Category: Uncategorized

Make Your Alumni Board Effective

June 9, 2011. During a series of interviews with leaders in alumni relations earlier this year, Academic Impressions found that many alumni relations offices are struggling with their alumni boards or alumni association boards. While a working board can offer institutional leaders partners to aid in achieving institutional goals for engagement and giving, most boards are not filling this role. Among the common problems: Many boards remain too focused on specific tactics — such as reunion and homecoming Other boards have grown too large and unwieldy, preventing them from “getting down to business” Boards struggle to ensure that 100 percent of their members give to the institution and that their members model supportive relationships with administration To learn more about the characteristics of an effective “working board,” we turned to Gary Olsen, associate vice president of alumni relations and executive director of the alumni association at Villanova University, and Christine Tempesta, director of strategic initiatives with the MIT Alumni Association. Olsen and Tempesta shared their advice on the qualities to look for in board members and managing the board’s scope of responsibilities. Who’s on the Working Board? Olsen and Tempesta suggest these criteria for selecting board members who will be well-positioned to […]

Four Tips for Managing the Brand Launch

June 9, 2011. Competition for visibility continues to pressure institutions of higher education to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. In order to stay competitive, maintain enrollment levels, and meet advancement goals, your institution needs a unique brand strategy that carefully defines who you are in the minds of stakeholders. Often, though, marketing professionals and institutional leaders have questions concerning how to effectively roll out or communicate a change to the brand. Past examples of branding efforts gone wrong have taught us that a brand campaign carries considerable public relations risk. This week, we asked Bill Faust, senior partner and chief strategy officer for Ologie, for his advice; Faust offers these four tips for success in managing your brand launch. Decide Whether You Need a Hard or Soft Launch Faust suggests that a hard launch or “roll-out party” isn’t always necessary: “some launches are very soft and are rolled out over time, applied to specific areas of the institution at a time.” If your institution has been through a tumultuous time or needs to change its public image dramatically (the public thinks of you as X, but you need them to think of you as Y), then a hard launch may be […]

Meeting Adaptive Challenges: The New Leadership Skill Set

  NOTE: For an updated and much deeper look at new leadership skills in higher education, based on years of intensive research, read this complimentary paper from Academic Impressions and Pat Sanaghan. To define the leadership skill set needed to meet adaptive challenges, we turned to Larry Goldstein, president of Campus Strategies LLC, and Pat Sanaghan, president of The Sanaghan Group. Having consulted for decades with institutional leadership teams, Goldstein and Sanaghan are uniquely positioned to comment on what makes academic leaders effective. Here is their take on five critical leadership skills needed to meet today’s — and especially tomorrow’s — challenges. 1. Leaders Need to be Systemic Thinkers The critical initiatives that will move your institution forward — whether improving student retention, reducing your carbon footprint, or raising money from alumni — will involve and affect multiple divisions within your institution. This makes it especially critical that not only your institution’s president but leaders within each division are able to recognize the impact of a given issue or a given effort on financial, academic, and programmatic decisions across the institution. Amit Mrig, president of Academic Impressions, notes those institutions that are most successful in responding to these common challenges are those that approach them […]

Building an In-House Leadership Development Program

Once you have clarity on the leadership skill sets your institution is seeking — and a commitment to look beyond the “usual suspects” when identifying future leaders — the next challenges involve offering meaningful opportunities for your institution’s “stylistic invisibles” to become visible and providing an intentional and deliberate process for developing your high-potentials as future leaders. There are three critical steps in achieving these aims: Create a robust peer network of emerging leaders within your institution Adopt a “proving ground” approach by engaging emerging leaders in the real work of the institution Incentivize and reward “deep mentoring” at all levels of your organization Several institutions have taken steps in this direction, but much of the most innovative and effective work on in-house leadership development over the past decade has been done outside the walls of higher education. The corporate sector, particularly, has become increasingly alert to its aging workforce and the threat that a leadership crisis presents to an organization’s profit and sustainability. For this reason, we reached out not only to one of the leading higher ed experts — Tamara Freeman, director of talent management and HR strategy for the University of Notre Dame — but also to Kimberly (Kim) Eberbach, vice president of […]

Rethinking Higher Education’s Leadership Crisis

America’s higher education enterprise is facing multiple challenges — increasing demands from students and government; changing demographics; structural fiscal challenges; and technologies that are disrupting how information and education is delivered. Not to mention an aging workforce and an uneven track record for developing leaders. Without investing in identifying and developing the right talent at all levels of an institution, a college or university will be ill-prepared to thrive in an environment of increasingly complex and high-stakes challenges and rapid change. Let’s take a closer look at the challenges academic institutions face, and what’s needed to move forward. How Prepared Is Your Institution? In April 2010, Academic Impressions conducted a survey of senior and mid-level managers in higher education across an array of public and private institutions; 176 administrators responded to the survey. The findings emphasize the extent to which higher education is under-prepared for replacing a rapidly retiring leadership. Perhaps the starkest finding from our survey, 48 percent of respondents graded their institution with a C, D, or F letter grade when assessing the level of commitment they felt their institution has toward their development as a leader. We also asked respondents to identify ways that their institutions currently […]

