Introduction – Why We Lead With Passion

Thanks for joining us at the launch of our new podcast and web site, dedicated to giving you the insights and tools you need to lead with passion in higher education.

In this first episode: Jim, Patricia and Brian answer the question, “What does it mean to lead with passion in higher education.” Get to know us as we start off our journey.

Episode 1 – Why We Lead With Passion – Transcript

Brian Gawor:                     Today on the Lead With Passion Higher Education podcast.

Jim Rogers:                        To be a part of a team or an organization that’s doing leadership and culture well is the best experience.

Brian Gawor:                     Welcome to the first episode of the Lead With Passion Higher Education podcast. We’ll be taking you on a journey across the leadership landscape with exciting guests and tough questions about how to make a difference in your career and at your institution. We have three hosts, myself, Brian Gawor, along with Jim Rogers and Patricia Maben. The three of us come at leadership from different backgrounds and careers, but we all share a deep passion for higher education. In this first episode, we thought we’d take some time to introduce ourselves and start to answer a key question: What does it really mean to lead with passion in higher education?

Brian Gawor:                     Welcome to the first episode of the Lead With Passion Higher Education podcast. I’m Brian Gawor, one of your co-hosts, here with my friends and passionate higher education leaders, Jim Rogers … Hello, Jim.

Jim Rogers:                        Hello, Brian. How are you?

Brian Gawor:                     Great … And Patricia Maben. Hello, Patricia.

Patricia Maben:                Hello, Brian. Hey, Jim. It’s great to be here.

Brian Gawor:                     You’ll be hearing from all three of us as we forge forward to confront higher education leadership and leading with passion in the coming episodes with some great topics and guests, but we thought today for our first episode we’d begin with some introductions. So we’re going to do a bit of a round robin here and ask some big questions. And Jim, I kind of want to start with you. How did you get involved with higher education leadership and why is it so exciting to you?

Jim Rogers:                        Thanks, Brian. So several years ago I had an opportunity to join the higher ed space, and I jumped in with both feet. I was excited and thrilled because the mission of higher ed is so important to me and very personal to me. You know, my parents did not graduate from college. I’m a first gen college graduate. My parents just aspired. They encouraged me and always set the bar and said, “You’re going to go to college, you’re going to be our first one. You’ll have a path to a better life if you go to college,” and you know what? In high school, I may not have fully grasped what that meant, but fortunately they encouraged me and I did get a chance to go to college, and I graduated from the University of Central Florida. I bleed black and gold, and the experience has had a lifelong impact on me.

Jim Rogers:                        In particular, if I think back, what UCF has meant to me, really in college I learned that I can learn. And forever my whole journey, personally and professionally, the fact that I know that I was able to take on any subject, any topic, and not be afraid to go learn it, I go back to really understanding that, and growing into that back at college. It is incredibly passionate to me that life is learning all the time, every day. No matter what you’re doing, you’re going to learn more, and school gave me an opportunity to get comfortable with that, to get confidence in that, and just trust that I’m able to learn. Then my brother went on and he graduated from UCF, and then my family just loved the school and participated with me and it continues to be a part of our family today, whether it’s Saturday on football or any other things that are going on.

Jim Rogers:                        The value of the experience and education has propelled and supported me my entire life. It’s been a big part of my brother and his life. It’s now part of my daughter, who’s at the University of Tennessee, and I see in her the same experience, right, she’s learning in the classroom that she can do things. She is learning that she can lead, and she was shy and nervous or not always willing to jump out and do that beforehand, but at the University of Tennessee she’s had those chances and she’s excelled, and she’s also built lifelong friendships. So the opportunity to go and work in higher education, particularly around enrollment marketing and helping young people find a place, the right school, the right place for them to grow, learn, experience and then jump off into a better life is so meaningful, passionate, and I love being a part of it.

Brian Gawor:                     Well, Jim, you have an incredible amount of executive experience. You’ve taken that and applied it directly to higher education and helping transform institutions in various roles here. I love that idea of learning how to learn, and as a key part of education. Now you’ve also had the opportunity to sit and talk with many higher education leaders, and you’ve been posting about this on Linkedin, and I’d love to hear you answer this question. What’s your definition of leading with passion, as you’ve coined that term, in higher education?

