Higher education institutions are not short on ambition. They are navigating enrollment pressure, regulatory change, student success demands, accessibility requirements, technology disruption, and shifting public expectations – all at once. Strategic plans reflect this reality: seven priorities, nine initiatives, twelve commitments. Each one justified and each one more urgent than the last.
And yet, across campuses, a familiar pattern emerges: people are working at full capacity, initiatives are active everywhere, but meaningful progress is uneven, slow, or invisible.
A workload and coordination problem inside a distributed system – one where authority, responsibility, and capacity are not aligned.
The Reality: Higher Education Does Not Prioritize Like Other Organizations
Most leadership frameworks assume organizations can choose a small number of priorities and align around them. Higher education does not operate that way.
Decisions and effort are distributed across:
- Faculty – with autonomy over teaching, research, and service
- Administrative units – each with distinct mandates and accountability structures
- Shared governance bodies – senates, curriculum committees, task forces
- External actors – accreditors, regulators, boards, and funders
No single group can fully set priorities. At best, institutions signal direction and attempt to coordinate action across semi-independent actors (EAB, 2024).
Much of what appears as internal over-prioritization is, in practice, a response to external mandates that cannot be declined. Accessibility requirements, accreditation cycles, reporting obligations, and shifting enrollment demands introduce new work that must be absorbed, whether or not institutional capacity has changed. The system expands because the demands on it expand.
This structural reality means that priority overload is not a failure of leadership will but rather the predictable outcome of a system with more demands than it has mechanisms to decline them.
Research confirms what campus leaders observe anecdotally: workload expansion has accelerated without corresponding structural adjustment (ath Power Consulting, 2026; Lancaster et al., 2023). Faculty and staff were already operating at full capacity before the latest round of strategic initiatives arrived.
The specific manifestation varies by institution type. In resource-constrained colleges, this often appears as staff roles expanding beyond sustainable limits. In research-intensive universities, it shows up as competing demands on faculty time that erode both research productivity and student engagement. The pattern is consistent. The context changes the pressure points, not the underlying dynamic.
From the outside, it looks like too many priorities.
From the inside, it feels like everything is mandatory, and nothing can be dropped.
Start Here: Make Institutional Work Visible
Before any institution can recalibrate focus, it must understand where effort is actually going. That requires diagnostic tools.
Heat Mapping
Workload Inventory
A workload inventory is a simple but powerful way to make visible everything faculty and staff are actually doing – not just what is formally assigned, but the full range of teaching, advising, research, service, administrative tasks, and the often unseen work that keeps institutions running. In higher education, much of this work is distributed, informal, and rarely captured in one place, which is why new responsibilities are often added without a clear understanding of existing capacity (American Association of University Professors [AAUP], 2020; O’Meara et al., 2020).
In practice, a workload inventory is typically conducted by asking individuals or units to document their activities over a defined period (for example, a week or a semester), often grouped into categories such as instruction, student support, administrative work, compliance, and strategic initiatives. This is usually combined with existing data, such as course loads, committee assignments, and project lists, and then reviewed collectively to validate accuracy. The goal is not precision down to the hour, but a shared, credible picture of where time and effort are actually going. That picture then becomes the basis for identifying overload, aligning work with priorities, and making informed decisions about what to continue, shift, or stop (O’Meara et al., 2020).
Capacity vs. Demand Mapping
Capacity mapping compares available resources against actual workload demand. It regularly reveals systemic overload that individual managers cannot see from inside their own unit (Maslach & Leiter, 2016).
When the map shows that key teams are operating beyond sustainable capacity, that signals a problem.
The Core Problem: Institutions Are Layering, Not Reallocating
The most consistent driver of workload accumulation in higher education is not the scale of any single initiative, but the institutional habit of adding without removing.
New initiatives arrive. Old ones are never formally retired. What was aspirational in one strategic cycle becomes an inherited obligation in the next.
Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) documented this pattern across organizational change efforts: without active mechanisms to stop or scale down existing work, change efforts accumulate rather than replace, and the people responsible for execution bear the full weight of both the old and the new.
Two structural conditions make this worse on campuses.
Process Inefficiency
Many academic and administrative processes have not been redesigned since they were built. They duplicate effort, require unnecessary approvals, and generate reporting that no one reads.
These processes consume real capacity without producing strategic value. Because they are often embedded in policy, compliance requirements, or historical practice, they persist long after their usefulness has diminished.
Diffuse Ownership
Unclear responsibility generates coordination overhead. When no one is explicitly accountable for a project’s momentum, the work is absorbed informally by the people willing to do it — almost always the institution’s highest performers (EAB, 2024).
