Leading Change Through Fatigue

Sophie White: Hi everyone and welcome to our latest episode of EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. This was a great conversation that I think will resonate with a lot of leaders and anyone who manages teams in this age of rapid change that we found ourself. In this conversation, Jenay I talk with Tacy Holilday and Joseph Drasin about their latest research and EDUCAUSE Review article on identifying change fatigue in teams. They share insights from their energy commitment model, which is a framework for how leaders can think about change fatigue from a cultural and systemic level. So not just individuals getting burnt out by change, excessive workloads, all of these concerns, but actually at a cultural level how teams are getting fatigued by the rapid pace of change, some of the behaviors that leaders might see in their teams as they're getting fatigued, and some interventions that we all can make in order to address this change fatigue.

I think it's a really important conversation about how our work relates to supporting each other as humans and also the latest conversations on mental health in the workplace.

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Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White. I'm a content marketing and program manager here at EDUCAUSE, and I am one of the hosts for today's show.

Jenay Robert: And I'm Jenay Robert. I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE and I'm your co-host.

Sophie White: Great. And we're really excited today to have two guests to talk to us about some recent research that they did and an article that they published in EDUCAUSE Review. On this show, we've really heard a lot lately about change management, how it relates to how the world is changing so quickly, how the proliferation of AI is changing what we do as technologists in higher ed. And we're really excited to see this research because it, based on my perspective, provides some actionable things that we can do to consider how change fatigue is showing up in teams and some ways that we can address them and support teams through change. So the article that our guests wrote is called Identifying Change Fatigue in Teams: Insights From the Energy Commitment Model, and talks about a framework for how we can look at this. So I'll introduce our guests and then we'll jump into it.

First, we have Tacy Holliday. Dr. Tacy Holliday is a change leadership expert focused on helping leaders move complex change forward without losing trust or burning out their teams. She's a director at a technology consulting firm and a faculty member in the Doctor of Business Administration program at the University of Maryland Global Campus. She brings twenty years of higher education experience and holds a PhD in organizational psychology. Thanks, Tacy, for being with us.

Tacy Holliday: Thanks, Sophie. Excited to be here.

Sophie White: Great. And Joseph Drasin, I should have asked how to pronounce your name. Is it Draw-son or Dray-son?

Joseph Drasin: Dray-son.

Sophie White: Dray-son. Okay. Thank you. Joseph Drasin is the ... Dr. Joseph Drasin is the Assistant Vice President for Service Strategy in the Division of Information Technology at the University of Maryland College Park and a member of the faculty. In his role, he leads efforts to improve campus operations and organizational effectiveness, as well as conducts research and publishes on topics related to organizational development, change management, and leadership. His professional background has focused on the development of high-performing teams and organizations, being a successful turnaround expert for struggling organizations and helping leaders prepare their organizations for significant change. Thanks for being with us, Joseph.

Joseph Drasin: Thank you very much for having me. Excited for the conversation.

Sophie White: Great. Helping turn struggling organizations around, I'm curious to hear about that. That sounds like a hard job, and it made me think of what is that show about restaurants that are in trouble and people go in to save them? That's kind of what you're talking about.

Jenay Robert: Like Kitchen Nightmares or something like that. Yeah.

Joseph Drasin: I guess it was kind of the organizational version of that. My early career was in ... I was a consultant, largely though I did some internal work in the medical field, biotech, some space exploration, and organizations particularly going through a lot of mergers and acquisitions go through very challenging experiences. And so I got to work on that. You kind of joke that it is very challenging work, but you're often given a very challenging thing, so you kind of know where to go with that. And I led the area of research that I work in and the areas I work in. So it was a really positive experience. And I still enjoy helping organizations get better and make a better environment for their staff, which I think is what a lot of us really are here for.

Sophie White: Absolutely. Yeah, that sounds like really meaningful work. I'm sure that's satisfying to see them able to turn around or grow in some way as a result of your work. So let's jump into it. I'm curious, we'll link the article that we're discussing in the show notes for this show, but I'm curious what inspired this research that you two have been doing. And can you start with just the inception story of it?

Joseph Drasin: I'll start with a little bit and then I'll let Tacy take over because I was trying to actually remember this earlier today. As I said, my background was in organizational change and my doctoral work was in management, but essentially in organizational psychology and how people experience stress during large scale change. I worked in and observed a lot of mergers and acquisitions and really interested in finding the factors that made such changes successful or not and how people experienced it. So that was my background. Tacy and I worked together. We taught together in a doctoral program and she reached out and said, "Hey, I'd like to do a paper." And we were actually sitting around and basically like, "What is the problem we experience?" And it is that we work in change management and what is happening right now, and this is what, three or four years ago, three years probably ago, is just something's different. Something's weird. It's not the normal change management world and what is going on. And we kind of had an inkling that it was something about COVID, something fundamentally had changed, but that's what led us down this conversation. And our previous paper was this energy commitment model where it seemed that a lot of the challenge with traditional change management, which is a lot about creating desirability, making people want to engage, didn't seem to be enough. People were just, we kept using the word exhausted. They want to do it. They just physically are exhausted. And so that's kind of what led to this. And once we wrote that, I think our first paper was, "How do we solve this? " And then we realized we not even sure what this is yet. And we've spent now the last two papers trying to figure out what this is.

