Caring for Students by Cutting Through Red Tape

Final exams are finally over (sorry – bad pun!), and students can head home for the holidays. I’ve been a little quiet in writing for this blog recently, and part of the reason is that I’ve been challenged to find ways to help students who find themselves in difficult circumstances.

There have been some structural changes in my university that I’ve mentioned before, and one task that moved onto my list of responsibilities is superintending the Withdrawals and Incomplete Grade Contracts processes. At Trinity Western University, these processes are available for students who are facing something too big to handle without help.

Students don’t normally withdraw from the university in October or November unless a BIG, LIFE CHANGING EVENT has hit them square between the eyes. Sometimes it’s an illness, sometimes an accident, occasionally a family crisis. Red tape rigamarole is not going to help. Policy? Paperwork? Really? No!!

There’s no substitute for personal care and attention when a crisis hits. It doesn’t matter what I think of the crisis, either. All the matters is what the student sees as the crisis. But the right person can make all the difference. Here’s an example.

A student came with her mother to withdraw because she was in a personal crisis: she was exceedingly lonely, overwhelmed with the workload, unhappy with her room mate, and things were not going well at all. The person at the front desk could tell that the mother was supportive of the daughter but would really rather that her daughter stayed in school.

The staff member who was well-trained and experienced at this started by asking the student why she chose TWU, what she was looking for in a school, why she chose the program she did, etc. She got the girl talking about her hopes and dreams and aspirations. She fished for the issues and listened, but didn’t make any judgments. In the process of talking, the student’s attitude changed from wanting to quit and walk away to wanting to stay and achieve, but seeking help.

That was the opening the staff member was looking for.

The student got a new dorm mate, was invited to a social club, and had a consultation with the Student Success Centre. And [pardon me while I check...], yes, her grades are good and she’s registered for next semester!

I hope our universities are never too ‘big’ to offer this kind of personal care. It can make all the difference in the world.

Merry Christmas!

The Number One Way to Build Trust

This is a follow-up post to “Three Not-So-Easy Steps to Prepare for Change.”

From @OwenGreaves on Twitter: “I trust you until you give me a reason not to trust you.”

When I first started working at my current university, I was introduced as the new Registrar at a faculty event. While mingling in the crowd afterwards, a faculty member said to me, “Welcome here. Watch your back.”

Now there is a greeting to give you the warm fuzzies, eh?

He wasn’t alone in his sentiments. I received a several similar warnings over the next while. I quickly learned that my workplace had an issue with trust.

Trust is hard to win and easy to lose. It can take years to build and a millisecond to collapse. As Glenn Keeler commented earlier, building trust can feel like a Sisyphusian task.

Much like Herzberg’s Hygiene Theory of motivation, there are certain basic things that must be in place but they don’t necessarily help us build trust. For example, good hygiene will not feed you at the dinner table, but washing your hands will help to keep you from throwing up after eating – it’ll help keep the food in your stomach.

Let’s apply this concept to trust. Keep your nose clean: don’t lie, steal, cheat, or otherwise be dishonest. That’s just good hygiene – it will not built people’s trust in you, but you can’t give them a reason to throw you out, either.

How do you establish trust?

Trust is a very personal feeling, I believe it must start with the individual and is very personal. What does that mean?

It means that I must do everything I can to enlarge the other person. People know when you’re angling for a piece of their pie. They’ve been burned before and they’re wary. But if people see that you really are working in their best interest, seeking to enlarge their sphere of influence and span of control, they will begin to trust you. More than that, they will extend some level of personal loyalty towards you as well. Yes, there are sociopaths out there who will use you but, like the policies you create, you can’t live in the exceptions. Simply guard yourself against these people while enlarging someone else.

Where do you start?

Start with your boss. Make him or her look very wise that they hired you and you can’t lose. And do the same with your closest staff members – the people who report directly to you. Help them succeed and look good doing so and they’ll go the extra mile.

My current boss did this for me. Shortly after I was hired, there was a small flurry of attention given to something called “The Bologna Process”. I’d heard of it, but was only vaguely familiar with it. My boss called me up and said, “Grant, you’re going to be invited to a meeting and the Provost might ask you a question about the Bologna Process. Are you familiar with it?”

