Letter from Amit Mrig, President, Academic Impressions

Establishing a culture of performance at colleges and universities is rapidly becoming a necessity as increased competition and an unsustainable cost structure drives institutions to rethink how they do business.

To remain competitive and respond to increased calls for accountability, institutions need to grapple with the critical question of how best to balance building a high-performance culture while honoring the ideals, traditions, and fundamental purpose of higher education. These two goals can’t be viewed as mutually exclusive. As an initial step, managers in higher education need to define staff performance metrics that are results-focused while not unnecessarily reductive.

In this edition, we’ve sought the advice of highly successful managers, both at academic institutions and in the corporate sector, to gather key considerations for deploying staff metrics in a thoughtful and credible way within the unique context of higher education. We hope their advice will be useful to you.

Articles in This Issue

Defining What Activities Are Truly Critical

Rubrics to Measure Satisfactory and Superior Performance

Rollout and Buy-in: Handling the Transition to More Effective Staff Metrics

Using Performance Measures to Drive Faculty and Staff Development