Education
Ms. Communication
How to build processes to ensure you’re speaking with and hearing all sides
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business | September 2009
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M. Valeriana Moeller, president, Columbus State Community College
M. Valeriana Moeller has heard all of the opinions, and she wouldn’t mind hearing them again.
Generations of leaders have spilled ink all over how-to books for the right way to describe organizational communications, but Moeller does it with a simplicity that belies the work she does in dealing with a few thousand employees and more than 20,000 students as president of Columbus State Community College.
“We talk, and we get people involved,” she says.
And so Moeller has had conversations with everyone she can to better understand the issues she needs to work on and help create a working vision for CSCC. Along the way, Moeller, who will retire in June 2010, has led CSCC to massive growth — it has become the largest community college in the state, added additional programs and built partnerships with four-year universities.
Smart Business talked with Moeller about how you figure out your skill set and how you can get information from all sides while staying on track.
Create an atmosphere of improvement. I meet with my team weekly and then I meet with them individually, and they also know that any time they need anything they can come to me. Sometimes it’s, ‘This is what’s happening; I need to bounce this off you,’ and we go and we talk about that.
I will also tell someone, ‘This meeting, this presentation, whatever, let’s talk about how it could have been better and how did you feel about what you did.’ You just have to engage people into talking and letting them know that everything is not a do-or-die situation, but that there’s room for improvement and we want everyone to be better. I want feedback when I do things because I want to know where could I have been better.
