Strategic Management in Higher Education Institutions
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| Lizenz | CC-Namensnennung 4.0 International: Sie dürfen das Werk bzw. den Inhalt zu jedem legalen Zweck nutzen, verändern und in unveränderter oder veränderter Form vervielfältigen, verbreiten und öffentlich zugänglich machen, sofern Sie den Namen des Autors/Rechteinhabers in der von ihm festgelegten Weise nennen. | |
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| Produktionsjahr | 2020 | |
| Produktionsort | Osnabrück |
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00:00
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19:47
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29:41
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Transkript: English(automatisch erzeugt)
00:04
Dear audience, welcome to my presentation on strategic management in higher education institutions. I'd like to show you five basic lessons learned which are drawn from the experiences in the higher education sector. And let me start already with number one of these five lessons learned.
00:24
Number one is strategic management could create huge benefits for universities and faculties. It could be definitely more than just a ritual. So let me explain what that means. If you develop a strategy, if you realize strategic management in a university, usually you are torn between two different orientations.
00:47
And let me take the example of a faculty. So assume we are a faculty, you're a dean and now you have to develop a strategic plan. So your president or your vice chancellor is coming and saying please make a strategic plan so he requires a development plan from you.
01:05
He or she wants to have a target agreement with you, fixing the goals and the objectives that you have to achieve. So you have to follow the retools that the university is defining for your faculty. So what are you usually doing? You aggregate the things that you are doing anyhow.
01:24
So you put together all the things in teaching and research and write quite often a quite comprehensive strategic plan. So you try to fulfill the standards. You try to fulfill the obligations that are put upon you. You follow routines and you legitimize what you are doing because you can say president look here.
01:44
Here is my strategic plan and I'm going into the right direction. The impact of such an exercise usually is quite low, but there is a completely different side of the coin. You could be an autonomous faculty which is steering with goals.
02:01
You really use your strategy to steer what's going on in your faculty. You use the strategy to improve, to make a major change, to use it for change management and to move crucial steps forward. And if you do that, of course, you ask what is in it for us?
02:20
How can we as the faculty benefit from the strategy? We could become an entrepreneurial faculty if we have that kind of idea in our strategy and we could follow that plan. So this is really finding your own pragmatic approach. This is your institutional management. And there could be a contradiction, of course, between the two things.
02:42
You have to follow the external rituals and you have your internal objectives. So how to deal with that? Of course, you do what you have to do. You cannot tell to your president, I'm not interested in your strategic planning process. You have to be part of it. But at the same time, you could try to create benefits for your faculty.
03:05
You could use the autonomy that you have to do something that is really beneficial for you. So you can really ask that question, what is in it for us as a faculty? And let me come to the potentials of a strategy.
03:21
So what could be the answer to this question? What is in it for us? So what could be the real benefit of a strategy? What could be the function of a strategy? And if you have the function, we'll come quite quickly to the principle that the form of the strategy should follow the function. So what could be the functions? The first is the ability to reallocate and to coordinate and to justify your decisions.
03:47
If you want to take away money from one department and put it into another, a strategy helps because a strategy can say what this department is doing. There is a preference in our strategy for their activities.
04:04
So that's the reason for reallocations. If you want to do that, what are the instruments that you can use? You can use formula funding. You can use a strategic pool where you say we are funding strategic developments and those who follow can get the money.
04:21
You need a strategic human resource policy. You have to prioritize your goals and you can sign agreements between the faculty and the department, for instance, about the targets that have to be reached. So this is coordination reallocation. The second function is a strategy is quite a good tool to build critical masses and to create synergies.
04:48
Especially in research, quite often we find we cannot do it alone. We need partners from other universities. We need partners within our university. We need a critical mass of people.
05:01
So what can you do? Again, coming to the instruments that are relevant for that, you could say as a university, we are going to create internal centers of research excellence. And then we would say we do not finance research across the board for every member of our faculties, but we put the money in a focused way into a center of excellence.
05:25
And you could have a competition between these centers of excellence and only two or three or four in the end will be nominated to be such a center. And this is the place where you then would have enough funding to build a critical mass.
05:40
You could form strategic alliances or you could focus on cross-cutting topics. I will come back to that later on. Three more functions. Of course, a strategy helps you to adapt to a changing world. The outside world is changing all the time in rapid speed. So you can have a SWOT analysis, strength, weakness, opportunities, threats
06:03
in order to adapt to what is going on outside. You could involve your stakeholders into your strategy development and you could have a very efficient planning process to come to decisions in time to be able to adapt soon to a new external trend.
06:23
Next point is a strategy, of course, is relevant for making the work of your university or faculty members meaningful. It creates identity. It creates motivation. This is really an internal objective that you have. So if you want to have that, you make large strategic workshops.
