USG Staff Conference
Chancellor Erroll B. Davis Jr.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Southern Polytechnic State University
[Lisa Rossbacher will introduce you.]
- Thank you, Lisa, and thank you as well for the fine job you are doing, not only here, but as interim Chief Academic Officer as well.
- It is a pleasure to be with you today -- and I appreciate the invitation.
- There are a number of groups and councils organized within the University System.
- And over the past 20 months I’ve become acquainted with many of them.
- And it certainly is good for me to learn more about the work of the USG Staff Council.
- Although I have to warn you; for some reason, once I speak to a System group, I don’t seem to get invited back!
- I appreciate the fact that you formally meet three times each year, in addition to holding a yearly conference.
- This indicates that as members, you take seriously your organization’s charge, “to advance the mission of the System as a whole and to promote and foster the welfare of System staff.”
- We are a System -- and my goal is to develop policy, structure, and culture that gets us thinking and acting more from a System perspective.
- This creates a stronger sense of how we can work together to truly and effectively address statewide needs with our combined System resources.
- And the other focus you have -- and which is so crucial to our success -- is that we must nurture and develop the people that make up this System.
- We have 39,600 faculty and staff -- 11 faculty and 28,600 staff.
- Every one of these individuals has a role and is expected to make important contributions within that role.
- I appreciate all roles.
- I especially appreciate the roles you play in driving our System forward.
- And second, I appreciate your focus through this council on strengthening your co-workers to ensure we all can be successful.
- One of the ways in which we foster success is through the creation and nurturing of a leadership culture within the System.
- Leadership is a keen -- if not compelling -- interest of mine.
- I believe that our success in shaping and creating a leadership culture within the University System will, in large part, determine our overall success in creating a more educated Georgia.
- And our success in this area also will affect the success we have in implementing our new Strategic Plan, which was adopted by the regents in August.
- So let me spend my time with you today to discuss first, leadership, and then our Strategic Plan.
- I have noted within our System the absence of a general aspiration to be in a leadership role.
- A research or faculty role seems to draw more aspirants.
- I also have noted a lack of commitment to develop people on a system-wide basis.
- I find that interesting -- we respond to parents and others who question the cost of a college education by telling them that it is a sound investment.
- But then we turn around and aren’t willing to invest in our own people.
- As far as I’m concerned, that’s a disconnect which borders on hypocrisy.
- In the System, our default position when someone leaves a key post is to initiate a national search.
- There’s very little effort made to develop the bench strength within the organization.
- So we are going to address that.
- Last year, we identified an initial ten System projects.
- One of those projects deals with staff training and development.
- President Wayne Clough is heading up this project.
- And we will be allocating resources to significantly improve our training and development efforts for University System faculty and staff.
- Georgia has a great university system.
- But nothing is static. “And, survival is really not mandatory.”
- And make no bones about it, the failure to create a great system -- or a great organization -- is, in fact, a leadership failure.
- But, I think there is something more important at work here.
- I believe this failure also reflects the failure to establish a leadership culture.
- When you see a culture where people do not aspire to leadership, it often reflects a general perception that management or administration, or whatever you want to call it, is seen as bureaucracy instead of leadership.
- No one seems to -- or wants to -- appreciate the power of leaders to change the future, to manage risks, to create outcomes.
- So what is the solution?
- The solution must be to create a culture of leadership.
- And by successful leadership I don’t just mean the traditional model of the charismatic leader.
- In fact, the theory I posit is that this form of leadership will fail over time unless it also creates a culture of leadership.
- Leadership, and a commitment to developing leaders, needs to exist at every level in an organization.
- Leadership means individuals trained and given the authority and space to act: to initiate: to resolve issues.
- Leadership also means individuals know exactly their level of accountability for those actions and decisions.
- A truly effective leadership culture is one that is not focused on an individual.
- It is one in which many are trained and developed to lead.
- Leadership -- effective leadership -- is not about the one. It is about the many.
- In the University System, we are taking slow and sometimes painful steps to demonstrate the power of leadership to alter the future, to manage risks, so that people get an enhanced understanding of leadership.
- We are taking a disciplined and more transparent approach in our planning, in our budgeting and in our resource allocation.
- We are looking at hiring as an opportunity, not to fill a slot, but instead to upgrade the System.
- And we are going to train relentlessly.
- Leaders are not born, they are grown.
- They are trained.
- And we are empowering people to do more things than a year ago.
- We are finishing an approvals and authorities project that is pushing down decision making to the lowest appropriate level.
- This gives people more responsibility -- and establishes clear, single point accountability.
- Finally, we are starting to put in place managerial control systems.
- To be successful, you have to have aspirational and measurable goals.
- You have to have systems that capture those goals; that report the progress on an ongoing basis; that make forecasts about the future and not merely report what has happened.
- We must have leading indicators that allow us to intervene, not lagging indicators that allow us to explain!
[PAUSE]
- A discussion of goals leads me naturally to our new Strategic Plan.
- This plan will involve and affect every aspect of our operations and our mission.
- It will affect every campus.
- It is our blueprint for the future, and its successful implementation will require involvement by all.
- The goal of the Board of Regents through its mission of teaching, research, and service at its 35 degree-granting institutions is “Transforming the System, Changing Lives, Strengthening the State.”
