TO: Employee-news
FROM: Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
DATE: December 9, 2015
SUBJECT: Functional Leadership in Abundance – Organizational Structure Process
ATTACHMENT: Functional Leadership in Abundance (9.2.2015) email
Colleagues,
I know everyone is extremely busy with final projects, beginning the in-between-semester business processes, and prepping for next semester. Before you know it we’ll all be gathered at the UCCPA for professional development, so I just want to take a minute to update everyone on where we are.
At August professional development, and in a follow up email, I laid out our plan for administrative restructure. The plan called for us to follow a four step process and we’re right about where we thought we’d be at this point.
Excerpts from my September 2 email layout the process:
Step One: Identify chief officers… Once assembly of the chief officer team reaches a point of critical mass, the team will work together to begin to work with others to organize functions into departments and departments into people.
Step Two: Establish functional groupings into departments and offices … At the close of this phase departments and offices will be established within chief officer responsibility areas, then we will move on to locating individuals.
Step Three: Location of individuals … In this phase chief officers will discuss with individuals how their own goals and abilities best serve Unity College within the new configuration… [I]t is important to revisit job descriptions, departmental reporting lines, roles, and available trainings—whether or not major change happens at this level.
Step Four: Institutional Committee and Policy Review… As need emerges, we will bring proposed committee changes to Sr. Staff for review and vote. Institutional policies go through the College Policies and Processes Committee.
Progress on Steps One and Two. With respect to Step One, at this point in time we have identified eight of the nine Chief Officers, so it is safe to say that we have reached the “critical mass” of Chief Officers needed to translate functional responsibility into departmental assignments. Step two work has begun and all identified Chief Officers have been working together to identify which functions and corresponding departments go with which Chief Officer.
I am looking forward to the State of the College Address and professional development sessions on January 14 when we will present each Chief Officer and her or his assignments. I’m as excited as you are to see what our new Chief Officers plan for all of us at Unity College.
Step Three during Spring Semester: During spring semester Chief Officers will continue to work within and between their departments to conduct a functional analysis of their units, fine tune job descriptions, identify project leaders, organize offices, and establish reporting lines, key-performance-indicators, heuristics, and budget augmentations within each function; But more so, establish effective working relationships between functions.
Step Four ongoing: All along the way we are and will continue to work within process and policy to establish personnel, working groups, and departments for Unity College. Policy may not be the most electrifying part of our work, but it is vitally important for a well-functioning, documentable, and transparent operation.
I know you are all concerned that we do not simply fall back into business-as-usual; I promise you that at every step we are challenging ourselves to think differently as we break down long established silos of higher education and create systems of shared responsibility and mutual accountability. I assure you that when we are done no one person or no one department will have a monopoly on information.
I will also be working with the Chief Officers in the Spring to create a compressive decision matrix that will be posted online that clearly delineates who/how and where to get information, decision, approval or signatures. My hope is that this will happen during a spring retreat with key members of the Unity College leadership in conjunction with ensuring that each Chief Officer works with their respective functions to identify key pinch points for us to address (I plan to explain this process and your involvement at professional development). This allow us to keep pace with starting the 16-17 year with the new model fully functional (pun intended J).
You recently received a Save-the-Date from me regarding State of the College and professional development for spring 2015. Sr. Staff will be finalizing the program on Monday and a full program of activities will be published before we break for the Holidays.
Please mark your calendars for January 14 when we’ll share the work that our Chief Officers have been doing to provide functional structure to support our strategic college vision.
PS: I have included the inaugural email for those of you who do not have it handy…
In Unity,
MPK
Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
Executive Vice President, CAO, CFO &
Liaison to the Board of Trustees
Unity College
Office: 207-509-7144
“Skill can be taught; loyalty can be garnered, confidence can be instilled; but attitude & integrity are inherent! So teach skill, garner loyalty; instill confidence; but never compromise on attitude & integrity”
