Articles

Who Heads the Program?

Analysis. At the simplest level, most universities will find themselves deciding between a staff person and a faculty member. Either one may have business or, more specifically, family business experience. One note of caution: Do not oversimplify the criteria for a director. Often, it seems, businesspeople, trustees, or donors want to hire a hard-driving entrepreneur. This person may bring many of the skills needed to get things done, but if the person has no background in academia, the director may find himself or herself frustrated because leadership styles may not translate effectively from the business environment to the academic environment. The director might also see the position as part time. Furthermore, if funding is not already in place, then the entrepreneur may be even more frustrated with the seemingly Byzantine funding process in universities.

On the other hand, many academics want someone with a national reputation. Often, this means someone with a strong research and publication record. If this is someone late in a career who has not developed the skills to teach, develop curriculum, and work with families (including working with development efforts), then it may be a poor fit. Again, the stakeholders must be informed. Stakeholders giving their opinions with too little knowledge can be destructive. The skills, credentials, and experiences of the director must be well thought out and aligned with the vision for the center (Keyt, 2000).

The skills set needs to resonate with the focus of the center, but on a metalevel. In other words, if teaching is the foundation, then beyond being a good teacher, the director must know how to develop curriculum, recruit and motivate faculty, and network for faculty approval of courses. Likewise, if the foundation is research, then the director needs to be able to facilitate aligning the direction of the research, recruiting faculty, and networking for both support and acknowledgement of the research. For outreach, the director, beyond possibly being a presenter at a retreat, needs to be able to recruit top talent and family businesses, as well as plan and market outreach programs, such as workshops, seminars, and affinity groups.

In the Forum Model, the director is often a staff person who may have little or no connection with the faculty, students, and administration. He or she typically is neither allowed to create nor teach courses and may not be proficient at research. Thus, he or she risks becoming marginalized. He or she does not attend faculty meetings and often has little or no university financial support: not only must he or she generates his or her own funding, but many also have to pay a charge for "overhead" fees back to the university. As a staff member, he or she has less protection, status, and capabilities (within the constraints of his or her position, not, obviously, as an individual).

As an aside, university support is the acid test for how successful the center is in its strategic planning. If the university sees the vision, it will be contributing time, resources, or intellectual capital. In contrast, a university that makes this a staff position with ever- increasing draining of resources indicates strongly how the university really sees the center. Likewise, a faculty member who is expected to develop curriculum as well as initiate research and programming for family businesses (and even professionals) in exchange for one course release tells something about the university’s commitment. Too many centers seemed trapped in lose/win relationships with their universities: If the centers do or do not fulfill their mission, the university looks to take far more than the university gives. The center must include the university in its planning from the outset, and the university must provide the leadership for an innovative program to succeed in an environment that often resists change.

The director needs to be able to address the needs of the various stakeholders. So, first, the director must be a strategic thinker and be able to convey that vision constantly, clearly, and concisely to the various stakeholders in a way that demonstrates that he or she has thought of the "win" for that stakeholder (e.g., how Admissions can use the center as a marketing and recruiting tool). The director must also design the governance and structure for the program. As part of this, the director must have ongoing feedback from outside the system in which he or she operates. (Again, this is exactly what we preach to family businesses.) Feedback sources should include boards that are not comprised merely of donors or friends, but that have the perspective of a key stakeholder group coupled with the information needed to support or occasionally confront the director. (See Appendix B for a visual of how this step integrates into the overall process.)

Beyond these skills, the job description emanates from the vision for the center. So, if the center is academically based, the director needs to be a member of the faculty. To return to a point made above [and one that Frishkoff makes in her article as well (1998)], the director will have a much greater sense of credibility with the stakeholders if he or she has family business experience. I believe that most universities have a number of faculty with such a background. Beyond that, they need strength in the area of teaching or research, whichever the center chooses as its foundation.

