Degrees of Certainty: Creating Enduring Impact in a Changing World

At EQUISS, we continue to believe that “the future of higher education is bright, filled with opportunities to redefine culture, innovate practices, and strengthen communities. Through inspired leadership and a commitment to shared success, higher education can chart a path toward a resilient and hopeful future.

We remain bullish on American higher education, in spite of shifting circumstances. 

We feel certain that positive transformation will emerge from this moment. 

Late last year, we launched a four article series on change leadership that presented our high-level framework designed to help professionals navigate the shifting landscape of higher education. Unprecedented disruption, and the most fundamental structural realignment in higher education in nearly a half century, make it the perfect time to shed practices that no longer serve professionals, students or the timeless mission of higher education. 

In our post, The View from the Middle, we explained why change leadership presented a more useful framework to middle level leaders than change management. 

“Conventional change management initiatives often take an incremental approach to organizational problem solving because organizations rarely make the time to map change management onto existing institutional structures or examine existing structural incentives to understand how the status quo is being rewarded. When these critical steps are missed, leaders and practitioners working in the middle of the university experience change management as a call to implement unfunded, small-scale shifts that are more performative than substantive. Too often, then, we blame a lack of vision when the structural conditions for success have not been defined or generated.”

Change leadership, on the other hand, grounds the work of middle leaders in three dimensions:

• Communicating Vision and Strategy: Middle managers must clearly articulate the rationale behind change initiatives, aligning their teams with the broader institutional goals. 

• Facilitating Collaboration and Teamwork: Middle managers must encourage collaboration across departments, facilitating the sharing of resources, knowledge, and best practices. At the same time, managers must be able to empower staff to participate in the design of the new workflows in order to build buy-in.

• Managing Resistance to Change: Middle managers must identify sources of resistance, especially perceived threats to job security, or concerns about the impact on teaching and research quality. 

Our community spoke, and we listened. 

Readers appreciated our analysis but also wanted deeper insights. In fact, middle leaders challenged us to explain the structural nature of the challenges.

The Director’s Paradox  

Earlier this year, at the 2025 ACPA meeting in Long Beach, California, we hosted a lively session to a packed room filled with middle leaders and unveiled our paradigm we call “The Director’s Paradox.” 

In short, the director’s paradox emerges from two sets of related challenges. First, most cultural, structural and institutional foundations in which managers were educated, trained, and promoted have shifted. Since the 1980s, higher education has operated in a context of predominant expansion in terms of demographics, enrollment, resources, cost, public opinion and opportunity. Institutional continuity has eroded. At the same time, middle level administrative leaders face tremendous challenges because they have to function at the inflection point of most institutions where vision meets implementation. They must contend with uncertainties like diminishing resources, reorganization and even shifting policy as they are expected to develop results. 

Once again, the response was overwhelmingly favorable, and the Q&A session told us how much middle leaders wanted more solutions, tools, and actionable strategies. 

In our next post, we will take a deep dive into Nexus - the institute we developed to meet the critical needs of middle leaders. 

If you, or a middle manager you know, are ready to create enduring impact and measurable results that demonstrates value and mission alignment…. 

Feel ready to shift out of reactive mode and communicate the story of the work in ways that resonate throughout an organization…..

Want to shed the fear-based paralysis that keeps people feeling stuck and is draining a team’s hope and inspiration….

Then Nexus is a fit.