How To Usher Education Professionals Through Large-Scale Change
By Andrea Vargas, CEO
This article originally appeared on Forbes.com for the Forbes Business Council.
From a pandemic to staffing challenges to shifting workforce dynamics, the education sector has faced many challenges in recent years. The growth of remote and hybrid work, coupled with return-to-office efforts and the rising cost of care, has required both organizations and professionals to reconsider how they navigate the field.
At the same time, technical innovations like artificial intelligence represent opportunities for both efficiency and novel approaches to teaching. Educators are now able to generate materials like personalized plans for students and interactive lessons at a much larger scale.
Finding ways to lead team members through these developments is more than a matter of necessity. It's one of personal growth. How we overcome adversity and encourage others to do the same is what defines us as leaders more than the adversity itself. Change is a constant in any field, and building the skills to navigate it at a broad level is what’s essential.
Even in the face of rapid development, enacting organizational change takes time. It’s important to remember that change can only take true hold when team members across a company have bought in. Even more, ensuring an extensive response by team members is best done with comprehensive action. In 2021, McKinsey research found there were higher success rates of change efforts when companies took more actions.
Regardless of the intricacies of your approach, it must be robust and far-reaching to be the most successful. Project management skills will serve leaders well here, ensuring no team member or task is missed as efforts advance. With strategic partnerships and additional stakeholder engagement, your organization can execute plans consistently and thoroughly. Identify these groups early, and engage with them often. Overall, change management should be thoughtful, organized and flexible enough to adapt when roadblocks occur.
Understanding the relationship between employee buy-in and enthusiasm is critical to successful change management. Sure, with enough buy-in, efforts should be successful. But shouldn’t employees be as welcoming of or excited about changes as they are willing to accept them?
Great leaders understand the depths of how we adapt and that altering course can inspire a series of emotions before major action takes place. This is especially true in industries like education, where communicating about change should be done in ways that align with the organization’s higher set of values. When stakeholders can more easily connect and resonate with efforts, the path to generating enthusiasm becomes much simpler.
Those who best navigate large-scale change are the ones willing to address it head-on. Consider any kind of major transition in your own life. Be it a move, a new job, a loss or something else, transitions can bring up feelings of anxiety or apprehension. The stakes can seem just as high at work, if not higher, so providing employees with avenues to work through emotional aspects of change is paramount. Clear communication and transparency can alleviate fear and uncertainty, so lay out an approach that focuses as much on strategy as it does empathy.
In the end, the organizational response to change is only as effective as those enacting it. Remaining unified requires everyone to stay on the same page, but it hinges on a multifaceted approach that allows team members to accept change in their own ways. It’s a tall order to make sure all parties are working in tandem with one another, especially in times of uncertainty. Staying organized and remaining willing to adjust will sustain leaders as they act. Ultimately, in acknowledging both the inevitability of change and its nuances at an individual level, leaders can more comprehensively make it happen.
