Dr. Kevin Sanders, DMA, ACC Founder, Cornerstone Leadership Group Newsletter Publisher, The Academic Leader's Playbook
Dr. Kevin Sanders, DMA, ACC
Founder, Cornerstone Leadership Group
Newsletter Publisher,The Academic Leader’s Playbook
Every institution where I have worked has a version of the same meeting schedule…
Capable, eager leaders are convened to decide something that matters. Several units are represented. Everyone wants a decision. Then months pass. The group consults more widely, circulates another draft, and schedules a follow-up. By the time anything is issued, the problem has evolved.
I have chaired those meetings. More than once, I was the reason they dragged on. We chalk it up to the pace of the campus, or academic culture. It is the price of shared governance. But how do we decide anything when the challenge is bigger than a single office?
The challenge of developing institutional policies
Watch what is happening with AI policy right now. Institutions everywhere are convening working groups, although faculty and students have been using the tools for more than two years.
Drafting an AI policy is rarely the hard part. Most campus leaders already know what their policy needs to say. What they are waiting for is the rest of the institution: Which offices will contribute people, time and budget? What will happen to faculty who have built a career on the kind of teaching that the policy will change? And how quickly can people be reasonably asked to move? Most importantly, should we be using AI at all?
Not one of those questions can be answered by an individual. No single office can own the decision. Shared ownership is now required to solve the problems that matter most, and collective capacity is what a group needs to work through them. However, few of us were trained to work collaboratively.
What a campus gets without collaboration
The same absence of collaboration that can stall an AI policy also kills interdisciplinary work on many campuses. We celebrate cross-disciplinary teaching in the strategic plan, then discover nobody can agree whose budget pays the instructor, which department gets the credit, or how shared research or teaching counts toward workload. John Kotter’s diagnosis of large organizations lands here. Hierarchies were built to run the enterprise, not to absorb constant change, and his answer is not to dismantle the hierarchy but to build a second way of working alongside it. Ideas have never been the obstacle. The challenge has always been the machinery to implement those ideas.
The stakes are rising. Major funders increasingly want consortium bids spanning several faculties and often several institutions, which means they are asking for precisely the collaboration our machinery punishes. A campus that can decide across offices can assemble that bid before the deadline. It can also say yes to industry partners on their timelines, rather than losing out to universities that answer faster. This raises a harder question: Who builds collective capacity?
Achieving results through collective capacity
So, picture that same AI planning handled differently. Using a collaborative approach, the group convenes in September and reaches a decision in three weeks because that first meeting addresses the hard questions head on, instead of waiting for them to surface in month five.
In this scenario, the decision-makers discussed the resource question early: which offices contribute people and budget, and what those offices can stop doing to create capacity. They named what the change means for faculty whose teaching would be impacted, and treated that as a real cost rather than dancing around the politics of the decision. They separated the question of whether change should be implemented at all from the question of how change would happen. And they decided on a pace people could absorb, and then stuck with it. Difficult conversations but no turf wars.
Notice what is missing. Nobody agreed on everything, but the group was not aiming for consensus. It found a way to use their collective capacity to keep moving forward, without pretending they all agreed about everything.
Steps to collective capacity
So, what does a group actually need to collaborate on solutions? Collective capacity requires five things, and most of them are worked out before the hard conversations ever start: defining success, deciding on ownership, stating the problem, hearing objections, and starting with small steps. Here are some strategies to complete those five steps:
• Agree on what success looks like. Ask each person on your leadership team, separately, what would make this a good year. If you get different answers, you need to find agreement before moving forward.
• Write down who owns what. Document which part of a decision belongs to which office, who can say no and to what, and what happens when two offices say no to each other. Rogers and Blenko found that organizations stall more often from unclear authority than from poor judgment. On campus we often view that as resistance. Usually, it is not. People simply cannot tell whether the decision is theirs to make.
• State the problem in one sentence. Groups argue about solutions long before they agree on the problem. Edmondson and Harvey find that groups from different professional backgrounds usually fail, not for lack of skill or goodwill, but because each one arrives with its own language and expectations. Discussing the problem shows you where the real disagreement sits, and a problem statement helps the group move forward.
• Make room for someone to lose the argument. On any decision worth making, somebody gives something up. If that person does not feel heard, they usually will not fight the group decision in a meeting. They go quietly, return the draft late, and raise a new concern four months later. The group needs a way to hear the objection up front, make the call anyway, and let that person retain dignity.
• Practice on something small. Most campus groups convene only when the stakes are high, which means every hard decision is also the first time that group has tried to decide anything together. Choose a low-stakes question first. A group that has acted collaboratively once has a method to follow. A group that has not is doing it for the first time when the stakes are highest.
Who builds collective capacity?
No one can assign collective capacity. There is no office for it and no section of the strategic plan that mentions it. That will be evident if you open your professional development budget and sort it into two columns: money spent developing individuals, and money spent on how groups work together. In most places the second column is close to empty. So, the collective capacity gets built by whoever convenes the next group and takes the five capacity-building steps before the first meeting.
Every institution is developing leaders all the time. The only question is: What is it training them to do? Every badly run committee teaches deference, turf protection, and waiting for someone else to act first. People get good at those things, and then they get promoted.
However, great teams can result from someone’s decision. So, if that’s going to be you, start with one number. Total up the hours it takes your institution to make a decision that crosses three offices. That number predicts how well you will handle the next decade, and almost no one ever calculates it.