- This has been the focus of efforts in the University System throughout its 75-year history.
- Driving planning for the University System and the budget needs for the 35 campuses is a philosophy that all resources available to the System must be aligned with the Board of Regents’ strategic priorities and state needs.
- These priorities and state needs have been identified and given focus through the Board of Regents’ new Strategic Plan. The Plan has six major goals:
- Renew excellence in undergraduate education to meet students’ 21st century needs.
- We are going to review our core curriculum and restructure where appropriate to measure competency.
- For example, we currently say that if a student completes a foreign language requirement, that is satisfactory.
- But the question is: can a student then speak the language?
- We will test for that core competency.
- We want to ensure that more of our students graduate -- more graduate in a shorter time -- and that they graduate with the core competencies they need to take those knowledge jobs to communities around this state.
- Create enrollment capacity in the University System to meet the needs of 100,000 additional students by 2020.
- Right now if you look at a model of the System’s enrollment, it is a vertical column -- with 30 percent of our students enrolled in our four research universities.
- Another 40 percent are enrolled in our comprehensive universities, and the remainder in our access institutions.
- We need to shape that more like a pyramid, with the greatest number of students enrolled in our comprehensive and access institutions.
- Frankly, we cannot enroll the bulk of those estimated 100,000 new students at our four research universities.
- So we will be working to make both the comprehensive and access institutions even more attractive to potential students in order to maximize the use of our space.
- Increase the USG’s participation in research and economic development to the benefit of a global Georgia. Increase the numbers of health profession graduates and create a long-term, system-level academic plan for workforce development.
- There are many, many opportunities open to us in the System to assist the state with economic development efforts, with increased research, and by addressing some key state needs, such as in healthcare.
- The Strategic Plan also looks at how we better leverage the resources of our universities to attract a much higher level of federal and other research funding.
- Strengthen the USG’s partnerships with the state’s other education agencies, with a key focus on the Alliance of Education Agency Heads.
- We must address pipeline issues that reduce the number of Georgia children who graduate from high school prepared for some form of postsecondary education.
- As we go forward, we will be expanding our collaboration with K-12 to ensure more Georgians graduate from high school ready to educate themselves further.
- For example, all of the state’s education agencies -- the Department of Education, the Department of Technical and Adult Education, the Office of School Readiness, and others, including the University System -- are now focused on improving Georgia’s high-school graduation rate.
- The work is being coordinated through the Alliance for Education Agency Heads, of which I am a member.
- We have made the University System’s efforts with this Alliance a priority in our strategic plan.
- Maintain affordability so that money is not a barrier to participation in the benefits of higher education by continuing a tradition of low tuition rates and by establishing a need-based financial aid program.
- Georgia historically has a low-tuition rate at its public colleges and universities.
- Our costs are not low -- our tuition is!
- Currently, at four-year institutions, Georgia is the lowest among the 16-state Southern Regional Education Board.
- And we have the Guaranteed Tuition Plan that fixes tuition for four years, enabling students and parents to financially plan for college, knowing tuition won’t change.
- So we will continue to focus on maintaining college affordability through reasonable tuition rates.
- HOPE is a great program that has helped thousands of Georgians.
- But we find that it’s entirely possible to be smart and have HOPE and still lack the financial resources for college.
- High-school freshmen make decisions based on tomorrow.
- So if you don’t wake up to what it takes to earn HOPE until your junior year, it’s too late.
- There are many “late bloomer” students who can be successful in college, but didn’t make the right decisions early enough to qualify for HOPE.
- And with no need-based aid, many are out of luck financially for college.
- Georgia cannot afford to let these individuals go by the wayside.
- So we will explore the possibilities of need-based aid.
- Increase efficiency by working as a system to focus on business functions, developing a leadership culture, engaging in workforce process improvements and establishing accountability metrics.
- What happens in our classrooms and labs is special and unique.
- But our back office operations, for example, are no different from those of any business.
- So, we will focus on creating back office operations that are world class, and that through efficiencies can free up additional resources for our instructional mission.
- And we are going to measure our performance at every level.
- Accountability is important -- to our customers and our funding partners.
- But it also is a tool we will use to effect continual process improvements throughout the System.
[CONCLUSION]
- All of these goals share a central theme: building the System’s capacity to ensure it is ready to meet the state’s growing needs for higher education, research, and economic development.
- We are about building capacity in intellectual excellence, in enrollment, in research activity, in economic development, and in human resources.
- The new plan also has a theme of building on excellence in all areas of the System, from the classroom, to research, to support services and general operations, along with a continuing push to ensure a diverse enterprise in terms of students, faculty and staff.
- The plan supports efforts of System to educate more Georgians to higher levels than at any time in our history.
- The plan also clearly demonstrates our willingness to be measured for performance and assure our funding partners of our prudent and efficient use of resources.
- Incremental resources will not be forthcoming without these measures.
- This plan gives us the structure to increase the value we add to the state.
- But we won’t be successful with this Plan without a strong, motivated, and trained staff.
- And that’s why our investment in people has to be fundamental to everything else we do.
- We need to train leaders throughout this System.
- We need leaders -- and a leadership culture -- at every level of the System and on every campus.
- Let me close by thanking you for all you do on behalf of this System and for your willingness to step up to the leadership challenge.
- Now, time permitting, I’ll be happy to take some questions.