How Express Newark at Rutgers University Built Alignment During a Year of Transition

How do you build trust and alignment before moving forward?

That was the question facing the new leadership team at Express Newark, a center for art, design, digital storytelling, and music at Rutgers University–Newark, where faculty, staff, and community artists co-create in a restored 50,000-square-foot space downtown. When co-director Stefon Harris stepped in alongside deputy director Natasha Dyer and co-director Nick Kline, they inherited more than an organization in transition. They inherited a decade of history — and the wariness that comes with it.

“This is a year of transition,” Harris said. “We had to make sure that we earned trust right away. Making sure that everyone feels seen, heard — because they don’t know us as leaders coming in.”\

We spoke with Harris and consultant Wendy Watson-Hallowell about how they used Constellations to build trust, align the team, and uncover shared values during a period of organizational transformation.

Setting the Stage: Hesitation, Not Resistance

Anyone who has led an organization through change knows the posture Harris walked into. It isn’t hostility. It’s something quieter and harder to move.

“There was a good amount of — I wouldn’t say resistance, there was just hesitation,” Harris said. “People were in that let’s-wait-and-see. I don’t know what to believe based on what happened before. I don’t know what they’re going to do.”

The hesitation had been earned. Express Newark was approaching its 10th anniversary, and the staff had been through rounds of strategic planning before. “They’ve been through a whole bunch of consultants,” Harris said, “and not necessarily feeling included in the end result.”

The timing raised the stakes. The anniversary offered a rare opportunity — a chance, as Harris put it, “to announce again who we are at our core.” That meant everyone needed to be delivering the same message, whether or not leadership was in the room. But the new team knew better than to rush toward messaging before the foundation was set.

“We knew that it was important to slow down and make sure that everyone felt on board and excited and energized to move forward,” Harris said. “There is a dynamic of needing to get buy-in right away, and not moving too fast until you have that.”

Working with Watson-Hallowell, the team landed on a first principle: everyone’s voice had to be part of the discussion, and the organization’s values had to surface without being steered. “You needed to have a set of questions that actually led us towards being able to articulate our values without being pushed in one direction or the other,” Harris said. “That’s what brought Constellations to Express Newark.”

“I Can Just Answer From the Heart”

Harris’s first encounter with the platform didn’t look like research as he knew it.

“It was completely surprising,” he said. “I’m used to doing a survey, people collecting data through direct questions. My first reaction was an emotional reaction of — wow, this is really interesting. I don’t exactly understand what’s happening right now, but I’m going to go forward and trust the process.”

Instead of another questionnaire landing in another inbox, the team responded to visuals. For Harris — a jazz musician by training — the difference registered immediately.

“People often say music begins where words end,” he said. “There are things that you can articulate in sound and in art that are really difficult to articulate in words. If I were looking at a certain type of language being presented to me, I probably would feel compelled to answer in a tone that’s related to that language. Here, I felt I can just basically answer from the heart.”

That distinction matters more than it might seem. Direct questions at work tend to produce what Harris calls “a work answer” — professional, filtered, and not quite true. “When I responded, it was really a personal response,” he said, “which was beautiful, and I think gives a deeper insight into the people that make up our organization.”

It also disarmed the defensiveness that a decade of institutional history can build up. When people are asked direct questions, Harris noted, they filter their answers through the past — I know what they think, I know where this is going. “It’s hard to get someone to be present, honest, authentic in the moment,” he said. “Here, there was no opportunity to really be defensive. There was no need to be.”

The Reveal: Sense Becomes Evidence

The aha moment came when the responses were synthesized and presented back to the team.

“The interpretation of it was so clarifying,” Harris said. “I just thought it was one of the most beautiful ways that I’ve seen someone get information out of people.”

The results confirmed what leadership had suspected — but confirmation, it turns out, is not the same thing as evidence. “You can sense how people feel, but you don’t really know until you give people the opportunity to express themselves anonymously,” Harris said. “It did show that there was really strong alignment around the majority of the values, and it also illuminated where there was misalignment — which we had a sense of, but we needed evidence.”

That evidence changed the politics of change itself. One long-standing challenge around art exhibitions had been difficult to address, in part because most staff saw it as outside their lane. The process revealed that the vast majority of the organization was already on the same page.

“It transitions us from ‘the leadership needs to change this’ to ‘as a community, as an organization, this is not what we believe in,'” Harris said. “So now my role as a leader — I’m not dogmatic about it. My role is to be a facilitator, to help affect the change that is being generated from the people who make up this organization.”

Watson-Hallowell watched the shift play out in real time. “I saw decisions being made more easily, instead of the personal stuff,” she said. “I didn’t expect some of the folks to be like, ‘Yeah, we have to make that decision’ — they’d been very hesitant to make decisions up until then. It made it safe.”

And the impact wasn’t only visible in the results. It was visible in the room. “I’m speaking to you as a director, but also as a faculty lead,” Harris said. “I just felt safe. I felt an affirmation, and I felt a deeper sense of connection personally to everyone in the room.”

Beyond the Building

For Express Newark, the process opened a door that extends past its own walls. Rutgers–Newark’s chancellor has a strong focus on research, and Harris sees an opportunity to study the impact of the arts on community life — if the research itself doesn’t get in the way.

“I don’t think we can go to the community who come into our building with a survey of 50 questions,” he said. “But this experience is very well suited for people who aren’t necessarily in a corporate setting or an academic setting to feel comfortable — and you can get to the heart of what they feel in ways that they may not be able to articulate in words.”

Asked how he’d describe the experience to a peer, Harris didn’t reach for the methodology. He reached for the feeling.

“I would lead with the excitement of the experience. It was really fun. It yielded these incredible results. It was fast, it was easy, it was innovative. It doesn’t feel like a better mousetrap — it feels like something new.”

Then he offered the kind of endorsement no one scripts: “If I were running 50 companies, and I had 10 companies where people were just blocked and they were stubborn and they were defensive — this is the tool I would use.”

Insight Summary

Organizational change fails quietly, in the gap between what leadership announces and what people actually believe. Express Newark closed that gap by starting somewhere unusual: not with a plan, but with an honest read of where people already stood.

Because the process was visual rather than verbal, it slipped past work answers, past defensiveness, past survey fatigue — and returned something rare in a period of transition. “There’s joy in it,” Harris said. “People let go of the fight for a moment.” What came back wasn’t just data. It was evidence that the community already shared the values its new leaders hoped to build on — and permission to move forward together.