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Leadership Abstract - Organizational Readiness: Middle Age and the Middle Way by Cindy Miles


A promising strategy for community colleges coping with midlife challenges is Appreciative Inquiry, a process that replaces classic problem-based analysis of institutional deficiencies with large-scale collaborative exploration of what is working well within an organization. Explore this winning strategy in the March Leadership Abstracts.


Organizational Readiness: Middle Age and the Middle Way
Cindy Miles
A classic view of organizational readiness suggests environmental scanning, strategic planning, and staff development as tonics against the current contagion of change. The unprecedented convergence of issues confronting today’s colleges, however, presents a nonlinear world of change that calls for nontraditional approaches. Rather than swift response or sweeping transformation, 21st century community colleges might be better served to step back and undertake a series of measured reflections about their history, habits, and commitments to sharpen their focus and heighten their readiness for the future.
A number of learning and organizational theorists extol the value of slow knowing, intuition, and holistic reflection over rapid logic and analysis to make sense of complex situations (Fullan, 2001; Senge et al., 1999;
Weick, 1995). From an organizational perspective, such deliberate sensemaking may be the most crucial skill a community college can develop to maintain equilibrium in this era of continuous change. The understanding that emerges from deep, strategic reflection can help steer a college through uncertainties of policy, funding, enrollments, staffing, competition, and markets.
As an inclusive enterprise, such introspection reinforces a college’s essential nature as a community of learners and provides an opening into the heart of the organization. Ultimately, this exploration of the heart - a cultural inquiry into shared values, practices, and traditions that drive the institution - enables the college as a community to care for its members and adapt more naturally to its complex, changing environment.
MIDDLE AGE IN MUDDLING TIMES
One starting place for reflective inquiry is the confluence of internal and external change factors in today’s community colleges. In the midst of major social, political, and economic changes reshaping all of higher community colleges are undergoing significant midlife passages. The educators and leaders who helped establish the country’s two-year colleges in the 1960s and 1970s are retiring in record numbers. Observers voice concern about the passing of the torch - not only of the collective experience and knowledge but also of commitment to the ideals of democracy’s college. For some institutions this middle-age transition is a midlife crisis; for others it is a time for renewal.
Compounding the situation is the cultural stasis among midlife organizations. As community colleges matured, they refined their norms, processes, subcultures, and ways of interacting with their environments. These cultural elements set them apart from other educational organizations and helped them flourish. However, as internal and external environments change, these defining characteristics and practices may become outdated. The challenge for the midlife organization, Schein (1999) says, is to resist the natural tendency to cling to habits that made them successful and to recognize that the very factors that shaped early success can trigger midlife failure. A community college coping with midlife challenges could benefit from distinguishing its cultural elements with enduring value from those that have become dysfunctional and need to be unlearned.
A promising strategy for such cultural analysis is Appreciative Inquiry (AI), a process that replaces classic problem-based analysis of institutional deficiencies with large-scale collaborative exploration of what is working well within an organization. Based on a philosophy of positive change, AI contends that the most rapid, systemic way to improve a human system is to build connections between its members, its positive core of capabilities, achievements, and wisdom, and its vision of a preferred future. Midlife community colleges might follow the lead of hundreds of businesses, schools, and nonprofit organizations that have used AI practices to leverage their high points of personal and collective capacity to meet external changes and internal needs for cultural continuity (Watkins & Moore, 2001).
THE POWER OF AND
Organizational readiness also means finding balance among the multitude of demands that put individual and institutional values to the test. Under pressure, community colleges face classic value conflicts between competing commitments to access and excellence, quality and efficiency, and equity and cost (Marshall, Mitchell, & Wirt, 1989). Rapidly evolving workforce needs, shifting political requirements, and new competitors in the postsecondary market call for nimble, responsive, and fluid college systems. Simultaneous pressure is rising for colleges to provide real evidence of performance, performance that is increasingly tied to funding. Cries for better, faster, cheaper run headlong into demands for quality and opportunity for all.
Complicating these external dynamics are longstanding rival institutional issues of academic education vs. technical training, honors vs. developmental studies, high tech vs. high touch services, and internal vs. external focus. Daily tensions arise in classrooms and offices as faculty, staff, and administrators strive to achieve balance between fiscal responsibility and growth, accountability and autonomy, consistency and personalization, and research and action. On top of it all, individuals across campus seek to quiet the conflict between their professional and personal lives.
Mark David Milliron, President of the League for Innovation in the Community College, encourages educators to welcome and embrace the messiness in the middle of these competing personal and organizational commitments. Similarly, Alfred and Carter (1999) call for examining the continuum between seemingly opposing choices and embracing the “contradictory community college.” Zen Buddhist traditions teach The Middle Way as a balanced path through the everyday world of dualities and confusion.
A community college on its path to organizational readiness might pave such a Middle Way by holding a series of open dialogues to illuminate the personal and collective meanings associated with crucial issues. These conversations should be designed to aim for and rather than or responses to habitual controversies and to promote recognition of natural organizational complexities. By growing in understanding of individual and systemic motivations inherent in these tensions, a campus community builds skills in managing ambiguity and respecting differences. In addition, it begins shaping a collective sense of purpose and the capacity to change.
A NEW SHARED VISION: HEAD AND HEART
Shared vision, an inspiring articulation of what could be, galvanizes individuals to collective enactment of this possible dream and is the hallmark of transformational leaders and exceptional organizations (Roueche, Baker, & Rose, 1989). Such a “vision worth working toward,” as Steve Gilbert of the TLT Group calls it, is generated from agreed-upon beliefs about the values and purpose of the organization. The language of shared vision trips lightly off the tongues of most college administrators today. Unfortunately, these words trigger rolled eyes and bored groans from many who hear them as empty incantations and PR sound bites. Too often the ideals of collaborative purpose are lost in ritualized “MVVG (mission, vision, values, and goals) sessions” or shelved in forgotten documents.
Despite distrust, when shared vision is authentically forged from collective principles of passionately committed individuals, it is too powerful an ideal to ignore. Such a commonly held commitment to making a difference is essential to community college progress, as well as to the satisfaction and success of students and employees who look to the college for the promise of better lives. If done honestly, even the effort toward collective purpose helps fulfill fundamental needs for belonging and contribution.
The hunger for higher purpose has been on the rise in public and private workplaces and draws many to serve in community colleges. Such purpose is about much more than fostering a hospitable campus environment. It is equally about aligning our actions with the principles we hold most dear. It is about coming together to grapple with tough questions and competing demands. It is about agreeing on expectations and committing to measurable outcomes for our students and ourselves. It is about finding new ways to distribute power and responsibility to avoid old organizational chains of blame. It is about fostering cultures of evidence to guide our decisions and development. It is about building trustworthy systems and treating individuals with care and respect.
The community college practicing reflective inquiry as an approach to organizational readiness knows itself and its environment, honors its past by building on its successes, sheds habits and practices it no longer needs, and understands and applies the power of and to balance conflicting demands and values. Most important, this college embodies a deep collective concern for the organization and its ideals as well as for the people who form its heart, a shared vision of a high performing and humane community of learners.
DISCUSSION POINTS
· What fundamental values, purpose, and principles do we share as a community of learners? How are our core principles and values demonstrated in our programs, policies, and practices?
· What midlife challenges are we facing as a college? How can we prepare for these challenges in the context of our core principles and values?
· What habits or traditions do we need to unlearn that no longer serve our values or goals?
· What are we doing exceptionally well as an institution that we can build upon to design our future success?
· How can we come together to create a more humane and high-performing organization?