The director also needs passion. Universities are slow to innovate and usually even slower to recognize and reward those innovators. So if the director really is driven by innovation, helping students and their families, generating meaningful research, or impacting this emerging (academic) field, then that passion will provide him or her with fuel for the challenge. If the director doesn’t feel rewarded by the psychic income, the tangible benefits will probably, even in the best circumstances, seem lacking.

From my experience, the three most important skills or traits for directors are innovative strategic thinking, effective communication, and diplomatic tenacity. The director must set or at least take full ownership of the vision. He or she ought to be able to communicate consistently, concisely, and clearly to people. There is often a great need for both repetition and reflection prior to any of us fully digesting a new idea. Then there is yet the further step of applying it to our own situation. For example, it was only in our third year that our president truly appreciated how unique our approach was, and he gained this insight from talking to some top people we brought in for the second Gathering (our conference that included our key stakeholders).

Finally, there is tenacity. Like entrepreneurs and perhaps anyone dedicated to success, this attitude is essential. Bureaucracies will tell you why it cannot be done. The status quo is valued. Change is suspect. Not making a decision is often seen as safer than making one. The director must believe in the vision, follow at least most of the rules, and be able to get it done anyway. Start with an attitude of creating solutions, seeking out feedback, listening and then being decisive, and diplomatically nudging "no" to “maybe” and “maybe” to "yes." Confront poor behavior and applaud, acknowledge, and celebrate good and great behavior. Build a cadre of passionate, talented, and committed partners. Defy the culture.

Experience. Although I have given some of our experience above, let me start with the threshold issue of faculty or staff. Looking at our vision holistically, our clear focus on teaching and curriculum as the foundation dictated that our director be a faculty member. I had been on the faculty in the business school for eight years at the time. As a tenured associate professor, I had taught about 15 different courses, from first-semester freshmen to third-year law students. In addition to teaching in the business school, I also taught in the liberal arts college and the college of law.

From a business perspective, I had worked for two of my family's businesses—one fairly large and one small and quite entrepreneurial. Also, as a CPA and lawyer, I had background in a large accounting firm as well as experience working with professionals, especially lawyers. For most of my 12 years on the faculty, I have also been co-owner in a business that conducts retreats, seminars, and training for businesses.

Passion. Suffice it to say I have a deep passion for teaching and for innovation. Teaching at the college level is as rich and rewarding an experience as I have ever had professionally. My second passion is innovation. This field offers both—in abundance.

Vision. The Holistic Model has been a vision that has worked well for these three years. It is as simple as drawing three circles, yet I use it in most of my meetings (and in the family business courses) to initiate the context for deliberations. In other words, it constantly challenges stakeholders and me to look at the relationship between the parts and the whole. It challenges them to take a systems approach. As I mentioned above, it continually raises deeper and better questions. It creates great ideas from that synergy: the Gathering, research about the effectiveness of the courses and retreats, students interning in family businesses besides their own, and retreats that parallel the student curriculum.

In relation to the metaskills mentioned above, I had experience at this level, especially related to teaching and, to a lesser degree, to research and outreach. In terms of teaching, I had already developed curricula and recruited faculty. Also, I had worked on developing the skill sets and other linkages between courses in a curriculum. I had started to develop the research skills needed for the two annual Gatherings (and the resultant books) from past efforts in collaborative research with colleagues in different disciplines from different schools. Finally, my teaching skills helped me develop programming. Additionally, I had experience constructing retreats and other programs from work during my eight years prior to becoming director. I believe that there are faculty at every university with similar qualifications.

Support. I had no release time in the first year and no support staff until halfway through that year. The latter made some sense in that I was given the luxury of investing the first semester in very rigorous planning. That involved research and communication: research on the field and communication with key stakeholders.