06:42
You focus on your values, on your mission. You have a lot of internal communication about your strategy and you have goal-oriented rewards even for individuals. If they follow the goals, they get top-ups in their salary, for instance. For instance, being rewarded for research performance or publications.
07:05
So making the work meaningful, creating identity. And now this is not the internal, but this is now the external function. You can demonstrate the famous unique selling proposition. So what makes you unique? You can make clear what you stand for.
07:21
Of course, then you have to invest more in outside strategic reporting, in your mission statement and in external communication. And the instruments already show there could be contradiction. There is not the same instrument for every function. Look here at these two things, the efficient planning process and large strategic workshops.
07:43
If you want to adapt to a changing world, you have to be quick. If you want to motivate your people, maybe you have to be slow and take everyone on board and hold meetings all the time. So there are different instruments for different functions. The same if you have more the internal aspect in mind,
08:02
you focus on internal communication. If you have the external, the outside world, your stakeholders in mind, then you focus more on external communication. So this is what I mean by form follows function. So be clear about the function and adjust the form of your strategic planning process
08:21
to the function you want to have. So that was number one. And here is number two. I think universities and faculties need a very, very good story for their strategy, for their focus, for their priority. And I would like to present to you some examples for that. So we really find a variety of typical content or priorities
08:45
of universities and faculties. And just to say, well, we want to be excellent, that's not enough. You have to be more specific with your story because what means excellence, everyone wants to be excellent. And here are a couple of examples, some German, some European examples,
09:03
but you will find the same things around the world. The first is many universities focus on topics and transdisciplinarity. So there are many universities in this world saying, we have different faculties, we have different disciplines, but we want them to work together on those topics where we are strong.
09:27
And here is the example of the University of Wuppertal, that's a German university. They say we have strategic priority areas and you can see them here, it's one, two, three, six different areas.
09:42
It's building blocks of matter and education and knowledge in social and cultural contexts, health, illness prevention and so on. You see these different topics and they say, we invest our research money and we build up teaching capacities
10:01
around these six topics. This is our strength, this is where we can contribute as a university. So they really focus on topics. And that's an interesting thing that many universities around the world are doing. The next one is especially international large research universities.
10:25
They quite often say it's also about topics, but they say we are the ones to tackle the grand challenges of today and tomorrow. And you have the example of the University College London here, which is saying our strategy focuses on global health, sustainable cities,
10:44
cultural understanding, human wellbeing, justice and equality and transformative technology. So they say, well, look here, we are contributing to the challenges of the societies of this world, to the challenges of mankind.
11:00
That's ambitious, but of course, it's also a clear and a nice profile that you can follow. Maybe you have to focus on one or two of these grand challenges if you're not so much a comprehensive university. But that's another way of prioritizing. The next one, the famous Dutch University of Maastricht.
11:22
What is the University of Maastricht famous for? And everyone around the world knows them for that. They built their profile around a distinctive innovation in teaching. Because University of Maastricht is one of the mothers and the founders of the idea of problem-based learning.
11:43
And if you look at their website, they say, what makes University of Maastricht special? So how are we different from others? And they say it's our education model. It's the European pioneer of problem-based learning, the education model that has been working and so on. So this is their profile.
12:00
So they have a specific innovation in teaching and learning. And this is also a very good idea to build a focus and to make clear what you stand for. So students, if you go there, you get problem-based learning in every program, in every lecture. And that's a fantastic profile.
12:21
But there's even more. Universities could focus on target regions. The University of Bayreuth, you see it on the left, a screenshot from the website, University of Bayreuth in Germany is famous for they focus on Africa. So they have a lot of programs, they have an excellence cluster
12:40
and so on, which is really focusing on Africa. That's a target region. Or on the right-hand side, the FOM, that's also a German University of Applied Sciences, they say, you can see the claim here, we are the university for professionals. So they have a specific target groups, professionals,
13:02
people who are working and who are studying part-time next to their work. And they say, this is what we are famous for. So if you are someone working, if you're a professional, come to us. That's our profile. Again, very distinctive and very specific.
13:21
I think I have two more. So here you see some small higher education institutions also sometimes make a very clear point for the university as a whole. We have the famous one in our country, that's the Ebers Wilder University for Sustainable Development. So they even have their profile
13:42
and their strategy in their name. Because they say, we are the university for sustainable development with a distinctive profile. And you can see from the description here, they did it now for almost 200 years. And they started with forestry and things like that.