So Tacy, you've done a lot more in the nitty-gritty of it.

Tacy Holliday: Yeah. I mean, I think I was missing a scholarship. I was very practitioner focused in the work that I was doing. I was interested in writing a paper and reached out to Joseph because we have this shared interest and how do you lead change? And I think what's at the heart of that is really, how do you take care of not only the mission, but the people that you need to take care of that are part of that mission and ultimately trickling down into the students that we serve that are at the heart of these institutions. And so like Joseph was saying, we were like, okay, what is it that we're seeing? What's different? I really think that we're in a bit of a new era with change because people have stacked changes happening in their life from what's happening in the political environment to AI and all those different types of things.

So it's like we are human beings at work. It's not just we're trying to implement this system, it's everything going on. We bring our whole selves to the office in whatever appropriate and professional ways we can, but we're impacted by all those things. And so is there something really different in terms of leading change right now? We think so. And I think what we ended up seeing was that fatigued teams, they don't need better speeches, they need more targeted support. And that's really what kind of directed this research. What does that look like?

Jenay Robert: Yeah. I'm really interested in this idea of, like you were saying, Joseph, something's weird right now and the sense of fatigue being different. It's something I think about a lot because a lot of my research focuses on how the recent advancements in AI are impacting higher education. And a lot of what people talk about related to AI is that these technologies will enable us to do more and more and more. And I think about this so much about at what point are we going to be so saturated with more that we physically can't carry on? We just can't do it anymore. So I wonder also if you saw that in your research.

Joseph Drasin: Yeah, we kind of looked at it at three levels because again, traditionally change management thinks about how many changes in organizational dealing with. We're reorging, we're implementing a new IT system, we have a new vice president, those kind of changes. And it's always been recognized like people do have capacity, but really when we were talking about it and doing the research, it's also about how people are coming to work. And if you think about the stressors with exposure to media and other things that cause our bodies to react as they do under stressors, they're coming to work already in often a distressed place and not with full energy. And what you said, yeah, we do implement things that we want to do more, but at a certain point people are like, "It's not more that I want. I actually kind of want less sometimes." Because people are really good at adapting to specific things and silly, but when we try and adapt too much and the research really bears this out, our minds, we become very fatigued mentally.

It's overwhelming to us and people then react in ways that are very rational, but can look very irrational.

Sophie White: Go ahead, Tacy.

Tacy Holliday: I was going to say that when we were starting to put together what we were seeing, one of the first things that we wanted to do was say, kind of validate that. Are we just seeing this? Are other people seeing that? And one of the reasons that we wanted to do research as opposed to just write up a thought paper around this was to see if everyone was experiencing what we thought they were experiencing too. And we saw that in the responses with our survey where we had about 90% of the people that responded said, "Yeah, we're experiencing either moderate or high change fatigue. We're seeing it. We're seeing it in our teams." So that to us said that we were onto something that could be really valuable for people here. How do you lead change in a fatigued environment versus leading change when everybody has all the fuel in the tank and they're different things?

Joseph Drasin: Yeah. And when that research came back, when it first goes out, I was like, it's like anytime you're doing this, I was like, "I wonder what we're going to get back." And when it came back, it was so overwhelming and so it was clear that there was not only a challenge, but pretty universal. And we were doing this in higher ed. I don't think there's anything ... I mean, I think higher ed's under a lot of stress and a lot of change for sure, but I think this is pretty universal. And one of the things that came out of it, which I've talked to a lot of people about when I do workshops and talk to leaders about this is one of the thing that came out in the data, which I didn't expect to see, but was really apparent is people's awareness of fatigue and challenges in their environment was so affected by where they sat in their organization, that those kind of the mid-level managers were really aware of it.

I can't remember Tacy what the number was, but it's like 80% or something saw a challenge. But as you moved up to ADPs and deans and into presidents and provosts, those numbers dropped.

Tacy Holliday: Yeah, fourteen.

Joseph Drasin: And of course now we have the question, we have a hundred hyphypotheses as to why that is. And I think, but it's a really important lesson for leaders, particularly as you move up in the organizations, you may be more disconnected for what's happening. To me, that was a really powerful, again, not something I expected to see or we thought was going to come out, but it's one of those really telling things about how much can be happening in an organization the leadership may be missing out on.

