Change Has a Plan, Uncertainty Doesn’t: A Discussion on Leadership in Higher Education with Dr. Dayna Lee-Baggley
With the beginning of the new academic year comes a continued period of uncertainty for postsecondary sector, challenging institutional leaders in managing organizational change and student, staff and faculty expectations. In this discussion with COO and Co-founder of TalentWise Collective, Patricia Polischuk, Dr. Dayna Lee-Baggley shares advice on how post-secondary institutions can adapt and create an effective and clear plan to move through this challenging and constantly shifting institutional and political landscape.
Q: As Canadian post-secondary institutions begin a new September term, how should leaders distinguish between change—such as new policies, programs, or enrolment strategies—and the uncertainty surrounding their outcomes?
Dr. Dayna: In higher education, change and uncertainty are related, but they are not the same thing. Change has a destination, there’s a plan, and there’s outcomes to achieve. And while change takes energy, it has some structure to it. For example, a university may decide to replace its existing learning management system with a new platform. Faculty and staff may need training, courses may need to be migrated, and the transition may be frustrating or demanding, but people know what is changing, when it is happening, and what the institution is working toward.
Uncertainty requires change but the change that is required is totally unclear. There’s no clear path, it’s an unknown destination, and there’s no clear markers of progress. It occurs when institutions know that significant forces are reshaping their environment but cannot yet predict where those forces will lead. Canadian universities are currently navigating major shifts in federal international-student and immigration policy, changing rules affecting international graduates, and growing geopolitical restrictions around international research partnerships and research security. Institutions know these developments may have major implications for enrolment, revenue, programs, staffing, research and recruitment, but they often cannot yet know the magnitude of the impact or when/how changes to these policies may change over time.
Uncertainty therefore requires not just the energy of change but activates our threat systems which are very sensitive to unknown and uncertainty. The threat system is part of what we refer to as our “survival mind,” an automatic, unconscious part of our brain responsible for such things as emotions, learning, memory, and automatic thoughts. When our threat systems are activated, we are less likely to be able to effectively perform, we can get stuck in emotional and worst-case scenario thinking. In higher education, that can show up as increased anxiety, rumour-sharing, worst-case-scenario thinking, resistance, conflict, or difficulty making decisions. People may become preoccupied with questions such as, “Will our program be cut?”, “Will we lose international enrolment?”, “Will there be layoffs?”, or “Will this affect my research or career?” In order to function effectively we need our frontal lobe activated which is the location of self-control, planning, and other executive functions.
That is why leading through uncertainty requires more than simply providing information. Leaders also need to help reduce the sense of threat created by not knowing.
Q: What can college and university leaders do to give students, faculty, and staff a sense of stability at the start of the academic year while being transparent about uncertainties such as funding pressures, international-student policy shifts, and evolving learner needs?
Dr. Dayna: Offering logic does not help deactivate the threat system because the threat system fundamentally does not use logic. It functions on worst case scenario. So even if the worst-case scenario may be very unlikely, that’s the one our threat system is focused on. Logic will never address this. Luckily there is a system in humans called the social safety system which is also part of our survival brain. When this part is activated, we “feel” better. But it isn’t activated through logic, it’s activated with a sense that we feel heard, understood and we are not alone.
Managing the threat system can be particularly challenging in higher education because many of the people working in universities and colleges (both leaders and staff/faculty) have been highly rewarded for using logic, analysis, planning, and problem-solving. Those skills are essential in academic environments and are often embedded into professional identities. But they are not the tools that calm the survival brain. When the threat system is activated, giving people more data or trying to reason them out of their concern does little to calm the threat system.
Leaders therefore need to recognize that responding effectively to uncertainty requires more than good analysis and data. It also requires attending to the human threat response that uncertainty can trigger.
The social safety system can also be harder to activate in higher education because academic departments have an unusual power structure. Department heads and chairs are often expected to lead people over whom they have relatively little formal authority. Moreover, tenured or permanent faculty may have strong protections through collective agreements and governance structures, while instructors, sessional faculty, and other term employees may work alongside them with far less job security and fewer protections. That can create a department where people are technically part of the same team but are experiencing uncertainty from very different positions. Academic culture and structure also tend to create competition with one’s colleagues (rather than competition from other institutions) around courses, resources, research opportunities, workload, status, and future appointments. In that environment, building social cohesion can be much more challenging. It can feel a little like herding cats, except some of the cats have tenure over whom you have very few carrots and sticks and some are wondering whether they will have a contract next semester.
Q: In your view, what leadership practices help institutions move beyond simply managing change to building the capacity to thrive amid ongoing uncertainty in the post-secondary sector?
Dr. Dayna: To manage uncertainty it is crucial to recognize that humans are messy and that logic alone is not sufficient to address the threat system. While many employed in post-secondary institutions spend a lot of their time using their logical brain, it would be a mistake to assume they are only logical humans. Survival brains needs to be attended too as well.
This makes communication especially important. One tendency in uncertainty is for leaders to be silent, not to say anything because they don’t have any “concrete” updates. But silence breeds even more uncertainty and room for the worst case scenario to fester. Universities are highly networked environments, with information moving quickly through departments, committees, faculty associations, unions, informal conversations, and long-standing relationships. If leaders do not provide information, people will often fill in the gaps themselves, and the survival brain tends to fill those gaps with worst-case scenarios. So, ironically, giving updates that you have no updates is actually helpful. It lets others know that you, as a leader, are on top of it, monitoring it but there happens to be no new information at that moment. It also allows space to discuss any rumors and to address them as quickly as possible before they take on a life of their own.
Another important leadership skill in uncertainty is validation. It can be helpful to acknowledge the elephant in the room that there is uncertainty and that it can cause additional stress. Validating
that uncertainty can cause distress helps to activate the social safety system because it tells the other person that they are not alone in their distress, even if the distress is “illogical”. This can be especially challenging in academia because validation is not typically how people are trained to communicate. Academic culture rewards critical thinking, debate, intellectual criticism, and defending a position with evidence. Validation requires a different skill: acknowledging the person’s experience without debating it, correcting it, or trying to talk them out of it. It can be helpful to remember that validation ends in a period, it doesn’t include a “but”. Simply saying the period out loud can be helpful. A leader might simply say, “It’s a really stressful time with all this uncertainty. I understand being uneasy or stressed by it. Period”. In academic environments where debate and criticism is often the default mode of communication, that can feel rather unfamiliar, but it is an important tool for helping people regulate uncertainty.
Studies show that when we can activate that social safety system, people feel more capable of handling uncertainty and their perceptions of threat decrease. This isn’t because we have changed anything, it’s because we have activated a hard-wired aspect of humans. When this social safety system is activated, people describe it as “someone gets me” and “someone’s got my back”. That matters in higher education because there is often a great deal that leaders cannot immediately fix. Thus, leaders in academia should keep in mind that activating the social safety system is a “fix” in itself. A deeply human fix.
Dr. Dayna Lee-Baggley has a PhD in clinical psychology with 20 years of clinical practice working with individuals, leaders, and workplaces. She is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of the “Impact me app” & the "Dr. Dayna Method." She is an internationally recognized expert in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. She worked for almost 15 years in multidisciplinary teams on medical, surgical and cancer care hospital units working with individual with chronic and life threatening health conditions. She brings both direct lived experiences working in health care settings as well as research, public, and private sector workplace experiences. She also conducts research at Dalhousie University and at Saint Mary’s University.
Patricia Polischuk is an executive coach who has worked with leaders from organizations across Canada. She has served in board leadership roles including the postsecondary education sector.