14:03
And everything they do is focused on sustainable development. They won prizes. They won the prize as the greenest university and so on. So very, very clear profile, very well positioned in the German landscapes. This is a very small university,
14:22
but everyone knows them in a very small city because they are so special. And my very last example is, you can also build your profile around your values. We have this private university, University of Wittenheide, also a German one. And they say, we build our profile around the idea
14:43
that knowledge and competence being reflected in practice and developed and enough freedom for students to develop their own personality, values, combining curiosity, dedication and so on. So their idea is we define ourselves through common values
15:04
and they put the values into the focus of what they do. And again, they are very well known for that. So again, a very specific profile. And so the message here is, think about it. No matter if you're a faculty or a whole university,
15:21
what makes you special, what could be your profile and try to go that way. So that was number two. Number three, it is very clear that the process, the process of strategy development is relevant for the quality of outcome. And what is important for the academic context,
15:42
the process always has to be a mix between top-down and bottom-up. You need them both. Let me explain. A strategy process should be carefully conceptualized as bottom-up and top-down process because of different functions, bottom-up.
16:01
In a university, you only get motivation, creativity, ownership of people if you develop the things bottom-up. So what do you have to do? You need full assemblies. You have to run projects, consultations, evaluations, workshops, working groups, and so on. So many, many activities coming bottom-up.
16:22
But at the same time, you need efficiency of the process. You have to move forward. You need coherence. You need coordination. Therefore, you need a schedule. You need frameworks. You need priorities, incentives, funding. You have to establish units to follow your strategy.
16:42
And that has to come top-down. So you could see one of them only is not enough. You need them both. Bottom-up motivates. Bottom-up promotes the creativity. But top-down gives a direction, leads to an efficient process. And if you are in the position to design a strategic process,
17:04
if you run strategy development, one of the most important things is reflect what are the steps and what is going bottom-up and what is going top-down. And if you do that in an elaborate and thoughtful way,
17:21
this is already 50% of succeeding with your strategy. So that was number three. Number four, universities are quite good at strategic planning, but often have difficulties with strategy to action. So implementation of strategy.
17:41
And I would say, university, please use the tools for strategic implementation. Don't neglect implementation. There is often a lot of engagement in developing ideas, developing a strategy. And then in the end, you have the strategy on paper. You show it to the outside world.
18:00
You show it to your people in the university. But what happens then? How can you implement? And this is a very important step. And let me take an example. I would like to take the example, you as the university, you want to increase your relevance in research through interdisciplinary collaboration.
18:22
That's our assumption. So this is our goal. So how can you put this strategy to action? And a couple of examples. Of course, you need internal communication. You need internal facilitation. If you want interdisciplinary collaboration, you need workshops about it.
18:42
You need retreats. You need research scouts, people running through the university, identifying those professors who could work together from different disciplines. You need task force, projects, activity planning, proximity. So if you want people to collaborate,
19:01
you have to put them in offices next to each other. And this is also, of course, something to put strategy into action. External communication and marketing of equal importance, of course. So you can use your interdisciplinary research topics to structure communication, to create a website about it or whatever.
19:22
Performance measurement, you need the right KPIs, the key performance indicators, the targets, agreements about it, reporting. To put strategy to action, you need transparency. Have we already been successful? And you can see it from the KPI.
19:40
Funding resources. Of course, if you want to promote your strategy, you have to fund it. You have to provide the money to realize. For instance, if you have a formula where you count the number of PhDs as a kind of success criteria, then if you have a collaborative PhD where two faculties work together, you could have double count of that PhD.
20:03
So implementing it into a formula or a competitive pool or target agreements or also with the professor's appointment. You can already set a target agreement with the individual professor. You have to provide a contribution to interdisciplinary collaboration.
20:21
So incentives. You could even create a unit which takes care of the whole strategic idea of research interdisciplinarity. I have the example of the technical university in Darmstadt, again a German one. They have something they call forum for interdisciplinary research.
20:42
That's a platform for the whole university. It has an organizational structure. There's a director. There are fellows for two to three years. There's an administration. And they really engage. That's a unit that engages in agenda setting to promote topics,
21:02
digitalization, water and so on, but everything related to interdisciplinary research. And they run workshops, conferences. They organize an annual day of interdisciplinarity. They have small internal competitive funds to push activities and they provide services for bottom-up initiatives.
