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Change Management Case Studies

Case 1. A large college partnered with CLOC on a long-term culture change effort to help faculty and staff fully embrace achieving excellence. This included greater attention to research, the responsibility of each faculty member to bring in research dollars, and reallocating resources to allow recruitment of the best graduate students. The CLOC team worked with the dean to create a multi-year plan that would guide the college through the process.

Within 18 months, the dean's top staff formed an administrative leadership team and the chairs were transitioning into an academic leadership team, each supporting the dean on college-wide efforts. The chairs took on a greater role in encouraging and funding cross-disciplinary efforts and orienting new faculty to the culture. Staff leaders coordinated professional development opportunities. The college is on track with a focused, results-oriented, large-scale culture change effort that is bringing it to the next level of excellence.

Case 2. For more than 15 years, internal and external reviews highlighted an academic department's inability to resolve tensions between, among other things, approaches to the discipline and the missions of its faculty and subgroups. These tensions manifested themselves in an unacceptably high rate of faculty departures and unacceptably low rate of graduate degree completion. The dean and provost asked CLOC to explore the issues with the various stakeholders and propose processes to resolve them.

Faculty generated and gave to the provost suggestions for structural change. The provost supported a faculty working group to develop a proposal that reorganized the department into two units. CLOC consultants worked with this group to identify issues that needed to be addressed, resolved them, and wrote a proposal that gained unanimous faculty support. CLOC also helped the dean shepherd the proposal through the required university approval process. The Faculty Senate approved this departmental reorganization, which resulted in two more tightly focused and aligned departments.