“Oh yes,” I replied (he didn’t ask me how familiar, but I think he suspected I knew very little).

I shut my door, and over the next couple of hours I made myself extremely familiar with it. When I was called to the meeting, the Provost turned to me and asked me to explain the potential impact of the Bologna Process for TWU. I spoke like an expert on the subject and the Provost thereafter considered me one of the best hires in recent memory (his words to me several years later).

In short, my boss gave me enough warning so I was able to make a good first impression. That endeared me to him immensely, and enlarged my influence with the Provost and the rest of the people around the table. Do this as often as you can. Your staff and your boss will trust you for it.

How to Lead by Numbers

Finding a solution to a complex problem

Hello friends!

It certainly has been a while since I’ve written here. My excuse is that I moved into a new home, and it discombobulated me! Most of these blog posts get written at home, usually late at night, but my evenings were taken up with the whole moving thing. We’re in our new place now and, as of last night, most of the boxes are empty. Phew!

What’s prompted me to get back on the blogging band-wagon is a question that arose because my office has just spent a whole whack of time running hundreds of reports to produce what we call:

THE CENSUS

 My office produces a census ever fall, spring and summer, on a scheduled Census Day. That day was exactly one week ago. Our Adds/Drops ended on Wednesday, which gave us Thursday to clean up course registration data and to solve anything weird that showed up. Then on Friday most of the day was taken up running reports, gathering data, and putting it into the Census format and posting it for the TWU community to see.

It is basically a whole bunch of numbers: how many students we have is the big number, then that’s broken down 311 different ways, from the average class size (by year) right down to the number of students that come from Winfield, BC or Field, Alberta. In the end, the report, if printed, is 50 pages long each year. Ugh! That’s a lot of numbers!

This raises that age old question: if statistics don’t lie but statisticians do, what’s the role of the Registrar?

No, no, no! We are not liars! You jumped to that conclusion much too easily, my friend. Registrars are very trustworthy people, unlike certain other professions…

All joking aside, I believe that when we play the role of statistician, we can do so relatively politics-free (for the most part). I’m not advocating that we stay disengaged. Far from it. We have the responsibility of tracking and reporting a lot of numbers, and it would be disappointing if we merely took the non-involvement method of “just reporting numbers.” Rather, I believe it’s our responsibility to take the bull by the horns to share the data to show other leaders in our universities what must be done. And for the most part, we don’t have a personal stake in what the numbers show us, so this keeps us relatively politics-free.

For example, this Census Day has given my office the opportunity to lead by numbers. Fortunately, this year, almost everything looks great as far as enrolment at TWU, but we have noticed one interesting tidbit. For the first time since we’ve been running the Census, we have WAY more students in first year (0-26 credit hours) than we admitted.

“Hmm,” we said. “What’s going on here?” So we ran some additional numbers and found that over the past two years the number of students taking 9-12 credits per semester has grown substantially, while the number of students who are taking 12-15 hours has dropped substantially. Even further, the number of students who are taking 16-18 hours has plummeted! Consequently, we have a pile-up of students who have not progressed to the second year (based on hours). This will affect our graduation rate and many other things, and it just might signal some problems for the future. I noted this in a report to the President and now we have everyone from the Pricing Committee to Financial Aid and the Provost’s Office looking into this. Senate will also have a look at it in the near future. I have no idea what conclusions will come from this, but I do feel a sense of satisfaction that we’ve done our job – we’ve led by numbers.

And hopefully avoided being accused of lying

We’re Hiring! Apply Within

Hi again, folks. I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet over the past weeks. I’ve been away on holidays, and I’ve been a wee bit busy with my personal life. Selling our home and buying a new place will do that to you, I guess. We plan to move into our new place on September 15, which is crazy considering my wife and I both work in education and school is starting just before that here in Canada. That’s how it worked out and I’m sure we’ll survive. Somehow. I hope…

But I’m back. So are you. I’m very glad to “see” you again!