Stakeholders. After building some internal consensus during the fall semester of 1998, we convened what would come to be called the internal (parents, faculty, staff, and students) and external (professionals and family business members) boards of advisers. Through these, we meant to represent the four key stakeholder groups: students, (parent) family businesses, faculty and other university personnel, and professional advisers to family businesses. Then we started working on the curriculum for the students, which started off as a concentration of four courses and evolved into a minor by the fall of 2000. With a great deal of help from the dean, the research commenced in large part because of the Gathering, resulting in two books written by about 20 authors in just two years. Also, with my presenting at USASBE and FFI conferences and cultivating faculty from the internal board and with the dean helping with recruiting, more than one quarter of the active business faculty now does research.

Now, as director, the focus is to maintain the growth and evolution of the research and teaching but focus this year on the retreats for the parent families. To involve the families of the students that are enrolled in the courses, we held a two-and-one-half-hour meeting at the beginning of the fall 2001 semester with students and their families. All of the attending families stated that they would be willing to attend the upcoming year’s retreats. Next year’s plans include holistically involving the professionals.

In a bigger sense, it is necessary that part of the university support be the leadership that helps ensure that innovation is rewarded and not penalized by the structure and culture of the university. The university leadership also must seek feedback, confront the bureaucratic culture, and create win-win relationships. Confronting the system and impacting change is difficult and finding someone able to do such a thing is rare.

Summary. Find an "academic entrepreneur"—someone who is a strong innovator, strategic thinker, effective communicator, and tenacious diplomat.

From the strategic plan/vision, develop a set of needed (meta)skills, experiences, and credentials. Involve the key stockholders in applying them.
The university's leadership must support the director with adequate time, resources, and people.

An Aside on Support. A director ought not to be a martyr (nor let himself or herself be set up to be one). Over recent months, I have talked with one director who in part stepped down because of frustration with trying to innovate at her university. I also have talked with two other directors who are staff and are assessing whether to quit or take their centers independent. Such examples may constitute red flags for the problems with the Forum Model. This anecdotal evidence may be hard to generalize to all Forum Model programs, but it is worth considering. Again, the strategic plan, the champion, and the academic foundation are strong tools to address this risk.

Universities must be proactive not just for the center's benefit but also for the director. To equate this position with one course release is to belittle it. Not to compensate the director for his or her "Herculean" [the term used by university students discussing the center (Cox & Heck, 2000)] effort risks exploitation and turnover. To count the entirety of the director’s work as service and (in the case of a faculty member) quash his or her opportunity for tenure and promotion is bureaucratic. It is lose-win. Leadership at the university must look hard at its own role in this equation.

The director's job can be thought of in numerous ways, but two titles resonate with my experience. One is academic entrepreneur, and the other is a client relations leader — the former because you have to work with people continually over whom you have no direct authority and you have to work with limited resources (Astrachan, 1992). So, you must constantly and creatively look for win-win situations and empower others to do the same. You must navigate and sometimes confront the bureaucrats who resist or are threatened by change and innovation. (This, by the way, is the best use of tenure I know of to empower the director to confront the system or people within it.)

The director must also be a client relations leader because it is less about being a scholar in a traditional manner (though being a scholar will be part of the job if the center is academically based) and because you constantly have to network. In a typical day, you may have breakfast with a colleague who wants to develop a course, meet with the dean at 9:00, teach a class at 10:00, meet with your staff from 11:00 till noon, have lunch with an alumnus on your board who is a partner at one of the Big Five, and then go into a two- hour planning session with Admissions (or faculty or families). Between all that, you may be working on research, planning the next retreat, or returning phone calls to everyone from the media to the Registrar. As a result, the wonderful luxury faculty often have to indulge their idiosyncrasies may be less available as a perk to the director.

The director must be excellent at managing relationships. He or she must get back to people, follow up, communicate things as simply as possible, and listen intently enough to create the win-win situations. For the client relations leader title, it all goes back to the glue that holds any foundation together: trust. Without trust in the leader/director, all else will fail. Without other key stakeholders seeing and sharing in the vision, all else will fail.

Continue to Part V & VI