How Shared Leadership Turns Student Success Into Institutional Impact

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Student success leaders are often responsible for outcomes that depend on people, teams, and decisions they do not directly control. This is especially true at large, decentralized universities, where advising, student affairs, academic support, colleges, faculty, and technology teams may all play a role in the student experience.

At the University of Cincinnati (UC), Tara Warden, Assistant Vice Provost for Enrollment Management, has spent years working within that reality. UC has 14 colleges with their own leadership and governance structures, so coordinating student success cannot depend on one centralized team telling everyone else what to do. It requires influence, shared goals, and ways for people across the institution to solve problems together.

In this episode of Next Practices, Warden shares how UC uses shared leadership to coordinate student success across a decentralized institution, why frontline staff need a voice in technology decisions, and how institutions can use AI to create capacity without losing the human judgment students need.

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NEXT PRACTICES

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

01

How can student success leaders lead without direct authority?

Build influence through trust, listening, clear relationships, and follow-through. At UC, central leaders help coordinate work across colleges and student success teams without requiring every unit to report through the same structure.

02

How can decentralized universities avoid working in silos?

Create shared goals and regular places for people across the institution to work through problems together. UC has used shared leadership tables for more than 20 years to surface student needs, share practices, and inform university decisions.

03

Why should frontline staff help choose student success technology?

They are the people who have to use it every day. Warden argues that adoption is much stronger when advisors and other frontline staff help evaluate whether a system actually supports their work with students.

04

How should institutions use AI in student success?

Use AI to reduce administrative work, surface useful context, and give staff more time with students. Keep people involved in decisions and communication so efficiency does not come at the expense of judgment or personal support.

Leading Through Influence Instead of Authority

At a decentralized university, organizational charts only tell part of the story.

UC’s colleges have their own deans, governance structures, advising teams, and student success operations. Warden’s team helps coordinate much of that work, but it does not directly manage everyone responsible for carrying it out.

Warden describes the model as leading through influence more than authority. For her, that influence comes from listening closely to the people doing the work, understanding what students are experiencing, and responding with useful tools, resources, professional development, and coordination.

The goal is not to make every unit operate the same way. It’s to help different teams work toward the same institutional priorities while preserving the local knowledge that makes decentralized models valuable.

Decentralized Doesn’t Have to Mean Siloed

One of UC’s longest-running examples started more than 20 years ago.

At the time, advising centers across the university had little central support. Teams were solving similar problems on their own, from staffing and training to assessment and student support. So assistant deans and advising directors started meeting regularly.

That group, known internally as ADAM, became much more than another committee. Every college and advising center has a voice. Members share what they are seeing, identify friction in the student experience, compare practices, and surface issues that may require a broader institutional response.

Today, university leaders also use the group as a way to understand what is happening with students across UC. Coordination does not require putting everyone under one leader. It requires giving the right people a consistent way to see what others are seeing and act on it together.

UC has applied the same idea through other shared tables and ideation labs, bringing together teams from advising, housing, student affairs, academic support, faculty leadership, and other areas depending on the problem being addressed.

Coordinated Outreach Requires More Than Good Intentions

Shared leadership also affects what students experience directly.

Warden points to early-alert outreach as an example. The goal is straightforward: identify when a student may be struggling and reach out before the problem gets worse. But more outreach is not automatically better outreach.

A student may hear from several faculty members, an advisor, a counselor, and another student support office about the same concern. Even when every message is well intended, repeated warnings can leave a student feeling as though the institution is confirming that they do not belong.

UC has worked to coordinate that outreach more carefully and pay closer attention to the language students receive. Warden says the university previously saw a negative relationship between early-alert use and retention in an earlier system. As the team refined its messaging and approach, including through its work with Civitas Learning, it began seeing positive results from its early-alert outreach.

Technology Adoption Starts With the People Using It

Warden has seen institutions choose systems that appealed to senior leaders but failed with the staff expected to use them every day. The result can be a familiar problem: advisors spend more time satisfying the needs of the system and less time working with students.

When UC selected its student success management system, Warden approached the process differently. Advisors were involved in evaluating the technology and determining whether it would actually help them do their jobs.

Her standard was straightforward: the system did not only need to work for leadership. Advisors had to believe it would work for them. When frontline teams understand how a decision was made, see their needs reflected in the system, and have colleagues involved in the process, implementation becomes something they helped shape rather than something imposed on them.

AI Should Give People More Time With Students

At UC, frontline teams are beginning to use AI to make tasks such as note-taking, communication, and reporting more efficient. The value is not simply doing administrative work faster. It’s what staff can do with the time they get back.

A student asking whether to drop a class may also be struggling with finances, work, family responsibilities, academic confidence, or something else entirely. Advisors need enough time to understand what sits underneath the immediate request.

AI can help remove some of the administrative work around those conversations. It can also help teams identify which students may need outreach and surface relevant information more quickly. But Warden is equally clear about the need for human judgment.

Institutions should not use AI to send unchecked mass communication that only appears personal. People still need to review the context, understand the student, and decide how support should be delivered.

The value of AI is not replacing the people closest to students. It is giving them more capacity to do the parts of the work that require a person.

From Shared Leadership to Institutional Impact

Warden points to a habit she believes holds institutions back: waiting for senior leadership to make the first move. People across an institution already understand many of the problems students are experiencing. They see friction in workflows, gaps between departments, policies that create unintended barriers, and opportunities to improve support.

Shared leadership gives those people a way to bring that knowledge together and inform decisions across the institution. At UC, that means connecting frontline experience with common goals that reach from individual teams to senior leadership. Warden describes collective action and collective impact as central to how the university approaches this work.

That is where student success becomes institutional impact.

The work still happens in advising meetings, outreach, technology decisions, classrooms, and individual interactions with students. But when those efforts are connected by shared goals, better information, and clear ways to act together, they can influence much more than one program or department.

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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

See how UC built a student success system that scales

Learn how the University of Cincinnati coordinates student success across decentralized teams while giving frontline staff the context and tools to act.

Read the UC partner story →

Resources

• Tara Warden – LinkedIn
• University of Cincinnati