what’s wrong with acc
and how to fix it
Matthew’s previous
post in this series
Part 1: Mission
ACC’s most significant problem is our mission.
Of course, we have a mission, but in its bones, this institution is not mission-centered or mission-driven. This does not mean we aren’t doing meaningful, life-changing work; we are, every day. What I mean is that we expend considerable energy on overcoming persistent institutional obstacles to excellence — energy that could go to more constructive, mission-centered work.
Start with your own experience: Think about how often you encounter a situation in your work-life at ACC in which you need to get something done, something that is plausibly necessary to accomplish the work of the college. You contact another unit, and someone in that unit — if they respond at all — responds with a cryptic, convoluted set of instructions obviously drawn from some other email that they wrote to get somebody else out of their hair. Or they just tell you that it can’t be done. Or they make the process so onerous that you entertain thoughts of never undertaking this particular task again, no matter how crucial it might be to your work.
There’s a lesson here about the difference between “having” a mission and being mission-driven: If you’re sitting in an office performing work with the expectation that everybody else in the institution should conform to a process that makes your own work easier, I have news: You are not mission-driven. That goes for everyone in the organization — and it goes double for professors. I’ll return to that point momentarily, but first, a parable.
I want you to picture a military unit in which the supply officer had this “conform to my workflow” mentality:
“Notice: Rifles and body armor will be issued only on alternate Tuesdays to reduce paperwork for supply division.”
If somebody deputized you today as a consultant and sent you to that unit, would you not immediately spot the glaring disconnect between the mission that people on the front lines are striving to accomplish and the supporting units that supposedly make that mission possible?
And what would you do about it, as a deputized consultant? Wouldn’t you suggest that every function, every role, every decision process, should be reviewed by every leader in the organization, with a simple question in mind:
How does this decision or process or function support the core mission?
While you’re deputized as consultant, take another moment to think this over: Suppose you meet with the supply officer, who tries to explain to you that taking more time to get the paperwork right is essential to providing good service even though it does indeed interrupt the service that their unit is tasked with providing, which means degrading the mission?
That argument actually comes down to this:
We have to give worse service so we can improve our service.
Would you not be skeptical of the motivation and rationale of a leader in a position like that, when that support service is mission-critical?
But that’s the problem: The only people who are skeptical are the people who are looking at these processes as “outsiders” to the function, especially people in the same organization who are the recipients of inadequate support and service. I often quip that the work I have to do at ACC is never the problem; it’s the work I have to do to implement the work I have to do.
And how do we label these skeptics? Complainers and troublemakers, the proverbial “squeaky wheels”?
What if we took an inventory of all the squeaky wheels in the organization and catalogued all their complaints and then used that data as a set of signs and symptoms — as grounds for an accurate diagnosis of what is going on?
No one would deny that there are among us dedicated, professional complainers and whiners, and that points to a diagnosis of malingering, or perhaps hypochondria.
But isn’t it monumentally obtuse, and I would even say psychotic, to deny that at least some of the complaints might point to real problems and patterns? And those problems are not merely communication problems that can be cured with a hefty dose of Vitamin Three C’s in a two-hour clinic the first week of the semester. Those signs may well point to underlying patterns that require radical reorientation toward the core mission of the institution.
So, how do we actually do that reorienting? First, let’s clarify the core mission of this institution, no matter who takes offense.
What is it we do here? What do we produce? What service do we provide our communities?
If you answered anything other than better educated human beings, then you’re not on board.
And this is not just the opinion of some idiosyncratic insider-malingerer. You tell me: What is the single most important accreditation we hold as an institution? If you answered something having to do with HR or accounts payable or software, then you’re not on board.
Now, at this point, our discussion must become more nuanced — which of course, means that people who have already turned off are not going to follow. So be it. But here’s the nuance anyway: No one would deny that ancillary functions within ACC are important to the core mission, and no one would deny that many of them are even essential. But the operative question is this: Would we perform those functions in the absence of the core mission of the institution?
The answer is an obvious no: Without the work of educating people, there would be no requisitions to process, no websites to maintain, no training to provide, nothing to market, nothing to advise about.
Now, quite often when people hear this kind of talk they become offended or defensive about the importance of their functions and units. And when professors hear this kind of talk they become inflated with a sense of their own importance. I understand these reactions, but both are wrongheaded — and here’s why. The core instructional mission of the institution transcends each of us and our particular interests.
Once we realize this, we need to come to terms with the priorities implied by our core mission. ACC does not exist to process requisitions, or dole out advising, update websites or devise marketing campaigns — or any of the other ancillary functions that benefit our core mission. On the contrary, ACC exists to educate people, and to accomplish that mission, instruction is primary, like it or not.
On the other hand, ACC is not a social service organization or PR company for professors. Individuals in this organization play their roles, which may be more or less central to the core mission, but no single person or unit is the mission of the institution. This is why in my years as dean, I have not hesitated to confront professors who are themselves obstacles to the instructional mission of this institution. Anyone who places themselves and their own interests above the core mission of the institution is not on board, no matter what their title may be.
Once we establish the core mission and the priorities it implies, we’re in a position to ask the diagnostic question: How does this activity, wherever and whatever it is, support the core mission of the college?
If leaders all across this institution asked that question every day, about every decision and process, and if we weighed our answers from outside the functional unit, we would be moving toward becoming a mission-driven, mission-centered institution.
What does “from outside” mean? Think about the supply officer: From inside that particular function and its interests, worse service does look like better service. But to those outside the functional unit, to those who depend on it — in other words, from the perspective of the institution as a mission — “better service” is merely a ruse for making their own workflow easier.
We don’t have to become transcendent to take the needed perspective. Rather, it takes two ingredients:
We can easily acquire that outsider’s perspective — by asking for it. The recipients of our functions already have that perspective, and they know, right now, whether our service helps them with their work toward the core mission. All we have to do is ask. And once we’ve asked, we must take the responses we get as signs to be investigated, not as the meaningless noise of squeaky malingering wheels.
If you’ve made it this far, let me summarize. I can distill my argument about mission into one simple formula:
Our mission is a marketing slogan, not an article of living faith.
How would you act in your daily work if educating people actually was your article of faith?
Up next: Trust.
