UMW’s Faculty Academy this year was more inspirational than ever, and that’s saying something!!
Having earnestly listened to every highly tuned word of Karen Stephenson’s presentation on the topic of trust within institutions, it occurred to me that the faculty at my institution should take a full year to digest, reflect upon, and engage her advice. She argued that there are essentially three kinds of relationships within institutions–transactional relationships, authoritative relationships defined by differential statuses of power, and relationships of trust. Those which are based on trust function through collaboration and “can absorb great amounts of ambiguity and uncertainty.”
Moreover, she argued, in any network, there are three kinds of “nodal” employees, all three of which are typically unaware of the fact that they are nodal: the hub is the “clearinghouse of information” and thrives at on pulling in strains of information from disparate parts of the organization; the gatekeeper serves as a link in the traffic of information between two elements of an organization; and the pulsetaker is one to whom other people turn when seeking advice about strategies or policies, because he or she has his/her “fingers on the pulse of the organization.” If the hubs, gatekeepers, and pulsetakers of the organization are misaligned with the organization, the organization is must realign them or risk failure. Even more urgently, if the relationship which governs any of these three nodal employees is defined by betrayal (i.e., betrayal of trust), it cannot be salvaged.
It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to reflect long and hard about: 1. the kinds of relationships that exist between faculty, between faculty and administration, and between our larger organizations; 2. the relationship between our institution at large and the public (i.e., the taxpayers of this mid-Atlantic state); 3. who the hubs, the gatekeepers, and the pulsetakers of our organization are; 4. the degree to which they value, exemplify, and promote trust; 5. (and this is the hardest and potentially most contentious one) identify and address where and why relationships based on betrayal exist; and 6. deliberate how to contain or reorganize accordingly. Our institution, having experienced lately a series of radical shifts in the top echelon of leadership, could truly benefit from such an analysis.
Readers, how might such an analysis benefit an institution, and how would you organize and engage in such an analysis?
May 18, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Excellent articulation of Stephenson’s arguments. You’re right. We do need to address these issues. It would mean a serious reexamination of how we do everything on campus. And that’s a good thing….
May 19, 2007 at 12:15 am
I wonder if we could get a grant, and maybe some facilitation help from Stephenson’s company, to push in these directions? Your post here would be a great core for a white paper of some kind to get us going.
May 19, 2007 at 1:56 am
Thanks for the great summary. I wanted to take some notes, but Stephenson’s presentation was so dense that whenever I looked away for a moment to write something down, I was two topics behind.
May 19, 2007 at 1:57 am
What kind of buy-in from faculty would we need? What might be the best strategy for getting colleagues to support such a movement?
May 19, 2007 at 2:12 pm
I’ve been thinking about her talk a lot too. We tried to kind of half-heartedly analyze our department a few years ago, but not quite in the same way, and I think we ignored some of the conclusions. She did say that she makes her materials available and that she thinks people can do this analysis for themselves. Of course, I think an outside perspective can always be useful.
May 19, 2007 at 6:10 pm
GC, let’s do it!!!!!!!!
May 25, 2007 at 3:15 pm
[...] The change begins when students commit to attending the conference. To be eligible, they submit a research paper. However ‘complete’ their research papers, we always revise them during the Spring semester prior to the conference. This work is done neither for grade nor credit, simply because it’s what is necessary to make the paper conference-ready. It seems to me that during this process, I become more a mentor than a (traditional) teacher. The relationship seems more collegial than hierarchical. [...]
May 25, 2007 at 4:06 pm
[...] The change begins when students commit to attending the conference. To be eligible, they submit a research paper. However ‘complete’ their research papers, we always revise them during the Spring semester prior to the conference. This work is done neither for grade nor credit, simply because it’s what is necessary to make the paper conference-ready. It seems to me that during this process, I become more a mentor than a (traditional) teacher. The relationship seems more collegial than hierarchical. [...]