Category: Blog

  In This Issue Setting Priorities for Your Division Developing the Action Plan Funding Your Action Plan Strategies to Ensure Implementation Consider this likely scenario. Your division has identified four strategic priorities that are of both high importance and high cost. But the institution is facing budget cuts, and you actually have less funding to work with this year than you did last year. How do you proceed? Too often, the answer proposed is more fundraising. While fundraising and friend-raising will be critical to the success of your initiatives, devoting an increasing percentage of your time to raising donor dollars — if you are relying on this as your primary means of generating additional revenue — is not a sustainable solution. You will need to find more creative ways to fund your division’s action plan — either by cost-cutting, or by finding a way for your high-cost initiatives to generate revenue and become self-sustaining. To help review an array of examples, we turned to Larry Goldstein, president of Campus Strategies, LLC, and Lucie Lapovsky, president of Lapovsky Consulting and past president of Mercy College. Revenue Enhancement: Thinking Outside the Box KEY EXAMPLE: DREXEL UNIVERSITY Looking at the high cost of […]

  In This Issue Setting Priorities for Your Division Developing the Action Plan Funding Your Action Plan Strategies to Ensure Implementation Once you have defined the priorities for your division and have set some strategic objectives for the immediate future (e.g., the next three years), how do you turn those objectives into concrete action plans with a champion, timeline, and clear measures of success? Larry Goldstein, president of Campus Strategies, LLC, suggests the following process. Gather a broadly representative group from your division and divide them into small groups, each of which will draft an action plan for one of the strategic priorities you’ve established. “The key is self-selection,” Goldstein notes. “Don’t assign someone to work on an action plan if they lack the enthusiasm and the interest. Otherwise, how strong can your action plan actually be?” Following a template for action planning developed by Pat Sanaghan, president of The Sanaghan Group, Goldstein recommends having each of the groups outline: What is the overarching goal? What are three specific action steps or activities that will move us toward the goal? What is the timeline? What resources are needed? Who will champion and steward the effort? Who else needs to be […]

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 […]

Few changes offer as much opportunity for resistance and tension within a unit as changes to the method of evaluating performance. It’s critical that not only the decisions around identifying the key metrics themselves but also the decision-making process, communication of the decisions made, and the steps for rolling out the new system are equally intentional. We’ve identified three key principles of an effective transition to a new system for evaluating faculty or staff: The metrics are developed as a collaborative effort between staff and supervisors The goals of moving to a more sophisticated system of performance metrics are clear, and it’s communicated that the metrics will be used as the basis for incentives and rewards for superior performance The process for rolling out the metrics is phased and deliberate Develop the Metrics in Dialogue with Your Staff Rick Dupree, assistant dean of development and alumni relations for the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, emphasizes the importance of not just dictating goals but of developing metrics in partnership with your staff. “Chat with them about what they’re sensing about the economy, about donor perceptions. Find out what challenges they’re facing. Let your officers play a role in determining […]