Effective Communication as a Change Management Tool in Creating Awareness on Leadership Vision and Strategy: A Focus on Management of Student Academic Records at Institutions of Higher Learning

Abstract

Successful change in organizations must take care of the leadership, the members, the organizational culture; and any planned change should not take for granted the readiness of the change recipients. One of the Key components in organizational change management is proper communication since information is the bloodline of an organization in today’s dynamic world. As leaders and managers make strategic decisions to stay at the competitive edge, change is inevitable and if not properly handled, it may lead to failure of the organization. This paper is an insight into the importance of communication in change management in institutions of higher learning based on a study conducted in 2011/2012 academic year in a private university in Nairobi Kenya. Staff members in charge of management of course registration and grades information in the university were the key respondents. Mixed methods of study involving qualitative data, collected through pre-study interviews and quantitative data in the actual study were used. Data collection was done in three phases, first were face-to-face semi-structured interviews in a preliminary study with 2 members of the University’s Management Committee, secondly, a pre-study with 6 representatives of two universities in Kenya regarded as local best practices in records management and thirdly, descriptive data was collected using a questionnaire which mainly collected quantitative data but also had room for open-ended questions. Evaluative Research design was adopted for the research, where the descriptive data were placed in comparison with the pre-set criteria from the best practice institutions.

Keywords: Change Management, Communication, Leadership Vision and Strategy, Higher Learning Institutions, ICT.