Posted: January 17th, 2023

AU Assessment Task 2: The Conference Context

Assessment Task 2: The Conference Context
Professor Virtuosa has just returned from attending the annual Association for Tertiary Education Management (ATEM) conference in Melbourne. ATEM is the professional body for tertiary education administrators and managers in Australasia.
At the conference, Professor Virtuosa ran into an old friend and fellow Vice Chancellor, Professor William Whiz. Professor Whiz was the keynote speaker at the conference and shared some of the challenges his university experienced in implementing its change program last year. Below is an excerpt from his presentation.
These days, universities need to be able to implement transformational change on an ongoing basis. And that’s not easy.
Our largest Universities, including my own, have operating budgets in excess of a billion dollars and a workforce of upwards of ten thousand employees. We are driven by multiple goals – educating the minds of the future, driving frontiers in knowledge through leading-edge research, delivering beneficial societal, community, and global outcomes and operating in a fiscally responsible manner. In my experience, university stakeholders often prioritize these goals differently or have different interpretations of what they mean in practice. And so when you are trying to achieve general agreement, this lack of clarity about our purpose impedes decision-making.
We work in large bureaucracies, divided up into Faculties or Schools – and each of these entities often has its own goals, systems, and processes. Poor communication amplifies the difficulty of driving change across this kind of structure. Traditional information cascades often fail in universities, making it harder to overcome resistance to change. In some cases, leadership conflict between management, Deans, and staff can make it difficult to implement change.
Academics have a passion for finding and arguing the right answers. When applied to change scenarios, robust debate in the search for perfection can impede progress. At the same time, a strong culture of collegiality often leads to an unwillingness to make ‘tough calls’ that could impact colleagues. Academic staff have a strong allegiance to their own discipline over their employer – and this means that when we make decisions that adversely impact their discipline groups, like downsizing, they fervently resist the change, even though it is patently obvious this is in the best interests of the university. Our workforces are heavily unionized and tertiary sector unions have significant bargaining power to influence management’s decisions about the scope, depth, and nature of proposed changes. Universities also have a long cultural tradition of consensus-based decision-making – so ‘top-down’ change processes are often met with skepticism, negativity, and resentment. All this means universities that only make token efforts to engage their employees or ignore resistance to change are unlikely to be successful at implementing change. In fact, war stories of failed implementations permeate the sector, associated with great costs – in time, resources, distraction from core research and teaching, and the rarely mentioned expenditure of the leader’s political capital.
As leaders, we need to identify and address the underlying causes of resistance and figure out how to overcome them. We must design our change processes to suit our universities. I’ve tried to adopt change processes I have read about in textbooks – it doesn’t work, because universities are not typical organizations. And we don’t want them to be typical – we must preserve and strengthen those cultural traits that engender pride among employees and lean on these to drive successful change. Thank-you.
Later that evening, you received an email from Professor Virtuosa, asking you to provide her with your thoughts on the following issues, inspired by Professor Whiz’s keynote speech:
1. How can we ensure that there is a strong alignment in strategic intent between:
a. the university and our key stakeholders (industry and our students)? (250 words) and
b. the university and our Faculties? (250 words)
2. What initiatives could we introduce in change management processes to reduce the resistance to proposed changes from academic staff? (650 words)
3. I think communication between my office and the Deans of each Faculty is poor. Can you identify three initiatives can we embed in the ways we work to improve these lines of communication (350 words).

Instructions

• This is an individual piece of work.
• Read the Case Study about the Mantra University.
• Read the The Conference Context that prompted Professor Virtuosa’ three questions above.
• Write a response of 1500 word to address Professor Virtuosa’ three questions.
• Draw on your superior critical thinking and problem-solving skills and comprehension of change management theories, concepts and processes.
• Support your analysis and recommendations, drawing on pertinent theories, concepts and processes, and relevant academic research.

• Include at least 10 academic references as part of your response. One of these references can be the subject textbook.
• Write your response in a Q&A format. Please note the following formatting requirements:
o Please use appropriate sentence and paragraph construction.
o Do not use dot points.
o Please correctly cite and reference your sources using the APA 7 Referencing style.
• Read over the Assessment 2 criteria rubric for this assessment task before starting your response.
Resources and readings relevant to the assessment
The Conference Context is based on a report by PWC entitled Managing Change in Australian Universities (2022).