She explained that big budget cuts at her institution a year or so ago meant she had had to find ways to accomplish the university’s mission with fewer staff members. She began the process by assessing employees’ strengths relative to their positions. As a result of her assessment, she kept some employees where they were, she moved a couple to positions she determined to be a better fit for their talents and skills, and she let others go (with several months’ notice and assistance with their job searches).

The competencies she displayed—building and maintaining trust, assessing people and situations well, and making difficult (even painful) decisions without pause—are invaluable.

“Releasing an employee troubles, disturbs, and unsettles every leader,” writes Phillip Clampitt and Robert DeKoch in Transforming Leaders Into Progressmakers: Leadership for the 21st Century (2011, p. 166).

Therefore “cutting your losses [is] . . . an act of judgment and courage,” they concluded.

In higher education, the phrase “cutting your losses” sounds insensitive and incongruent with our culture of learning. Instead, we teach, correct, guide, and motivate . . . sometimes indefinitely. We may convince ourselves that “if only I were a better supervisor, then he/she would be a better employee.” And so we try yet another approach and give the employee more time.

The costs of keeping marginal employees, of course, can be very high. Their actions (or inaction) can affect recruitment and retention of students, the learning environment, risk and liability, and customer service. They also can affect morale, as other employees compensate for deficits or create ways to work around them.

What does it take to be able to handle challenging personnel decisions well? How can we develop these traits and/or skills? What are your thoughts about the statement: “We cannot afford mediocre employees”?

Our students deserve our best, including courageous leadership. How are we building and sustaining our value to our campuses?

Lisa Tetzloff is the Director of the Office of Student Life at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Sound great?

Hasn’t happened for me yet, either.

Sure, our students had some great presentations and excellent experiences but nearly always my student groups struggle to accurately communicate the true picture of what they experienced.  They struggle to not use too many “inside jokes” when describing their time at the conference and nearly always ended up engaged in a conversation about “why can’t we send more people next year?”  Given that our travel funds are not likely to increase anytime in the near future, we needed a new plan.

So, my insanely talented staff member (that’s you, Matt!) says, let’s try blogging.

Our office now requires any students traveling to conferences sponsored by our department to blog each day while they are there.  We create a blogging site for the group’s travels and make each of them the authors. I love the fact that those of us not attending the conference can keep track of their experiences and that we can comment and have dialogue while they are there. We also send the site around to our student affairs colleagues and division leadership so that they can get some insight into student experiences.

This has enabled us to document these travel experiences and now see, in writing, what we already knew about the impact of spending time with other students who are similarly committed to common goals.  As one of our student orientation coordinators posted, “I don’t think I ever got completely used to everyone actually understanding ‘Orientation Speak’ and being able to have in-depth conversations about different aspects of their programs.”

The use of blogs has enabled our students to do more active reflection on these conference experiences and has allowed us to use the sites to help other students understand what the experience might be like the next time around. We get pretty active commentary from participants about what they like and don’t like about the conferences and, when warranted, our structured reflection topics allow for some time for them to pause during a busy conference and make meaning of this experience that the university has offered to them.

For our department, we reported themes communicated in these blogs as part of our annual report in hope of illustrating the impact that off-campus professional travel has on our student leaders.  Themes of increased pride in our university, increased confidence in their own leadership efficacy, and enhanced sense of community with other student leaders certainly made this student affairs professional proud.

If you’d like to take a look at one of them, here’s a link to the blog from our delegates at the National Greek Leadership Association conference in Hartford, CT this year.

http://bscgreeksgotongla.blogspot.com/

And just for fun…check out the Wordle the blog for our Student Orientation Coordinators’ trip to the regional NODA Conference (at the top of this post) and the Wordle for our Program Committee’s travels to the NACA regional conference (2) pasted below.  Looks to me like they had a good experience…and had some fun along the way!

So, how do you facilitate reflection when your students travel? Any interested in blogging?  If you are, let’s correspond and if our students attend the same conferences we can cross-promote their sites!

And here are the results from the last poll.

To how many of you does this scenario sound familiar?

Problem A: We need more money to do X and X is important to our mission as a campus (need more staff, need new furniture, any problem)

Problem B: We have no way to get new money that doesn’t involve placing more burden on those we’re trying to serve or cutting from somewhere else  (We could place another fee on students OR we could cut other programs that are either out of our jurisdiction or connect to our mission)

We can’t truly fix problem A until there’s a solution to problem B and there IS NO SOLUTION to Problem B.

