Articles & Posts from Teibel Education
Two decades of insights on leading through change. These articles and posts explore the challenges that matter most to organizations in transition — strategy, governance, teamwork, communication, and leadership — with practical perspective drawn from our work with institutions and teams across the country.
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We constantly calibrate our efforts around time horizons—immediate tasks, short-term goals, long-range plans. Being tactical keeps our attention on what’s right in front of us. Strategic thinking, by contrast, implies stepping back, surveying the landscape, and making deliberate choices about the longer term. Visioning demands imagination. It calls on us to step out of constraint thinking and into possibility. It’s about seeing success in a particular domain and giving ourselves permission to believe it’s achievable.
For decades, finance in higher education has operated behind the curtain—crucial, yet often disconnected from the conversations that shape the future of our institutions. Budgets were built, reports delivered, and progress—at least on the surface—continued.
But what happens when that model begins to break down? When the pressures of rising costs outpace tuition revenue, when external funding dries up or becomes uncertain, and when the equations that once held things together begin to fall apart?
People don’t have a problem with change; they have a problem with the uncertainty it creates. Change forces us not only to recognize that we can’t rest in our comfort zone, but that we need to confront the fact that we might not be able to look forward sufficiently to see where we will land. Let’s explore three common reactions to change in the workplace.
A true team operates with a shared purpose and unified goals. Too often, organizations assume collaboration will magically happen, while in reality, individual departments prioritize their own objectives, leading to siloed efforts and competing priorities.
Want to transform your meetings from time-wasters to productive powerhouses? Discover the five essential elements that can elevate your facilitation skills and engage your audience like never before. Learn to unlock the secrets of effective facilitation and take your group discussions to the next level.
What is a bias toward action? It’s moving quickly on an idea with a recognition that there is never enough information to guarantee success. It’s making time for conversation and, when the time is right, declaring the conversation to be over. It’s leadership delegating authority to someone who will pull the lever and begin the work.
Social practices can also be applied to innovation. Across organizations, individuals are responsible for taking care of concerns and bringing awareness to problems that affect how work gets done. Recognizing these inefficiencies, however, is not the same as addressing them. In order to bring new ideas into being, consider the action of making offers.
Leadership is about exercising power and influence, but not as force or domination. We increase our personal power by engaging authentically with others in the mission while exercising the authority we’ve been granted to improve outcomes. What allows some to lean in and make unpopular decisions?
A complaint is simply a manifestation of unresolved dissatisfaction that lingers over time. Each one of us has experienced this at work as well as in our personal lives. One way to address a complaint is to name your concern and turn it into a request.
Colleges and universities, corporations, local government — pick any organization with two or more departments — have got a silo problem. What would have to change to tear down these artificially constructed walls that create misunderstandings, gaps in communication, all leading to rampant inefficiencies?
Shared governance is the decision-making model that guides leaders across all higher education institutions. There is much written about this model of authority being delegated from the board to administration, and then from administration to the academy. In a perfect world, the Board oversees and guides, the administration develops tangible strategies to fund and execute, and the academy provides the intellectual rigor and evidence that validates the strategy.
Culture is your greatest strength and greatest weakness. When leaders put new processes, systems or structures in place, the reaction is often some form of resistance. Your people do not have a problem with change, they have a problem with uncertainty.
What is Patrick Lencioni's major premise on how groups develop into high-performing teams? In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, it comes down to five qualities that people bring to group dynamics: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and a focus on results. When these qualities are present, groups are able to accomplish extraordinary things. In the absence of these qualities, groups become mired in personality and political distractions that take away from achieving their goals.
Anticipating a difficult conversation in your education institution can be challenging, uncomfortable, and anxiety-provoking. Whether it's delivering bad news, addressing a sensitive issue, or confronting a direct report about their behavior, there are practices you can build to increase your confidence and produce the result you’re looking for.
Campus leaders explain how a shared governance process can achieve genuine buy-in among decision makers, resulting in innovative strategies for both academic and administrative efforts.
The workplace is full of opinions. When one is expressed, others react with automatic responses (I like, I dislike, I agree, or I disagree). Then counter-opinions are given. We learn nothing from these exchanges except who is good at dominating others.
Missing in the literature on shared governance is a recognition that in the absence of collaboration, these groups execute by power over people or activities. Breakdowns of trust, lack of transparency, or an incomplete understanding of roles end up driving boards, administrators, and academics to act in unproductive manners.
As we approach the spring of 2022, we face another period of uncertainty. What if we could transport ourselves into the future and discover this uncertainty only increased over time?
While this past year has been one of the most difficult in the history of higher education, there is beginning to be a growing light at the end of the tunnel. The emergence of the COVID-19 vaccine has brought a renewed sense of optimism. University leaders around the country are planning for a majority of their students to be vaccinated by the end of the summer or earlier, and fully reopening their campuses come fall.
Teibel Education’s President Howard Teibel; Rutgers University Executive Vice President — Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer Michael Gower; and University of Colorado Boulder Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Russell Moore have a Webinar discussion on the Future of Higher Education and the roles we can play to navigate through this crisis.
COVID is a revealer of and accelerant of how we need to change as institutions. Academics, administrators, and boards need a new framework to meet these challenges as we look out over the horizon.
Howard Teibel and Pete Wright have a conversation about Leadership, Resiliency, and Team during times of crisis.
The phrase “New Normal” has been thrown around these last few weeks but it’s way too premature to say we’re there.
At Teibel Education, we are committed to helping our clients navigate change. As a result of COVID-19, we are in the midst of uncertainty, the likes of which we have not seen before.
Howard Teibel sits down with Leah Thayer of NBOA’s Net Assets magazine for a wide-ranging interview on communication, the perils of thinking in terms of “problem-solvers” as leaders, turning around moods of cynicism on teams, and more.
Teams are as prevalent today in the workplace as water coolers in the common area. This is rooted in the nature of project work, often requiring knowledge and skill from disparate groups expected to work together. The rollout of a new technology or improved business process often requires coordination among business managers, external consultants, marketing, training or sales groups, each working toward a common objective. Often, the coordination produces more cross-team dysfunction than success.
The history of leadership clings to outdated notions—dominating a room, commanding attention, or speaking so forcefully it pierces people’s listening. But what if effective leadership is less about convincing others to follow and more about bringing an authentic voice that invites genuine engagement?