Building a collaborative center, one merger at a time

Author: Aeron Haynie

Importance

When becoming the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), a large centre, I wanted to keep the best aspects of inclusive teaching while also learning more about managing a large team. I knew we would be more successful (and happier!) if we could create a workplace culture where everyone feels valued and respected and where folks could work collaboratively. In addition, because our centre kept growing and changing, we needed to work hard to make sure that all the teams felt connected to a common mission and that they felt valued and listened to. As faculty who became a director after 20 years of college teaching and who valued an inclusive, student-cantered approach, it took me awhile to learn how to transfer these skills into centre work and how to find (the few) useful and progressive management materials.

Scenario

I began working at the University of New Mexico in 2013 as director of a two-person Center for Teaching Excellence. After two years I was asked to merge the centre with the large, established student tutoring centre (12 full-time staff), then a year later we took on the graduate resource centre and then, two years after that, added the instructional designer team (14 full-time staff). “Ah,” said a colleague from the Business School, “you are a full-on manager now.” I bristled at the comment, but he was correct that my job changed radically. I went from single-handedly designing and facilitating faculty development initiatives, workshops, and consultations to spending the majority of my time on HR and budget issues (except for one hellish period before I hired a new faculty developer when I was doing both). I received no formal training on how to manage a multi-million dollar budget or how to supervise staff. Thankfully, existing staff were experts on how to hire, train, and pay our 100 student employees. I’ve written elsewhere about what happens when graduate students are thrown into teaching with little to no training (Haynie & Spong, 2022). Similarly, faculty often enter chairing and administrative work with no formal training and little support. Luckily, our university houses two excellent programs that helped me tremendously: the Division of Equity and Inclusion and the Campus Ombuds, where I learned the role of implicit bias in hiring and how to have difficult conversations, respectively. I found two smart non-academic sources: Jonathan and Melissa Nightingale’s books and newsletters and Anne Helen Peterson’s book, Out of Office, which we used as a way to design policy for working remotely.

Although teaching and directing differ, there are some basic teaching principles that do transfer to supervising a team: establishing rules and policies that are transparent and equitable, communicating the value and purpose in what you’re doing, adopting a growth mind-set toward employees, soliciting anonymous feedback often, and establishing shared values.

When teaching, I always begin the semester by asking students to work in small groups to generate a set of community guidelines that we will all abide by. Often these guidelines include specific request for me (such as “return papers and quizzes promptly”) as well as rules of civil discourse in our discussions. These guidelines are usually then posted online, after I’ve vetted their suggestions, we refer to them when difficulties arise. In addition to the rules themselves, the exercise has the additional gains of getting students to talk to each other in the first week, demonstrating that I care about their points of view, and getting student buy-in on course policies.

I’d like to claim that I immediately transferred the community agreement exercise into building a values statement for the centre, but the impetus came from a staff member. She had worked previously in an advocacy-focused organisation on campus and brought with her a different work culture, one around passionately shared values. She approached me many times to talk about various changes she wanted to see. There were times when I found this staff member presumptuous and even annoying. But I also knew that she had something to teach me. I recalled the advice of my colleague and mentor, Professor Alicia Chavez who once said that she purposely seeks out the most irritating or frustrating student to engage with and mentor. “This is the student who needs me most and probably has the most to teach me.” With those words in mind, I met several times with this staff member to hear her concerns and suggestions. She urged me to consider building centre values, something that I had associated with empty corporate slogans. Upon reflection, I realised that this was similar to the community agreements exercise I often did with my students.