Tacy Holliday: Yeah, that perception gap. And it's not that senior leaders are indifferent, it's that they actually see different signals based on where they're sitting in the structure of the organization. So how can we help them more fully see what's happening so that they can take the strong encouragement that they want to take to support their teams and institutions?

Joseph Drasin: And I'm not sure how much of it is like what you said about there's physical proximity, you're just not as close to the frontline, so you may not observe it. And how much is an internal bias? I'm a leader, I'm supposed to bring change. And so I don't want to believe that there's a potential barrier. So I mean, that's a whole, I think, a really important conversation as to what's driving that, but the end is clear there is not full awareness.

Jenay Robert: I was also thinking about internal bias in terms of the people who are most likely to be in those leadership positions, maybe they are also more likely to simply thrive on this type of ... We all know people in our lives who are like, "The more pressure, the better. I just get more stuff done." And so maybe you're not feeling it in the same way, and then those types of people are more likely to advance in those positions too.

Tacy Holliday: You said something really important there that I want to dig into. So for folks that aren't familiar with our ECM model, we talk about how in order for somebody to take action to support a change, they have to have the commitment to it. And that could be they think it's really valuable. It could also be they know they have to do it for whatever reason. Maybe there's a regulation, maybe they're required for their job, but then they also have to have the energy to actually take the step. They have to have the energy to open the email to read the latest. They have to have the energy to engage in the training. They have to engage in whatever they have to do. That's all energy. And so what we've said is that if they don't have enough resources, if they don't have enough energy, even if they think it's a great change, they're not going to be able to successfully adopt that change.

And it has nothing to do with what they want to do. It has to do with what they have the capacity to do. So the reason I'm mentioning that is when we think about senior leaders, oftentimes senior leaders have, even though they have a crushing amount of work that they often have to do for the organization, it's hard to be in those top seats. They often have more control over the resources that they do have than someone who's sitting at the front lines. And so they may be able to allocate things a little bit differently to relieve some of that pressure. I think that's part of the perception too.

Joseph Drasin: Yeah. No, I'm thinking about this now and I've thought about it that is it that people at top also have more personal resources, that they have more access to self-care, though certainly knowing the senior leaders, I know they work an insane amount and I'm not sure they ever take a vacation. So it is really interesting how much comes into the locus of control that I feel I have control over my environment, so I'm less affected by some of these stressors. Yeah, that's a really interesting avenue to go down.

Jenay Robert: But even thinking about what does that self-care look like, I mean, even if you're somebody who's working constantly, there's still certain things that take mental energy when you're not as well-resourced. So even something as small as what's for dinner tonight, do you have the resources to just say, "I don't need to think about that because I'm going to order out, " or are you on a budget and you can't think about ordering out, you really have to put thought into, "Do I have groceries? Can I buy groceries?" In some cases, it's, "Can I buy groceries?" Those types of things that you can't outsource, I think that all adds to the energy that you have available or detracts from it as the case may be. Exactly. Yeah.

Joseph Drasin: And I think that was a big piece of this, which is I think one of the things that's very challenging for organizations is so much of this is things outside of their control. The president of any organization still can't control what's going on in society.

Sophie White: I was just looking, Jenay, we do a series of EDUCAUSE workforce reports every year too. So I was taking a look at the 2025 ones and it showed similar levels of excessive workload being reported about 70% across teaching and learning cybersecurity and privacy and technology leaders. But I think the conversation about lack of control is really interesting because there was some suggestion of that in our workforce reports, but I like how we're diving in more. I'm curious, did you all see that people were validated by being asked about their change fatigue? I'm curious if you could talk about maybe the methods a bit and what the reactions of some of the survey respondents were. I know with a lot of discussions around mental health, having someone say, "Oh, I see you and I know that you're going through this hard time can be validating and maybe some kind of intervention in a way." So I'm curious what the methods and responses have been like.

Tacy Holliday: I can share a little bit. We went through, we didn't just do a casual survey. We went through a whole IRB process to get this research approved and things like that, because we wanted to make sure that we were bringing good data back to the population that would use this. So we were careful about how we were talking to people who are engaged in responding. But after the fact, after we collected, we had heard a lot of people reach out to me, I know for you too, Joseph, and just said, "I'm so glad people are talking about this, " because what they felt was that what we were describing was not a new thing, but it was giving them language for talking about what they were already experiencing, and that was most of the feedback that I got.

Joseph Drasin: Yeah. And I've given talk from this subject and there is a lot of that. I now have a word for what I've been feeling and I don't feel like there's something wrong with me because a big part of this is if you look at the research, it's not that people don't want to do the work and it's not that they're feeling stressed or overwhelmed because they're not tough enough or anything. No, these are all really natural consequences. Our bodies are only supposed to be able to deal with so much change. There's actually a reason we're designed that way. And so when people hear that what I'm experiencing is pretty universal and it's to be expected, it doesn't make things better in and of itself, but it does make people feel like I'm not alone and people are concerned about this. And hopefully as leaders become more aware of this, there are things that will improve, but just having the problem validated and having language and structure around it has been really helpful.

