- This blog was kindly authored for HEPI by Professor Susan Lea, Principal Consultant at Sagewood Consulting Ltd, and former Vice Chancellor of the University of Hull.
At any time, but particularly in times of challenge, an executive team’s leadership of the university’s strategy is paramount. This strategy charts the path to achieving shared institutional vision and mission, embodies organisational identity, frames associated plans, informs targets and timeframes and, ultimately, is the measure of a Vice Chancellor and their team’s success. Consequently, developing a compelling and purposeful strategy and implementing the anticipated change is pivotal to achieving a successful and sustainable university.
This sounds so simple and yet the extant research, as well as my own 30 years’ experience working in and supporting higher education institutions, has shown how difficult a task it is. Studies vary widely in terms of the percentage of organisations that fail to execute their strategies successfully from 50 to 90 per cent ((PDF) Strategy implementation: What is the failure rate? (researchgate.net). However, the upshot is the minority are successful – and higher education institutions are likely to be no exception.
Of course, a ‘good’ strategy (see Mike Baxter’s insights: University Strategy 2020 – Goal Atlas) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for impactful delivery. Even the most brilliant strategy will fail if efforts to implement it occur through what I would call ‘operational creep’. To clarify, this is entirely different to the need to be agile and proactive in response to a changing world while remaining focussed on the overall trajectory of an institution. Rather, I define operational creep as the ability to get drawn into a maelstrom of operational concerns to the extent that a focus on the institution’s strategic imperatives is lost and decision-making becomes ad hoc and predominantly reactive.