I have some very good news to share with you and I hope you’ll share it too. We have two positions for hire in our office. One is to replace a current staff member who is going off to do more education. That position is a front-line, meet the students face-to-face and give them great service kind of position. It’s a registration and payment and solution-finding position. This person will work with a team of eight.

The other position is a behind-the-scenes database position, focused on research, numbers, data clean-up, report-writing, editing and generally for the neat and tidy types. This person will work with a team of three.

We have a great working environment. It’s not a union environment, but people are treated well here and our office staff all get along great. They are high achievers, each of them hired partly because they have a customer service, solution-finding mind set. So much of our work is integrated, so at any one time, you’ll find people putting their heads together to figure something out and we enjoy that collaborative atmosphere in the office.

Come work for us. Apply within. If you can’t come work for us, but you know someone who might be interested, please share this with them! And if you have further questions, shoot me an email at grant (dot) mcmillan (@) twu (dot) ca [that's code to keep the spambots from finding my email address and filling my inbox with drivel]

Next post will be more interesting (with pictures), and is coming soon.

Cheers!

Grant

Summer Time = Renovation Time at TWU

In Front of the Reimer Student Centre @ TWU

Summer time at TWU seems to be the best time to do renovations. In fact, since I’ve been at TWU, there has always been some major renovation or new construction. First it was the new School of Media Arts & Culture buildings, then it was the move into the Langley Events Centre for our Spartans Athletics teams. Next came the new fire support pump house buildings (which my son helped build) and some significant renovations to the Douglas Building (which my son also worked on). This summer it’s new carpet in the Mattson Centre and a new exterior & seismic upgrades to Fraser Hall, and an extension on the Neufeld Science Centre courtesy of KIP funding. You might not think that new carpet is a big deal, and it’s not from a renovation standpoint, but it is a big deal for an office that’s trying to stay open to serve the campus community. Why is it a big deal? Because when you change carpets, you have to take everything off the floor. If you look around your office space right now, I think you’ll see that pretty much means everything except the pictures on your walls.

Try removing everything from your office and still stay open to serve clients. It’s not easy, let me tell you. But we lived through it with some humour, a great carpet installing company, and a superb IT department who patiently and without a word of complaint moved some computers, printers, and phones three times in a week to help us out.

Students were sometimes a little confused when the front doors were blocked off and they had to go around to a side entrance that said, “Exit Only.” They managed to find their way into the building. Sometimes they ended up in a maze of desks and chairs stacked up in front of them, but they made it work, too.

Twelve days later and the office is all put back together again. Check out some pics below – including a couple of Fraser Hall.

In Front of the Reimer Student Centre @ TWU

Shiny and New!

The Registrar’s Office is getting a makeover. New carpets are being installed this week. The contractor and the TWU Maintenance department have been great to work with so that we can stay open and serve students.

We could have closed – hey, it’s summer, things are slow, we’re open 24/7 online… – but after talking about it we decided to stay open. There is a new cohort of MA Leadership students starting today, and they might need access to a real person to help them solve some issue or to help them navigate the first time they’ve been to TWU. We also have a payment deadline coming up and the vast majority of students pay well in advance. Only about 10% pay in person, but they need that in-person service to do so.

And, frankly, we just wanted to prove we could stay open, offer superior service, all while having everything ripped up and moved. So far so good!

Here are some pictures of what’s going on.

 

Three (Not So) Easy Steps to Prepare for Change

Are you ready?

On Friday my little world at Trinity Western University suddenly and dramatically changed. My boss, the Provost, was let go without warning. Did it bother me? Yes. Did it throw me off? No. Will it affect the Registrar’s Office? You bet it will. Can we handle that? Yes.

But we might not have been able to handle this 4 years ago. Ok, let me be real about it. Yes we would have been able to handle it because people have extraordinary resources that they don’t even realize – but it would have been extremely difficult and we would have lost key staff members over it.

So what’s changed in those four years? Only one thing: we took the time to get ready.  And now we pride ourselves on being light on our feet and able to handle big changes.

How did we do this?