As I was talking about at the very beginning, when we first talked about this, our first, what we wanted to write about was like, how do we fix this? And it really was when we started, there's not even a really good, clear, concise definition of what this is when we started. And that was like a couple years ago when we originally started on this, just getting our hands around that then allowed us to kind of step into, okay, what are the factors and the framework that kind of drive it? And then eventually, what can we actually do about this?

Tacy Holliday: Yeah. I had a senior leader reach out to me yesterday and share that she'd read the article and that she was rethinking some of the initiatives that she was working on. She's like, "I'm starting to think about this in terms of what I have to get done and where I have a little bit of control to just take care of the team. And so maybe we don't have to do this tool adoption right this second and it's not going to hurt our mission." So it was exciting to hear how people are already putting this into place in their decision making and their work as well.

Joseph Drasin: Yeah. And I've had the same, not just implementation, but even things like reorganizations, which are one of those things that are particularly challenging during fatigue. I've had people say, "We're going to delay that or we're going to hold it off. We're going to try and minimize it until maybe next year just because we've already implemented three new IT systems. Let's not throw one more thing on top of people. "

Sophie White: This is encouraging. I've seen a bit at our conference lately around EAB put out a less doing less with less framework, which I think is really encouraging because I feel like we were on this trend of doing more with less for a while. So actually looking at how leaders can cut in their strategic planning, the amount of work that they're expecting their teams to do feels so valuable. And I like how you're putting a framework. I'm going back to what you said too, Joseph, about it being a weird time. And I think I've felt that. And I think we also saw, there was a period where we were joking about everything was unprecedented, that word kept showing up. And I haven't even seen that happening as much anymore. It feels like everyone's maybe just resigned to this fact that change is happening so quickly. I'm curious if you could talk a bit about some of the behaviors that you identified through the research of when teams are experiencing change fatigue, what that actually looks like in terms of individual behaviors and team behaviors. And then we can move on to maybe some interventions that leaders can think about enacting.

Tacy Holliday: I can take that. So we looked at a number of different behaviors and there were five that we found supported in the research that we did, and these are team behaviors. So one was errors and oversights in work. So if you're starting to see mistakes happening, next one was last minute absences, people kind of not showing up to work, taking leave, things like that, suggesting that their systems are overloaded, they have stuff going on. Slower output, maybe they're just not working at the same speed as before, things are getting jammed up, fewer ideas and initiative. And what we saw there was maybe somebody that normally speaks up or normally suggests new things, maybe they're taking a step back. They don't have the capacity to suggest more right now. And particularly in the strongest signal that we saw was around collaboration breakdowns. So if you think about it, as an individual, you are using your own resources to get work done, but there's also kind of this pool of resources. You're working with other people, you're getting support ideas from other people. As one person gets strained, as more people get strained, there's less collective capacity that you can draw from. And so those relationships break down, there's tension in the relationships, collaboration breaks down and then so kind of has an impact on everybody. So it kind of almost feeds itself a bit.

Joseph Drasin: Yeah. And those first three things I weren't really surprising. Other literatures suggested it. And I think if you ask most people, if someone's fatigued, they'd be like, "Well, they're probably not going to work as hard. They're going to make more errors because their executive functions are somewhat dampened." It was those last two that they surprised me and they shouldn't have, because the minute you start thinking about it, the person who normally comes up with ideas, both their own executive functions may be their stress. So they may not be coming up with as many ideas, but also, and I think a lot of us have probably experienced it. It's like, "I have an idea of how we could fix this, but do I really want to add one more thing that I'm going to suggest and get tapped to actually do it? " And so I think a lot of it's that even if it's happening subconsciously.

And the last one I think is really interesting because a lot of people, and I've talked to several people about that, when you become stressed or you're having challenges in your personal life, a lot of people, the first thing they do is they reach out to friends, they reach out to family. We're social creatures, we have social networks. That's what we look to for support. But in this environment, it's like the opposite is happening. People are putting up walls. They're becoming more insular. They're not sharing, which I think it's the opposite of how we'd expect people to act as something that's really interesting and needs to be explored and want to explore even more. But the impact, and as Casey said, it was our strongest indicator is people stop collaborating, which of course as an organization is the last thing you want to have happen when you're trying to implement large scale change, you need that collaboration.

But we're seeing groups becoming siloed, individuals becoming siloed, and that's causing significant challenge in any kind of change. And like I said, it's probably the last thing I would've expected to happen, and yet it was the strongest indicator, which anytime you're doing research and you get a, "Oh, that's kind of weird, that's the most interesting stuff." When it confirms what you already kind of expected, people are doing less work, they're slowing down. I mean, it's good that we have that, but I just think it's not moving the needle as much.

