For higher ed decision makers, any program initiative can benefit from faculty buy-in, from a minor grading policy update to a full curriculum redesign. In fact, the smallest changes may even prove the most contentious. Being able to generate buy-in from your team of faculty, staff, and administrators becomes a critical skill to have at your disposal.
Faculty are a particularly central part of any educational program, whether they are course creators or instructors, tenured or temporary. They play central roles in shaping both student outcomes and the overall experience, as they design and deliver curriculum, foster community, and act as the primary point of connection between students and the program. Moreover, research suggests that extensive faculty involvement in students’ experiences is a net positive for programs overall: “In general, the research reveals that more contact between students and faculty, both inside and outside the classroom, enhances college students’ development and learning outcomes” (Kim & Sax, 2009, p. 438).
Given their influence over student experience, faculty should not only be informed of decisions but also actively engaged in shaping them. Students will experience initiatives, even ones that are not student-facing, via your faculty. Consider the different learning experiences a student might have with a professor who understands institutional procedures and one who has never learned those procedures. The challenge for administrators is simple: to move beyond bringing faculty “along for the ride” and instead use their expertise to help plan the journey. This is, without a doubt, a leadership challenge—one that will require you to engage a community of faculty whose expertise may not lie in higher ed administration. However, it is worth doing. To that end, this piece will focus on two key inflection points to leverage the power of faculty present in your program to gain buy-in for improvement initiatives, as well as messaging tips tailored to faculty concerns that will help you approach these interactions. Although these items are especially essential for tenured faculty, most are beneficial when working with adjunct faculty as well.
The Point of Co-Creation
Many initiatives fail because they skip the first point of potential alignment: leaders don’t take advantage of the opportunity to co-create the initiative with impacted parties. In other words, they don’t involve enough people in the process of change (Bucy et al., 2021). Although co-creation is valuable for just about any project, those that involve faculty see particular benefits from this inclusion. Ideally, you should base your programmatic decisions on reliable research; existing policies and goals should (hopefully) be informed by research-backed best practices. Many faculty are research-oriented, analytical experts; many also draw expertise from deep experience in industry or other institutions. This means they have insights that will enrich your approach. Alternatively, this also means they will feel particularly slighted not to be consulted about plans that impact them.
There’s no good reason why your in-house research and industry experts should simply be informed of your research- and industry-based decisions. Consider how you can involve your faculty when you are evaluating the research and making suggestions on directions for your initiatives. Believe it or not, involving more people at an early stage will save you time. It may seem counterintuitive—how can more people spending more time talking save any time at all? But early involvement means more buy-in; it means allowing your faculty to shape the initiative and take ownership of it. That, in turn, leads to later efficiencies when it comes to implementing this initiative across the faculty.
Co-creation can be trickier than you might expect due to scheduling and workloads. Faculty are famously stretched thin between the many obligations of their roles. If you want buy-in for your initiatives, you need their participation; if you want their participation, they need to be provided with space to participate.
Once you’ve determined the time and space faculty have to participate, use that information to guide your next steps. If you have a small number of faculty who will be impacted, consider bringing your initiative to a faculty meeting. For a larger group of faculty, creating a survey to inform your decision-making can be a good starting point. Then, you may even supplement the survey with the formation of a focus group or task force surrounding the topic.
For most initiatives, it will be key to create champions among the faculty. This is particularly useful for situations with rolling impacts, like a new approach to course development. Faculty will be looking to the first participants in the process to understand the process and determine if it works; if it’s better or worse than what they did previously; and if they will be enthusiastic, neutral, or resistant when it is their turn to participate. Thus, choosing the first person or round of participants for such an initiative is particularly important, and you’ll want to make that determination not just for purposes of efficiency or timing but also for the potential of that person to become an influential champion of the new process. If you can’t find a champion, figure out why—what is it about the initiative that is either misunderstood or deprioritized by faculty, or actively disagreeable to them? Is the initiative not well-matched with the faculty or institution you have?
Finally, although it is critical to bring in faculty, don’t make the mistake of failing to incorporate other campus stakeholders who could help with your initiative. Bringing in others, from accessibility experts to instructional designers to library contacts, will set you up for smooth integration with those offices in the future when needed. They may also provide knowledge and frameworks that help you avoid unnecessary repeated work. For example, you may be spearheading an initiative to create a standard reference guide for students to use in each of their courses. Library contacts may have resources you can include in your reference guide rather than recreating them. Accessibility experts can advise on formats that will allow your guide to be used by all students using a variety of technologies, from screen readers to mobile devices. And instructional designers may be able to suggest the optimal organization of the guide and standard placement within courses for students to locate and understand the information. Creating these kinds of alliances within the institution can pay dividends for an initiative and smooth the way for future collaboration.