REFERENCES AND RESOURCES
Alfred, R. & Carter, P. (1999, May). Contradictory Colleges: Thriving in an Era of Continuous Change. Commission Paper. American Association of Community Colleges.
Appreciative Inquiry Commons. Weatherhead School of Management, Case
Western Reserve University.
<https://appreciativeinquiry.cwru.edu/>
Center for Formation in the Community College. Dallas County Community
College District, League for Innovation in the Community College, & Fetzer
Institute.
<https://www.league.org/league/projects/formation/>
Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a Culture of Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Marshall, C., Mitchell, D., & Wirt, F. (1989). Culture and Education Policy in the American States. New York: Falmer Press.
O’Banion, T., & Milliron, M. (2001). College Conversations on Learning.
Learning Abstracts, 4(5).
Palmer, P. (1999). Let Your Life Speak. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Roueche, J., Baker, G., III, & Rose, R. (1989). Shared Vision:
Transformational Leadership in American Community Colleges. Washington, DC:
Community College Press.
Schein, E. H. (1999). The Corporate Culture Survival Guide. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.
Senge, P., et al. (1999). The Dance of Change. New York:
Doubleday/Currency.
TLT Group. The Teaching, Learning, and Technology Affiliate of the American
Association for Higher Education.
<https://www.tltgroup.org/>
Watkins, J. M., & Mohr, B.J. (2001). Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination. San Franciso: Jossey-Bass.
Wheatley, M.J. (1992). Leadership and the New Science. San Francisco:
Berrett-Koehler.

Cindy Miles <mailto:cindy.miles@ccd.cccoes.edu> is Vice President of Learning and Academic Affairs at the Community College of Denver.

Dr. Susan Salvador
Office for Student Services
03/19/2003