Tacy Holliday: And there's something important here too, I think, that I want to call out around the behaviors. That doesn't mean that if somebody has a ... We all have off days. So when we're talking about change fatigue, we're talking about a cluster of patterns. We're talking about over time, and that's important. But part of why I think this is valuable is that what we say something is or how we label or describe something, that tends to be the frame that we use to solve the problem. And so thinking about this in terms of someone is fatigued and they have a really good reason to be fatigued, invites a different solution, a different type of leadership than thinking ... It's like this othering that sometimes happens in organizations where I'm doing what I need to do, but the problem is over here. It's with the administration, it's with the faculty, it's with whoever it's with.

And so I think by thinking about this, we are all going through a lot right now. It helps us turn towards each other as opposed to turning on each other. And I think we need more of that right now.

Jenay Robert: I think it's a really helpful way of thinking of it, particularly because I think the type of fatigue that we're talking about is coming from more systemic problems rather than individual sets of circumstances. And you could easily see in a leadership position, you could easily get caught in the trap of seeing some of these behaviors and thinking this person is struggling and maybe they need to be on an improvement plan or they need to try harder, they need to do better at their job. And you could even see it going into formal actions that could impact the person's job. And so I think the framing that you're putting on this to start, that would signal to leaders, we can open up conversations about fatigue and is this a systemic issue? Is this something we need to address across the organization or at least across the team?

Joseph Drasin: A hundred percent. And there's a couple pieces to that. Absolutely. It often can be seen when people are fatigued that cynicism goes up, incivility goes up and some of these other things. So it is very easy to see it as this person's ... It's a problem with them. But one of the things also that came out is fatigue, while it is experienced by individuals, it really is an organizational state. Your organization is fatigued. It's not an issue with a single person. And then I think this comes back to that other piece that leaders are A, usually the drivers of change and also sometimes the most ignorant of the state in their organizations in the day. They take on a lot of responsibility, which is why we try and speak to a lot of leaders out there and why we try and publish this content to make them aware that there is this environment and they, because of their position, because of their biases, all these things we talked about previously, may be somewhat ignorant of it and they may be coming to conclusions that are incorrect and not helpful.

A person who is fatigued, particularly if you ... And many of us have been in this situation where you're a manager, you have a high performer who stops performing well, your thought should be, okay, what has changed in their environment? They didn't just suddenly become somebody who doesn't care about their work. Something is precluding them from. And while it's not our job to solve everyone's problems, we do have some responsibility to recognize that and think about it and provide the support we can.

Tacy Holliday: I think it's also important to call it because I don't want to other senior leaders because they're in a different view in the organization. They're seeing different signals. And the signals that we're seeing like errors and oversights or last minute absences, usually it's the direct supervisor that's seeing that behavior most quickly. And so what we have is a perception gap through how the organization is structured where we need to connect the dots and what's happening on the ground, so to speak, with the people who are controlling the resources, the pacing of the change. This is not anyone's fault. This is how things are operating now and how do we come together from the different vantage points that we have, share that information about what people need and chart those solutions together.

Joseph Drasin: Absolutely. And it's interesting when you're talking about that, I was thinking as higher education, we are actually changing and adapting faster than we ever have.

Tacy Holliday: Absolutely.

Joseph Drasin: And it's interesting that this environment is happening while we're in some ways being as successful as we've ever been in that regard.

Sophie White: That's a great point. There's always so much groaning about higher ed being slow to change, but just thinking about the pandemic, especially for technology professionals, the pandemic moving to emergency online teaching and all of the changes that have happened as a result of that, I think it's so important to maybe acknowledge that some areas of the institution can be slower, but I think in our line of work, people are changing really quickly. And I really appreciate ... Oh, go ahead, Joseph.

Joseph Drasin: I was going to say, even if you look prior to the pandemic 10, 15 years ago, the pace of change has drastically gotten faster in higher education. And certainly COVID gave us this case study in it. But even if you look today, when I think about large IT projects we run, our turnaround and implementation speed, how quick we go from ideation to actually executing a project, things that used to take a lot more deliberation, they just occur a lot more quickly. So our success rate of implementations has also gone up significantly. So we actually have gotten a lot better at a lot of aspects of change. Right.

Sophie White: Go us. We should celebrate too. Thanks for clarifying. That's really helpful to look at the longer term context. And I'm really appreciating this emphasis on the cultural elements of your work. I think it's been popular for a little while to talk about burnout. And I liked how in your article you distinguished between burnout as more of an individual condition, whereas this is more of a cultural and systemic one. And I'm curious, so we've been talking about some of these indicators of change fatigue. Based on your research, what are some specific solutions that leaders can start thinking about? Obviously talking to the folks who are supervising those on the front lines to understand what's going on, but if you understand that change fatigue is happening on your team, what should people be doing about it?

