Culture Change Requires Personal and Organizational Changes: Lessons from the Shared Equity Leadership Model

Abstract

In Short This article presents a model of shared equity leadership that helps transform campus cultures so that students, faculty, staff, and administrators from all backgrounds experience greater inclusion and ameliorates equity gaps. The key to success is the combination of personal- and organizational-level changes that create a critical mass of employees dedicated to the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The findings also showed that each faculty, staff and administrator must first turn inwards and do their own personal work in order to then turn outwards to transform their institutions. Organizational-level changes (such as hiring diverse leaders, revising reward and incentive structures, and expanding accountability systems to include a focus on DEI) were simultaneously enacted as campus change agents worked on their personal journeys.