Anyone who is familiar with such a scenario knows what you inevitably do.  You make your best effort to solve problem A with minimal resources by going through the back door or skimping.  OR you make the unfortunate choice to solve problem B by passing the cost on to another massive student fee, even though it probably doesn’t feel completely right to do so.

I couldn’t help but think of season 4 of the Wire.  For those who aren’t familiar, the schools are a wreck because of the “corner kids” not being educated in a way they understand, but the government won’t allow the kids to be educated differently despite people who have proven that such innovation is effective.  So, the current system doesn’t work to solve problems but rather squelches innovation and actually perpetuates the problems that exist.

This brings me to the State of New Jersey.  It’s come down the line that the new governor plans to cut the state budget by a mind boggling 25 percent; those of us in higher ed know that we tend to take the lumps in such budget cuts.  Everyone’s scared to death, but part of me is glad.  Massive change and budget reductions REQUIRES a rethinking of how things are done.  True change and true destruction of the old way of doing things will only happen when those changes are forced to happen.

At the risk of massive narcissism, I will quote myself…”Personally, I believe this to be the biggest benefit of any crisis situation, whether it be personal, local or even national.  A crisis is an opportunity to reflect on our values and to think about what may be most important.  While we are in crisis, we can reconnect with what our values should be and emerge leaner and meaner and more prepared to do great work in the world.”

25% budget cuts might break the system and cause much needed change to happen.  I might be alone here, but I think that’s a good thing.

Just the other day, I read another article about Hofstra Unviersity dropping its 69-year-old football program as a cost-saving measure.

Colleges and universities are taking some very drastic measures to cope with the budget crisis in higher education. It seems like all of the talk recently in staff meetings at my institution – and I’m sure many other institutions – is about how the budget crisis in our state is impacting what we do.

How do you continue to provide high quality services and programs with less and less money and fewer resources? I don’t know that there is any simple answer to this, but it’s a question burdening many of us.

My institution has seen a decrease in state funding support of about 35 percent over the past 7-8 years.  Recently, the institution has implemented furlough days for its employees, put a hiring freeze on most positions, put stringent limitations on travel-related expenses, and increased the cost of many of its essential services.

This is all no surprise to any of us reading this blog, I’m sure.

I write this today to engage the readers in a discussion about what your departments are doing to creatively and effectively battle any budget-related shortfalls your institutions might be encountering. What are your departments doing that many of us may have not considered yet?

“This is the worst budget crisis I’ve seen in my 20 years of working in student affairs.” – Phone conversation with SA Director in WA.

In case you haven’t heard the U.S. economy is hurting and every day a news article is written about the impact it’s having on higher ed.

“Arizona State University, anticipating at least $25 million in budget cuts this fiscal year — on top of the $30 million already cut — is ending its contracts with as many as 200 adjunct instructors.” – The NY Times

“Take the UW. The university’s endowment fell by 14 percent in the year ending September, to $1.9 billion. The UW spends about $95 million of that each year on professorships, scholarships and other programs — money which may now need to be trimmed back.” – The Seattle Times

“Harvard has sent a letter to its deans saying that the university’s $36.9 billion endowment fund lost 22 percent of its value in the last four months and could decline as much as 30 percent by the end of the fiscal year on June 30.” – The NY Times

The irony of bad economic times is college enrollment generally increases.

“There is also student demand, which has been skyrocketing. Last week, the UW announced 1,100 more sophomores, juniors and seniors stayed in school this year than had been anticipated, probably because of the worsening economy. Emmert says applications for the 5,500 freshman slots could shatter records this year by reaching 25,000.” – The Seattle Times

Most articles I’ve read talk about the impact on faculty and administration, but what about the SA Departments. How are you handling the downturn?

SA budgets are generally either:

1. Operational – based on the institution and/or state budget
2. Activity Fees – based on a per student / per credit enrollment fee

How is each budget fairing right now? Are operational budgets being hit the hardest because of massive state budget cuts? Are activity fees going up due to the increased enrollment? Or are activity fees hurting as well because they now have to service a larger number of students?

The economy is hurting almost everyone, but educational institutions have to deal with it in their own unique way.

“We can adapt to changing spending environments, but we are not like a business,” Jenny said. “We can’t just cease degree programs that students have already enrolled in.” – The Seattle Times

How are you managing now?

—————

If you’re working on goals, try the most advanced goal achievement social network, GoalTribe.com.
The site guides you to set goals, build motivation, connect to a
support group, track your progress and overcome obstacles to success.
You can also learn all about goalsand self improvement on the GoalTribe blog.