The Point of Launch
Once you’ve created and committed to a plan, you still have opportunities to increase faculty buy-in. The first step is to commit to fully informing faculty about the initiative early in the process. Be transparent about changes as soon as you are able, and take responsibility for delivering the information you need to deliver yourself. For example, if you’re hiring someone new to manage a process or program, it’s unfair to place the onus on the newcomer to explain why they were hired and what their role will be to existing faculty and staff on their first day in the office. This may sound obvious, but inattention or last-minute communication can result in these sorts of awkward moments, leaving both the new employee and the existing team feeling out of the loop.
As any good educator knows, telling someone that something is going to happen does not necessarily mean that they have learned or understood the information, much less that they agree with your reasoning. It’s not enough to be open; you also need to help faculty understand what they don’t know. A key way to do so is to give these research and industry experts access to the research and industry information that is guiding your decisions. At a minimum, give your faculty the chance to explore insights that inform an initiative, decision, or process on their own by distributing or pointing to relevant resources. Even if the research performed by your faculty looks very different from the kinds of research that you incorporate into your leadership decisions, many will respond to your willingness to show them the basis for changes and give them the chance to interrogate its methods for themselves.
Conversation—not declaration—should also be part of this process, even after the initial planning phases. Dr. Andrew Hsu, president of the University of Charleston, has overseen major changes during his tenure, including splitting the university’s school of science and engineering into two separate schools. His approach to gaining support for initiatives like these is organic and detailed: “One thing that I like to do is just go talk to those faculty members individually. Sometimes I would just knock on the door and show up in their office and then start talking to them about, what I want to do and, what’s their concern and make sure that, even if we disagree, he or she understands why I’m trying to do what I want to do" (McNaughton, 2025). This is a personable technique and ensures everyone has access to the information guiding the decision. As Hsu puts it, “I often think that if we all have the exact same information, most often than not, you would come to the same conclusion as to what’s the right thing to do. And that is why the first thing I do, when I go talk to someone, is to share with them what I see as all the facts surrounding the issue” (McNaughton, 2025).
Finally, when your initiative involves some form of training or information sharing, consider the past to help you plan the future. Are there training opportunities, sessions, or other programming that your faculty have particularly enjoyed or found beneficial? What characterized those sessions? In our experience, the following features tend to be effective:
- Presenters who are other faculty, graduate students, or who highlight a similar educational background to the attendees
- Topics chosen by faculty groups
- Topics framed around common needs (For example, if your initiative is to drive adoption of the institution’s LMS gradebook among faculty, framing a session as “Faster, Clearer Grading in the LMS” rather than “Using the LMS” can be particularly effective.)
- Flexibility of format/attendance (Hybrid sessions, or one in-person and one virtual option, can be appealing.)
- Snacks! Beyond the timeless appeal of free food, sharing a snack or a cup of coffee can create community and build connections.
Messaging Tips
Whether you’re at the first or second inflection point, as you engage faculty in these conversations, keep a couple of hallmarks of faculty cultures in mind. Of course, these may apply to a greater or lesser degree in your institution, or they may not ring true at all. However, the following are common items that can be worth considering at many institutions.
Guide the conversation.
Whether you’re leading an initial discussion, a basic technological training, or an initiative retrospective, make sure you enter the session with a plan. Ideally, you’ll have a timeline, key points you’ll need to convey, decisions that will need to be made, and strategies for adjusting for unexpected detours. Just because you will welcome difficult questions doesn’t mean you need to let them overtake the session; it’s also important, as in any group discussion, to avoid one person monopolizing the conversation. Lay out ground rules clearly at the start, and warn participants that you may redirect periodically to allow for a variety of voices to participate.
Avoid common assumptions.
It can be easy to approach these conversations with assumptions. Any of these may be more or less significant at your institution, in your discipline, or in relation to your initiative, but all of them can be traps that are easy to fall into if you’re not paying attention. However, they are not hard to avoid if you’re cognizant of them. Let’s take a look at a few that are particularly common:
- Student experience is the ultimate goal, and we can all agree that anything that benefits students is worth extra effort. Yes, faculty care about students and their experience, but they often also suffer from ever-expanding workloads because they care. The burden of student need is often primarily borne by female faculty, faculty of color, and early-career faculty (O’Meara et al., 2017). Moreover, students advised or taught by those less committed to student experience often seek out these faculty to make up for the support they are not getting from their advisors or other instructors. So, to speak only of how something will benefit students—particularly if it means more work for faculty—often exacerbates this support burden. Avoid this by engaging with the idea of what the initiative means for faculty: does this initiative present benefits to their efficiency, tenure portfolios, or personal enrichment, and can you emphasize these benefits as much as you emphasize the benefit to students? If the initiative will lead to only increased effort on the faculty’s part, do you have a plan to free up capacity for this labor through hiring, redistributing work, or deprioritizing other tasks?
