February 2013

Posted by Carly Foshee Chatfield on February 5, 2013

Starting Conversations across Silos during Times of Change

Jenny Mehmedovic, Assistant to the Provost, University of Kansas

Marilu Goodyear, Director for the School of Public Affairs and Administration, University of Kansas

Recorded presentation: http://educause.adobeconnect.com/p2ceo2uv1dw/

Resources found on the "resources" tab for their Annual Conference presentation.

The KU Way works both ways: if you hear of someone going out of their way to be courteous and friendly, we say "yep! that's the KU way." But if you hear about an out-of-date response, well "that's the KU Way," too.

We got a new chancellor and then a new provost, began strategically planning, new plan "Bold Aspirations."

Used a faculty member and an IT person working together.Start with idea that we have to reach all audiences.We had to convince a lot of people, so we started with the literature. What are the elements of successful organizational change?Ask deans and governance, who has expertise we can build on? Nominate faculty, staff who have expertise in organizational change (teaching courses) and who has successfully implemented change in our organization. Had 90 nominations, 75 participated.

Jenny and Marily interviewed those people and put with our research and put the concepts together in our plan. Had to build a common language. So many people we talked said "Thank you" for asking us to use our expertise here at KU.

It really created a culture of involvement across the campus.

We asked people to critique two sample workshops. What elements are key to the KU culture. Learned that when you delegate to a committee, it is important to let them work on that problem. Set up guidelines, what do they get to decide and what do they not get involved with. We had a history (according to feedback) of setting up committees that then did not actually implement changes.

Accepting change means you accept it, not that you agree with it. Some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue.

There was a disconnect between people who wanted to implement changes at the leadership level and those who just felt they would be impacted no matter what.

Break for questions...

When we talk about silos, we were tasked with getting people out of their silos across the campus and talking to each other. We were looking at broad organizational change, how could administrative departments better support academic departments, how could we implement single sign-on, not just IT changes, but IT involved in several of the major initiatives.

What we saw was in the beginning, people were really head-down in their own departments and after the change workshops, we had people talking about the same things, not necessarily good observations, but even if they were complaining they were all now complaining about the same thing.

When we tried to combine two groups that seemed to do the same thing (facilities, etc), there was a lot of fear that one group would lose face, power, even name of the merged group. We had to work to assure everyone involved that they were/are important. If the housing staff had built a culture of "family" and even some employees had transferred away from a group that did not have the same culture, they would understandably be threatened by a potential merger with their former group.

How you communicate about change by Ford & Ford: 4 phases...

• • Initiative

  • Understanding

  • Performance

  • Closure

Initiative phase was...

Understanding phase was when we really spent a lot of time and resources trying to learn/understand where people were coming from.

Performance conversations are where you ask people to take responsibility for something.

Closure conversations were when we had to debrief and figure out what went right/wrong, what we could do differently in the future. If you don't have those closure conversations, you create dead rats that just hang around (Well, in 1985 we tried that...). If you can process those conversations with your participants, let them talk through disappointments, you can avoid these lingering issues.

Resistance to change: there was some impatience at the leadership level, wanting to move forward and we had to work to understand that resistance is not necessarily a bad thing. Resistance comes from three primary areas:

• • Disagree

  • Fear

  • Lack of ability/skill/confidence

And you have to know which of these areas is generating the resistance. If someone is resisting out of fear, training them isn't going to relieve that.

When you try to make a change -even in your personal life- you go about it mentally or physically:

• • Analyze

  • Think

  • Change

OR

• • See

  • Feel

  • Change

It is important to find out where people are coming from, in order to work on communication breakdown. We had to find and train facilitators within our organization, we trained 30 different volunteers, both faculty and staff. When we finished our training and deployed the facilitators, it was important to have a faculty facilitator working with faculty, someone who already spoke the language, etc. We had a day-long training and were careful to match facilitators with appropriate groups, and we had enough facilitators to pair a novice with an experienced facilitator.

Facilitator advice: have a clear charge, help the leader plan meeting, debrief every meeting. Use time between meetings to analyze with leader.

Change can be managed and anyone can learn the skills required to implement change in a successful way. Speaking the common language is critical. The term "dead rats" actually became part of the common language that is still in use today. The change must also fit the culture. We are a Tier One research organization, but our culture is different from that of Texas or Oklahoma State.

One thing we learned is that our consultants were experts at implementing change but they were not experts in our culture and we all learned that we needed expertise and partnership across the board. We had to include our participants in order to achieve buy-in.