hierarchy-bird-tree

I’m more convinced than ever that the greatest challenge facing higher education isn’t the economy - it’s the inefficient way of operation that is engrained in the culture of the industry.  


Hierarchy: The Greatest Enemy of Efficiency 

I did a review of the book Good to Great a while back.  At the time, I wasn’t really impressed with the book, mostly because I was set up with great expectations for the content of it.  While I was let down about its revelations, I agreed with most of its sentiments, particularly as it pertained to hierarchy.  It discussed how companies who had made the leap from good to great put excessively hierarchy aside in favor of hiring great people and empowering them to make decisions.  Unfortunately, no one in higher education has ever seemed to get the memo.  

How much time (and therefore money) do we waste every year in higher education due to our hierarchical structure and rule by committee?  Meeting after meeting after meeting, and no one in the room is empowered to pull the trigger.  Let’s make it tangible.  Say you have five people in a room for an hour long meeting where no one is empowered to do anything.  Using a rough estimate based on the cost of salary and benefits, that costs the institution about $250.  Ten people in the room with no empowerment?  $500.  What about your weekly staff meeting when nothing gets done?  That could up upwards of $1000, maybe more.  How many meetings happen in your office every week that result in nothing? 

Meetings are necessary, but if no one in the room is empowered to make a decision because of a director or a VP that doesn’t trust the judgement of their employees, then what is the point?  Maybe a written proposal or a white paper comes out of it.  Inevitably, that proposal goes and sits on someone’s desk untouched for weeks, or even months.  Sometimes something comes of it, but most of the time it doesn’t, and everyone’s time (and institutional resources) has been wasted.

The question keeps coming back: Why would you hire people if you don’t trust them to do their job?  You spend months collecting resumes and interviewing looking for the smartest, most competent, motivated people.  You finally narrow it down (by committee of course), make them an offer and they accept.  You pay their moving expenses, bring them on board, spend thousands outfitting their office, buying their equipment and training them.  Then you don’t allow them to do anything.  They have ideas that will never get acted on, and suggestions that get laughed at.  They can never get a straight answer to a simple question, because a formal policy has to be written for it (again, by committee).  When they get frustrated, they get told that they’re acting unprofessionally and that this is just how higher ed works.  This is the reason that higher education loses so many great, smart, motivated people. 


The hierarchical structure isn’t the only problem.  

People also spend a ridiculous amount of time on things that just don’t contribute to the bottom line of the organization.  That takes your time away from things that DO matter.  For example, I know a lot of people felt very passionately about the Facebook Class of 2013 Groups scandal.  But lets be honest folks: The amount of time some of you spent on that was ridiculous.  Committees were convened to “decide” if you should create a competing “official” group, webinars were attended to discuss “what’s next”, people wasted countless hours on Twitter, Facebook and Google doing detective work.  I get that it’s sexy and more interesting than every day work, but I also don’t think direct business impact was never considered.  How many applications does your school get from Facebook?  What percentage of your audience is ACTIVELY engaged in your Facebook groups (and, no, I don’t think one or two wall posts means actively engaged)?  Can you show me that engagement in a Facebook group significantly increases the likelihood of enrollment?   

We’re all over-worked.  Most of us have more to do in our job descriptions that can be reasonable achieved, and don’t get paid nearly as well as our corporate counterparts. I’m not suggesting that you dedicate zero time or energy to things like Facebook 2013 - yes, you should create your school’s official Facebook group.  But that takes five minutes. What are you going to do with the rest of the 7 hours and 55 minutes of the day?  Making pragmatic decisions about how you spend your time is crucial.  Ask yourself what areas you can dedicate your energy to, that will affect the bottom line of your institution. 

 

Bottom Line

Schools across the country are slashing budgets by ten, fifteen, twenty percent.  People are losing their jobs.  Students are getting short-changed.  How much of this could be prevented if higher ed took a step back from itself and asked what other ways there were to increase efficiency of operations besides laying people off and slashing budgets?  Perhaps this downturn will force this adjustment when administrations find that laying people off and continuing to operate inefficiently only exasperates pre-existing problems. 

Update: Jesse Rodgers has written a really great follow-on to this post over at his blog.

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