1. We hired the best people we could afford, people with the right attitude and skills to do almost anything we asked. In Jim Collins’ language, we got the right people on the bus. Sometimes this meant we did without until the right person came along, but we were patient and committed to getting the best.
2. We worked hard to get our systems running smoothly, which gave our staff some margins around their time and jobs so they can make adjustments. In Stephen Covey’s language, this meant they could stop fighting the fires of the urgent, and could start focusing on the important parts of their work.
3. We focused on building trust – trust in ourselves and our team’s abilities – but also earning trust from the rest of the university. In Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner’s language, this meant we developed credibility. People no longer avoided us and worked around us, but started to come to us and work with us and even proposed ideas to us (that’s when you really know the foundation of credibility has been laid).

When the news came with a resounding crash, we jumped a little and then said, “It’s ok, we can handle this. We’re ready for anything.” That’s a good place to be.

Grant

 

The Registrar as Judge, Jury, and Executioner

I am often amazed by how willing some people are to be judgmental in the extreme. Why are we so eager to enact frontier justice, so ready to holler out “Let’s get ‘im an’ string ‘im up from the nearest branch!”?

Ok, so maybe I shouldn’t be writing any Zane Grey novels anytime soon – my western twang is a bit rusty. But I worry when I read stories this one in the Edmonton Journal about a Dean who seems to be facing something that looks and sounds an awful lot like a lynch mob. What sort of school culture is supportive of such quick and dirty justice?

I believe that Registrars can easily become part of such a judgmental culture. Each semester we determine who ends up on Academic Probation, who might be kicked out of university for grades that are too low and other similar judgements. We’re often involved in academic dishonesty decisions and sometimes student life incident decisions. We’re also quite good at determining who makes the honor roll or Deans List. It’s Commencement or Graduation season, and the waves of students crossing the stage, who have all had to meet some criteria that we’ve calculated, are evidence that we’re very good at judging – it’s part of the job.

I don’t have a problem with my role as a ‘judge’. However, I have to remind myself that being a judge is only one small portion of my job, but it can have life-long consequences . I need to remember that I am dealing with real human beings who are in circumstances that I am not, and who need to be treated with grace & mercy wherever appropriate and possible. We are in a unique position of power, and as you might remember that famous line from the recent Spiderman movie, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

I was inspired by this response article to the one above, and I am cheering inside that there’s a colleague who admits that he’s not friends with the commencement speaker, but he’s calling for a more gracious response from people. Perhaps I’m sensitive to this because I was not a very good undergraduate student. I scraped by for a multitude of complex reasons, none of which was a lack of ability (I redeemed myself in my graduate studies). I remember chairing a meeting with about 40 faculty members a few years ago where the conversation became quite critical and demeaning to undergraduate students with a low GPA. I finally spoke up and said, “Folks, I understand your point, but I can’t agree with you. If I did, I would not be able to stand here with you today – you would have rejected me.”

The silence in the room was palpable, and then the ring-leader apologized.

I believe we have to watch our seemingly natural bent towards a critical spirit. I think it’s a shame that we’re trained so diligently in education to be slow to leap to conclusions, to be careful about our assumptions, etc., yet we so quickly forget this when we deal with people who are vulnerable.

Let me encourage you to cultivate a spirit of grace and mercy, and to guard your heart against a spirit of criticism and self-righteousness. It is only when our hearts are right that we can rightly play the role of judge.

 

 

P.S. Thank you to Stefanie Ivan at Grant MacEwan University for the inspiration for this post. A more gracious (former) Registrar would be hard to find.

Do More, Do Better with a Theme

You know how there’s always too much to do, right? And you know how it feels to have everyone wanting everything done right now, ASAP or, preferably, yesterday. Yes, you do – I can see you nodding from here.

So how are we (you and me) supposed to get all this done? How can we do all this and still do more and do better than last year? Truth is, we can’t always do more but we can always do better, which sometimes makes room for more especially if we work smarter. And sometimes, frankly, with limited hours in a day doing more of something usually means doing less of something else.

One way to make it look and feel like I’m doing more and better is to have a theme, or emphasis, for a time. I usually pick a theme for a year. I try to put the theme in front of my eyes as much as possible so that it helps remember it and reminds me that whatever I’m doing, I should do with this emphasis in mind.

