, HR innovation. Taken together, they tell a clear story about leading transformation: authentic leadership, a focus on outcomes, and an understanding that people and culture are the underpinnings of successful transformation. Listening for how effective most institutions really are in this kind of leadership became my pursuit for the conference.
What stood out was the laser focus on culture and change management as the actual enablers of transformation. Reorganizations, new technology, new budget models—those still happen, and they matter. But the work that determines whether any of it sticks is cultural. People have to understand the change, be open to it, and be supported through it. And critically, the transformation has to be clear in its outcomes. The why has to be specific enough that someone three levels down can express it without consulting a slide. Without that, the reorg is just furniture rearrangement, and the new system is just a more expensive version of the old problem.
In conversations around the conference, I kept asking the same question: what’s actually changing at your institution, and why? The answers sorted themselves by altitude. Senior leaders had the story down. Mid-managers had pieces. Individual contributors mostly knew something was happening to them, not always why. This wasn’t a communication problem in the usual sense. Information was moving, but understanding wasn’t. The leaders presenting at WACUBO seemed to truly understand how to lead through transformation.
What seems to separate the institutions that will pull this off is not just vision. It’s execution discipline. The presentations that landed for me weren’t the ones with the cleverest framework. They were the ones built around the critical human elements of transformation, beginning with a clear sense of where the institution was going before anyone touched the org chart. Knowing the why, communicating it clearly, and caring for the people involved are rarer than any of us would like to admit.
So for me, there was an important, time-tested lesson: Test the why by altitude. If the people doing the actual work can explain it in their own words, you’re further along than most institutions. If they can’t, you have significant work ahead of you.
At a time when higher education needs significant transformation more than ever, I’m cautiously optimistic. Many leaders willing to lead transformation (and talk about it to their community) understand what it requires, and they’re getting better at it. Whether that understanding can reach the institutions that need it most is the harder question.
Originally posted by Dave Kieffer on LinkedIn. Be sure to follow him there to catch all his great industry insights.
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