21:23
So this university says we have a strategic goal and we set up a unit in order to push the strategic goal forward. This is implementation. This is strategy to action. And my very last example is you can institutionalize transdisciplinary collaboration
21:41
with the famous matrix structure. Imagine you have a university with four faculties, different disciplines. Now what are you doing? You implement cross-cutting profiles. This is, I think it's the example of a Dutch university, profile number one, dynamics of youth,
22:03
number two, institutions for open societies, pathways to sustainability and so on. And now what does it mean to create a profile? It means you create a cross-cutting structure. So on the one hand universities is structured vertically in faculties,
22:24
but horizontally it's structured in profiles and there could be a separate infrastructure, a governance structure, funding for the profile, even staff members that are working for the profile, a building where the profile is positioned,
22:43
evaluation of the profile and not of the faculty. So you see, it's a new organizational principle. It's a matrix. You do not only look at the faculty, you organize the university according to the profile. And this sets a very strong incentive for the strategic goal
23:03
that we are talking about. So these were my examples that I wanted to give you, very specific topic, specific initiative to increase transitional research, but you can see how important implementation
23:21
and strategy to action is. Okay, now already the last one. Remember five lessons learned. There could be more, but I picked out five. University strategies often fail in practical implementation because of typical university issues. And what is important, instrumental design.
23:42
Instrumental design could help to avoid the failure. And let me in a minute again give a couple of examples. First of all, I'd like to show you the standard process of strategic management. You will know it. It sounds quite easy. You initiate an analysis of the environments,
24:02
of the strength and weakness, opportunities and threats. You reveal, coordinate and develop strategic directions and options. You identify and foster a profile, a vision, a mission. You prioritize, set and communicate goals, set a strategic plan. You pursue the goals, you apply steering mechanisms,
24:22
you motivate, so you implement. Remember, implementation. And you supervise your goal achievements with monitoring and incentives. And the whole thing is a cycle. It's always going in a cycle. So it sounds quite easy, but there are many obstacles on the way and the question is how to overcome them. So there are some typical failures of strategic university management,
24:46
but the good message is there are potential remedies to these failures. So let me give you some examples. In many universities, there is the danger that strategies are irrelevant for everyday life. They are on paper, they look nice, you can hang them to the wall,
25:03
but it doesn't matter in everyday life. So again, strategy to action, participation, communication. This is what it takes to make it relevant for everyday life. If nobody in everyday life sees anything of the strategy, it's not worth it to develop it.
25:23
Often we have quick starts that fizzle out. Everyone is ambitious and you are starting and then at a certain point, things fade away. So you need process promotion. You have to run strategic development as a project and you need the power to push this thing forward.
25:41
As a leader, you cannot say, I leave it to someone else. You have to do it. You have to be the one promoting what is going on. Often we don't have cycles. University one-time action strategy is there, but there is not a cycle and there is no feedback loop
26:00
to revise your strategy. So you have to implement cycles. The question is how many years does it take to have vision, strategic plan, targets, action plan, communication and then starting again. But definitely you would need a cycle. There's more. Often strategies are like being set in stone.
26:24
There is no flexibility. There are five-year plans and nobody changes them. This means you need regular cycles for adaptation and revision of strategies. Continuously, you need to assess what you are doing. You cannot just say, we have the strategy, we are happy.
26:42
Let's look at it again in five years time. No, it's a continuous process. Often there is no follow-up to incentive participation, which leads to disappointment. I know universities who made a big, full assembly and everyone was discussing about the strategy and there were high expectations,
27:02
but then somehow people didn't hear anything again about the process. So they were totally disappointed. So you need a follow-up process. You need feedback loops. Maybe you need a regular leadership statement. How far did we come in our strategy?
27:20
And you have to be transparent about that. Quite often the missions of universities are quite exchangeable. I would recommend to you, do the exercise, take a random sample of five mission statements of universities, delete the names and then show it to your colleague and ask, do you know, can you guess which university it is?
27:43
Often you can't because they are quite the same. So again, think about, to go beyond the general excellence claim, develop your profile. Remember, I think it was my lesson there at number two. So this avoids the problem of exchangeable missions.
28:01
Last slide on that. SWOTs, the SWOT analysis usually is too much inward looking, not enough opportunity and threat analysis. So you need stakeholder consultation, you need benchmarking. That has to be part of it. Strategies often are very bureaucratic. So you have to keep it alive with a pragmatic approach.
28:22
You need a lot of dialogue elements. Don't do too much paper shooting because then it becomes bureaucratic. It has to be lively. There has to be communication. And there is often no strong link to funding, which of course also could be solved by having a strategic orientation of funding with formula funding or competitive funds.
28:45
So think about instrumental design. Design what you do, the process that you develop in a good way. And there are enough ideas how to do it. So you will be able to solve it. And good instrumental design is crucial.
29:01
So here are my five lessons learned again in a very short version. Number one was focus on specific benefits and respect the principle form follows function. Second, create a convincing story. Third, take care of the process. Fourth, turn strategy into action and implement. And fifth, be aware of potential failures and avoid them through instrumental design.
29:27
Five lessons learned. There could be more. But these five, I think, help you to run a strategic development in a university in a good way. Thank you very much for your patience and attention.