Role: Strategy consultant & executive coach
Facilitated organisation-wide alignment workshops and executive coaching sessions for the senior leadership team, securing collective endorsement for a newly integrated institutional strategy.
University leadership had committed to a major merger of departments and institutes, but lacked a unified strategic vision and a shared understanding of the reform's downstream impacts. The restructuring was culturally and institutionally complex, dissolving long-standing academic disciplinary boundaries that historically anchored the university's identity. The new matrix-based management system was also unfamiliar.
Stakeholder engagement: university-wide alignment seminars to collaboratively map strengths and hidden synergies within the new structural model. Leadership enablement: monthly executive coaching sessions for the eight-person leadership team executing the transition. Core focus: matrix management practices, cross-departmental collaboration, and change communication tactics. Iterative dialogue was used to surface, address, and constructively resolve internal friction.
Endorsed strategy: a consensus-backed document defining long-term priorities and goals. Unified management culture: the executive team gained a shared vocabulary and clear models for functioning within the new matrix structure. Operational transparency: cross-departmental dependencies became explicit, highlighting the precise investments required to make the merger a success.
Change management in an academic organisation is not a purely administrative or technocratic exercise. It is a negotiation of professional identity and values. Strategy cannot simply be handed down from above — it must be co-constructed through structured dialogue. Providing targeted executive coaching at the precise moment decisions are finalised but implementation capacity is still vulnerable bridges the gap between intent and execution.