Leading through disruption

This blog was kindly authored by Anila DeHart, an Advisor and Researcher in Education–Workforce Coordination and former Global Managing Director, Talent Strategy and Transformation at Deloitte.

Higher education leaders are not short of words for what this moment feels like, and none of them are hopeful: compounding, challenging, turbulent. I hear this across conversations and sessions with higher education leaders.

This is not surprising given what is converging: financial restructuring, portfolio reviews and course closures, consolidation and merger talk, sharper questions from employers and students about what a degree delivers, and the pressure to build AI into teaching, assessment and daily operations. Restructuring alone has a toll: Times Higher Education’s UK University Redundancy Survey of over 1,000 staff found that 93 per cent whose department had seen redundancies said it had damaged morale. Leadership itself is turning over just as fast: HEPI’s own research on vice-chancellor recruitment found that nearly half of sitting vice-chancellors were appointed since 2022, with average tenure now shorter than FTSE 100 chief executives.

Naming the pressures is the easy part. Knowing how to lead through all of them at once is harder.

The work underneath the work

Across the sector, leaders are finding that while the technical aspects of restructuring are demanding, they are rarely what determine success. What matters most is the quality of leadership through uncertainty: how trust is maintained, how difficult decisions are communicated, how staff and students are brought along, and how institutional culture is both protected and evolved.

In my own leadership and transformation practice, I have long found inspiration in Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky’s writing on this. Heifetz, a Harvard Kennedy School professor, spent decades studying why capable leaders fail when a problem has no ready-made expert answer. In Leadership Without Easy Answers (1994), he argued that institutional failures usually happen not from a lack of technical competence, but because adaptive problems get treated as technical ones. He developed the idea with Linsky in Leadership on the Line (2002), sharpening what is now known as adaptive leadership: mobilising people to face problems that have no existing solution.

Technical problems have known solutions that expertise can supply: a revised reporting line, an updated policy, process or system, or setting up a new initiative. These are real and demanding, but solvable with the right expertise and resources. Adaptive problems require people to change what they believe, how they relate to each other, and what they are willing to let go of, whether that is telling a faculty member their course is no longer relevant, that how they teach and assess it needs rethinking, or that they now have to build AI into work run the same way for twenty years.

Heifetz and Linsky noted that technical work tends to get the attention, because it is visible and can be delegated to expertise. The same pattern is showing up in early results from a self-assessment I built for higher education leaders. The assessment asks leaders to rate their teams and institutions as ‘solid’ or ‘needing action’ across four areas: showing up (presence under pressure), engaging others (trust across teams), driving change (sustainable impact) and the change mechanics. The first three sit on the adaptive side of Heifetz’s distinction; the fourth, the mechanics, covers the technical work related to design, process, technology and governance. Confidence and progress cluster almost entirely around the mechanics, while the other three areas show the least movement, even when leaders recognise their importance.

What would it take to do both well?

Doing both well is not a single skill, and it does not sit at one level.

At a personal leadership level, it means practising what Heifetz calls “getting on the balcony”: stepping back from the day-to-day dance floor of meetings and decisions often enough to see the patterns in what is actually happening, then re-entering with that view intact. It also means managing your own state as a leader, since it is contagious: noticing what depletes you and what restores you, regulating yourself before you try to regulate the room, and building support of your own: peers, mentors, and allies.

Organisationally, it means building the structures that let people do that work without it costing them individually: naming losses explicitly rather than glossing over them, creating space where competing views can be aired and prioritising leaders’ willingness to ask about people at the same level as asking about numbers. One practical application is portfolio reviews, where I argue that the conditions of a review and honest attention to culture and incentives shape the outcome as much as its design.

Two practical strategies are within reach of individual leaders now.

Ask for the adaptive work to be named and planned for, not assumed. When a change is proposed, ask that the plan set out how the human impact and engagement actions will be managed, on what time and with what support, in the same document as the technical timeline. If it is not written down, it usually is not happening.

The other is building whatever keeps that work sustainable: governance that asks about people as well as numbers, a peer group where it feels safe to say things are hard, a mentor who serves as a sounding board and feedback mechanisms that make it possible to hear about adaptive challenges early, while there is still time to act on them.

Operational plans get written down and signed off months in advance. The leadership and organisational capacity to carry them rarely does. Which one actually decides whether the change lands?