92 Strategic Leadership
Faculty Involvement
The need to prepare faculty and staff for involvement in a strategy process
is obvious in a number of ways. A third or a half of the strategy council may
be faculty members who typically have neither studied management nor been
involved in formal strategy processes. They may also have a distaste for some of its
methods and language. Most importantly, faculty members already have full-time
jobs that consume much of their time. Strategy development is not business as
usual, and it periodically consumes more time than a typical committee, especially
for those in leadership roles. Given these very real challenges, leaders have to
ask themselves how faculty participation in the process can be most worthwhile.
Surely if faculty members are asked to chair a major task force, they need ample
staff support and time to make it possible. Their other responsibilities may have
to be adjusted temporarily. Intensive faculty involvement in the strategy process
may also be enabled by carving out a week at the end or before the beginning of
a semester for concentrated work on strategy.
Orientation to the Strategy Process
One of the fatal blows to a strategy program is to begin without an orien-
tation to the procedures, timetables, expectations, and organization of the
process. Especially as a committee or council is about to begin an intensive
cycle of planning, it is essential that ground rules be made explicit and that
participants be given the tools they need to make a contribution to the delib-
erations.
In most cases, the preparation should involve a one- or two-day retreat, for
which new members receive a special orientation. In particular, the leaders and
staff of the process do well to prepare a notebook and or Web site with articles on
current issues facing higher education; key information from documents of the
institution; excerpts from prior plans, including mission and vision statements;
and materials that convey a sense of institutional history, identity, and distinc-
tiveness. Participants should also receive a fact book or similar materials that
contain important quantitative data about the institution, including a full set of
strategic indicators. A presentation on the significance of the data, especially of
the financial information, should be part of the retreat.
In considering the process and content of planning, the issue of financial
constraints and opportunities should be addressed forthrightly. If an institution
faces tough financial times, it makes sense to build that fact into expectations from
the outset. The strategy effort may, in fact, have to focus on creating equitable
procedures for reallocating resources. If new resources are available, the SPC and
its various subgroups need to know the institution’s broad financial capabilities.
Limits should not be so tight as to discourage high ambition and creativity, but
it is ultimately self-defeating to create high expectations that can only be disap-
pointed.