Jim Rogers:                        Sure. Well leadership is so well written about, discussed and talked about; however, my experience now in 20 years of marketing and executive leadership with global responsibilities, building products, building teams, hiring all over the globe really, but even in particular within higher education, it’s still elusive. So there’s these two components that I am passionate about, and that is bringing leadership and culture together.

Jim Rogers:                        So first is, it’s important to have a vision and to enable your staff, your team, your department. And what’s great about leadership and culture, you could do it with the small group, you could do it just as a manager, you could do it as a department, you could do it as a division, you could do it as a whole institution, but creating something, a purpose for your employees to be part of that’s bigger than themselves. This is so important, and then making sure that they see their part in that.

Jim Rogers:                        So the leadership part of it, and that’s well documented, but not easy to do, needs to be coupled though with a culture of making sure that every day is still a great day. That production, that they know how to operate, that they’re recognized for the good work that they’re doing, that they understand what the rules of the road are. Could be performance, could be transparency, it could be innovation. Whatever those core components are, they need to be established and working every single day. That culture of having every single day have a great experience, knowing where you fit in, how to operate within the expectations, and then connecting them to that bigger picture so that they see the purpose of their job and their impact more broadly, and then connecting that back again to their work is something that I don’t see many organizations or leaders doing well, but it’s so important.

Jim Rogers:                        Particularly our young people, they have such big ideas on changing the world and trying to be a part of it, but not knowing exactly how to fit in to do that. To be a part of a team or an organization that’s doing leadership and culture well is the best experience. Bringing that together into higher education with both of you, I’m excited about that and the other people we’re going to engage.

Brian Gawor:                     Well, I’m excited as well too, and we know of course that once you do that successfully in an organization, it could be contagious, and the great thing in higher education, it can be contagious all the way down to both the students and the community where the higher education institution is. So I know we’re going to be bringing in some of our friends that have done that successfully and talking with them about how they lead with passion. Now, I want to move on to Patricia here. Patricia, tell us a little bit about how you got involved in higher education leadership and why this is exciting to you.

Patricia Maben:                I really got involved in higher education leadership through my childhood. I grew up in West Point, New York, which of course is where the United States Military Academy is, and my father was a colonel in the army and a professor of chemistry. So I really was born into the love for education, the love for higher education, and kind of that individual purpose that it serves, but also that broader societal purpose that it serves. It was very much a part of my fabric as I myself went into college. When I got out of college I was, like many college graduates, really uncertain of which path I wanted to take, and I really gravitated toward working in a college environment. That passion for really sharing the love, I guess, of higher ed with faculty and students and prospective students and staff and parents of students and graduates of the college that I worked at really was very exciting.

Patricia Maben:                I think even today … You know, I worked on the college side. I worked at the corporate side, servicing and working for colleges. I feel like what’s most exciting about higher education leadership is through a presentation, through a meeting, through a one-on-one with anybody who is somehow impacting higher education that you can really share what’s so exciting, and it’s very purposeful. Everything you do in higher education, any role you play, whether it be at a company or at a college or a university, even if you’re working in college counseling as a secondary school counselor, having a direct impact on the success of higher education and the success of individual students. So that’s my background, and it’s been really a lifelong goal of mine to work and contribute to higher ed until I can’t anymore.

Brian Gawor:                     Well, and it’s not an exaggeration to suggest that you have met with thousands of higher education leaders over your career, and you’ve had an incredible career. I’d love to hear from you when we think about this concept of leading with passion in higher education. What does that mean for you?

Patricia Maben:                That’s a great question. You know, leading with passion for higher education is … I think in my view, it’s taking every single opportunity. Like if you work in higher education, no matter what role you have, no matter what role, whether you’re managing people or you’re a part of a big team, or maybe you’re your own person in an office running the whole show for a certain part of the college or university, or working in a company and in that company you might be the person touching the data for that college, or you might be the person who’s preparing the slides for that college or the person who’s doing direct consulting with that college, leading with passion in higher education is essentially saying, in your role in higher education, if you do that with all of your passion and share that vision of successful colleges and universities, in particular student success, right, each student needs to successful.