In higher education, addressing this is not simply a matter of assigning ownership. It requires navigating governance structures where authority is shared, decisions are consultative, and accountability is distributed. Clarifying ownership, therefore, is both an operational and a governance exercise.
Rethinking Focus: A Practical Framework
Once the real workload picture is visible, institutions must make deliberate decisions about what belongs where. This requires differentiating three categories of work that are too often treated identically:
- Non-negotiable obligations
Accreditation requirements, regulatory compliance, legally mandated functions. These must be resourced and completed. They are not strategic choices. - Strategic investments
The limited number of areas where the institution is making a deliberate bet on the future. These require protected time, clear ownership, and sustained attention. - Aspirational or legacy work
Initiatives that were once important, or that emerged from prior planning cycles, but that no longer align with current direction or capacity.
Most campuses have a substantial amount in the third category.
The Missing Discipline: Disinvestment
Institutions are practiced at launching initiatives. They are not practiced at stopping them.
Disinvestment is the discipline of explicitly stopping, pausing, scaling down, or redesigning work so that institutional capacity can be redirected toward what matters most. It is not simply “cutting.” It is not abandonment. And it is not a quiet loss of momentum that leaves people wondering whether a project still matters.
Done well, disinvestment is a deliberate institutional act.
It names the work that will no longer continue in its current form, explains why, acknowledges the people who contributed to it, and redirects capacity toward higher-priority obligations or strategic investments. This matters because every initiative that remains unofficially alive still consumes attention—meetings, updates, reporting cycles, and the expectation that someone may be asked to return to it (Armenakis & Bedeian, 1999).
In higher education, disinvestment is especially difficult because work is rarely just work. Programs, committees, and initiatives carry identity, history, and relationships. Ending or pausing something can feel like a judgment on the people who built it. Research on organizational change consistently shows that resistance is less about the change itself and more about how it is experienced by those affected (Armenakis & Bedeian, 1999; Kotter, 2012). That is why disinvestment must be handled transparently and respectfully.
A useful disinvestment process asks:
- What work is no longer aligned with current institutional priorities?
- What work continues only because no one has formally stopped it?
- What work has value, but not enough value to justify current capacity demands?
- What work should be paused until it can be properly resourced?
- What work could be simplified, combined, automated, or reassigned?
The goal is not to do less for the sake of doing less. The goal is to create the conditions for meaningful work to move.
Without disinvestment, workload inventory and heat mapping become performative. They may reveal overload, but they do not relieve it. Institutions can see where capacity is strained and still choose to add more. This dynamic—where demands accumulate without corresponding removal—has been identified as a key driver of burnout and organizational stagnation (Maslach & Leiter, 2016; Loveday et al., 2022).
Disinvestment is the bridge between visibility and action.
It turns the heat map from a diagnostic tool into a decision-making tool. It allows leaders, faculty, staff, and governance bodies to move from “We are overloaded” to “Here is what we will stop, reduce, defer, or redesign so that this work becomes possible.”
In that sense, disinvestment is not the opposite of ambition.
It is what makes ambition sustainable.
Does this resonate?
References
- American Association of University Professors. (2020). Statement on faculty workload. https://www.aaup.org/report/statement-faculty-workload
- Armenakis, A. A., & Bedeian, A. G. (1999). Organizational change: A review of theory and research in the 1990s. Journal of Management, 25(3), 293–315. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639902500303
- ath Power Consulting. (2026, January 15). The top 5 drivers of faculty & staff burnout in higher education—and what institutions can do about them. https://www.athpower.com/faculty-staff-burnout-higher-education-causes-solutions/
- EAB. (2024, October 15). Reimagining shared governance for today’s higher education landscape. https://eab.com/resources/blog/strategy-blog/reimagining-shared-governance-for-todays-higher-ed-landscape/
- Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change. Harvard Business Review Press.
- Lancaster, C., Kolakowsky-Hayner, S., & Kovacich, J. (2023). Areas of work-life that contribute to burnout among higher education health science faculty and perception of institutional support. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/17482631.2023.2235129
- Loveday, P. M., Dowd, T., & Simpson, S. (2022). Tipping point: The staff wellbeing crisis in higher education. Frontiers in Education, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.929335
- Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (1999). Six areas of worklife: A model of the organizational context of burnout. Journal of Health and Human Services Administration, 21(4), 472–489.
- Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311
- O’Meara, K., Kuvaeva, A., & Nyunt, G. (2020). Equity-minded faculty workload: What we can and should do now. American Council on Education. https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/Equity-Minded-Faculty-Workloads.pdf