Joseph Drasin: I mean, this is where we're getting the real challenges. We've identified a problem, identified it's systemic, and it's what do you do about it? I think there's some very practical things you can do, which we kind of alluded to a little earlier, which is around the pace of change and being really thoughtful about what changes are really priorities and what changes really can wait. And that's not an easy process to go through, but I think it's really important. I think organizations also need to look more broadly rather than this division, this chancellor, this vice chancellor, what are their priorities, but consider the breadth of change happening throughout the organization. We went through an activity recently, and if you look at the number of major systems that have been implemented, the number of senior leaders who have changed in the last couple of years, the number of new major processes or new business areas for our ... It's like every month you're averaging about one.

And so taking a very broad look at your pace of an organization, not just within your division, your department, your college, but the more broader impact of change. And getting to the frontline as a leader, not just in terms of physically seeing it, but finding ways to measure it and instruments that can, again, hit this broader question because it's not just the HR department looking at changes that are happening in their world or the finance department or the IT department or academic affairs. Most staff and faculty are being hit by all these. And so getting that broader view, getting that broader prioritization is I think is really, really important. I think all this stuff being done around mental health is really important. Tacy kind of talked about people, unexpected absences, but encouraging people to take mental health days. It is really important that people do get some ways to decompress, do stay away.

A thing we work around is around job redundancy is not quite the right word, but you should never be the sole person responsible for something, not just from an emergency management aspect, but you should be able to go on vacation and not be checking your email and not coming back and feeling like you're even more stressed than you started. And we do a lot of organizational analysis and that's one of the questions we ask is how do you feel when you come back from vacation? And that's a really good indicator of people's current state of being. So there are some instruments that can be used in that space, but that's, I think the first step is from a leadership standpoint, getting that broad perspective of what the pace in your organization really is like. I do think there's things like reorganizations that need to be really carefully thought about right now and make sure that your organization is really prepared for it and it's really going to pay off, so to speak.

Tacy Holliday: I'll give really two practical quick things that people can do. First thing is make sure that you're not part of the problem. And so what I mean by that is if you're leading change or you're leading a team that's responsible for implementing a change, recognize that there's a high likelihood that change fatigue is occurring in your team and kind of plan for that. There might be an exception where your team's fine, they're not fatigued, but generally speaking, plan for them being fatigued. And then look at the resources that are in your span of control. So if you're a senior leader, that might be the pacing of change. If you're a department chair or some other people manager, project manager, you might not have control over that time table, but there are resources that you have control and influence over. How can you use them to support people that are showing signs of fatigue?

So I think it's really looking at that, recognize that it's occurring, have a human approach to taking care of people and then looking for resources that you have control over to lighten the load or redistribute so that you can help people work through the situation that they're in.

Joseph Drasin: And I think it's really important for everyone from the most senior leader down to the manager and staff to acknowledge and talk about it. And we don't want to create an environment where people are just talking about it all the time. But when you see particularly high performing people who seem disengaged or you can kind of see it in people's faces just having the conversation and talking about it, like, what are we collectively experiencing and how can we help each other? Because as the research says, for whatever reason, people's response to this is to isolate themselves, to isolate from other units. And we often, I think it's really important for us to push against that because one of our greatest strengths is our social networks, is our partnerships on campus. And we know our partners on campus and your colleagues on campus are probably experiencing the same thing. So you almost have to make a proactive effort to fight against that potential natural instinct to just close your door or put your headphones on and just focus on work and shut things out because we know you need that support.

Tacy Holliday: And that does not mean plan more events that make people go get it because then that just adds on top of things.

Joseph Drasin: Yeah. No, we're not trying to ... Yes, nothing artificial, please.

Sophie White: Right. No trust falls.

Joseph Drasin: Oh gosh, no.

Jenay Robert: My gosh. Something that you mentioned earlier that I'd like to return to as we're thinking about actionable advice for people is this unique position of, I guess for lack of a better phrase, middle management, people who have direct reports, but then are also reporting to some senior leadership. And I think that's a really interesting space for this topic because you're best positioned to observe a lot of these behaviors, but then you also probably lack some of the power that you would need to change some of the things that are impacting fatigue. So do you have specific advice for people in that middle position?

Tacy Holliday: I can talk a little bit about that. And then Joseph, if you want to jump in. A couple months ago, I did a retreat with some deans and we were talking just about this and the research. And one of the things that we talked about was the important skill at that level of what we're calling translational leadership, which means you're translating what you're seeing across both levels to help ensure that there's a shared understanding, shared understanding of what the priorities are, shared understanding of what people need, shared understanding of how things are going, and that deans, directors, middle managers and organizations can play a really important role in making things, even simple things can make things a little bit easier. Where can you bring clarity so somebody's not having to work as hard to figure out what's going on? That reduces the load. Where can you show care and consideration? How can you help connect the dots? You're very often a boundary spanner between different groups. So how do you help connect the dots so that people don't have to work as hard to figure out what's happening, what they need to do, and what support is available? And then going back to it, what resources do you have that you can use in a way that supports the work that needs to happen and the people doing it?

