Education

Thomas V. Chema

By Matt McClellan

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Take a chance. You have to be willing to take some risks, which is contrary to the whole academic enterprise. Colleges and universities are some of the most risk-averse places on the face of the earth. It’s understandable — for some of the faculty, nothing has changed in their disciplines for a thousand years. Talk about change, forget it. Talk about taking a risk, that’s not even in the vocabulary.

To answer that question, we have to be open to change. We have to be open to taking some risks. You never really know. You try to evaluate the data to make your decision, but you ultimately are taking a risk. The mistakes you make by action are usually much less significant than the ones you make by inaction.

You have to be open to the fact that you may not succeed with a given course. You may have to eat a little crow and reverse yourself. That’s happened to me on occasion. I’ve come up with ideas for this or that, and it didn’t work. I had to say, ‘Well, we’re going to go back to the old way, or maybe we’re not going back to the old way, but the methodology we’re using isn’t cutting it.’

You’ve got to accept that risk that it isn’t going to work and not be so stubborn that you just keep pushing something the wrong way.

Take care of personnel issues immediately. We have a tendency to want to be nice and to have everybody like you. So you tend to put off personnel issues — the tough ones, that is. The nice ones, when you’re promoting somebody or giving a raise, those are easy.

But the tough ones, when you’re not promoting or giving a raise, when you are actually asking someone to find employment elsewhere, those are the tough ones. They have to be dealt with, and they have to be dealt with directly. You need to avoid procrastination that is so easy to fall into in personnel actions.

Know your business. An awful lot of managers, as opposed to leaders, don’t understand their own business. You may think you do. The old Harvard Business School mantra of the ’50s and early ’60s that a manager is a manager is a manager; well, that only works if you learn your business.

Before you start, you’ve got to do your homework. You’ve got to know about the problems, you have to know what the real funding and financial issues are. It’s easy to overlook the fundamentals, but it’s a pitfall from which you can rarely recover.

Avoid groupthink. You can get yourself to the position where you’re only talking to your close associates, and they’re only talking to each other. Especially when things are going well, you can get into a mindset where you know how to do this, you’ve got to be right, and you’re not going to countenance any criticisms or opposite points of view. Eventually, that leads to people not telling you bad news and not coming up with alternative solutions. That is a very important pitfall to avoid.

It’s important for the leader in the organization to invite input, concern and criticism. You have to articulate it. You can’t just assume people are going to tell you bad news.

And, you have to make sure you never punish the messenger. If there’s something going wrong, you need to deal with it, but do not kill the messenger. That’s a disaster.

Treat employees differently but equally. We have this group of tenure-track faculty, who are among the smartest people you are going to meet, their knowledge is miles deep, and they also know they’re smart.

We have another group of people who are service employees, people who work in our food service, dining halls, people who work in the custodial side or maintenance. Their backgrounds are very different.

A college campus is like a little city. You have all the diversity of income level and job responsibly. We have people who work from 9 to 5 and 24-7.

It’s a challenge, and the first piece in dealing with that challenge is to recognize that not everybody is the same. Too often, we misinterpret ‘all men created equal.’ That is true philosophically, but if you tried to treat every employee the same, you are gearing up for failure. You, in fact, have to meet the needs of different groups, and those needs are very diverse.

Second, do not to try to treat everybody the same. That’s different from not treating them equally as a philosophical matter, but you have to deal differently with people.

Third thing, and I see this in virtually every area I’ve been involved with in my career, you want to make sure the people who are your managers are treating the people who appear to be below them on the totem pole the same way they treat people who are above them on the totem pole.

I don’t know why it is that human beings tend to be nice guys and gals up the line but don’t feel the same compunction down the line. That’s a huge mistake, and in a diverse work force, if people treat folks who are reporting to them differently than they treat folks to whom they report, you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

HOW TO REACH: Hiram College, (330) 569-3211 or www.hiram.edu