Preparing higher education organizations for crisis is about more than just making plans for pandemics or wars. Higher education organizations face a wide diversity of crises, and their diverse communities have varied experiences of, and needs during, crises. Our research has revealed that crisis leadership, and especially crisis preparation, is built on a foundation of leadership skills that we already practice every day, such as communication, planning, and community building.

Higher education organizations face a wide diversity of crises

Our team came together in late 2022 with a single goal: to conduct a nationwide study of crisis leadership at Finnish higher education organizations in the hopes that we could help the nation be better prepared for future crises.  Our team consisted of researchers from the University of Jyväskylä’s Finnish Institute for Educational Research and Tampere University’s Faculty of Management and Business.  

We held panel discussions with staff from a variety of institutions and conducted a nationwide survey, and one of the first lessons we learned, in the very first panel discussion, was that crises were about far more than wars or pandemics. When we asked, “What crises have you experienced?” we expected to hear about COVID, about the war in Ukraine. The answer that surprised us most was “the merging of my university.” But how was a merger a crisis? The participant said, “You don’t know how to do your work, you don’t know the rules anymore, you don’t know what to do, with whom.”  Comments such as this one helped us form a conception of crisis in higher education that reflect the variation in crises that people had experienced:

While there is no single threshold or criteria by which an organizational crisis can be defined, a crisis is broadly speaking something that blocks or otherwise interferes with an organization’s primary functions in such a way that usual routines and practices are no longer effective, and major negative outcomes may result if the crisis is not dealt with appropriately.

Panelists discussed more than two dozen types of crises relevant to higher education. These crises ranged from employee- and student-centered crises like professional misconduct, sudden illness, or family challenges that might affect just a single work team up through meta-crises like climate change that affect the entire globe.

That there is such a diversity of crises changes how we should view crisis leadership: it is no longer the domain of just rectors and deans as they deal with the whole organization’s response to events like wildfires or wars, but instead the domain of every leader, and every staff member, as they face challenges that may affect just their small part of the organization.

The organizational community has a wide diversity of crisis experiences and needs

Not only were crises more variable than we had thought, but people’s experiences of any given crisis could be highly variable as well. Participants shared with us that there were many factors that could affect how individuals or groups might experience a crisis, including (in alphabetical order) caregiver status, cultural background, disability, family characteristics, immigrant / international status, language use, precarity of position, and role at the organization. These factors, and more like them, all have the potential to affect what these individuals or groups need before, during, and after a crisis. Thus, integrating the diversity of the organizational community into crisis preparation and accounting for the unequal impacts crises will have within the community when leading during crises is important for crisis leadership.  

Everyday leadership is the foundation of crisis leadership

If crises are so diverse, experiences of crisis so variable, and needs regarding crisis so personal, what can leaders do? While we do not have all the answers, the best advice we can give is this: do not think of crisis leadership as a separate domain of leadership, but rather as something that must be attended to all the time. That crisis leadership is everyday leadership. And that everyday leadership is crisis leadership.

By saying that crisis leadership is everyday leadership what we mean is that the skills needed for crisis leadership, and the actions that lead to crisis resilience in a group, are not all that different from what leaders and groups should be doing every day. For example, all of the following leadership tasks provide benefits when done in the everyday as well as when done specifically for crises.

Good practices for everyday leadership and crisis leadership: Open, trustworthy, useful, and thoughtful communication to (and from) the full diversity of the community. Building resilient practices and structures: ensuring that predictable challenges such as someone getting sick or equipment failures do not cause crises or overloads that impact the well-being of staff. Being flexible and regularly evaluating the current operating environment. Developing community and trust. Understanding and accounting for the individuality of those you work with, including identifying ways to support and improve their well-being.

The wide range of crises those in higher education organizations must prepare for and the variability of experiences of crises by those in the organizational community can seem overwhelming at first. But investing in everyday leadership, such as good communication, thoughtful planning, and strong community building, is also an investment that will bear fruit in times of crisis, on those days that one hopes never come.

See the figure for a summary of the full recommendations of our report. The full report can be found here: https://doi.org/10.17011/ktl-rt/12  

We will be continuing our research into crisis leadership, and would love to discuss this topic more. Reach out to us if you are interested! 

Marc Perkins & Laura Minkkinen

Marc Perkins (marc.c.perkins@jyu.fi), ORCID 0009-0000-9738-6840

Laura Minkkinen (laura.a.minkkinen@jyu.fi), ORCID 0009-0000-9786-5577 

Full report: Good leadership practices as a basis for crisis resilience: How Finnish higher education can work better in crisis. https://doi.org/10.17011/ktl-rt/12

See the whole research team on the project website:

TSR project website (only in Finnish)