Joseph Drasin: And I think higher ed sometimes struggles with this isolation and the siloing because we are organized that way, but middle managers, and they do play a particularly difficult role because A, they have staff that they're directly supervising who are experiencing this challenge. They themselves are experiencing it and they are trying to communicate up to their leadership challenges which go beyond, "Hey, I just need more resources and more money," which is often not available. When I say resources, more staff or more being able to hire, which is obviously for many of us times not available. So it's articulating those needs beyond that and collaborating with others. I mean, I keep going back to breaking out of these silos and middle managers, having their own almost support group amongst themselves.

So they have space to collaborate, they have space to be open and talk about their challenges and understand how other people are approaching this. I mean, one of the early conversations we had is we're observing this thing, we're seeing people early on, we're seeing people act in a way we don't expect. We see cynicism where we don't normally see it. What are you observing? What are you trying to do about it? What do you find is helping your staff, helping yourself and so forth, and how can we support one another? Because it's a pretty universal experience that's happening according to the data. Some groups are able to maintain some level of effectiveness. I think everyone's been, it has affected them, but some groups are still able to perform pretty well. And so it's understanding what are those leaders doing and driving forth and what resources can they still bring to bear?

And I do think for a lot of middle managers, they need to make sure they take time out for themselves because they are torn between this above and below. And often their focus is on trying to communicate up to their leadership of their needs, managing and helping their staff and giving their staff what they need and being the servant leaders that a lot of us are taught to be. But that still means you need to take care of yourself because if you burnout as a director or a manager or whatever, your staff needs you and that then you're not able to do the things you need to do.

Sophie White: Yeah. You mentioned that some teams are still performing at a high level despite this. I would imagine that that can be a pitfall too if you have a team that is still meeting its overall goals and looks like it's doing fine, but below the surface has this change fatigue going on. I don't know if you have thoughts on that or just ideas for how, should we look at those teams differently if you have a high performing team, but you're worried about them eventually running into these change fatigue issues and not performing at such a high level?

Joseph Drasin: So I'll speak anecdotally since I can't back this up with data, but teams I've worked with and observed, a lot of what they are doing is keeping very careful control over pace. They're scoping projects very carefully. They're not extending, they're working hard, but they're also trying to be really careful about what they do, what they engage in, making it clear when asked to do things, the risks that come along with that. They're trying to be very cognizant of their challenges. So I've seen that in some groups and seems to be helping them a lot. Now, obviously that not all leadership and not all environments is that always possible to do. Your other point is a concern. There are people who will run themselves ragged. And that's what I was kind of saying earlier, people need to be careful about themselves because there are people who can look like they're doing great and suddenly they hit a wall and now they're on sick leave for the next three weeks as they have driven themselves into the ground.

And burnout when experience for long periods of time doesn't go away. Short periods of burnout, we've all had it where we have to work an 80, 100 hour a week for things and we do it a couple times, but then you recover from it. But when you're overworked, you're overstressed, you're fatigued for long periods, you don't recover as quickly.

Tacy Holliday: Yeah. I think acknowledging it is really important too. If your team is taking on more and more and more and continuing to perform, acknowledging that becomes really important as opposed to just thinking everything's fine so I don't need to do anything. Checking in, almost like, is there anything that you need, anything I can do to support you? I think being there to take care of the team is really important and also modeling it. It can even be simple things like I have something in my email signature that says, "My work hours may not be the same as your work hours." So if I'm sending you an email at this particular time, it doesn't mean that I'm expecting you at 10 o'clock at night to send me an email. So I think little things like that, we can model the type of healthy working that we want to have.

Joseph Drasin: The idea that when I go on vacation, if I'm gone for a certain period, I try and do at least half that vacation where I do not check my email. If a true crisis happens, people know my cell phone number, it works all over the world, but I think it's important that, and I'll tell my staff, "You're on vacation. Why are you responding to this message? You can get to it when you get back." I think that is important to model for people. And again, taking time off, particularly in higher education, a lot of us do have a good amount of vacation time and I know we're under pressure to get things done, but those times of true release from work are incredibly healthy.

Jenay Robert: Something we haven't talked about, and I wonder if it's because we're just all like-minded and it kind of goes without saying, but maybe it would help to talk about this for our listeners is the so what of all of this. I mean, at the end of the day, I could imagine that there are some leaders who would react to this information by saying, "People need to figure out their own burnout issues. That's not my problem. Deal with it. Or if this isn't the right place for you, fine, resign and we'll replace you with someone who can deal with it." And again, I don't think that's the standpoint of anyone on this call.