What does this look like? Here are my last 5 themes I’ve chosen since starting in the Office of the Registrar at Trinity Western University:

• Teamwork (2007-08)
• Simplify (2008-09)
• Trust & Respect (2009-10)
• Transparency (2010-11)
• Outreach (2011-12)

I chose Teamwork for the first theme because I wanted to get a sense of the team I was brought in to lead, and to help them get to know me. I needed to gauge their strengths and to help them gauge mine. I didn’t care about weaknesses as much – I needed to know who we could tap to initiate, lead, complete, convince, etc.

I chose Simplify because I was at that frustrated stage when I knew enough about my new place of work to know that I couldn’t do everything – and because it seemed to me that people were deliberately making things complicated. I had a suspicion that this was for job security (“it’s too complex for just anyone – you need me”) but it was also the source of most of our inefficiency and inability to get things done. Actually, the theme became “Simply. Simply. Simplify!” which was a reflection of just how frustrated I was by the level of complexity at the university. I’m getting over it

Trust & Respect was my own personal theme, as I realized just how badly TWU was organized around political silos. Silos are another way of saying, “Don’t touch my stuff!” which is also another way of saying, “I don’t trust you with my stuff!” That is annoying and unprofessional, and can be tough to break down from a middle management position. Senior management can break down silos by structuring things in such a way as to avoid silos, but middle management also has some tools at its disposal. The primary one is interpersonal savvy: if you trust me, you’re more likely to include me. I worked hard at building trust.

Transparency was really an extension of Trust and Respect. As we’ve all heard, knowledge is power. We also know that hoarding power breeds distrust. Therefore, one way of extending trust is to provide information and knowledge as openly as possible. I believed that our office needed to provide reports, data, and general information as openly as possible, and in a non-political way.

Outreach is just emerging for me as a theme for this next year. It came to me a little differently than the previous ones, and that ‘s a good thing. It didn’t come as a recognition of a problem that needed addressing. It came to me via an article I read in the College & University Journal called, “The Evolving Office of the Registrar”.  Outreach in this context means finding ways to take the Registrar’s Office out from behind our desks into the areas of the university that can benefit from our service.

Choosing a theme for a year is my way of doing more and doing better. What are your ways of doing more and better?

Cheers!

Grant McMillan

Registrars Conference Coming Up!

Pardon me – I was just drooling over the WARUCC Conference Schedule - did I get any on you? Sorry about that, but have you seen the list of top-notch presentations yet? Wow!

The first one to catch my attention was “Diplomas Counterfeiting and the Internet.” Ooo, intrigue, anti-counterfeiting, etc. Sounds juicy. Then I spotted a Strategic Enrolment Management presentation called, “Third Time Lucky?” Ah, someone’s actually being honest about mistakes made and lessons learned. That should be good.

Several presentations around the whole Risk Management world look great. For example, how to manage Study Abroad students and the risks inherent in administering their travel studies is one topic. Another is called, “Behavioural Incident Policy and Procedures” and comes from the voice of experience: “At the University of Lethbridge, we encountered our first serious behavioural incident in…” Yikes – I’d like to hear about that.

One of the most interesting topics for me is labelled, “Revoking the Degree: From Crisis to Policy.” What? We’d actually do that? Now that I think about it, yes, yes we probably would/could. I’d better get familiar with that policy – it is likely the most serious penalty a university could impose on a student.

Also, for the techies out there, hear about going mobile – developing apps for iPad, iPhone, Blackberry and Androids. The University of Toronto Mississauga is the leader in Canada on this and has developed apps for timetables, exam schedules, viewbooks, etc., including Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Finally, two presentations that I know will be absolutely top-drawer are from a good friend and former colleague, Dr. Ellery Pullman. He’s an expert in Developmental Psychology, and also in mentoring from a developmental psychology approach. Appropriately, he’s making two presentations at the conference: “Understanding Today’s College Student” and “The Adaptive Model of Mentoring.”

But there’s still more that I haven’t even touched. And of course, when I attend conferences I usually change my mind about which sessions I’m going to attend. So, check out the sessions yourself and I hope you plan to attend the conference.

Cheers!

Grant McMillan