We brought in a guest speaker to give us an overview of how set of shared values can help guide an organisation. Next the staff (including me and the associate directors) formed small groups to decide on specific guiding principles of our shared work. This took time but many iterations but eventually we came up with seven CTL core values: student success; service; cooperation; growth; equity; belonging and compassion (University of New Mexico, n.d.). We invited students to examine the initial set and add their own, which became our last value. We talk about our values in staff meetings, on retreats, and in student trainings. More importantly, we visit these values in anonymous annual surveys in which we asked staff to reflect on how well we enact our values and to give specific examples of where we are failing to live up to them. When interviewing candidates for jobs we send them a link to our values ahead of time so that they can reflect on them and think of ways that their specific jobs might contribute. Often, we refer to these stated values when confronting particularly difficult decisions. For example, in describing our value of equity, we state: “We realise that the university was not designed for everyone, so we are committed to fostering and enacting inclusive pedagogies. We challenge preconceptions of strengths and weaknesses and educate ourselves on the root causes of educational inequity. We seek to identify and remove barriers to access.” Although we employ a diverse group of staff and student employees, we realise that we need to work even harder to make sure that our staff and students mirror the demographics across campus. Particularly with hiring student tutors, we realise that it helps minority students feel more comfortable seeking academic help when they encounter tutors who look like them in spaces that are welcoming. Therefore, we worked with the ethnic centres on campus to embed tutoring in those spaces and asked for ways that we could make students from these groups feel more welcome in applying for jobs with us.

A second example of how our values guided us was when our team received grant funding to create a video, “Who are our students?”, a portrait of our diverse student body. New faculty are often given demographic overviews of our diverse student body, but we thought it would be more compelling to have a group of students speak themselves about their cultural, experiences, and ways that instructors make them feel welcome. We started arranging meetings with the ethnic centres on campus and composing questions. Then my associate director realised there was a potential problem. She sensed that this collaboration was at risk of seeming transactional and tokenising diverse students. She then appointed one of her staff with strong ties to the centres across campus, to lead the initiative. The process was much slower that we’d originally anticipated but it was truly a collaboration with the centres and the result was richer and more authentic of our students’ lived experiences.

Reflection

Lack of formal training, mentorship, and the changing structure of the CTL meant that I was often out of my comfort zone. It is very easy to feel like an imposter in this situation. I was also new to the campus and had to learn the unique campus culture and various stakeholders. When you feel like an imposter you are less likely to seek feedback or admit your lack of knowledge Although I had chaired two departments at previous institutions, managing staff is quite different. As chair, you are handling logistical matters for your peers but you have very little power and (in my experience) department members do not shy about from telling you what they really think. When directing staff you are more like a boss: you have the power to hire and fire and give raises. This means that people will be less candid, more guarded. On a positive note, while faculty work is individualist and often competitive in nature, staff work is collaborative. There are very few individual accomplishments; everything happens through team effort. It took me awhile to feel confident enough to solicit more feedback from my staff and to seek a more collaborative relationship with my staff.

The exercise of creating our centre’s values helped us clarify what motivates our work, helped staff collaborate across programs, it was inclusive of our student employees, and was not top-down. With so much change in the organisational structure of our centre, this was a way to clarify what we have in common and of seeing how each sub-group contributes to the whole. Fortuitously, we did this work before the COVID crisis hit and this allowed us to respond in a more collaborative manner. I know that we wouldn’t have worked so well together without doing this important work.

Looking back, of course I wish I had given myself more grace in my learning curve and felt more comfortable in admitting what I did not know.

Advice

Whether you are coming from a faculty role, and assuming a greater staff leadership role, be honest with yourself about your own areas of discomfort. Do you feel that you will be perceived as less confident, less competent if you adopt a more collaborative leadership style? What gaps do you have in your own expertise? Are there members of your staff who have strengths that could help you in building a better centre. Is there a particular staff member or faculty ally who seems to be challenging you in stressful ways? What could you learn from that person? What resources does your campus have that might help you with a large, process-oriented goal? For example, might it be more effective to have an outside facilitator guide your discussions?

Consider the process as well as the product. The exercise of creating and articulating a centre’s grounding values needs to be done by the entire staff and this will take more time. This cannot be a top-down or even core group exercise. And finally, values need to be referred to when making difficult decisions and revisited and adjusted periodically. Consider how you might build a process that is sustainable and capable of adjustment.

References

Haynie, A., & Spong, S. (2022). Teaching matters: A guide for graduate students. WVU Press.

Nightingale, J., & Nightingale, M. (2017). How f*cked up is your management: An uncomfortable conversation about modern leadership. Raw Signal.

Petersen, A.H., & Warzel C. (2021). Out of office: The big problem and bigger promise of working from home. Random House.

University of New Mexico. (n.d.). Centre for Teaching & Learning: Values. https://ctl.unm.edu/about/values.html