Joseph Drasin: No, and again, I didn't always work in higher ed, and that is certainly an attitude of some leaders. And I think it's a fair question to ask because yes, we are organizations that are trying to perform things and we're all adults and there's some aspect of that. But I would say to, I mean, we know that A, going through staff is very expensive. Severing with staff is expensive. Rehiring is expensive. Loss of institutional knowledge is incredibly expensive, but also fatigued staff are just not as high performers. And so there's actually a huge cost to you. And leaders who can create high performing teams get huge amounts of productivity out of that. And we know that from all the research around highly performing teams says that. And even the early change management literature, the reason change management became a thing was not just because we want to improve people's experience, but we'd like our projects to be successful and we'd like to not spend millions of dollars implementing things that don't work and all those kind of things. And I did want to say, because to your comment, just we've kind of glossed over this, but good quality leadership and good quality change management practices are still the bedrock of all of this. Being a good leader and all those leader competencies that we have been talked about for a long time are still critical and really important and good change management practices and principles are still really important. And so I don't want to get away from that too much because we need to acknowledge that and recognize without those, none of this works anyway.

Tacy Holliday: Yeah. And I think it would be wrong to have as a takeaway from this, "Oh, people are tired, take it easy." That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is that you are going to have to lead people or are already leading people who are fatigued and how you support them through a change needs to be a little bit different. Taking into account how you can help with the resources that they need to be successful. By focusing your energy on that, you as a leader are going to help your organization be successful because we're not just changing to change in higher education. We're changing because the workforces that our students are going into are different from how they were. The technology that we have to use is different. The regulations, the policy, the government, everything's different. We're changing to make a better organization for the people that we serve. We want those changes to be successful. So by thinking a little bit differently about how you lead change, you can help your teams and organizations be successful. And ultimately our students, that's the whole point of all of this.

Joseph Drasin: Yeah. And what you've said there is like you're already doing this as a leader. You are leading most likely a fatigued environment. Hopefully this helps you be more effective at it so you can be a better leader, so you can achieve your organization's goals and so forth.

Sophie White: Exactly. Thanks for bringing it back to the mission. I think that's really important in all of this to think about how we can better serve our students and the goals of the institutions by supporting our people.

Joseph Drasin: I was going to say, I think we're in a mission-based organization. I've worked in healthcare, space exploration. A lot of these fields where people who work there care about the mission, and I think it is really important to constantly keep us connected to it. Some of us work with students directly or work with researchers or work with service directly, so we get it. Some of us are a little couple steps away from it. So finding ways actually to reconnect people to the mission. I do think really, I can speak for myself and for others, I see it does really reinvigorate people.

Tacy Holliday: Yeah.

Sophie White: Yeah. We've seen a lot of that in the leadership type of discussions that we've had. One on institutional resilience earlier this year really focused on making sure people understand how the specific work they do connects to the mission. Before we wrap it up, I'm curious if you two have any future plans for this research. Where do you think this is going? What's your next project related to the energy commitment model? If you're comfortable sharing it or we can keep it a secret.

Tacy Holliday: We were actually talking this morning. We had our meeting to talk through the next article that we're working on. And again, we could preview it a little bit, I think. You want to take it, Joseph, chat with it a little bit?

Joseph Drasin: Sure. So when we left our last article, we kind of had broke it down into different types of change and that this is probably a little different, whether it's a process change, a people change, technology, whatever. And so both of us, since both our organizations work with large scale kind of IT implementations, we want to dive into that as a case study of specifically if you're implementing a large IT, how does fatigue and let's try and refine some of these findings and recommendations for that specific environment. We kind of thought after we were coming out of our last paper, we could have a whole series of four or five or six different types of changes. How does this really, like a case study almost of it, how does this really play out? So that's where we're thinking of going next.

Tacy Holliday: Yeah.

Sophie White: Beautiful. Thanks for the sneak peek. I'm excited to see that come out.

Joseph Drasin: And we always joke, as people actually have to do this, we're like, "I really want to find the answer to this because we're also dealing with this every day."

Tacy Holliday: And although we didn't study the student population, we studied higher education in the workforce. I think a lot of what we're seeing around change fatigue is also relevant for our students. They're also dealing with a lot, and so skills in helping people achieve their goals, helping teams achieve their goals in a fatigue state translates directly into also how we think about how we serve our students. So I think there's a connection there.

Sophie White: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, thank you both so much for this conversation. I'm leaving inspired and like we talked about, just being able to put a finger on this weird time that we are in and understand how we support teams through this type of change fatigue and the interventions we can make has been so powerful. So thank you for doing this really important work for all of us and for our students and for the good of higher ed. We really appreciate it.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. Thank you.

Joseph Drasin: Thank you for having us and allowing us to share it.

Jenay Robert: Yep.