Overview of Micro-change and Personal Development Projects

Micro-change Project

Westminster College employs an early alert team (CARE), made up of key constituents from departments and academic divisions, in an effort to quickly identify struggling students and connect them to campus resources.  This team has taken on different forms over nearly 15 years, but none have settled into work processes that seem to be effective.  External stakeholders describe CARE as a ‘black hole’ where their referrals disappear and impact on students is unclear.  CARE team members either feel unprepared to guide students or naturally do the work well.  Student support services staff are confused about how they connect to CARE and the origin of referrals.  These insufficiencies continue to surface despite some effort to make change.  The CARE team recently fell to my leadership making it ripe for this micro-change project.

Through a SWOT analysis, we defined five major challenges: undefined processes/workflow, lack of confidence in the work of CARE, insufficient training of CARE team members, unclear outcome measures, and inadequate technology resources.  In truth, we tackled improvements for each of the identified challenges, but for the purposes of this project I focused on increasing confidence in the work of CARE, specifically with faculty and coaches who are our primary sources of referral.  To achieve this aim, the CARE team developed a communication workflow which adheres to Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) guidelines, but offers the referring person evidence and updates of the students’ progress.  To measure our success, I developed a pre- and post-survey for faculty and coaches and engaged in focus groups.

Personal Development

As I move into the Vice President of Student Affairs role, I have been mindful of my leadership and adjustments I may need to make.  In my previous role, my strengths were creativity and collaboration.  This new position requires skills that I’m finding are rusty and will need attention quickly.  As such, my personal development goals are as follows:

·        Strengthen my leadership and supervision of the Student Affairs team by articulating a clear vision, focusing on staff development, and cultivating collaboration/teamwork.  

    Here I draw heavily on Collins (2005).  I did inherit staff who are not the right people on the bus and will need either to provide them appropriate development to stay on the bus or work to remove them from the bus.  Being clear in how I define greatness and exercising level 5 leadership will aid this effort.  Equally important will be precise identification of the work we can do well and matches our vision.  As an extraordinarily small staff, we can be stretched too thin if we veer from our mission and purpose, diluting the value and quality of our work. I have selected the personal development exercises of Coaching for Performance (#3) and Dual-minded Leadership (#5) toward this end.

·        Build trust and confidence in the Student Affairs division by mending relationships with Athletics, nudging staff to resolve conflicts with others, and leveraging my positive relationships with faculty, staff, and students to forge new collaborations. 
Here I rely on ideas from adaptive leadership (Heifetz, 2009) such as naming loyalties, acting politically, and orchestrating conflict.  Additionally, I have selected the personal development exercise of Social Capital (#2) to aid in this work.  In the Strategic Planning class, I completed Feedback Seeking.