drbrendanmoloney - Essential Steps to Success

Governance reform is one of the hardest change projects a university can undertake, precisely because the people asked to approve it are often the same people whose roles, authority, or committee seats are affected by it. Unlike an academic restructuring or a financial turnaround, where the board sits outside the change and directs it, governance reform asks the board and senior academic leadership to redesign the structure they themselves operate within. That dynamic explains why so many governance reform efforts stall at the diagnosis stage or produce cosmetic changes that leave the underlying structural weaknesses untouched. Successful reform follows a fairly consistent sequence, and skipping steps in that sequence is the most common reason reform efforts fail.

Want expert help putting this into practice? Dr Brendan Moloney can guide you through it.

Step One: Diagnose Structural Weaknesses Honestly

Every governance reform effort should begin with a genuine diagnostic phase, separate from any proposal about what to change. This means examining board composition against the skills and independence the institution actually needs, reviewing committee charters against what those committees are really being asked to do, and looking honestly at where decisions are made in practice versus where the formal structure says they should be made. A common finding at this stage is that informal authority has drifted away from where formal authority sits — a strategy committee that rarely discusses strategy, an executive committee that has quietly absorbed decisions meant for the full board, or a president who has become the de facto source of board agendas rather than the board itself.

The diagnostic phase fails when it is rushed or when it is conducted defensively, with participants more concerned about how findings will reflect on them than about surfacing the real picture. Institutions get better results when the diagnosis is conducted with some distance — whether that means an external reviewer, a governance committee given explicit permission to be critical, or simply enough time set aside that people move past defensiveness into honest assessment. Findings should be written down and shared, even when uncomfortable, because a diagnosis that is never stated plainly cannot be acted on.

Step Two: Sequence Board Composition Changes First

Related: drbrendanmoloney - Best Practices for Professional Excellence.

Of the three structural levers — composition, committee structure, and charters — composition changes should generally come first, because the people who will evaluate and approve later changes are the board itself. A board that has already begun to diversify its skill set and independence is far better positioned to evaluate whether its committee structure and charters are fit for purpose than a board attempting to reform its own committees with the same composition that produced the weaknesses in the first place.

Composition change is necessarily slow, since most boards can only add or rotate a limited number of seats per cycle without disrupting continuity. This is precisely why it needs to start early in a reform sequence rather than being left until other structural work is done. A practical approach is to build a skills matrix — mapping the competencies and independence the board needs against what current members provide — and to let that matrix quietly guide nominations over several cycles, rather than attempting a wholesale membership change that would itself destabilize the institution during a period when stability is needed.

Step Three: Redesign Committee Structure and Charters Together

Once composition is moving in the right direction, committee structure and charters should be reformed together rather than sequentially, because they define each other. A charter with no corresponding committee competence is aspirational language with no teeth; a committee structure with no clear charter drifts toward whatever work its members find interesting rather than what the institution actually needs governed. This step should start from institutional risk and strategy — what actually needs board-level attention — rather than from the existing committee names, since existing committees often persist out of habit long after the issues they were built to address have changed.

Charters written at this stage should be specific about what a committee reviews, how often, what authority it has to act versus recommend, and how it reports to the full board. Vague charters are a common source of the very drift the diagnostic phase identified, so this is not a step to rush through with template language borrowed from a peer institution without adapting it to the actual structure being built.

Step Four: Secure Buy-In From the Academic Senate

See also: drbrendanmoloney - Essential Steps for Effective Leadership.

Governance reform that touches the relationship between the board and academic governance — shared governance structures, the role of faculty representatives, or the boundary between board authority and academic senate authority — cannot succeed without early, genuine engagement from faculty governance bodies. Presenting a finished reform plan to the academic senate for ratification, after the real decisions have already been made elsewhere, reliably produces resistance, regardless of how sound the plan is on its merits. Faculty governance bodies are rightly protective of their role in academic matters, and reform efforts that appear to encroach on that role — even inadvertently — will be read as encroachment whether or not that was the intent.

The more durable approach is to involve academic senate leadership from the diagnostic phase onward, not as a courtesy but as a genuine source of insight into where the current structure creates friction from the academic side. Reform proposals that visibly incorporate faculty input, and that are explicit about what remains untouched in the shared governance relationship, tend to move through senate approval processes far more smoothly than proposals that arrive as a fait accompli.

Step Five: Treat the Reform Itself as a Change Management Project

It is easy to treat governance reform as a document-drafting exercise — new bylaws, new charters, a revised committee list — and to underestimate the change management required to make the new structure actually function. People who have served for years under one committee structure do not automatically adapt their behavior because a charter has changed; old reporting habits, informal channels of influence, and assumptions about who to call about what all persist unless actively addressed. Successful reform efforts build in a transition period with explicit support: onboarding for new committee assignments, a clear communication of what has changed and why, and a willingness from reform sponsors to correct behavior that reverts to old patterns rather than assuming the new structure will simply take hold on its own.

Step Six: Review and Adjust Rather Than Declaring Victory

The final step, often skipped, is building in a genuine review point after the new structure has been operating for a reasonable period — typically twelve to eighteen months. Governance reform is rarely perfect on the first attempt, and institutions that treat the initial redesign as final, rather than as a first iteration to be tested against real experience, tend to accumulate the same kind of drift that prompted the original reform. Scheduling a formal review, with a genuine mandate to adjust charters or composition further if needed, keeps the reform effort honest and signals to the institution that governance is expected to keep improving rather than being fixed once and left alone. This step-by-step view of governance reform — diagnosis, composition, structure, faculty engagement, change management, and review — reflects the approach to higher education governance that Dr Brendan Moloney sets out across this site.