Category: Blog

  In This Issue Setting Priorities for Your Division Developing the Action Plan Funding Your Action Plan Strategies to Ensure Implementation Beginnings are critical, and operational plans often lose momentum in their first year of implementation. This “first-year dilemma” emerges when expectations around timeline and phasing haven’t been right-sized. Consider these two scenarios: The student affairs division at Institution A has over-committed its staff and its limited resources, committing to too many action steps in the first year. In a surge of enthusiasm for moving the division into the future, the champions of the action plan have committed to do 80 percent of the work in the first year. The teams involved are stretched too thin and are losing momentum. The college of education at Institution B has the opposite problem: it’s become bogged down in the research and data gathering, and is seeing few tangible results in the first year. The college is still “planning to plan.” Let’s look at both what could have been done at the outset to avoid these two scenarios, and also at what can be done now, in the midst of the year, to diagnose the issue and address it. We asked for the […]

  In This Issue Setting Priorities for Your Division Developing the Action Plan Funding Your Action Plan Strategies to Ensure Implementation Managing your division with excellence is going to require making very tough decisions. For example, perhaps you recognize the need to add an academic major in response to rising market demand. Yet your faculty and other resources are already operating at capacity, and you have limited funds for hiring additional faculty and limited space to allocate for the new courses. This scenario demands an honest and courageous look at whether your current resources are being invested in the best possible ways. As Michael Porter, a professor in the Harvard Business School, contends, it’s difficult to decide what to do and even more difficult to decide what not to do. But it’s most difficult to decide what to stop doing. “Just adding revenue streams isn’t enough. The public is increasingly skeptical as to whether colleges and universities use their resources in the most effective way. This will have a major impact on revenue growth in the coming years —- be it from net tuition, fundraising, or state appropriations. I can’t think of a more critical time for division heads to […]

Staff metrics and evaluation can be used to incentivize both superior staff performance (by giving managers the rationale and flexibility to reward high performers) and meaningful progress toward the strategic goals of your unit –- if you approach staff metrics in a thoughtful, credible way. This entails: Defining what activities are truly critical to measure Establishing criteria or rubrics for various levels of performance Designing and rolling out metrics through a fully participatory process Ensuring that the metrics inform effective supervision and staff development There is often need for greater intentionality in deploying staff metrics across both the administrative and academic divisions of an institution. In this edition, we’ll address examples from both sides of the organization. Focus on Results, not Tasks First, just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to measure. It may be easy to track the number of service requests responded to by facilities management staff or the number of events organized by alumni relations staff, but these measure tasks completed, not necessarily progress toward that unit’s strategic outcomes. To take a more intentional approach to measuring performance, identify the outcomes that truly matter to the division (whether these are learning […]

When performance metrics are developed in collaboration with staff and treated as a basis for incentivizing and rewarding superior performance, this entails a rethinking of the role and process of supervision. Check-ins between managers and staff, or between department chairs and faculty, can become a structured dialogue centered on the key performance measures and the resources needed to support faculty and staff in achieving success. We turned to Pat Sanaghan, president of The Sanaghan Group, and Mike Theall, an associate professor at Youngstown State University and a leading thinker on faculty evaluation, to learn more about what more effective supervision for faculty and staff would look like. Here is their advice. Effective Supervisory Dialogue Sanaghan, who is publishing a chapter on structured supervisory dialogue in his forthcoming book, How to Actually Build an Exceptional Team, suggests the guiding principle that the focus of supervision has to be the success of the team member in contributing to the unit’s goals. “The dialogue between supervisor is not meant to be critical,” he cautions. “Supervisors need to be asking themselves not how they can correct problems, but how they can incentivize, promote, and reward superior performance.” To facilitate a productive dialogue with that […]