Strategy for Leading and Managing Change in Higher Education (La MANCHE Strategy)

The La MANCHE Strategy is geared towards the achievement of smart, sustainable and inclusive change in higher education institutions from Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The strategy suggests a number of practices, activities and measures for the universities to undertake and embed in their day-to-day operations and management, which in the long-term will improve their organizational capabilities, will create competitive advantage for them and will bring them closer to the concept and reality of the entrepreneurial university.

The necessity for some of these practices and measures became evident only in the process of project implementation and were not initially thought through in the application form. In other words, the La MANCHE strategy captures to a great extent the collective learning journey of the project consortium members. It introduces such terms and realities as shared leadership, succession planning, talent management, knowledge management, stakeholder management and student engagement which are considered a novelty and a result of the collective experience and evolved knowledge of the consortium as a whole.

Like any strategy, the La MANCHE strategy provides a series of recommendations to close the gap between the current status quo and the desired future. It is based on an analysis of the current situation and an informed view of the future of the universities. The list of recommended actions is forward looking and by no means exhaustive. Universities are encouraged to look for further innovative and creative techniques to achieve smart, sustainable and inclusive change at institutional level. The strategy is designed as a working reference and describes various generic approaches that could be used selectively depending on the concrete contexts or academic environments.