- We are all here to teach students skills for the workforce. Many faculty shy away from focusing on skills as the ultimate goal of their teaching. Some are more focused on content than skills; some see their end goal as creating thinkers rather than workers, and perceive skills-focused learning to be in conflict with that goal. These goals are not necessarily in conflict, but they are not identical, so consider if there are ways to align the benefits of your initiatives with both goals.
- Teaching or course design is the faculty's main job, and all of their time goes to it. Teaching, research, and service are all often components of faculty jobs, particularly if they are tenured or tenure-track. Depending on the institution, these are weighted differently when faculty performance is evaluated, and they may have particular feelings about that weighting. Adjunct faculty may have a full-time job outside of the institution, or they may be seeking a permanent faculty role; both prospects necessitate time doing things other than teaching courses. A task that takes an hour to complete may represent a quarter of the time a faculty member has available for teaching-related tasks that week. In the short-term, prioritize making the time spent on your initiative low-friction, high-value, and maximally efficient. In the long term, to make your institution more initiative-friendly, advocate for including involvement in campus initiatives as a positive indicator in tenure, promotion, or other faculty review processes.
- Faculty are content experts, not teaching experts, and they are aware of that. Despite the fact that it is quite common for faculty to have no or little formal training in teaching or course design, many have been doing some version of it their entire career. Thus, even if they are aware they were not formally trained in it, they may be resentful at the suggestion that they have more to learn or that someone else might be able to make improvements to their course. There are also faculty who are indeed teaching experts and may resent a broad assumption that they’ve never considered pedagogy before. The best way to support all faculty in upskilling is by emphasizing the research that backs these recommendations and the relevance of the skills to their experience. Consult the list of commonly successful training approaches above for help with this.
Be ready to answer difficult questions.
Challenging questions are a central component of academic culture. For example, in the hiring process for many faculty positions, it’s common for a late-stage candidate to present their research and then receive a flurry of questions from the department. These questions can be particularly challenging to answer because they are often rooted deeply within the disciplinary area of the questioner, the interpersonal politics of the department or institution, and the perceived areas of weakness of the candidate. In short, asking and answering hard questions play a central role in faculty relations, and to interpret such questions as uniquely combative to you or your initiative would be to overlook their actual purpose.
With this in mind, how can you plan to answer those questions? Using the example of the adoption of a new LMS, there may be an existing grading practice that simply doesn’t work in the LMS as designed. You don’t need to troubleshoot on the fly. Instead, have information about how someone can get support with redesigning or working around these types of issues ready to go for your session. The question may also be stickier; there may be a deeply controversial new requirement, and you know there will be complaints about the expectations. Be ready to be honest about the reasoning behind the move, to acknowledge what difficulties it may present, and, if possible, to provide strategies or resources that faculty can use to comply more easily.
There may also be things you don’t yet know. Don’t just come to the meeting prepared to say “We’ll have these answers later.” Instead, come with your own questions about those topics that you’ll use to frame the path forward. Comments similar to the following can lead to engagement and may spark a strong idea you wouldn’t have pursued otherwise:
- “That’s a great question and one I’m hoping this conversation will help us plan out."
- "How do you do X now?”
- “What would make sense for X, considering the broad range of students this initiative will be serving?”
Conclusion
From idea to execution, effective buy-in is less about selling a decision and more about sharing the work. When leaders engage faculty early as co-creators and in foreground comprehension and conversation, initiatives move faster, land more smoothly, and build lasting trust. As you plan, give faculty time and structure to participate; recruit and equip champions; connect with campus partners who will amplify the effort; and be ready with evidence, resources, and pathways for feedback when questions arise. Frame change in ways that acknowledge real workloads and highlight concrete gains for teaching and scholarship, as well as student learning and satisfaction. Do these things consistently, and “buy-in” becomes the byproduct of a healthier culture: one where faculty expertise shapes strategy, and strategy strengthens the work faculty do every day.
References
Bucy, M., Schaninger, B., VanAkin, K., & Weddle, B. (2021, December 7). Losing from day one: Why even successful transformations fall short. McKinsey & Company.
Kim, Y. K., & Sax, L. J. (2009). Student-faculty interaction in research universities: Differences by student gender, race, social class, and first-generation status. Research in Higher Education, 50(5), 437–459.
McNaughton, D. (Host). (2025, April 29). Higher education strategic planning that drives growth and faculty buy-in (No. 257) [Audio podcast episode]. In Changing Higher Ed. The Change Leader, Inc.
O’Meara, K., Kuvaeva, A., Nyunt, G., Waugaman, C., & Jackson, R. (2017). Asked more often: Gender differences in faculty workload in research universities and the work interactions that shape them. American Educational Research Journal, 54(6), 1154–1186.