Tearing Down Fences

 [Editors Note: This blog was first published January 5, 2020 and inspired by an administrator I admire very much who spends as much time wearing the scrubs of a nursing instructor as she does ensuring the program and its graduates are outstanding. I have republished it as my current institution works to address silos of all sorts...]

At all-faculty meetings, I often like to tell the story of the college where I grew up as an administrator. I obtained my first faculty job there and subsequently became a Dean over a nearly 15 year period of time.

In the early days at that institution, a very dynamic president with great vision established a strong career development and talent management perspective that remains with the institution today. Her perspective was that the best administrators are those that know the institution well and are grown internally by careful cultivation, stretch assignments, and encouragement. When she arrived, prior to my time, the administration was bloated and her first effort was to begin unifying the leadership, winnowing down the administrative ranks until her senior administrative team consisted of an executive assistant, an executive vice president for academic and student affairs (evp), a chief administrative officer, and a senior student services officer. Once she had assembled the right team, the president drew a much heavier line between internal operations and external advocacy, entrusting the evp to manage all aspects of the internal operations, including the budget. This dynamic duo, a picture of contrasts, then set about establishing the next generation of leaders.

The college established a four day retreat style leadership development Institute open to all employee types with a promise that every desiring employee would eventually have an opportunity to attend. A nationally recognized figure and former president facilitated sessions on leadership versus management, the college budget, personnel evaluation and improvement, institutional improvement, accreditation, and other meaty topics. An important aspect of the Institute involved using various sorts of leadership inventories to identify both individual characteristics and the complementarity between team members. An explicit component of the Institute was ensuring that every participant knew their leadership would be needed at the institution in both current and future positions.

The president also handpicked a few members of the organization at all levels to participate in individual development. These folks were provided stretch assignments and other career enhancing activities, such as establishing a professional development plan, participating in out-of-state recruitment efforts, course release for administrative and professional development duties. As the capacity of the college grew, internal applicants became highly competitive and earned important senior and executive positions. The few external hires in this period were unsuccessful for a variety of reasons and the internal promotions typically lead to positive results. The evp had been a tenured math faculty who later became the department chair for mathematics and that philosophy extended to other leadership positions. Over time, the college expanded its senior academic leadership to include the evp, two assistant vice presidents for academics (1 Ag Professor), a vice president for student services (tenured counselor), a vice president for professional development (English Professor), and a dean for academic services (chemistry professor). All but one of these individuals had come from faculty ranks and had been tenured as faculty prior before being promoted. The only “outsider” in the bunch began as a department chair for e-learning before being promoted.

In addition, the institution I grew up in had an interesting organizational structure. Department chairs--elected members of the faculty with continuing teaching assignments -- reported directly to the evp. The end result was that the distance between cabinet level decision-making and directly serving students remained very short. The development of this cadre of faculty administrators created a camaraderie and commonality of interests across the faculty and administration such that on issues we often felt more at odds with colleagues in our employee group than with the “other side.” There was no “us and them,” only “us.”

The institution I grew up in was not perfect. It sometimes struggled under an unrealistically positive sense of self-efficacy. This positivity is understandable. All of us in the administrative ranks had strong institutional identity. We believed that we were engaged in something important together. A strong sense of purpose in terms of both community and student success had been very intentionally instilled in us from our early days as faculty. So yeah, we were all a little bit nearsighted and starry eyed.

The funny thing is that even though I know we were a bit idealistic, I have sought to replicate the same conditions at every institution. More than anything, I’d like to tear down the fences between faculty and administration, to muddy the waters to the point where we are not really distinguishable from one another but bound together with common understandings about work and purpose. The institution I grew up in eroded that artificial barrier by promoting faculty to senior administrative positions and did so with intention. That college seems long ago and far away but it remains with me as an ideal.

Deconstructing fences is not something you do in one season. It takes time and intention. The first step is to move from a privacy fence to something cuter you can see through. Transparency does a lot of things. It helps those on the other side see what you are doing. It gives them the opportunity to ask questions, and if you answer those questions with honesty and authenticity, it helps them understand complexity that goes into so many of the decisions that must be made. With transparency and understanding, one can begin to develop trust and that underpins everything.