Deepening Your Talent Bench: Horizontal Career Ladders

Historically, the pathway to the presidency in higher education has been through traditional academic ranks — tenured faculty or department chairs becoming a dean, and then later a provost. But as Academic Impressions president Amit Mrig notes, “the competencies required to ascend the academic hierarchy don’t necessarily match those required to lead increasingly complex organizations in an increasingly competitive marketplace.” Rather than increase reliance on the private sector as a source for future leaders, institutions may do well to take a cue from the private sector’s approach to leadership development. To prepare for a globalized economy where talent, ideas, customers, suppliers, and financing will come from different markets around the world, the best-managed corporations like General Electric, IBM, and PepsiCo are intentionally requiring emerging leaders to manage major projects or even run entire divisions in different parts of the organization — units that may be far outside their discipline or home town. This strategy of building horizontal career ladders not only builds cross-boundary collaborations and global connections, but gives these future leaders a systemic view of the organization. Horizontal Career Moves Versatile leaders develop transferable problem-solving and diagnostic skills that allow them to assess the strategic — not just the technical — […]

Report: Developing Leaders in Higher Education

by Amit Mrig

June 2011. Nearly one-half of higher-ed administrators gave their institution a C, D, or F letter grade when assessing their campus’s commitment to their development as a leader. Higher ed institutions are facing impending waves of retirement at all levels of the institution and across all sectors of our industry. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, how institutions capture and transfer knowledge and identify and develop the next generation of leaders will be key determinants of their futures. Recent research by Academic Impressions suggests that institutions have yet to meaningfully address this problem. In a survey conducted of a broad range of administrators, 40 percent of respondents indicated that their institution was not actively preparing for the upcoming retirements. Many industries with aging workforces face similar challenges. Fortunately for higher education, the private sector is much further along in tackling the problem and has many lessons to offer. That’s why we’ve asked experts from both higher education and the corporate sector to share their insights and expertise on these critical issues. We hope their advice will be useful to you. In This Issue Read this full report (PDF). See Upcoming Leadership Workshops

Identifying Leadership Potential in Your Staff

Once you have identified the skills that are essential in tomorrow’s higher ed leaders, you will need ways to identify the staff within your institution who demonstrate those skills — these are the people whose leadership development you want to invest in, and whom you want to entrust with greater responsibilities and opportunities to contribute meaningfully to your institution’s success. Larry Goldstein and Pat Sanaghan offer the following tips to guide you in identifying emerging or potential leaders at your institution. Avoid Comfortable Cloning “We tend to hire and promote people who remind us of ourselves, who think like us. The courageous and effective act is to choose people who have different background, different perspective. You learn through diversity, not through looking at yourself in the mirror all the time.” Pat Sanaghan, The Sanaghan Group The practicing of replicating the demographics (in terms of race, gender, and socioeconomic background) and the leadership philosophy of current leaders can be referred to as “comfortable cloning.” It’s comfortable, but ultimately not as effective as establishing a more diverse talent bench. “We need to look instead to people who are very different from us,” Sanaghan advises, “who can provide new, unexpected solutions to adaptive challenges.” A […]

Locally Sourced Foods on Campus: Thinking Outside the Box

June 2, 2011. The University of Winnipeg has been praised in the media lately for a dramatic turnaround in the quality and profitability of their food services operation; Macleans’ 2009 University Rankings had taken the university to task for poor food and poor service, and the institution’s dining operation was seeing attrition in its student customers. In the two years since, not only has the University of Winnipeg recovered, but its food services operation — which now focuses on organic, locally sourced food — is the most requested caterer in the local community, its head chef has won an Iron Chef Award, and the return on investment has been so high that the university is preparing to expand its operation by launching an off-campus restaurant. This week, we spoke with the University of Winnipeg’s president, Lloyd Axworthy, to ask what other institutions in the US and Canada could learn from the success of his institution’s transition to locally sourced foods. He offered several key takeaways worth noting: Conduct thorough research into student demand Consider public-private partnerships that can help manage costs and mitigate risk Recognize that your purchasing program can actually impact the market in ways that will allow you to negotiate lower prices […]

Planning Online Programs: Making Sure There’s a Market

As they look to improve student access and increase degree completion rates, more institutions are considering launching or scaling up existing online initiatives. At Academic Impressions, we’re responding to the trend with a series of articles interviewing leading experts on planning online programs, and by offering an upcoming conference that leverages collaborative information sharing and case studies to guide institutions in developing a working plan. It’s becoming more widely recognized that online programming entails far more than just providing electronic correspondence courses; with the new mode of course delivery come new demands on instructional design, technological infrastructure and student support services, staff and faculty training, and new challenges for your marketing and recruiting efforts. The investment required demands that institutions adopt a deliberate approach to developing online programs. The potential for increased tuition revenue and increased access to higher education is significant — but to see success, you have to look before you leap. Joel Hartman, vice provost for information technologies and resources and chief information officer at the University of Central Florida, suggests that those initiatives that have failed in the past share some or all of these characteristics: “Conceptualized by administrators who made the assumption that there was a market […]