Smart Leadership Transitions Supported By Social Intelligence
May 6, 2025 | Liz Gross
Leadership transition is a time when your campus needs to balance continuity and change management. If you’re supporting a leader or are an incoming leader, social intelligence allows you to quickly communicate historical perceptions and stakeholder engagement, as well as gather and share real-time internal and external feedback during the transition. Leaders at every level of an organization make strategic decisions and an ongoing research partnership supports your understanding and informs priorities as those decisions unfold.
4 Ways to Support a Leadership Transition
An ongoing research partnership equips leaders with what they need to build and execute their vision—not as a one-time snapshot, but as a relationship that evolves alongside the transition.
Inform leadership priorities. Exploratory insight reports on the topics you help define—audience research, program demand, geographic reach, whatever matters most as you set direction—help you shape your plan as you learn what your audiences care about and believe, understand market demand, and assess your campus’s fiscal and market position.
Provide historical context to what’s happened at an institution. An ongoing, real-time dataset gives you a baseline of understanding where you’ve been, where you are right now, and where you want to go—context that would otherwise live only in institutional memory and walk out the door with the outgoing leader.
Onboard and support new executives. Executive onboarding and strategic alignment sessions, plus an Executive/Senior Leader Presentation grounded in research rather than internal assumptions, give new leaders a holistic, evidence-based starting point instead of asking them to rebuild institutional knowledge from scratch.
Assess progress in real time to build continued momentum. Quarterly KPI check-ins let you determine where you want to be, track progress against your strategic priorities, and adjust course as new information comes in—rather than waiting a full year to find out what’s working.
Social Intelligence in Action
Supporting an Incoming Provost’s First Year
When a new provost joined a mid-sized public university, their first priority was understanding the institution’s current standing with faculty, students, and the public before setting new strategic direction. We began working with their office early in their tenure, using ongoing research to give the provost’s team a fast, evidence-based read on where perceptions were strong and where trust needed rebuilding.
Insight reports tracked how faculty, students, and the public were discussing recent leadership changes, giving the provost’s team an early view of concerns before they became bigger issues. Quarterly check-ins kept research priorities aligned as the strategic plan took shape over the first year, shifting focus from understanding where the institution stood to tracking whether new initiatives were landing as the provost’s priorities became public.
By the end of the first year, the provost’s office had a real-time view of how each major initiative was being received, letting them adjust communication and rollout timing before issues escalated rather than after.
Inform and Assess a New Dean’s Strategy
In 2022, we started providing insights in support of a dean transition at a highly ranked professional school. On the cusp of transformational change in the field, the dean identified six topic areas of research and public scholarship to elevate the contribution and status of the campus and its programs within the industry.
The dean wanted to understand how the new research pillars were contributing to the school’s reputation before her vision was publicly announced. We provided historical social intelligence to understand how past online conversations and media coverage related to the six topics. Our analysis revealed unidentified opportunities, such as highlighting faculty voices that were influential in niche industry communities (adding to the group of faculty who can be considered “well-known”) and elevating the role of well-positioned research and policy centers.
We found unique opportunities to support each research pillar based on the communities, publications, and influencers already affiliated with each topic. For example:
Connect with the work of alumni and related roles—many notable alumni were talked about generally and referenced in relation to their institution—rather than in alignment with the dean’s strategic priority.
Encourage faculty to talk about their research and practice in relation to the institution, rather than only their personal brand, so all three connection aspects are elevated in conversation.
Strengthen the media relations strategy related to one of the topics—when compared, social media had a stronger narrative but most of the target audience was likely to be reached in news. Learn from social media to inform media relations.
Understand and leverage the cross-industry impact work related to one pillar that had particularly high positive sentiment.
This high-profile dean arrived with a vision of what the school should be known for. We were able to show them that they already had a lot of brand presence and industry influence for two of the topics, so they had an opportunity to build on strengths. In other, emerging areas of research, they didn’t have a strong presence so they needed to formulate a launch strategy. Our analysis enabled them to contrast data with a vision to see a realistic path forward—focusing limited resources where they’re most needed.
From there, we continued with real-time social intelligence to identify the share of brand voice of their research pillars and support the dean's strategy during the public launch, and the following two years. As unrelated global news events created reputational headwinds during that period, they could share data with leadership to determine whether the dean’s priority areas were suffering as a result of outside circumstances. They maintained the research pillar brand share of voice and increased the public reach of four of the six topics.