Patricia Maben:                If you embrace that and share that passion, that to me is leading with passion in higher education, and making that a part of your day to day where that energy around higher ed is something that you choose to do and you share it with others each day, because that really I think drives a lot of success of students and colleges and universities.

Brian Gawor:                     Great.

Patricia Maben:                Yeah. Brian, so I would love to hear with your experience, and I’m so curious, how did you get involved with higher education leadership and why is it so exciting to you?

Brian Gawor:                     Well, maybe I’m a little bit of a different story. I’m actually an example of one of those guys who was a real thorn in the side of the college administration when I was a student. I went to a national liberal arts college, and really deeply value my liberal arts education, became very close to the faculty that changed my life at my institution, but, you know, I was a columnist on the newspaper and I did kind of the campus gossip or a thorn in the side of the administration column, and I had the radio station license. My girlfriend was the editor of the newspaper, and my best friend was the chair of the student government, so we had built a cartel by the time I was a sophomore. We had a lot of fun, and I got the full value of my liberal arts education, being deeply involved in the institution and in shared governance and things like that.

Brian Gawor:                     But over time I started to get more involved with individual students and took some roles in student affairs, and ultimately … And I know we’ll share stories over the course of the podcast here … through some very moving experiences, working directly with students through both success and tragedy, I decided to get a student affairs degree. So I went to get my master’s degree and worked in an advising role while I actually lived in with students, and I ended up staying at my alma mater for 10 years, first in student affairs and then working in the admission’s side, running the campus tours and working with hundreds of students to get them enrolled, and then became a fundraiser. I moved around and ended up doing both annual giving and major gifts roles, and ultimately working with donors.

Brian Gawor:                     So,that’s kind of how I ended up in higher education. It’s just recently that I’ve been more on the support side, being a researcher in higher education, when I also enrolled in my doctoral program and kind of finishing that off. And like Jim, I am the first person in my immediate family to get a bachelor’s degree. I don’t even think I knew that growing up. My dad is a graphic designer and had corporate roles and had more of technical art education. My mom had been an accountant and had some education based on that, but they just always told me, “You know, you’re going to go. You’re going to go to college,” and I had teachers in high school that made that happen for me. And, I just got very immersed in the higher education environment and I really never left it and worked with college administrators or students pretty much every day.

Patricia Maben:                That’s a really exceptional career, doing so many different roles and obviously clearly passionate about it. What about your definition, Brian, of leading with passion in higher education? How would you define it from your perspective?

Brian Gawor:                     We know from research that the systems in higher education can kind of move along, and they’re fairly successful. I’m sure we’re going to talk about retention rates and graduation rates. They’re not fabulous, but when we look at institutions that have really made a difference, and particularly drill down to individual people who have had their lives changed by higher education, there’s something called an institutional agent, and that’s that individual who admits those processes, decides to take a personal interest in an individual, and a lot of the research is on students. This could be somebody in the financial aid office, in the admission office, in student affairs. Could even be somebody on that fundraising side that takes that student under their wing and really pays attention and makes a personal difference for that student. I see that with both students and also staff members that I’ve worked with in higher education, and it’s really that idea of being an institutional agent to make a compelling change in someone’s life and show personal interest, and it’s really a big deal.

Brian Gawor:                     And then secondly, increasingly, higher education needs to be focused on definable outcomes for students and their families. I’m actually one of those people who’s passionate about those numbers and saying, “How can we move the needle here and provide a better product, a better experience for students and their families that are investing in higher education?” There’s been a lot of buzz about it over the course of the last decade, and we know we’re going to be increasingly facing that scrutiny from the public and from people who are making the investment, and we have to be passionate about moving the needle in higher education. So it’s taking that personal interest and then also really thinking system wide, how can we move the needle here and do that with passion?

Brian Gawor:                     So that’s who we are, three higher education enthusiasts from different backgrounds and careers looking to explore what it means to lead with passion. We want to help you make a difference for students, faculty, your institutions, and yourself with this podcast. As we move forward, we’ll be bringing you guests that look at higher education leadership from different perspectives and are pretty passionate themselves. Expect for the conversation to be real and for us to disagree at times, but also expect us to provide you with some concrete ideas on how to make a difference as a leader yourself. Stay tuned, my friends. We’re ready to talk.