By Dr. Jennifer Askey, ModernThink Consultant and Executive Coach
Change management has become the perpetual background noise of modern higher education. Walk down the hallway of any faculty building or administrative suite, and you are bound to hear about a new initiative, a restructuring plan, or a software migration. Whether these shifts are driven by shifting political winds, Board directives, fluctuating enrollment numbers, technological imperatives, or sheer financial pressure, virtually every college and university is engaged in some sort of active “change project.”
Yet, despite how frequently institutions initiate change, our track record for landing it successfully is remarkably poor.
Data from the ModernThink Higher Education Insight Survey© used in the Great Colleges to Work For program gives us a clear statistical window into why higher ed change so often stalls. When we examine the survey dimensions around Communication and Collaboration—particularly at institutions not recognized as “Great Colleges to Work For”—a massive disconnect emerges. Only 49% of employees at these institutions agree that changes affecting them are discussed beforehand, while just 48% feel a sense that “we’re all on the same team.” Year after year, these low scores point to deep-seated disenfranchisement and declining morale. The data simply confirms what we observe in practice every day: a profound gap between the administrators dictating change and the front-line staff tasked with living it.
The Frustration of the Top-Down Mandate
In higher education, major structural changes are frequently designed in vacuum-sealed boardroom environments, far removed from classrooms, labs, and student service points. When a mandate is handed down from above, the implementation falls squarely on the shoulders of faculty and staff who were not participants in the planning process—and who often didn’t even know the change was on the horizon.
This approach triggers an immediate and predictable wave of frustration. It sends an implicit message to employees that their localized expertise is being ignored, and that their value to the organization is being sidelined in favor of top-down administrative metrics.
Furthermore, these top-down directives almost always suffer from a critical blind spot: they fail to account for the intricate, unwritten webs of institutional knowledge that keep a university running. Senior leaders often design change initiatives under the assumption that an organization is a machine made of interchangeable parts, where switching out a policy or a software platform is as simple as replacing a cog.
But a university is an organism, not a machine. When you ignore the people who understand the nuance of the process, you lose the institutional memory that holds the system together. Consequently, in the short term, these top-down changes almost always decrease efficiency and completely burn through employee goodwill, rather than achieving the streamlined optimization the change was originally supposed to deliver.
The Illusion of Efficiency
Why do distant leaders default to this top-down model? Usually, it is driven by a desire for speed. In the face of a budget shortfall or a legislative mandate, senior leadership feels immense pressure to act quickly and decisively. Involving the wider campus community feels messy, slow, and inefficient.
But this is an illusion. Any time or money saved in the design phase by skipping consultation is paid back with massive interest during the implementation phase. When communication is poor and trust is low, employees don’t actively lean into the change; they either openly resist it, or they engage in a form of passive compliance—malicious compliance, even—where they do exactly what is asked on paper, knowing full well it won’t work in practice.
We all want to be seen, and we all want to know our expertise matters. When a provost, a vice president, or a dean rolls out an entirely new operational framework without explaining the trajectory or inviting input on the execution, they aren’t just changing a process—they are fracturing the psychological contract of trust with their people.
How Leaders Bridge the Gap
If you are a department chair, a director, or a mid-level leader, you often find yourself caught in the middle of this dynamic. You didn’t design the mandate, and you don’t have the power to cancel it. But you are the person responsible for leading your team through it.
How do you maintain trust and communication within your unit when the directive from above feels completely disconnected from reality? You shift from a deficit-oriented mindset of passive enforcement to a possibility-focused framework of co-created implementation.
Here are three ways leaders can build trust and protect institutional knowledge when navigating a top-down mandate:
1. Translate the “Why” and Acknowledge the Friction
Trust begins with transparency. When a top-down change is announced, don’t just read the corporate talking points from central administration. Your team will see right through them. Instead, open an honest dialogue. Explicitly acknowledge the friction. You might say, “We have been handed this directive, and I know it feels like it ignores the hard work you’ve already put into this process. I see that frustration.”
From there, work to translate the external pressures driving the decision (the enrollment drop, the state funding model) into terms that make sense for your unit. You don’t have to defend the decision, but contextualizing it removes the feeling that the change is just arbitrary cruelty from above.
2. Protect Institutional Knowledge through Co-Design
Senior leadership may have decided what the change is, but they rarely know how to actually make it work on the ground. That is your leverage point. Invite your team into the design phase. Gather your faculty and staff and ask: “Given that we must move to this new system by next semester, how can we design the transition in a way that respects our workflow and preserves what we know works best for our students?”
By giving your team agency over the how, you honor their expertise, safeguard critical institutional knowledge, and minimize the initial drop in efficiency that plagues poorly managed rollouts.
3. Focus on Care for the Community
When institutional trust is low, the local culture of your department becomes your team’s anchor. Change causes anxiety because it threatens people’s sense of competence and security. Double down on your communication channels. Increase the frequency of your one-on-ones, not to police output, but to check in on capacity. Ensure that your “rockstars”—the quiet, reliable staff members who bear the brunt of administrative shifting—know that their extra labor is seen, valued, and protected.
Reclaiming Agency in the Face of Change
The ModernThink survey data reminds us that trust isn’t a commodity that senior leaders can mandate from the boardroom; it is built or broken in the daily in the localized loops of communication between supervisors and their teams.
We cannot always control the macroeconomic or political forces that mandate change in higher education. But as leaders, we have total agency over how we treat the human beings walking through that change. By refusing to treat our people as cogs, by actively inviting their expertise into the implementation design, and by maintaining a relentless focus on the health of our community, we can transform a disruptive top-down mandate into an opportunity for deep, collaborative resilience.
About Jennifer Askey
Dr. Jennifer Askey is an executive leadership and mindfulness coach who works with higher education leaders all over North America. She leverages assessments, mindfulness practices, and powerful coaching conversations to help her clients build the career impact they want to see. Jennifer is also a sought-after workshop leader and team alignment facilitator. She works with units to establish a solid connection between their success parameters and their strategic and operational tactics. Learn more about her work and contact her at jenniferaskey.com.