In Brief
Higher education provides unique challenges to implementing disruptive change. Leaders often face highly distributed authority, leadership misalignment around a business case for action and the definition of success, and sponsors and work teams that lack authority to make decisions and implement organization-wide changes. As leaders look to move their institutions beyond the status quo, they need to focus on leading through change by aligning goals, behaviors and processes among leaders. Finding ways to align active sponsorship from leaders is perhaps the most important factor to increase the likelihood of successful implementation of disruptive change.
How Leaders Can Mobilize and Align Sponsors
Read more from our Implementing Disruptive Change series:
- Implementing Disruptive Change: Within Higher Education
- Administrative Support in Higher Education is a "Job to be Done" With the Customer at the Center
- Implementing Disruptive Change: How to Align Educational Leaders
- Implementing Disruptive Change: Mobilizing Leaders
- Implementing Disruptive Change: Leading Through Change
In implementing disruptive change, organizations must focus on key sponsors by assessing their level and type of commitment. You need substantial levels of commitment from the senior manager who has the organizational power to authorize and legitimize the change.
Every manager in the organizational hierarchy — down to the individuals who need to change themselves — must demonstrate a similar level of commitment. This synergy translates and reinforces the importance of the change at each organizational level.
It’s important to demonstrate strong commitment to the change through effective communications and actions that model and reinforce those communications. The most effective leaders have discovered that real change is accelerated when what they express, model and reinforce are aligned.
An organization should assess a sponsor’s alignment and use the results to pinpoint messages and behaviors the sponsor can use to demonstrate commitment. The assessment profile can identify specific actions that have a high return on investment, so that a manager's most scarce resource (time) can be used effectively.
Below is the framework for a sponsor assessment in each phase of an initiative:
| Requirements | Programming | Implementation | Monitoring |
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| Express: formal and informal oral and written communications |
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| Model: behaviors and decisions that prioritize and allocate resources |
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| Reinforce: formal and informal rewards that reinforce the desired change |
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Leverage Sponsors to Effect Disruptive Change
Higher education provides unique challenges to implementing disruptive change, as leaders often face highly distributed authority, leadership misalignment around a business case for action and the definition of success, and sponsors and work teams that lack authority to make decisions and implement organization-wide changes. As leaders look to move their institutions beyond the status quo, they need to focus on leading through change by aligning goals, then aligning behaviors and, finally, aligning processes. Under this framework, higher education institutions should focus on assessing their leadership’s level and type of commitment by how they express, model and reinforce the change. Look for active sponsorship.